Life & Wisdom Quote by Leonard Alfred George Strong

Strong slips a small manifesto into what first reads like a polite writerly platitude. “People and places are the source of my work” sounds like the kind of sentence you’d find in a back-of-the-book bio. Then he needles the reader: it’s “not the truism it seems.” The turn matters. He’s asking you to stop treating setting as decor and character as the sole engine of story. For Strong, a place isn’t a backdrop; it’s a presence with moods, habits, and a kind of moral weather. A person, meanwhile, is never just an interior life; they’re an accumulation of rooms, streets, climates, class signals, and local rituals.

The subtext is quietly radical for prose and verse alike: description is not secondary to psychology. If you write a city well enough, you’ve written an argument about the people who move through it. If you render a person precisely, you’ve mapped the places that made them legible to themselves. Strong’s refusal to “distinguish as sharply” also hints at a resistance to the modern tendency to treat mobility and individuality as clean escapes from origin. He’s closer to the tradition where landscape is fate, except he keeps it supple: places change, people change, and the two do it together.

Contextually, it reads like an early-20th-century sensibility shaped by travel, empire, and the widening awareness that “locale” is never neutral. His craft claim doubles as an ethical one: to write responsibly, you have to grant places the dignity (and culpability) we usually reserve for human actors.