The Mysterious Quote - Winter 1999 Edition

Jan 6 00:29 UTC 1999

This is the winter edition of a Grex game that has been running for many
seasons now.

It works like this: Whoever is "up" posts a published quote. The object
is to guess the author. The first person to guess correctly gets to give
the next quote.

If you're up and people are having trouble, it's considered good form to
give hints and/or another quote by the same author.

If you're guessing, please guess one author at a time (that is, no
scattergun guessing by one person). If you're told that your guess is
wrong, then you're free to guess a different author.

Your quotes can be easy or hard, but the authors should be people that
at least some Grexers are apt to have heard of.

response 2 of 195:

Jan 6 07:21 UTC 1999

agora item 53 has been linked to books 79.

response 4 of 195:

Jan 6 21:27 UTC 1999

Salmon Rushdie?

response 6 of 195:

Jan 7 22:48 UTC 1999

sorry, sorry - start of term's v. busy!  i'm afraid it's no to everyone 
suggested so far, including salmon rushdie - i figure it's my fault you 
had a guess outstanding!

thanks very much for getting this rolling again, john!  appreciate it...

um - this seems to be even trickier than i thought it would be, and i 
don't know booth tarkington or paul coelho, so i can't say much about 
where you're going wrong.  mr rushdie, on the other hand, is far too 
much still alive - which reminds me that i read a critic somewhere who 
said that the fatwa was outrageous, but that he would sypmathise with 
anyone who wanted to shoot rushdie on the grounds of literary style...)

so, it's back a good hundred years from rushdie.  er... let's try 
another quote, which i hope won't make it *too* immediately obvious...

'There was a peculiarity, however, which could not have failed the 
notice of a looker-on this night in Antioch.  Nearly everybody wore the 
colours of one or other of the charioteers announced for the morrow's 
race.  Sometimes it was in form of a scarf, sometimes a badge; often a 
ribbon or a feather.  Whatever the form it signified merely the wearer's 
partiality; thus, green published a friend of Cleanthes the Athenian, 
and black an adherent of the Byzantine.  This was according to a custom, 
old probably as the day of the race of Orestes - a custom, by the way 
worthy of study, as a marvel of history, illustrative of the absurd yet 
appalling extremities to which men frequently suffer their follies to 
drag them.'

this quote is dealing by reference with a central aspect of the novel as 
a whole, certainly as regards the plot, and the film adaptation...

pob lwc, as we say in wales...

response 8 of 195:

Jan 8 08:50 UTC 1999

sighs of relief and congratulation!  ben hur it is, so well done and 
you're up, gjharb... i presume it was the charioteering that gave it to 
you?

and hey, remmers, what *was* your original guess?...)

response 10 of 195:

Jan 8 17:16 UTC 1999

Yep, Lew Wallace would've been my guess too, based on the last
entry. Gloria beat me to it. I look forward to her quote.

Simon is quite right that the film version (actually, both films:
the silent one and the C. Heston version) are better known that
the original novel nowadays.

response 12 of 195:

Jan 8 18:12 UTC 1999

Okay - here it is:

"The rain continued.  It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and
steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the
eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the
memory of rains.  It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle
and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil
and molted the bushes.  It shrank's men's hands into the hands of wrinkled
apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped."

response 14 of 195:

Jan 8 19:12 UTC 1999

Not Maugham.  Here's the next paragraph:

"The Lieutenant looked up.  He had a face that had once been brown and now
the rain had washed it pale, and the rain had washed the color from his eyes
and they were white, as were his teeth, and as was his hair.  He was all
white.  Even his uniform was beginning to turn white, and perhaps a little
green with fungus."
. 

response 16 of 195:

Jan 8 23:18 UTC 1999

John Fowles?  The French Lieutenant's Woman?

response 18 of 195:

Jan 9 03:24 UTC 1999

(In any case, I vehemently disagree with that critic about Salman Rushie.)

response 20 of 195:

Jan 11 14:40 UTC 1999

Sorry it took me a few days.  I don't log in much on the 
weekends.

Here's a new quote:

"I don't often speak of myself," said John, "but as you are going away 
from us out into the world to shift for yourself I'll just tell you how 
I look on these things.  I was just as old as Joseph when my father and 
mother died of the fever within ten days of each other, and left me and 
my cripple sister Nelly alone in the world, without a relation that we 
could look to for help.  I was a farmer's boy, not earning enough to 
keep myself, much less both of us, and she must have gone to the 
workhouse but for our mistress (Nelly calls her her angel, and she has 
good right to do so).  She went and hired a room for her with old Widow 
Mallet, and she gave her knitting and needlework when she was able to do 
it; and when she was ill she sent her dinners and many nice, comfortable 
things, and was like a mother to her.  Then the master he took me into 
the stable under old Norman, the coachman that was then.  I had my food 
at the house and my bed in the loft, and a suit of clothes, and three 
shillings a week, so that I could help Nelly.  Then there was Norman;
he might have turned round and said at his age he could not be troubled
with a raw boy from the plow-tail, but he was like a father to me, and 
took no end of pains with me.  When the old man died some years after I 
stepped into his place, and now of course I have top wages, and can lay 
by for a rainy day or a sunny day, as it may happen, and Nelly is as 
happy as a bird.  So you see, James, I am not the man that should turn 
up his nose at a little boy and vex a good, kind master.  No, no! I 
shall miss you very much, James, but we shall pull through, and there's 
nothing like doing a kindness when 'tis put in your way, and I am glad I 
can do it."

response 22 of 195:

Jan 11 22:32 UTC 1999

Nope.  I almost posted something from "Oliver Twist", though!  I 
couldn't find a passage that didn't immediately identify the novel.

You have the right rough time period, though.

response 24 of 195:

Jan 12 14:47 UTC 1999

Not Jane Austen, but you have the right gender of the author.