response 64 of 207:

Nov 1 05:03 UTC 1998

Ok! this is my first stint, and i haven't read the rules quite thoroughly ..
so please do NOT accuse me of cheating .. here's a sitter ...the opening lines
of which book are 
        'Last night I dreamt of Manderley again.'

response 66 of 207:

Nov 1 07:21 UTC 1998

 re #64:  but the rules of the game are that you have to correctly
          enter the last person's question before you get a turn to
          post your own quote.  

 re #63:  hmmm..  since you haven't seen fit to decide I'll cede 
          to remmers if he wants it.  if he doesn't, I've got an
          amusing book handy which should be quote-worthy..

response 68 of 207:

Nov 2 04:52 UTC 1998

That viewpoint is quite okay with me. I cede to McNally and look
forward to his quite.

response 70 of 207:

Nov 2 10:13 UTC 1998

sorry if i'm just blundering around and getting in the way here (while 
everybody waits patiently for a quote) but i don't suppose any of you 
know if there was ever an answer to maeve's quote at the end of the 
summer?  i've only just stumbled across it, and i've chewed my 
fingernails down to about mid-forearm by now being frustrated by it...

response 72 of 207:

Nov 2 15:31 UTC 1998

well, i did wonder about asking if you'd meant to say 'that viewpoint is 
quote okay with me' but it seemed dangerously close to being facetious, 
especially since i've only just stuck my head above the water around 
here... oh well, with a little luck maeve'll be in here at some point, 
and might be kind enough to put me out of my misery...

response 74 of 207:

Nov 3 02:18 UTC 1998

Nah, what you did was reasonable. I just wanted to remind folks that
this is an author-guessing game primarily.

response 76 of 207:

Nov 4 13:00 UTC 1998

brilliant!  you've no idea how pleased i am to see you! it was: When
I opened my eyes we were by a bend in the road, and a peasant girl in a 
black shawl waved to us; I can see her now, her dusty skirt, her 
gleaming, friendly smile, and in a second we had passed the bend and 
could see her no more. Already she belonged to the past, she was only a 
memory.
or at least that was the end of it - and ye gods, i don't know either of 
those (rebecca being the exception)!  hey ho; here was me thinking it 
sounded familiar...<hollow laugh>...
so which, please please, and authors?...)
                                         ...thank-you!

response 78 of 207:

Nov 5 07:57 UTC 1998

  OK, new quote as promised:

        "Orwell -- and let us never forget that he was an Eton boy
        from a fairly privileged background -- regarded the labouring
        classes the way we might regard Yap Islanders, as a strange
        but interesting anthropological phenomenon.  In 'Wigan Pier' he
        records how one of the great panic moments of his boyhood years
        was when he found himself in the company of a group of working
        men and thought he would have to dring from a bottle they were
        passing round.  Ever since I read this I've had my doubts about
        old George frankly.  Certainly he makes the working class of
        the 1930s seem disgustingly filthy, but in fact every piece of
        evidence I've ever seen shows that most of them were almost
        obsessively dedicated to cleanliness.  My own father-in-law
        grew up in an environment of starkest poverty and used to tell
        the most appalling stories of deprivation -- you know the kind
        of thing:  father killed in a factory accident, thirty-seven
        brothers and sisters, nothing for tea but lichen broth and a
        piece of roofing slate except on Sundays when they might trade
        in a child for a penny's worth of rotten parsnips, and all that
        sort of thing.  And *his* father-in-law, a Yorkshireman, used to
        tell even more appalling stories of hopping 47 miles to school
        because he only had one boot and subsisting on a diet of stale
        buns and snot butties.  'But,' they would both invariably add,
        'we were always clean and the house was always spotless.'"


  Beware of jumping to incorrect conclusions..

response 80 of 207:

Nov 5 14:01 UTC 1998

it does sound very english - but too light-hearted to be serious 
biography... love that hopping 47 miles bit.  the father-in-law 
reference leads me to wonder if it might be bill bryson, and something 
like notes from a small island?

response 82 of 207:

Nov 6 11:20 UTC 1998

cool!  i'm all excited...)  and please call me simon... is the 
'w.h.y.r.l.' item lively?  must try it...
in the meantime, have a go at this - don't know whether it'll be easy or 
not...
'There in the dusty light from the one small window on shelves of 
roughsawed pine stood a collection of fruitjars and bottles with ground 
glass stoppers and old apothecary jars all bearing antique octagon 
labels edged in red upon which in Echols' neat script were listed 
contents and dates.  In the jars dark liquids.  Dried viscera.  Liver, 
gall, kidneys.  The inward parts of the beast who dreams of man and has 
so dreamt in running dreams a hundred thousand years and more.  Dreams 
of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter 
all his clan and kin and rout them from their house.  A god insatiable 
whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood.  The jars stood 
webbed in dust and the light among them made of the little room with its 
chemic glass a strange basilica dedicated to a practice as soon to be 
extinct among the trades of men as the beast to whom it owed its being.'

response 84 of 207:

Nov 6 14:01 UTC 1998

i can see why you say that, but the mystical'swords&sorcery'-sounding 
elements are something of a sidetrack here; this is a writer who is very 
firmly grounded in reality, it's just that his description is, er, 
idiosyncratic...)

response 86 of 207:

Nov 9 02:19 UTC 1998

  Likewise, I was going to guess Roald Dahl but I wouldn't think that
  that description applied to him, either, except perhaps in direct
  comparison with Lovecraft..