Here's how this works.  A person enters a short quote by a well-known
author.  It can be prose, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, whatever.  Other
people try to guess the author.  Whoever guesses correctly gets to give
the next quote.

If people are having trouble guessing your author, you should give
hints or more quotes by the same author.

When you make a guess, it'd be nice to supply the reasoning behind it;
that way, we all learn more about literature.

There's a leftover quote from winter agora that I entered and no one has
guessed, so I'll start by reposting it with the guesses so far.

214 responses total.

Here's my quote, left over from winter agora:

     Alice once told me that pioneer women suffered from anexoria, that
     there was evidence that proved it was so.  I couldn't imagine Thomas
     Clausen walking up the lane from California only to find his wife
     skin and bones.  I was used to thinking of that first family as
     long-suffering but philosophical, wise and robust.  I found a
     picture up in the attic of a later family, standing out in front of
     the house, all of them, even the baby, looking grim as hell.  I
     actually don't have too much rapture about time past, although Alice
     has accused me of being hopelessly sentimental.  There has never
     been a time of simple light.  Still, I try to imagine the land for
     the taking, and what it must have meant to have space for as far as
     the eye can see.  The Wisconsin Indians in 10,000 B.C., perhaps
     sleeping right where our yard was, hunted mastodon.  *Mastodon*.
     They ate bison, giant beavers, caribou, and elk.  It is unthinkable
     now that anyone could ever have drunk out of our rivers and lakes.
     I don't have the power to imagine what it must have been like.  I
     can't even visualize the endless prairie, the vast tracks of
     woodland.  I can't hold it in my mind long enough to know absolutely
     what we've lost.  And so the loss is magnified, knowing, as I do,
     that my powers are poor, and that our world has become diminished
     beyond all measure.
 
Guesses so far -- all incorrect -- are John McPhee, William Least Heat
Moon, and Peter Matthiesen.  It's known that the author is a living
American.

This response has been erased.

There is a relation with Alice to consider..... 

Hmm...I was reading something by Annie Dillard this afternoon, and the style
struck me as somewhat similar to this.  Unfortunately, I don't have the means
at  my disposal to check if she's still alive.  But, I'll guess her.

She's still alive and writing.  However, it's not Annie Dillard.  It's
correct, though, that the author is a woman.

Hm, no guesses for a couple of days.  Okay, here's another quote from the
same work:

    During my time in jail I wasn't always sure that Howard and I would
    weather the storm, and I often tried to think what it was, a single
    thing, that went deep enough to hold us.  I knew that what had
    brought us together in Ann Arbor was the mysterious chemical
    bonding that is not rational, eyeball to eyeball, so that we both
    went to our respective apartments and dreamed each other up,
    yearning, never straining aginst the force that drew us right
    against each other.  Emma had been conceived shortly after we met,
    we had bought the farm, and then Claire came along.  There were
    children and real estate to bind the ties.  His parents, Nellie and
    Walt, had had a strong union, and Howard believed, with a kind of
    fervor that seemed nearly Christian, that there was a sanctity in
    marriage to uphold, that the huband and wife were to make their way
    through the world, shoulder to shoulder.  I hadn't known anything
    to speak of about marriage when we met, but I had found his
    aspirations impossible to resist.  Lying in the hospital bed I
    thought to myself that my passion for Howard had soon been replaced
    by something that was stronger than respect, or habit, or maybe
    even need.  It wasn't a simple connection like affinity, because
    there had been periods when I felt as if I was living with a
    stranger, that I didn't know or particularly like the man asleep
    beside me, the man who always got up so early.  There were dozens
    of feelings that came to me in varying strengths as I lay still.  I
    recalled my affection for Howard, my admiration, the attraction I
    felt to him, and the way he could take me by surprise and amuse
    me.  Those feelings were on the side of what I called love.  On the
    other side there was rage, irritation, disappointment, boredom.
    Somewhere in the middle was endurance, stolid and essential as
    air.  I wasn't certain the group of feelings wouldn't cancel each
    other out, if any of them could possibly be powerful enough to
    carry me along by his side, shoulder to shoulder.

 Oscar Wilde

A living American?  Come on, Jim.
If the dating weren't so clearly more recent, the first quote would have
had me tempted to guess Gertrude Stein.  But she's not living, & the
diction is clearly much later.  I have no idea, I'm afraid.  Ann Arbor,
too.  Phooey.

 I was being funny. ;)

Alice Fulton?

Not Alice Fulton.

Another hint:  The work I'm quoting from is very recent.

It wouldn't be md or remmers, would it?

Definitely not remmers, and it's not md unless he uses a female
pseudonym.

Yeah, right.

This response has been erased.

Nope, it's not anybody online here to the best of my knowledge.

My guess was somewhat serious, really!  You both are capable of sounding
like that if you decide to try, IMO.  I saw that the the
narrator was female, but if you'd said the author was female I missed
it - apologies if so.

See response #5.

No new guesses in a while.  Okay, I'll put in another quote from
this author, or some hints, later today or tomorrow if nobody gets
it by then.

Are these quotes from a memoir?  That is, did this woman
actually spend time in jail?

Not as far as I know.  The quotes are from a work of fiction.

Hmm... no activity for three days.  Not sure what hints to give.  The
author is current; I'm quoting from her second novel, published in
1994; I believe it's her latest.  It hit the best-seller list in Ann
Arbor, though perhaps not nationally.  She's won a literary prize or
two.  Here's the opening paragraph of the novel:

        I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely
        than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an
        unfortunate accident.  I hadn't learned that it can happen
        so gradually you don't lose your stomach or hurt yourself
        in the landing.  You don't necessarily sense the motion.
        I've found it takes at least two and generally three things
        to alter the course of a life:  You slip around the truth
        once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are,
        feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at
        the bottom of the heap.

The only writer I know who vaguely fits John's hints is Susan Holtzer, except
I think she has only written one book, and his quotes don't sound at all
like her.  However, if she has written a second book, and I have somehow not
heard of it, and the style is very different...nah, impossible.

Nope, not Susan Holtzer.  Although the narrator of the novel has an
Ann Arbor connection, I don't know if our author ever lived there or
not.

I'm not at all confident here, but I think that the hints I've seen
could all apply to Annie Proulx.

They probably could, but it's not Annie Proulx (author of _The Shipping
News_).  Actually, I think Proulx's style is quite different from that
of our mysterious author.

could it be Phyllis Naylor?

I'm not familiar with Phyllis Naylor, but it's not her.

This is pretty much out of the blue, but Annick Smith?  (Or was she guessed
already?)

Nope, not Annick Smith.

Hmm, I'll try to come up with something more in the hint dept.

Mysterious Quote, Spring Agora #20, has been linked to books #38.

It's hard to come up with hints about this author.  She hasn't been
around for that long.  Maybe she's not that well known yet.  I've
been quoting from her second novel; her first was published in 1989.

One more quote.  If nobody gets this in a couple of days, I'll tell
you who it is.

    In the jail I was often so tired I'd fall asleep mid-sentence
    and then wake up feeling drugged and wrenched.  I read the Laura
    Ingalls Wilder books again, for solace, for the company of old
    friends.  When the good dog Jack was left behind, across the
    swelling Missouri River, I threw myself under my blanket and
    sobbed.  I knew I was crying out of proportion to the dog's bad
    fortune and ill treatment and yet I couldn't stop.  The tears
    kept coming even as I beat my fists on my mat.  I was still
    hitting the mat when I realized I was asking a question:  It
    had nothing to do with the dog at all.  It was Howard; it was
    about Howard.  Why hadn't he come after me at Lizzy's funeral?
    I hadn't ever wondered before, and I had to sit up with the
    asking.  Why hadn't he tripped through the crowds and tried to
    help me?

Well, John, I'm reasonably sure that the author (like most of those guessed
recently) is someone I'm totally unfamiliar with.  *Someone* please guess
it?

Wendy Wasserstein - _The Heidi Chronicles_

(The dog did get across the river ok, if anyone's wondering. :) )

Not Wendy Wasserstein.

This response has been erased.

(I don't even know who Wendy Wasserstein is...)

This response has been erased.

I didn't know who Wendy Wassterstein is, either. But she is the only
woman Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction in the last ten years (1989). 
Thought it was worth a try.

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