The Grex Mystery Quote Item should be reborn, like a phoenyx, in the
winter agora, and since I had the honor of having the quote as we changed
seasons, I suppose it's up to me to enter this. :-)

I still don't have a good quote, but I shall attempt to enter one by
tomorrow.

214 responses total.

While we're waiting for Twila's quote, I'll state the rules, for
the benefit of newcomers.

The person who is "it" enters a quote from a published work. It
can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, anything. Then
people try to guess the author. The first person to guess
correctly gives the next quote.

If people are having trouble, it is usual to give hints and/or
enter additional quotes by the same author.

It's only necessary to identify the author, not the particular
work quoted.

Would one of the Books FWs please link this item there?  Thanks.

 Done. I don't like to link, but such is the will of the people.

Ahem.  anderyn, are you there?

good, lord.  i'm still a fw?  mien gott.

Or is that Mein?
Btw, I see that I'm not actually a fw anymore, so if one of the fw's
would care to remove my name from the starting file I'd appreciate it.  :)

(Mien Gott works.  Or you could say, Um Gottes willen.)

I'm there. Just a bit... distracted by the hoidaze. Um. This author is
no longer living and is not an American. 

The yellow omnibus crawled up the northern roads for what seemed like hours
on end; the great detective would not explain further, and perhaps his
assistants felt a silent and growing doubt of his errand. Perhaps, also, they
felt a silent and growing desire for lunch, for the hours crept long past the
normal luncheon hour, and the long roads of the North London suburbs seemed
to shoot out into length after length like an infernal telescope. It was one
of those journeys on which a man perpetually feels that now at last he must
have come to the end of the universe, and then finds that he has only come
to the beginning of Tufnell Park. 

Is the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?  If this *is* a Sherlock Holmes story,
I have no idea which one it is...

Heh.
*I* have no idea.

Well, I'll try the obvious:  Agatha Christe?

Yeah Agatha Christie is obvious, and I'm sorry I didn't think
of her first. But I don't know if that's right...

(I think we can rule out Conan Doyle though. The passage appears
to be in the 3rd person, and the Holmes stories were all
narrated in the 1st person, by Dr. Watson.)

(Didn't Doyle write books other than the Holmes stories, though?)

(Not mysteries, I think.  But in other ways it seems most unlikely to be
Doyle, anyway.)

Not Doyle, and not Christie. But it IS a mystery writer of approximately the
same era. He is perhaps better known for other writings, however.

Re #13:  A minor correction:  not *all* of the Sherlock Holmes stories were
narrated by Dr. Watson.  There were a few (I think maybe two) which Holmes
undertook to narrate himself, during a period when Watson was married and
unavailable to be his sidekick.

How about...  H.G. Wells?  (Random guess.)

        F0or ramdon guesses may I say Kipling?

Neither Wells nor Kipling. I shall do some research on this person's dates
and such, since I daren't rely on memory with such erudite readers. :-) More
info coming by tomorrow.

I'll enter G.K. Chesterton as my random guess du jour.

Actually, I was already doubtful it could be Doyle b/c of the setting:  were
there omnibuses in his time?

happy new year " Naw Warsha abhinandan" to all book loving friends
and wish that there will be very good discussion on books in the new year 1998
Once again Happy new Year to all of u

Thanks Vaibhav, and the same to you.

Now if Twila would only get back to this item. It's been over
a week...

Okay, okay, okay. :-) Twila puts on her pitiful face and asks for
mercy because of her miserable bronchitis...

And Remmers is right! G. K. Chesterton, the Father Brown series.
Go for it, John!

        Oh wow! It was a long shot, but I read many of the Father
        Brown stories once upon a time, and the style seemed to
        fit.

        Bronchitis, yuck. I'll forgive you.

        Okay, that means I get to give a quote. Hold on a sec...

        Here goes....

        There is a place in California which does not appear on
        any map and is known as Upper Dubbing. No county seat,
        Upper Dubbing is simply a large room on the third floor
        of the Sound Department Building at Columbia Pictures'
        studios -- a room where sound and image meet, are
        balanced and synchronized. More important, it is in
        this room that the various sound tracks which eventually
        compose the final sound-complex heard by millions in the
        movie houses are unified and adjusted -- where the
        dialogue track, the music track, and the sound-effects
        track are, in other words, "dubbed" into the picture.
        Three quiet, dignified, brilliantly competent gentlemen
        sit at three sections of a huge desklike instrument that
        makes one think of a tribunal and manipulate an array of
        dials, switches, and buttons that put to shame the
        equipment of a comic-strip mad scientist.

Walt Disney (-my- random guess du jour)

        Not Walt Disney. I doubt he'd be talking up Columbia
        Pictures, since he released movies through his own
        studio.

        But like Disney, the author is a deceased American male.
        Unlike Disney, however, he is not generally regarded as
        being primarily a "film person".

        No new guesses for a few days. Okay, here another quote
        that perhaps bears more directly on what the author is
        known for:

            There have been more words written about the Eroica
        symphony than there are notes in it; in fact, I should
        imagine that the proportion of words to notes, if anyone
        could get an accurate count, would be flabbergasting.
        And yet, has anyone ever successfully "explained" the
        Eroica? Can anyone explain in mere prose the wonder of
        one note following or coinciding with another so that
        we feel that it's exactly how those notes *had* to be?
        Of course not. No matter what rationalists we may profess
        to be, we are stopped cold at the border of this mystic
        area. It is not too much to say *mystic* or even *magic*;
        no art lover can be an agnostic when the chips are down.
        If you love music, you are a believer, however dial-
        ectically you try to wriggle out of it.

Sounds like me, actually.  It also resembles a remark Stravinsky
once made: "Whenever a group of musicians are discussing Beethoven's
5th, there always comes a point when someone stops talking and sings
'da-da-da-daaaaaaaaa.'  The limits of music criticism could hardly
be better defined."  It also resembles a remark Robert Craft made
after peeking in on Stravinsky composing: "As many times as I've
seen him do it, it's still as mysterious to me as if he were a
conjuror performing a trick."  

Oh!  Is it Anthony Burgess?

        Not Stravinsky, Craft, or Burgess. (Why Burgess? Because
        of "Clockwork Orange"?)

        Not Michael Delizia, unless he's had a former career as
        a ghost writer that I'm unaware of.

        Like Stravinsky, the author is exclusively associated
        with music, in the public mind.

Anthony Burgess because he was a composer as well as a writer, and
one of his novels was called "Eroica Symphony" and was modeled
after Beethoven's 3rd.  I got no more guesses.

Really?  I never knew that about Burgess.  I'll have to check out that novel,
I guess.

Who is Leanard Bernstein?

I bet Cyklone got it.  "Joy of Music" or something.

The Burgess book that's based on Beethoven's Eroica is called
"Napoleon Symphony."  It was published in 1974 and now appears
to be out of print.

Aaron Copeland.

        Cyklone's right -- it's Leonard Bernstein, quoted from
        his book _The Joy of Music_. 

        So cyklone gets to give the next quote.

OK, give me a day or two to think of the next one . . . .

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss