Welcome to the Spring "Mysterious Quote" item.  In this item, somebody
(usually whoever won the last one) enters a quote from a novel or other book.
Other people try to guess the author.  That's about all the rules, I think.

215 responses total.

Since remmers gave me the option to enter the next quote, and because I had
a neat quote standing by, here it is:

 

"  The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of
guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when
pierced.  Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each
other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking,
grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition.
This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air
sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed
gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy
nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length.  Slugs of
dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized
convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all  be
regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead.
Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints.  Infinite
phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for
later disposal.  In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an
eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy.  And yet, despite all of
this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the
sultan's speech.  It is a marvel that can only be explained by the power of
brain over body, and, in turn, by the power of cultural conditioning over
the brain."

<blinks>

Sounds like Douglas Adams' style.

That it does.  Also a little like Tom Robbins, but I don't think it's him.

        Interesting to read, since I am now listening to Mr. Methance.com
CD.

  That's Neal Stephenson, from "Cryptonomicon".

That was quick.  Yes, Stephenson, so mcnally is up next.

  As it happens, I ran across a quote last night that I thought was
  suitable, although I suspect the author may be quickly identified..
  Anyway:

     "When I was young, I went to the theater at the nearby shopping
     center and watched a movie about a talking Volkswagen.  I believe
     the little car had a taste for mischief but I can't be certain,
     as both the movie and the afternoon proved unremarkable and have
     faded from my memory.  <H> saw the same movie a few years after
     it was released.  His family had left the Congo by this time and
     were living in Ethiopia.  Like me, <H> saw the movie by himself
     on a weekend afternoon.  Unlike me, he left the theater two hours
     later, to find a dead man hanging from a telephone pole at the far
     end of the unpaved parking lt.  None of the people who'd seen the
     movie seemed to care about the dead man.  They stared at him for a
     moment or two and then headed home, saying they'd never seen anything
     as crazy as that talking Volkswagen.  His father was late picking
     him up, so <H..> just stood there for an hour, watching the dead
     man dangle and turn in the breeze.  The death was not reported in
     the newspaper, and when <H> related the story to his friends,
     they said, "You saw the movie about the talking car?"

Beady?

What?

  re #9:  heh..  not unless the Chicago stuff is all a cover story..

Spring 2001 agora 17, The Spring Mysterious Quote item, has been linked
to books.

(and to the games conference, although I forget the item number.)

agora 17 <--> poetry 245

{I need to forget this item in agora.}

i would like to state that these are much larger than "quotes" nd in 
actuality they are whole paragraphs. let me remind you a quote is not a 
paragraph, but a single sentence.

But the Mysterious Quote item is supposed to give you enough of a 
sample of the writer's prose for you to tell who it is, either from the 
style or the subject matter or from other clues.  It shouldn't be 
something you recognize merely because it's famous, but it shoudn't be 
obscure and without any identifiable characteristics, either.  Harder 
than you think to find such quotes.

Right.  I think by "quote" here we mean "quoted passage", which can
in principle be of any length.  I don't think the game would work
if restricted to one-sentence quotes.

Also, I have no clue who the author of the quote in #8 is.  I assume
the movie referred to is Disney's "The Love Bug" from 1969.  If the
author was a kid at the time, that would make him or her around 40
now.  So definitely a contemporary author, fairly young.

David Sedaris

If it weren't for the age of the author and the location of the scene, I'd
guess Marquez. Seems his style of existentialism.
 
(BTB, I've never heard "quote" used in a way that would imply such a length
restriction. I thought the terms "quotable" and "quotation" were much more
common. Maybe that's my educational background, but academic sources use
paragraphs as quotes all the time -- and call them that... go read a style
manual.)

  #20 is correct, the author in question is David Sedaris.  It's from his
  book "Me Talk Pretty One Day", though it may also have been used in one
  of the monologue pieces he does for the public radio show "This American
  Life."

  I'm not quite sure what to make of the book.  Sedaris can be quite funny
  in smaller doses, but his unpleasant alternating nastiness and whininess
  are too much for me when reading an entire collection of his pieces at once.

Darn, that book is sittin gin my to be read pile right now.  I like his stuff,
Naked was my first exposure to his writing, which is much like his NPR work.

  (It's not just "much like" his NPR stuff -- I've heard several of the 
   pieces from "Naked" and "Me Talk Pretty One Day" broadcast verbatim
   on "This American Life.")

What is this item doing in Poetry?  It isn't about poetry.

Poetry quotes are sometimes posted here.

Or quotes about poetry:

Sometimes a man survives a considerable time from an era in which
he had his place into one which is strange to him, and then the curious 
are offered one of the most singular spectacles in the human comedy.  
Who now, for example, thinks of George Crabbe?  He was a famous poet in 
his day, and the world recognised his genius with a unanimity which the 
greater complexity of modern life has rendered infrequent.  He had 
learnt his craft at the school of Alexander Pope, and he wrote moral 
stories in rhymed couplets.  Then came the French Revolution and the 
Napoleonic Wars, and the poets sang new songs.  Mr. Crabbe continued to 
write moral stories in rhymed couplets.  I think he must have read the 
verse of these young men who were making so great a stir in the world, 
and I fancy he found it poor stuff.  Of course, much of it was.  But the
odes of Keats and of Wordsworth, a poem or two by Coleridge, a few more 
by Shelley, discovered vast realms of the spirit that none had explored 
before.  Mr. Crabbe was as dead as mutton, but Mr. Crabbe continued to 
write moral stories in rhymed couplets.  I have read desultorily the 
writings of the younger generation.  It may be that among them a more 
fervid Keats, a more ethereal Shelley, has already published numbers the 
world will willingly remember.  I cannot tell.  I admire their polish -- 
their youth is already so accomplished that it seems absurd to speak of 
promise -- I marvel at the felicity of their style;  but with all their 
copiousness (their vocabulary suggests that they fingered Roget's 
Thesaurus in their cradles) they say nothing to me:  to my mind they 
know too much and feel too obviously; I cannot stomach the heartiness 
with which they slap me on the back or the emotion with which
they hurl themselves on my bosom; their passion seems to me a little 
anaemic and their dreams a trifle dull.  I do not like them.  I am on 
the shelf.  I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets.  
But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own 
entertainment.

Interesting quote.  It is indeed possible to become a dinosaur
in one's own time.  Me, I try to counteract the tendency.

Dunno about the author.  Sounds British.  Must be post-Romantic,
but probably not by much.  Late 19th/early 20th century?  A poet
who wrote old-fashioned poetry.  Hmmm...  Thomas Hardy?

wow, that was perhaps the quickest I was able to pounce down upon a solution
using the internet... dead on, the first Yahoo search, the first quote I
grabbed.
 
But, having said that, I'm not going to say who I is, except to say that
John's incorrect about the author but correct about the era. My off-the-cuff
guess would have been someone like Huxley, who's also contemporary (but also
wrong).
 
This has been linked to the poetry conference apparently so I can be a pain
in the ass in the item. =}

(yay!)

Yes, British, yes to era, no to Hardy.  And brighn is correct also on 
the quickness of a search, if one wants to go that way.  But that isn't 
exactly sporting, eh?

(Is he correct on the the ass-painfulness of his response?  Let's get to the
meat of the question here.)

oh, it's sporting enough to look it up in a search, it's just not sporting
to post the answer or to even drop any hints...

except to say this: I even have a copy of at least one of this author's books.
Now all someone has to do is rifle through my library, and they'll have it
in no time. ;}

you tell us, ori

(Paul wox!)

you're just saying that so I'll let you peek at my library...

A bunch of Bs come to mind: Beerbohm, Betjeman, Bridges?  

Who were the UK dinosaurs?  Yeats?  Kipling?  Masefield?  Chesterton?  

Housman?

The UK Dinosaurs... isn't that what the Doors changed their name to after
Morrisson died?

Hmm... Chesterton sounds like a good bet.  Of course, if that's
correct, Michael gets to go since he dropped the name first.

Could be Kipling too.

As for doing internet searches:  Might not be sporting, but when
I give quotes, I assume nowadays that people are going to do it
if they can.  So I tend toward giving recent non-public-domain
quotes that are unlikely to be found on the internet.

Well, sporting or not, it takes the fun outta the game (for the 
guesser).  Like giving in and peeking at the answer to a Jumble--you 
immediately wish you hadn't, 'cuz you could've gotten it with a 
little more effort...

Anyway, no on all guesses, and another quote:

I lived near Victoria Station, and I recall long excursions by bus to 
the hospitable houses of the literary.  In my timidity I wandered up and 
down the street while I screwed up my courage to ring the bell; and 
then, sick with apprehension, was ushered into an airless room full of 
people.  I was introduced to this celebrated person after that one, and 
the kind words they said about my book made me excessively 
uncomfortable.  I felt they expected me to say clever things, and I 
never could think of any till after the party was over.  I tried to 
conceal my embarrassment by handing round cups of tea and rather ill-cut 
bread-and-butter.  I wanted no one to take notice of me, so that I could 
observe these famous creatures at my ease and listen to the clever 
things they said.

I have a recollection of large, unbending women with great noses and 
rapacious eyes, who wore their clothes as though they were armour; and 
of little, mouse-like spinsters, with soft voices and a shrewd glance.  
I never ceased to be fascinated by their persistence in eating buttered 
toast with their gloves on, and I observed with admiration the unconcern
with which they wiped their fingers on their chair when they thought no 
one was looking.  It must have been bad for the furniture, but I suppose 
the hostess took her revenge on the furniture of her friends when, in 
turn, she visited them. Some of them were dressed fashionably, and they 
said they couldn't for the life of them see why you should be dowdy just
because you had written a novel; if you had a neat figure you might as 
well make the most of it, and a smart shoe on a small foot had never 
prevented an editor from taking your "stuff."  But others thought this 
frivolous, and they wore "art fabrics" and barbaric jewelry.  The men 
were seldom eccentric in appearance.  They tried to look as little like 
authors as possible.  They wished to be taken for men of the world, and 
could have passed anywhere for the managing clerks of a city firm.
They always seemed a little tired.  I had never known writers before, 
and I found them very strange, but I do not think they ever seemed to me 
quite real.

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