Well, I ran across a quote today that I found quite interesting,
so I thought I'd enter it and see if anybody can identify the author
and work.  So as not to upstage keats' "mysterious quote" item, I'm
entering it in Writing rather than Agora.

   Yet, what the memory repudiates controls the human being.  What
   one does not remember dictates who one loves or fails to love.
   What one does not remember dictates, actually, whether one plays
   poker, pool, or chess.  What one does not remember contains the
   key to one's tantrums or one's poise.  What one does not remember
   is the serpent in the garden of one's dreams.  What one does not
   remember is the key to one's performance in the toilet or in bed.
   What one does not remember contains the only hope, danger, trap,
   inexorability, of love -- only love can help you recognize what
   you do not remember.  And memory makes its only real appearance
   in this life as this life is ending -- appearing, at last, as a
   kind of guide into a condition which is as far beyond memory as
   it is beyond imagination.

As hints, I'll state that the author is American and deceased.

85 responses total.

I have (almost) no idea.  mumble mumble.

(Now, let's not all speak up at once...)

(I'd speak up if I had a clue.)

john, you're welcome to guest host on agora if you'd like...i ask katie
occasionally if she'd like to do it, but she's always the retiring one.
regarding the quote: i'll take the first guess, but i doubt it will be
correct: d.h. lawrence.

(Nah, you are the master of the mysterious quotes, I'll confine my
efforts to backwater conferences like this one.)

Lawrence isn't that bad a guess, though you must've forgotten my
hint that the author was American.

oops, and so i did...well, it's a good thing i didn't think i'd be correct...

ah ha! _now_ who's backwater? writing 46 is now also agora 94, which should
give the quote-hungry something to do for the next two weeks (at least)
while giving john some of the respect he more than deserves. 

john, these guys are good--i haven't stumped anybody since the first quote
by lodge, who wasn't a well-known. i don't think you'll be able to keep
your secret until the new year.

i hope nobody minds the link, and i know that's uncharacteristic of me.

S'Okay by me.

The author of this quote is quite well known, though the place where he
said it might not be.

keats, I thought that no one got that Orwell thing last summer - the first
one I saw, & only after it was all over I believe.

 Leo Buscaglia (sp?)

But Buscaglia is not dead, is he?
 
A beautiful quote and quite to the point.  No guess yet.

Nope, not Buscaglia.

 
 so what do I know from this??? It was a guess.

William James? (Though I'd have to throw in Henry too, as someone said
that Henry was the better psychologist, and James the better writer.)

Nope, nobody from the James Gang...

Er, Rane, they're *both* James.  Or is that the point of that comment?

Er, I was using newspaperese, referring to the person cited by family name.
I finally decided that the quote has to be more recent than the James
gang. There is the reference in it to "performance....in bed". I think
this is a euphemism that arose in the egocentric sixties. This would also
appear to make it a male, since it is a rather male idiom. 

Good deductions.  You're right on both counts.

     I'd say it has some of the same ring as Tom Wolfe, but I
don't know if he's dead or not.  The thing that troubles me about
this guess (other than the state of life of Wolfe) is that this writer
seems to have a consciousness of
rhetorical style, note the repetitions, almost
as though this were a speech rather than writing.  This
quote would definitely sound good read aloud; it's got rhythm, but
it's not poetic.  That doesn't strike me as Wolfian
now that I think of it. Hmmm.  I'll have to think more.
     Chris

well, the most prominent 60s personality of whom i can think who is dead is
abbie hoffman. it sounds a bit more articulate than i'd expect of hoffman, 
but that's cynical. i'll guess abbie hoffman.

Nope, not Hoffman.  (Although the author of the quote was active
in the 60's, it doesn't follow that he was a "60's personality"
per se.)

With considerable doubt, I guess John Updike. What I've read of Updike
is not as rhetorical as this quote, but he wrote a lot more than I've
read. Right era, gender, nationality (but he *shouldn't* be deceased,
since he would be younger than I am 8>.)

(Well, to paraphrase Tom Lehrer, when Mozart was my age, he'd
been dead for 14 years.)

No, not Updike.  I do think he's alive.

I'll give a hint of sorts.  The quote appears in the introduction
to one of the author's books.  And the quote gives no clue
whatsoever as to the subject matter of the book.

Norman Mailer

   Doesn't sound macho enough for Mailer, and anyway,
isn't he alive?

henry miller? i'm not allowed to read him because he's too naughty, but he's
a dead american writer who otherwise seems to fit the profile...

re #25: I thought he died a while ago.  Henry Miller also sounds like a 
good guess.

I like the suggestion of Henry Miller, but he entered the 60's at age
69 - was he still so modern (*60*s modern)? My addition to the
accumulating list will be Truman Capote: he major work is earlier, but
he stayed in the headlines much longer (but I don't know what he wrote,
then).

re 27: He *just* published yet another humungously large book this summer.

Good guesses, but no correct ones so far.  Not Mailer, not Miller, not
Capote.

I'll augment the material for all you literary detectives to work on
by quoting the paragraph that immediately precedes the one in #0:

    I do not remember, will never remember, how I howled and
    screamed the first time my mother was carried away from
    me.  My mother was the only human being in the world.
    The *only* human being:  everyone else existed by her
    permission.

well, now i'd guess proust (just kidding).

If we have to have a howler, how about Allen Ginsberg? Did he write
Introductions? Fits, though, including rhetorical style. And *Kaddish*
is a lament for his mother. Do we have a winner?????

I thought of the point of howl & thought no, can't possibly be.  The other
one never entered my mind ... I still doubt it, Rane, but a cute one - &
maybe right.

ginsberg is still alive...

well, it sounds a lot like it might be tennessee williams, too, but i don't
have enough of his stuff lying around to check and confirm that. still, it's
easy to imagine it's him, so i'll guess tennesse williams. williams saw much
of his work as related to his parents in a kind of neo-freudian way. here's
a passage about his father, for example:

    a psychiatrist once said to me, you will begin to forgive the world when
you have forgiven your father.
     i'm afraid it is true that my father taught me to hate, but i know that
he didn't plan to, and, terrible as it is to know how to hate, and to hate,
i have forgiven him for it and for a great deal else.
    sometimes i wonder if i have forgiven my mother for teaching me to expect
more love from the world, more softness in it, than i could ever offer?
    the best of my work, as well as the impulse to work, was a gift from the
man in the overstuffed chair [his father], and now i feel a very deep kinship
to him.

so my guess is tennessee williams.

('course the problem with that guess is, the passage john has added above
indicates that the author lost his mother at some relatively early age,
and williams did not.)

I did have high hopes with Ginsberg, but to show that I hold no grudges,
HERE's to the good health and long life of Allen Ginsberg!!

How about Jack Kerouac?

there's a good guess, too.

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