The Quote Quilt is a 20-week contest celebrating DDG’s 20th Anniversary. The idea is to create a story built entirely out of 20 consecutive quotes from 20 different books, one week at a time. Each week readers can submit one quote from any favorite book of theirs which builds upon the prior quotes thereby extending the story. The winning entry of the week will will be added to the story. The developing story will be posted here on the Bulldog each Tuesday afternoon. Entries should be posted below in the comments box and state which book the quote is from and which week of the contest it is being submitted for.
The Payoff
Everlasting Fame and a $5 Gift Certificate which can be picked up at the bookstore.
The Rules
There is no limit to the number of entries which can be submitted, nor the number of weeks one person can win. The only rules are that the book must be in print and the quote must logically further the narrative of the story. The quote can be as short as a single sentence or as long as paragraph. It is true that first person quotes, and quotes which are not too heavy on proper nouns have a leg up. Each book from which a winning quote entry is used will be put in a special display at the store
This Week’s Winner
Week 16 winner is Laurie MacWhinnie for a quote from Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
The Quilt To Date
“I didn’t set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind.”
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
“No matter what he does, every person on Earth plays a central role in the history of the world and normally he doesn’t know it.”
“We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it!”
“Sometimes I think about how odd it would be to catch a glimpse of the future, a quick view of events lying in store for us at some undisclosed date. Suppose we could peer through a tiny peephole in Time and chance upon a flash of what was coming up in the years ahead? Some moments we saw would make no sense at all and some, I suspect, would frighten us beyond endurance.”
“And now I thought of oatmeal: in the winter, great steaming ladles of the stuff, gray, like lava dished from a volcano on the moon.”
“I am a cowardly man. I say it now, now that I have carried to its end a plan whose perilous nature no one can deny. I know its execution was terrible.”
“Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the most difficult demand ever made of it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am. Really, one should know it, for I have not left myself ‘without testimony.'”
“My mother is a fish.”
“Yours is a family of unusual traces,” a soothsaying neighbor once said.
“We are bred to survive,” the father answered, accidentally clipping the woman with his weed wacker, lacerating her ankles. “It is evolution — we keep what we need, we lose the rest.”
“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.”
“So I went to the shabby little monastic apartment where the grand piano glittered like a sneer in the midst of near-squalor and the books and papers piled on chairs and the old coffee cup with dried dregs inside… and where the friend of my youth received me as though he were not a Success and I were not a Failure (both spelled with capital letters), laid his hand on my shoulder, pronounced my name, looked at me from the ice-water-blue, abstract eyes which were a reproach to all uncertain, twisted, and clouded things and were as unwavering as conscience.”
“Your offer,” he said, “is far too idiotic to be declined.”
“I am often called an idiot, and at one time I certainly was so ill that I was nearly as bad as an idiot; but I am not an idiot now. How can I possibly be so when I know myself that I am considered one?”
“It was then that began our extensive travels all over the States.”
“All our family acquaintances have followed the same path: their youth spent trying to make the most of their intelligence, squeezing their studies like a lemon to make sure they’d secure a spot among the elite, then their entire lives wondering with a flabbergasted look on their faces why all that hopefulness has led to such a vain existence. People aim for the stars and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd. That might deprive you of a few good moments in your childhood but it would save you a considerable amount of time as an adult — not to mention the fact that you’d be spared at least one traumatic experience, i.e. the goldfish bowl.“
It is not unlike me that in heading toward the West I should travel east. That has always been my tendency. I was going to Deer Isle for a very good reason. My long-time friend and associate, Elizabeth Otis, has been going to Deer Isle every year. When she speaks of it, she gets an other-world look in her eyes and becomes completely inarticulate. When I planned my trip she said, “Of course you’ll stop at Deer Isle.”
“It’s out of my way.”
“Nonsense,” she said in a tone I know very well.
Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck
The bus levelled down onto the straight line of road that ran to Burguete. We passed a crossroads and crossed a bridge over a stream. The houses of Burguete were along both sides of the road. There were no side-streets. We passed the church and the school-yard and the bus stopped. We got down and the driver handed down our bags and the rod-case. A carabineer in his cocked hat and yellow leather cross-straps came up.
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
“Six hours is a long time at a family reunion, or flying in an unpressurized cockpit, or standing in line at the blood bank. But six hours in an eight-foot rowboat with a young woman who has the limitless capacity to cause you to forget to draw breath is considerably less time.”
Going to See the Elephant – Rodes Fishburne