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 18 winner is Jason Simpson for a quote from E.B. White’s One Man’s Meat.
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.”
“I began to wonder what it would be like. I wondered how time would have marred this unique, this holy spot–the coves and streams, the hills that the sun set behind, the camps and the paths behind the camps. I was sure that the tarred road would have found it out, and I wondered in what other ways it would be desolated. It is strange how much you can remember about places once you allow your mind to return into the grooves that lead back.”
********
Evidently I’ve slept. The sun is hot. My watch says a few minutes before noon. I look over the rock I’m leaning against and see Chris sound asleep on the other side. Way up above him the forest stops and barren grey rock leads into patches of snow. We can climb the back of this ridge straight up there, but it would be dangerous toward the top. I look up at the top of the mountain for a while. What was it Chris said I told him last night?–“I’ll see you at the top of the mountain . . . no . . . “I’ll meet you at the top of the mountain.”
How could I meet him at the top of the mountain when I’m already with him? Something’s very strange about that. He said I told him something else too, the other night–that it’s lonely here. That contradicts what I actually believe. I don’t think it’s lonely here at all.
from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, Bantam Books (pp. 216-217)
“Perhaps I’m old and tired” he continued, ” but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. Look at me: I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway.”
The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy by Douglas Adams
Sarah
There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE, Barchester Towers
“Don’t you understand? There’s something here! Something that affects the area!” she said. “It’s twisted all the ley lines. It’s protecting the area against anything that might change it! It’s … it’s …” There it was again: the thought in her mind that she could not, was not allowed to grasp, like a dream upon waking.
Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett , from
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. You know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.
You’ll look up and down streets. Look ’em over with care.
About some you will say, ” I don’t choose to go there.”
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
you’re too smart to go down some not-so-good street.
From “Oh the Places You’ll Go” by Dr. Suess
If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.
Memento Mori, by Muriel Spark
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with tose who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate,
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great and would suffice.
“Fire And Ice”, Robert Frost
“I have never been in such a mood. It seems as if I had hitherto been dreaming, or slumbering into another world; for in the world, in which hitherto I have lived, who would trouble himself about a flower?–I never have heard of such a strange passion for a flower here… Would that I could explain my feelings in words! I am often full of rapture, and it is only when the blue flower is out of my mind that this deep, heart-felt longing overwhelms me. But no one can comprehend this but myself. I might think myself mad, were not my perception and reasonings so clear; and this state of mind appears to have brought with it superior knowledge on all subjects. I have heard that in ancient times beasts, and trees, and rocks conversed with men. As I gaze upon them, they appear every moment about to speak to me; and I can almost tell by their looks what they would say. There must yet be many words unknown to me.”
Novalis – Henry von Ofterdingen