The Quote Quilt Contest: Week 9 winner

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The Facts
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 9 winner is Penn for a quote from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

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.”

“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.”

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4 Comments

  1. “He loves fish, Hannah whispered.
    “Why do men love to fish, Hannah?
    “Because when they catch a fish, bring it from the dark ocean into a clear day, it’s like seeing a woman naked for the first time. But they get to do it over and over. They’ll never get to see us naked for the first time again. Every nibble they get is like an electric shock of hope. There’s something that’s always been clothed and they’re about to undress it.”

  2. From “The Song of the Lark” by Willa Cather: For week #2

    “Artistic growth is more than it is anything else a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that being truthful is easy. Only the artist, the truly great artist, knows how difficult it is.”

  3. from “Your Mother was a Fish”, by A.M. Homes

    “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.”..

  4. I am lonely. I have a mother; I love her, but, all the same, I am lonely. That’s how it happens to be. . . . Lonely people read a great deal, but say little and hear little. Life for them is mysterious; they are mystics and often see the devil where he is not. Lermontov’s Tamara was lonely and she saw the devil.

    Anton Chekhov, “A Doctor’s Visit” (Later Short Stories, 1888-1903)

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