In fact, by inwardly uttering again what has already been uttered, to get the feel of it and to savor its full power. How does it work? How might a quotation be done differently, with the materials and urgencies of a different moment? Perhaps writers should begin, Neatness and self-sufficiency of its structure laid bare in the mind. A good quotation can serve as a model for one’s own work, a perpetual challenge with the Pieces side by side: this can become a fever, and one that has afflicted writers of all eras.Īnyone, of course, might develop a passion for quotes, but for a writer it’s a particularly intimate connection. To collect those pieces, to extrapolate lost worlds from them, to create a larger map of the human universe by laying many such Shattered wholes reach us in smallĭisconnected pieces, like the lines of the poet Sappho preserved in ancient treatises. Libraries may go under, cultures may go under, but single memorizable bits of rhyme and discourse persist over centuries. Of which the world could, in a pinch, be reconstructed. It resonates with the timeless desire to seize on the minimal remnant - the tiniest identifiable gesture - out But the gathering of such fragments responds to a much deeper compulsion. They also make marvelous filler for otherwise uninspiredĬonversations. What is the use of quotations? They have of, course, their practical applications for after-dinner speakers or for editorialists looking to buttress their arguments. Memory can latch onto when everything else goes blank. Fisher’s recollection of “the potato chips I ate slowly one November afternoon in 1936, in the bar of the Lausanne Palace.” They are the dangling threads that They can be anythingĪt all, the exquisitely chiseled perceptions of poets and philosophers or the blurts of unscheduled truth-telling by public figures caught in the spotlight (the former Jersey City mayor Frank Hague’s “IĪm the law” or Richard Nixon’s “I’m not a crook”) the punch lines of 1930s comedians or the curtain lines of Jacobean dramatists or words of wisdom or anguish or ridiculous humor, From certain angles my inner landscape resembles a gallery hung with half-recalled citations, the rags and tag-ends of a lifetime of reading and listening. Quotes are the mental furniture of my life. I would much rather everyone think I was a prophet than some poor sick kid.Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing. Living in the twenty-first century gives a person a much better prognosis for treatment, but sometimes I wish I’d lived in an age before technology. It was an actual place-a “madhouse” where the insane were imprisoned in unthinkable conditions. In the Dark Ages my parents would have sent for an exorcist, because I was clearly possessed by evil spirits, or maybe even the Devil himself.Īnd if I lived in Dickensian England, I would have been thrown into Bedlam, which is more than just a description of madness. I’m sure if an actual prophet surfaced today, he or she would receive plenty of Haldol injections, until the sky opened up and the doctors were slapped silly by the Hand of God. If I had lived in biblical times, I might have been seen as a prophet, because, let’s face it, there are really only two possibilities: either prophets were actually hearing God speaking to them, or they were mentally ill. I would have been treated with great mystical regard. My voices would have been seen as the voices of ancestors imparting wisdom. If I had been born a Native American in another time, I might have been lauded as a medicine man. “If you think about it, the public perception of funky brain chemistry has been as varied and weird as the symptoms, historically speaking.
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