Autobiography in Quotes

[truepenny]

cija's fault. Also renenet's and rliz's, for doing one of those question memes which I don't want to do, but which awake the itch for doing a meme.

Mostly, these are from the various places I keep quote lists: notebooks, computer files, my own brain. The exceptions are The Wind in the Willows and Amphigorey, where (a.) the sense is in my head but not the exact words, and (b.) once I started extracting quotes, I wouldn't be able to stop.

"Harriet, the Superintendent has caught the hang of our half-witted manner of conversation."
--Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon

All questions to be answered in quotations.

1. Who are you?

Writers lead lives of unparalled glamour.
--Caitlin R. Kiernan

At seven I was smarter than most ten-year olds, at fourteen smarter than a seventeen-year old, at seventeen smarter than a twenty-year old. Twenty-four now, I was no smarter than any other twenty-four year old around the place and anyway, it was no longer a race and there were no more prizes for being a prodigy. Everyone had caught up with me and I knew, I understood with a sharp gut stab of horror, that the danger now was that I would stand still while they raced past.
--Stephen Fry, Making History

2. What do you look like?

Like the best portraits of people, Svenson's best portraits of sock monkeys focus on sitters that seem to have complicated inner lives.
--The Los Angeles Times

JINX: She's short, symmetrical, hair on top. Buffy something?
--Jane Espenson & Doug Petrie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer 5.12, "Checkpoint"

3. What's your secret?

"I see you are an idiot, whatever else you may be," said the Queen.
--C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

4. What do you want to be?

He was huge and fierce, a nightmare in black and orange, and he moved like a god through the world; which is how tigers move.
--Neil Gaiman

BUFFY: I walk. I talk. I shop; I sneeze. I'm gonna be a fireman when the floods roll back. There's trees in the desert since you moved out, and I don't sleep on a bed of bones.
--Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer 4.22, "Restless"

5. What can you do?

It was a bit like wrestling a bear. Some days I was on top. Most days, the bear was on top.
--Neil Gaiman

6. What can't you do?

When my mistress tells me she is made of truth,
I believe her, though I know she lies.
--William Shakespeare

But here the cotton gown, which had nobly stood by him so far, and which he had basely forgotten, intervened and frustrated his efforts. In a sort of nightmare he struggled with the strange uncanny thing that seemed to hold his hands, turn all muscular strivings to water, and laugh at him all the time; while other travellers, forming up in a line behind, waited with impatience, making suggestions of more or less value and comments of more or less stringency and point. At last--somehow--he never rightly understood how--he burst the barriers, attained the goal, arrived at where all waistcoat pockets are eternally situated, and found--not only no money, but no pocket to hold it, and no waistcoat to hold the pocket!
--Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

7. What is love?

He that lives in hope danceth without musick.
--George Herbert

You can play with your Magneto figure and your Gandalf figure, and they can fight each other. Or you can have them love each other.
--Sir Ian McKellen

[Ed. because tzikeh's right: M-C-K-E-L-L-E-N.]

8. What is friendship?

One does not cherish a goblin, exactly. But one does not like to waste them.
--Ann Downer, The Glass Salamander

BUFFY: Weird love's better than no love.
--Jane Espenson, Buffy the Vampire Slayer 5.18, "Intervention"

9. Are you strong?

My silence is original silence, not a quotation from his silence.
--Tom Batt

"In truth," he said, "we can only do what we can. I spoke not to crush your hope, mistress, but only to warn you that not all grails are found intact. Nor, indeed, found at all."
--Barbara Hambly, Traveling with the Dead

10. What are you afraid of?

...the more enchanted you get, the more certain you feel that you are not enchanted at all.
--C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

11. What would you do with a million dollars?

...a performance at Lying-in-the-Way of Prawne's The Nephew's Tragedy. It is being put on , for the first time since the early seventeenth century, by the West Mortshire Impassioned Amateurs of Melpomene.
--Edward Gorey, The Unstrung Harp

12. What would you tell the one who loves you? [N.b., I can't answer the question without it ending up being Mirrorthaw. Just so y'all know that.]

"Let us go on and take the adventure that shall fall to us."
--C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said, 'Bother!' and 'O blow!' and also "Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.
--Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

"Darling, if you danced like an elderly elephant with arthritis, I would dance the sun and moon into the sea with you."
--Dorothy L. Sayers, Have His Carcase

13. What do you want to do?

"All names will soon be restored to their proper owners."
--C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

14. Where do you want to be?

It was the sort of house that you never seen to come to the end of, and it was full of unexpected places.
--C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

"What an odd way this house is built," Simon said, as they turned into another narrow corridor towards the stairs leading up to the next floor. "All little bits joined together by funny little passages. As if each bit were meant to be kept secret from the next."
--Susan Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone

15. What do you want?

DRUSILLA: Oh, Angel, it's still warm.
ANGEL: I knew you'd like it. I found it in a quaint little shopgirl.
--Marti Noxon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer 2.16, "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered"

I drove around the city
Looking for a room
That was high above the water
Where my things could be in tune.
--The Traveling Wilburys, "Cool Dry Place," Traveling Wilburys vol. 3

"We can't possess one another. We can only give and hazard all we have--Shakespeare, as Kirk would say."
--Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon

Comments

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

"facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought."
--Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

Sorry. It had to be done though.

[heresluck]

Well, that's unfair -- I want to play too, but I have so many volumes of quotes I'll never manage to narrow it down.

Drat.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Dude. No one's fault but your own.

But it is a pity. Perhaps you could think of the quote and THEN look for it in your quote book? Or do a series of them, like one per volume or something? Because I want you to share in the madness.

[pameladean]

This is, to quote one of my editors, awesome.

I mean, I have quotations in my head like regular people have glial cells, but I can't go sorting them like that. They're more like the weather.

And for heaven's sake, WHERE DID IAN McKELLAN SAY THAT? WHERE WHERE WHERE WHERE WHERE?

Pamela

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It's somewhere on his website (http://www.mckellen.com/). Either under LotR or maybe under the first X-Men movie. I cannot at this moment find it (*tears hair with frustration*), but will look again later (after today's other claims to my attention have been dealt with) ... unless someone else finds it first and saves me the bother.

But, yes, he really did say it. Isn't it great?

[cija.livejournal.com]

At long last, I'm a bad influence! I'm so pleased.

I found the best way to keep this from taking days if not weeks was to restrict myself to quoting only those books I could reach from where I was sitting without getting up. People who keep all their books on bookcases instead of on every level surface might find this difficult, though.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Dammit, it seems to have disappeared. I swear I found it on his site, because I used it as a card on Here's Luck's birthday present in 2001. And, I mean, I couldn't have made up something that cool.

Perhaps it was in an interview somewhere. I don't know. And apparently the invisible brain weasels were in control, because I didn't give a proper citation for it in my quote-file.

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

2002. I mean 2002.

See what I mean about the invisible brain weasels?

[pameladean]

I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to cause a tizzy. Perhaps it will come to you. I can live without knowing. Really.

Pamela

[heresluck]

Perhaps you could think of the quote and THEN look for it in your quote book?

This suggestion is an excellent one, in theory, but fails to take into account that I write them down because I can never remember them otherwise.

But, again, the mind like a steel sieve is nobody's fault but my own.

Sticking to one volume might work. Hmmm.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

I saw it on his site, in an interview; there's corroboration (or indeed - there's blood! blood, we say, we must have blood, it admits of no doubt - which is a quote quoted in Couds of Witness, maybe from Death's jest-book, but Peter is trapped behind a pile of boxes)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It isn't you causing the tizzy. I promise. That's just how I get when I go to look for something (a quote, a book, a whatever) and can't find it. That's actually what my next post, about A Walking Tour of the Shambles, is reflecting, too. It's me. Many people find it slightly to extremely unnerving. You don't need to feel even slightly culpable.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I feel better now. But Google failed me, so I think maybe it's disappeared somehow. V. disappointing.

The quote about blood is from Dickens, actually. Since Clouds of Witness is still on my desk from doing the post ... epigraph for Chapter Three, from David Copperfield.

Must ... track ... down ... quotation ... and ... subdue!

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

People who keep all their books on bookcases instead of on every level surface might find this difficult, though.

You know, I've heard there are people like that, but I think they're a myth.

[vass]

I've seen it. It's at a dinner party, a snobbish woman is talking, and she actually means blood as in breeding, not blood as in the beverage er, liquid. I still remember the thrill of delight when I first saw it in its natural habitat. That thrill is the second of the two things that make Gaudy Night and Tam Lin my favourite books in the world: the first is identifying them as quotations, knowing that they're from somewhere else, and that if I just keep reading I'll stumble across them someday, and it'll probably lead me to something wonderful to read. They're rather arbitrary reasons for making something my favourite book, I know. I have others, but those are the ones that made the books first sink hooks into me (imagine what happened when I first read Dorothy Dunnett!)

[vass]

I keep books on bookcases instead of on every level surface. They serve instead of wallpaper or other decorations.

Of course, like pets, they don't stay there. But that's where they rest. I like to stare at them greedily, unable to choose which to pick up next.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Well...

Not all my books, because there's the one I'm currently reading, and there are some of mine yet in Ireland, but almost all the ones here are on shelves. I've wanted to do this for years, and it really soothes my mind to have them there, at the end of the bed, where I can just look at them and take reassurance therefrom.

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

You know, somewhere deep in the library at the University of Florida was a Dorothy Sayers concordance. Some poor sod had decided to track down EVERY REFERENCE in her Wimsey novels. All that quote-dropping, even the slightest nod of a quote, and it was there.

And of course now, miles and years away, I really really want that concordance every time I reread Sayers. I can't even remember who did it or what it was called... but I wants it, I do.

*goes merrily off to play with quotes*

[(Anonymous)]

If you read this... it's the Lord Peter Wimsey Companion, and it's just been reissued in a second edition, and it's available at www.sayers.org.uk, and it's great. And the poor sod is Stephan Clarke, and I've met him. Obsessive, yes, but otherwise normal. :)

And I greatly admire truepenny's quotes.

Erica the anonymous