cahn

She got the which of the what-she-did
Hid the bell with a blot, she did
But she fell in love with a hominid
Where is the which of the what-she-did?

My favorite SF writer ever!

ETA: "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell," Cordwainer Smith.

julianyap has declared this month National Put Quotes in Your Blog Month. Who am I to argue? I love this kind of stuff. So, all my posts this month will have a quotation in them. From something.

A Caligula... can rule a long time, while the best men hesitate to do what is necessary to stop him, and the worst ones take advantage.

So, let me talk about Farthing (Walton) (which the above quote is not from). I actually liked it, though it sometimes is a little (or, uh, more than a little) heavy-handed in its moralizing (but, hey, lately I've been reading Doctorow and Ayn Rand, so apparently I'm on a kick for heavy-handed political moralizing in my fiction). I liked it because I took immediately to the main character, a woman who tends to start explaining things in the middle-- guess why I liked her?-- and because I just loved her relationship with her (dead) brother. Those were the best parts of the book for me.

Farthing failed a great deal in trying to be both a mystery and a political thriller. It did okay in the second, if you're in the mood for reading about that kind of thing, and did very well at depicting the kind of darkening of worldview that happens gradually enough that you might not notice if you're not directly affected-- but the first was terrible. It's a pleasant surprise when a book you don't think is a mystery, like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, turns out to be, and a rather annoying disappointment when something you thought was a mystery isn't really (no plot twistiness, no actual mystery plot, really). And the characters of the Evil people served the political ends, not the literary ones, and so were less well drawn than Agatha Christie's, and it's not like she was the queen of nuance. (The character of the mother, in particular, was a cartoon version of the way teenagers think about their mothers.) So-- although I liked it, I can't recommend it unreservedly to someone who is like me. Also, the first sexual entanglings were interesting, but by the fifth one I was like, "is everyone in this book entangled in some irritating way??"

The book from which the above is taken (and which I cite because I woke up the morning after reading Farthing with it in my head) is somewhat more roughly written than Farthing, but in many ways has a rather more nuanced approach to evil (and evil in families/politics in particular).

ETA: Shards of Honor (Bujold). I think half the things that get quoted in our household are Bujold...

All right, one more list, and then back to the regularly scheduled ranting.

Here are ten Quotes That Are Important to Me. I was inspired to do this by a discussion with nolly-- I suspect that some of these are easier to get (than the last batch) if you are familiar with the work in question, or guessable if you know me, though I consider some of these much more obscure than the last batch. (D took it and got only 3 for sure and guessed another 2.) In chronological order of my first exposure to them:

1. "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye... You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed."

2. As I made my way home, I thought Jem and I would get grown but there wasn't much else for us to learn, except possibly algebra.

3. "And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content."

4. In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.

5. (for extra credit, what is the poem based on)
Thou indeed art just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavor end?

6. ...Though Camelot is built, though the king sit on the throne,
yet the wood in the wild west of the shapes and names

probes everywhere through the frontier of head and hand;
everywhere the light through the great leaves is blown
on your substantial flesh, and everywhere your glory frames.

7. And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.

8. Tri lloneit prytwen yd aetham ni idi.
nam seith ny dyrreith o gaer sidi.

And because it's not fair otherwise, here's the proper translation:
Three fullnesses of Prydwen we went into it.
Except seven, none rose up from the Fortress of the Mound.

And to be perfectly fair, here's the "popular" translation (and the one I knew until my post-college-year):
Three shiploads of Prydwen we went to it;
except for seven, none returned from Caer Siddi.

9. "...libero, dritto e sano e' tuo arbitrio,
e fallo fora non fare a suo senno:

per ch'io te sovra te corono e mitrio."

("...Here your will is upright, free, and whole,
and you would be in error not to heed

whatever your own impulse prompts you to:
lord of yourself I crown and mitre you.")

10. "The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart."

Answers, with possibly way too much commentary, in a couple of days.

(edited to change dumb reference to wrong person, sorry...)

From lightgetsin: Ten references I expect my nearest and dearest to get. I did this by making a record of things said in our apartment over the last week, so it's less of a top ten list than it is a random sampling...

1. "Modified rapture!" (Double points for "Oh joy, oh rapture!")
2. "Never trust a god who grins all the time and wears a top hat, that's my motto." "Is it? That's a strange motto."
3. "We have top men working on it now." "Who?" "Top. Men."
4. They departed into their own country another way.
5. "My days of taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle."
6. "The Horse! I have been asking for nothing else for an hour!" [This may be a conflation of two quotations from the same source]
7. "I don't want all the marbles. I don't want any of the marbles. It's death for me to be caught with marbles in my possession, remember?"
8. "I'm retired!" "As am I, Robert, as am I. And yet... here we are."
9. ...a larj swety slof...
10. She took the point at once, but she also took the spoons.

No one is more surprised than I to find the author for #9 on the list.

Also, because I like to go to 11 for that extra push off the cliff, the email version (D would get neither of these):

11. "Don't you forget me, - -." "I would never."
12. "That girl is slow!"