Garner's Quotations

by Dwight Garner

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  For Cree

  Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations.

  —MARGARET DRABBLE, A SUMMER BIRD-CAGE

  The primary object of a student of literature is to be delighted.

  —LORD DAVID CECIL

  PREFACE

  Make your own Bible. Select and collect all those words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the blast of a trumpet out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John, and Paul. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  For nearly four decades, I’ve kept what’s known as a commonplace book. It’s where I write down favorite sentences from novels, stories, poems, and songs, from plays and movies, from overheard conversations. Lines that made me sit up in my seat; lines that jolted me awake. About once a year, I’ll say something I think is worthy of inclusion. I mostly end up deleting those entries.

  I began keeping my commonplace book in the 1980s, when I was in high school. In the 1990s, when I was working as the arts editor for an alternative weekly newspaper in Vermont, I typed the whole thing into a long computer file. I’ve moved it from desktops to laptops and now onto my iPhone, too. Into it I’ve poured verbal delicacies, “the blast of a trumpet,” as Emerson put it, and bits of scavenged wisdom from my life as a reader. Yea, for I am an underliner, a destroyer of books, and maybe you are, too.

  Commonplace books are not so uncommon. Virginia Woolf kept one. So did Samuel Johnson. W. H. Auden published his, as did the poet J. D. McClatchy. E. M. Forster’s was issued after his death. The novelist David Markson wrote terse and enveloping novels that resembled commonplace books; they were bird’s nests of facts threaded with the author’s own subtle interjections. For fans of the genre, many prize examples have come from lesser-known figures such as Geoffrey Madan and Samuel Rogers, both English, who issued commonplace books that are notably generous and witty and illuminating. These have become cult items. The literary critic Christopher Ricks said about Rogers that, although he may not have been a kind man, “he was very good at hearing what was said.”

  In my commonplace book, for handy reference, I keep things in categories: “food,” “conversation,” “social class,” “travel,” “politics,” “cleanliness,” “war,” “money,” “clothing,” etc. I use it as an aide-mémoire, a kind of external hard drive. It helps me ward off what Christopher Hitchens, quoting a friend, called CRAFT (Can’t Remember a Fucking Thing) syndrome. I use my gleanings in my own writing. Like Montaigne, I quote others “in order to better express myself.” Montaigne compared quoting well to arranging other people’s flowers. Sometimes, I sense, I quote too often in the reviews I write for The New York Times, swinging on quotations as if from vine to vine. It’s one of the curses of spending a lifetime as a word-eater, and of retaining a reliable memory. Perhaps the book you are holding will purge me of this habit. I fear it will inflame it.

  I am no special fan of most books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, The Yale Book of Quotations, and The New Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations, to name three dependable reference books, are invaluable, for sure, as repositories of literary and verbal history. (Countless other books of quotations aren’t reliable at all, and the less said about quotation sites on the Internet the better.) But even the best contain a good deal of dead weight. They lean, sometimes necessarily, on canned and overused thought and, grievously, are skewed to the upbeat. So many of the lines they contain seem to vie to be stitched onto throw pillows or ladled, like soup, over the credulous soul. “Almost all poetry is a failure,” Charles Bukowski contended, “because it sounds like somebody saying, Look, I have written a poem.” The same is true of quotations and aphorisms. So many have a taxidermied air, as if they were self-consciously aimed at posterity.

  The book you are holding is a more personal venture. It’s an attempt to break with the conventions of commonplace books and volumes of quotations. For one thing, it contains only a small selection of the material I’ve hoarded. For another, in arranging these sentences I’ve gone by feel, not by category. I’ve tried to let the comments speak to one another and perhaps throw off unexpected sparks.

  Quotations, by definition, are out of context. I’ve played freely with this notion and have placed some lines quite out of context indeed. In this book there are few life lessons and little uplift, except by accident. I’ve selected lines mostly from books and writers I admire, and it’s my hope that a reading list might present itself over the course of the proceedings. This book is a way of saying thank you to many writers for the pleasure they’ve brought me. Obviously I don’t agree with everything said; retweet does not always, as they say on Twitter, equal endorsement.

  A literary critic thinks long and hard before bringing another book into the world. Perhaps, this critic thinks, a thrifty book that points the way to other books might be worthwhile.

  Writing in the April 1904 issue of The Atlantic, Walt Whitman declared that he was tired of “gloved gentleman words.” He admired “unhemmed latitude, coarseness, directness, live epithets, expletives, words of opprobrium, resistance.” I have tried to put Whitman’s words to use in regard to quotations. There is more blaspheming in this book than there is in most collections of quotations. (Until fairly recently, most did not permit profanity.) It is a truth universally acknowledged among book critics that the most memorable lines in many novels contain the word fuck. These cannot be printed in newspapers. I have saved these lines up, and present some of them here.

  —Dwight Garner

  I hope this pen works. Yes, it does.

  —Katherine Mansfield, diary

  How’re you doing, apart from the end of liberal capitalist democracy?

  —Ali Smith, Spring

  A friend of mine says this is the beginning of the end of the global order.

  —Rachel Cusk, Coventry

  One day someone will use the last surviving Latin word in English to say something like, This sucks.

  —Michael Hofmann, Paris Review interview

  I’ve heard the saying “That sucks” for years without really being sure of what it meant. Now I think I know.

  —Stephen King, The Stand

  I wonder what the nice people are doing tonight.

  —Chelsey Minnis, “Iceberg”

  Why are you all reading? I don’t understand this reading business when there is so much fucking to be done.

  —Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

  Better a good venereal disease than a moribund peace and quiet.

  —Henry Miller, Quiet Days in Clichy

  —They’ve got crabs.

  —What’s wrong with that? I asked. We eat crabs all the time.

  —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People

  Here we go then, (genital) warts an’ all …

  —Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.<
br />
  Everything that is true is inappropriate.

  —Oscar Wilde

  Everyone nodded, nobody agreed.

  —Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

  Let’s, as if sore, grab a few things from the flood.

  —A. R. Ammons, “Sphere: The Form of a Motion”

  Fragments, indeed. As if there were anything to break.

  —Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought

  —He licked his lips. Well, if you want my opinion—

  —I don’t, she said. I have my own.

  —Toni Morrison, Beloved

  Love poems must be bounced back off a moon.

  —Robert Graves, Paris Review interview

  See the moon? It hates us.

  —Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories

  The moon, big as a Bitcoin.

  —Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein

  Supposing one fell onto the moon.

  —D. H. Lawrence, “Indians and an Englishman”

  Moon’s left town. Moon’s clean gone.

  —James Michie, “Arizona Nature Myth”

  You know where the Beatles got that shit from. You know that’s our shit they fucking up like that.

  —Albert Murray, South to a Very Old Place

  How come the Beatles never got busted for statutory rape—because they’re white?

  —Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood

  I hope you don’t mind, I’m from the South, we’re touchers.

  —Charlie Rose, attributed

  Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.

  —Robert Christgau, in The Village Voice

  —How’s everything with you?

  —Absolutely marvelous!

  —Shit.

  —Bernard Malamud and Brendan Gill, in conversation

  Somehow he knew, based on very little experience, that this faux-casual shit spelled money.

  —Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

  If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

  —Dorothy Parker, attributed

  Tweedy shitballs.

  —Calvin Trillin’s term for boarding-school types, Remembering Denny

  I’ll have no college swankies.

  —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

  Oh, fuck, not another elf!

  —Hugo Dyson, as J.R.R. Tolkien read aloud an early draft of The Lord of the Rings

  I am putting a mental jigsaw together of what a hobbit looks like, based on a composite of every customer I have ever sold a copy to.

  —Shaun Bythell, Diary of a Bookseller

  I couldn’t give a damn who found the rabbit’s foot or the magic mug.

  —David Hare, The Blue Touch Paper

  I place a total embargo on dragons.

  —Clive James, Play All

  Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.

  —Zadie Smith, On Beauty

  Shit, I said to myself, if I stop now, I’m liable to wind up with a fucking picket fence.

  —Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood

  One can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

  —Anne Sexton, Paris Review interview

  In a detached house there is no one to hear you scream.

  —Amanda Prowse, in The Telegraph

  A bad review is like one of those worms in the Amazon that swims up your penis. If you read it, you can’t get it out, somehow.

  —Denis Johnson

  It’s only words, unless they’re true.

  —David Mamet, Speed-the-Plow

  —And is critically acclaimed.

  —Those who can’t teach gym, acclaim.

  —Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am

  The unbelievable boredom of reviews. Has Anthony Powell had a stroke or was he always like that?

  —Auberon Waugh, The Diaries of Auberon Waugh

  Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece.

  —William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

  I just want to eat about a hundred million oysters and two tons of caviar and go swimming naked in champagne.

  —Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

  Grace does her own shucking.

  —Grace Jones’s tour rider, which requests two dozen fine de claire or Colchester oysters on ice

  You put your finger into it, and go swish, swish, swish.

  —Jane Jacobs, on how to make a West Village martini

  Wasn’t the whole twentieth century a victory lap of collage, quotation, appropriation, from Picasso to Dada to Pop?

  —Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence

  I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.

  —Jack Kerouac, On the Road

  The not paying for things is intoxicating.

  —Philip Roth, American Pastoral

  I don’t trust anybody who hasn’t shoplifted.

  —John Waters

  White noise about white people.

  —Gil Scott-Heron, on John Knowles’s A Separate Peace

  Keep Britain, White.

  —V. S. Naipaul’s tweak of the racist slogan “Keep Britain White”

  What whites called leftovers, but we knew as leavings.

  —Kevin Young, “The Kitchen”

  Did you know I was born in a Holiday Inn?

  —Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction

  The assumptions a hotel makes about you! All the towels they give you.

  —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show

  Cleanliness might not be next to godliness but it is certainly adjacent to horniness.

  —Geoff Dyer, on hotels, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

  No problem is insoluble given a big enough plastic bag.

  —Tom Stoppard, Jumpers

  When correctly viewed

  Everything is lewd.

  —Tom Lehrer, “Smut”

  Nothing risqué, nothing gained.

  —Alexander Woollcott

  The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex, and picnics.

  —Christopher Hitchens

  [Martin Heidegger] is recorded to have laughed only once, at a picnic with Ernst Jünger in the Harz Mountains. Jünger leaned over to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, and his lederhosen split with a tremendous crack.

  —Paul Johnson, Humorists

  The meat around my skull can’t stop smiling.

  —Catherine Lacey, The Answers

  All of us look younger and sweeter when we smile our real smiles—the ones that come when we are genuinely happy.

  —Stephen King, From a Buick 8

  When I saw it I knew I wanted to be smiled at like that.

  —Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

  No generalization is wholly true, not even this one.

  —Attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., among others

  Let’s have some new clichés.

  —Samuel Goldwyn

  I need some new attitudes, some new affirmations and denials.

  —Lionel Trilling, Life in Culture

  There’s nothing new

  under the sun,

  but there are new suns.

  —Octavia E. Butler

  It’s up to you to break the old circuits.

  —Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

  Goodbye, and I don’t mean au revoir.

  —Christopher Ricks

  And off he fucked.

  —Kingsley Amis, attributed, after having told someone to fuck off

  This is the life I’ve always wanted—social distancing without social disapproval.

  —Tom Stoppard, on the coronavirus, in The Spectator

  Neither am I.

  —Peter Cook, responding to the boast “I’m writing a novel”

  Of course it’s all right for librarians to smell of drink.

  —Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels

  We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholical
ly.

  —Joseph O’Neill, Netherland

  Edward worried about his drinking. Would there be enough gin? Enough ice?

  —Donald Barthelme, Flying to America

  A big fucking bar, sis, with every kinda liquor imaginable!

  —Elaine Stritch, on what heaven will be like

  No class of people are more abundantly provided with time for drinking than readers of books.

  —Delmore Schwartz, “Dostoevsky and the Bell Telephone Company”

  It’s all right, it’s all right; everything is calm; we are just eating every thing that moves in here, dry people.

  —Barry Hannah, Hey Jack

  My ambition was to live like music.

  —Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

  Put thy shimmy on, Lady Chatterley!

  —D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

  We all came into this world naked. The rest is all drag.

  —RuPaul

  Treat everyone you meet like they are God in drag.

  —Baba Ram Dass

  Oh honey … I’d love to trip through the Pentagon in heavy drag and get myself a lovely general! That would be a test of real democracy.

  —Charles Wright, The Messenger

  Our own correspondent is sorry to tell

  of an uneasy time, that all is not well.

  —Wire, “Reuters”

  To tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, even if the truth is horrible.

  —R. T. Clark, BBC home news editor, during World War II

  The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

  —Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon

  Fox News did to our parents what they thought video games would do to us.

  —Ryan Scott, on Twitter

  I have no enemies. But my friends don’t like me.

  —Philip Larkin

  There was obviously nothing to recommend me to anyone.

  —Deborah Levy, Hot Milk

  I have always disliked myself at any given moment; the total of such moments is my life.

  —Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

  I’m not much but I’m all I have.

  —Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

  Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I’m fine.

  —Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son