Self-Quoting Dilemma
I have always been a bit of a sucker for quotations. I have several books of them put away somewhere (space is very much at a premium for me and things I'm not using constantly get buried sooner or later). I have spent some time recently looking at the quotes on the applicable Goodreads page and can heartily recommend it. Everyone is on there. Einstein, Gandhi, Shakespeare, JFK, Mae West, Malcolm X....countless thousands of concise and profound observations by names famous and not so famous. I liked a few of the ones I felt most akin to and they have appeared on my page.
How egotistical is it to want to see yourself quoted in such esteemed company? VERY, I should think, but the temptation is there all the same. I don't remember ever pretending not to be at least a little egotistical - arrogant even, on occasion. I'm too honest to deny it completely. But in my own defence, I really do think you need some degree of egotism and arrogance to get anywhere in this world. It's a kind of self-belief or self-confidence if you ask me, and it's a rare kind of an artist who doesn't have any of that in their DNA. Quoting yourself on the dedicated quotes page is very much frowned upon, if not actually against the rules on here. And you need to meet their criteria for being "important" too, which I definitely don't. Ho hum. As the late, great Irving Thalberg once wisely said, "Credit you give yourself is not worth having".
Despite that, I've been trying to think of some things I've committed to paper over what I still laughingly refer to as my "writing career" that I am most proud of. Most of the quotes I would choose are as yet unpublished, intended for books 2-4 of my KT Legacy Series, and I don't want anyone to steal them, so I've had to get MAN STRUGGLING WITH UMBRELLA out and flick through it. These are, to date, some of my Legacy's finest moments, I think....
1) From "Sweet Surrender", Page 116:
You were a poet of sorts once, somewhere, in another life, and I loved to fathom your poet's soul and wonder why your beautiful gift was so cruelly taken from you when you were still so young and full of promise. You'd muse on me and fantasise then. You'd see something in me you would not dare speak of and you'd weave the prettiest clothes for me from it. You'd dress me in sunshine and sky and oceans and comets and music and the voices of the angels and the others would look on me so wistfully. They all wished they could be me for you. They all wished they could touch you as I did. They all wished they could capture what we had, but oh, how we would guard it, and they saw only my shadows and how they'd fall on you in your lighter moments. You saw a special something walking alongside me. A something only poets could see.
2) From "Meanders And Oxbow Lakes", Page 145:
Back in 1987, my astrological mentor, Hailey, suggested to me that what a writer leaves out can be just as important as what he puts in. It took me about five years to work out what that meant because I was young and foolish and I didn't want to admit that there was anything about the business of creative writing that I didn't understand. My mind simply didn't work in such a way because it hadn't realised that it could. Once I began to see what was so obviously missing from silent film and radio drama, I began to see potential in the world of prose writing that I had never suspected was there (and that's why I started thinking in terms of meanders and oxbow lakes), but at the end of the day, this book's here not only because of all that, but because in this writer's opinion, the principal ingredients of the average novel are patronising and overkill.
3) From "In The Heat Of The Morning", Page 155:
A faraway look came into her eyes for a moment. Then her dog came bounding up, the spell was broken and she turned her back on me.
I think she was crying.
I watched her every step, her every swing of the hips until she became a tiny dot; when that tiny dot disappeared I lost the ability to breathe. I fell to my knees gasping for air, my gown billowing up over my head in the wind as I wept. I put my forehead on the grass till the tears came running out, and when they did, I lay down and wanted to die.
4) From "Killing Time On The Other Side", Page 47-48:
Before I go any further, I must explain to you the Poet's Problem. I didn't invent it, for sure, but I did re-name it after an early B-side by Blondie. It seems to be all but universal, and it goes like this:
A natural born poet has a deep love of his mother tongue and all of the wonderful uses it can be put to. He loves a pun, a witticism, an ambiguity, a clever turn of phrase, and so on. He sees deeply into the written word, he feels it, has a rapport with it, it is a forever friend to be both cherished and protected. The poet sees beauty in brevity. He is concise. Every word is chosen and married to its neighbours with the precision and care of a master craftsman. The poet will agonise on whether the semicolon is really the right punctuation to use at a certain juncture, on whether the capital letters or italics are necessary, on which word is to be used twice for effect. The poet looks through a microscope. He sees the world of the small in great detail. He is less concerned with character or plot than he is with mood or resonance. To the true poet, prose is something of an abomination. It's inferior. It's lowbrow. Careless, it is, ephemeral, formulaic and long-winded. The poet seeks a kind of perfection the world of prose writing simply does not have the time or inclination for.
5) From "Special Occasions", Page 20-21:
In a book, this kind of conversation appears trifling, insignificant, it doesn't look like it's heading anywhere without the benefit of the correct inflexions, pauses, facial expressions, body language; there's no easy way to put across the quantum leap of faith it was all building to without spelling it out. The fact is that it was dawning on me as those verbal nonentities circled that this person I was talking to was not merely a DIY caricature assembled via Simon's rifling through my journals, tapes and photographs; someway, somehow, this was the Real Sophie. No matter what had been programmed into her image by whom, the essence of the originating mould was there, and there was no way anybody, not even the miracle man himself, could have brought that off so well. I found that my entire conception of where we go when we dream - be it a lucid dream or the common or garden variety - was undergoing a degree of stress it was hard to pass off as inconsequential; wherever she was really and whatever she'd been doing, Sophie had been commanded into my dream by Simon Stock, and the engaging vision I'd assumed to be nothing but necessary window-dressing was more than likely a representation of what she herself would prefer to be, the engagement ring - and therefore I must also assume her marital status - included. This was an idealised but conscious projection of the woman that meant more to me than anything else in the world - still - and no matter who or what else might come my way I knew in my heart I'd carry my love for her to the grave, possibly beyond the grave, possibly into eternity. You cannot imagine how beautiful this girl was to me. Yet she was a walking lie.
******
Do you have a favourite passage in MAN STRUGGLING WITH UMBRELLA? Or just a favourite piece, maybe? I'd be very interested to hear what you like best and why.
How egotistical is it to want to see yourself quoted in such esteemed company? VERY, I should think, but the temptation is there all the same. I don't remember ever pretending not to be at least a little egotistical - arrogant even, on occasion. I'm too honest to deny it completely. But in my own defence, I really do think you need some degree of egotism and arrogance to get anywhere in this world. It's a kind of self-belief or self-confidence if you ask me, and it's a rare kind of an artist who doesn't have any of that in their DNA. Quoting yourself on the dedicated quotes page is very much frowned upon, if not actually against the rules on here. And you need to meet their criteria for being "important" too, which I definitely don't. Ho hum. As the late, great Irving Thalberg once wisely said, "Credit you give yourself is not worth having".
Despite that, I've been trying to think of some things I've committed to paper over what I still laughingly refer to as my "writing career" that I am most proud of. Most of the quotes I would choose are as yet unpublished, intended for books 2-4 of my KT Legacy Series, and I don't want anyone to steal them, so I've had to get MAN STRUGGLING WITH UMBRELLA out and flick through it. These are, to date, some of my Legacy's finest moments, I think....
1) From "Sweet Surrender", Page 116:
You were a poet of sorts once, somewhere, in another life, and I loved to fathom your poet's soul and wonder why your beautiful gift was so cruelly taken from you when you were still so young and full of promise. You'd muse on me and fantasise then. You'd see something in me you would not dare speak of and you'd weave the prettiest clothes for me from it. You'd dress me in sunshine and sky and oceans and comets and music and the voices of the angels and the others would look on me so wistfully. They all wished they could be me for you. They all wished they could touch you as I did. They all wished they could capture what we had, but oh, how we would guard it, and they saw only my shadows and how they'd fall on you in your lighter moments. You saw a special something walking alongside me. A something only poets could see.
2) From "Meanders And Oxbow Lakes", Page 145:
Back in 1987, my astrological mentor, Hailey, suggested to me that what a writer leaves out can be just as important as what he puts in. It took me about five years to work out what that meant because I was young and foolish and I didn't want to admit that there was anything about the business of creative writing that I didn't understand. My mind simply didn't work in such a way because it hadn't realised that it could. Once I began to see what was so obviously missing from silent film and radio drama, I began to see potential in the world of prose writing that I had never suspected was there (and that's why I started thinking in terms of meanders and oxbow lakes), but at the end of the day, this book's here not only because of all that, but because in this writer's opinion, the principal ingredients of the average novel are patronising and overkill.
3) From "In The Heat Of The Morning", Page 155:
A faraway look came into her eyes for a moment. Then her dog came bounding up, the spell was broken and she turned her back on me.
I think she was crying.
I watched her every step, her every swing of the hips until she became a tiny dot; when that tiny dot disappeared I lost the ability to breathe. I fell to my knees gasping for air, my gown billowing up over my head in the wind as I wept. I put my forehead on the grass till the tears came running out, and when they did, I lay down and wanted to die.
4) From "Killing Time On The Other Side", Page 47-48:
Before I go any further, I must explain to you the Poet's Problem. I didn't invent it, for sure, but I did re-name it after an early B-side by Blondie. It seems to be all but universal, and it goes like this:
A natural born poet has a deep love of his mother tongue and all of the wonderful uses it can be put to. He loves a pun, a witticism, an ambiguity, a clever turn of phrase, and so on. He sees deeply into the written word, he feels it, has a rapport with it, it is a forever friend to be both cherished and protected. The poet sees beauty in brevity. He is concise. Every word is chosen and married to its neighbours with the precision and care of a master craftsman. The poet will agonise on whether the semicolon is really the right punctuation to use at a certain juncture, on whether the capital letters or italics are necessary, on which word is to be used twice for effect. The poet looks through a microscope. He sees the world of the small in great detail. He is less concerned with character or plot than he is with mood or resonance. To the true poet, prose is something of an abomination. It's inferior. It's lowbrow. Careless, it is, ephemeral, formulaic and long-winded. The poet seeks a kind of perfection the world of prose writing simply does not have the time or inclination for.
5) From "Special Occasions", Page 20-21:
In a book, this kind of conversation appears trifling, insignificant, it doesn't look like it's heading anywhere without the benefit of the correct inflexions, pauses, facial expressions, body language; there's no easy way to put across the quantum leap of faith it was all building to without spelling it out. The fact is that it was dawning on me as those verbal nonentities circled that this person I was talking to was not merely a DIY caricature assembled via Simon's rifling through my journals, tapes and photographs; someway, somehow, this was the Real Sophie. No matter what had been programmed into her image by whom, the essence of the originating mould was there, and there was no way anybody, not even the miracle man himself, could have brought that off so well. I found that my entire conception of where we go when we dream - be it a lucid dream or the common or garden variety - was undergoing a degree of stress it was hard to pass off as inconsequential; wherever she was really and whatever she'd been doing, Sophie had been commanded into my dream by Simon Stock, and the engaging vision I'd assumed to be nothing but necessary window-dressing was more than likely a representation of what she herself would prefer to be, the engagement ring - and therefore I must also assume her marital status - included. This was an idealised but conscious projection of the woman that meant more to me than anything else in the world - still - and no matter who or what else might come my way I knew in my heart I'd carry my love for her to the grave, possibly beyond the grave, possibly into eternity. You cannot imagine how beautiful this girl was to me. Yet she was a walking lie.
******
Do you have a favourite passage in MAN STRUGGLING WITH UMBRELLA? Or just a favourite piece, maybe? I'd be very interested to hear what you like best and why.
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Adam
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Jul 13, 2021 03:56AM
Some very beautiful snippets here, well chosen.
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