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“QUOTE” OR “QUOTATION”: WHICH IS IT?

April 17, 2016
THINKING AND THOUGHT, WRITING/BLOGGING
2 Comments

Quote properly the quotation.  So, to be proper, quote is the verb; the words spoken or written constitute the quotation (a noun).  And yet, however, we do have misquotes and misquote–and a researcher just might find three or four really good quotes to bolster the argument.  Thus, the living English language will accept the verb becoming the noun, no matter how many howl “Quothe? Never!”; for it shall be “Nevermore!”

THE QUOTE CHALLENGE: A BLOGGER’S ACTIVITY

Bloggers write.  Bloggers come up with ideas to write about.  Bloggers write about loss, grief, illness, addiction, disappointment, failure.  Also about humor, happiness, geography, history, fishing, travel, truth, parents.  Real things.  Made up things.  Any thing.  Every thing.

Quotations are great sources of inspiration and great sources for topics for bloggers’ writing.  Quotations are like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re going to get until you bite into a piece (unless you cheat with the inside cover of a Whitman Sampler).  [The old Latin psychology phrase–not quoted here–says that whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.  Feeling crappy?  Most of what happens then throughout the day feels crappy.  And maybe it was that flat tire in the morning before work, or the kids, or the unfinished report.  So a quotation that is supposed to be uplifting then feels crappy.]

So there is this kind of challenge going around Bloggerville: “The Quote Challenge”: Here’s how it works.  A blogger posts 1-3 quotes [obviously something significant to the blogger-author] for three days.  Then the blogger nominates three other bloggers to do the same.  Simple?  The payoff?  Possibly nine names of bloggers for all others to see; maybe nine quotes/quotations of importance to someone “out there.”  AND–NO TEST ON MONDAY!  What’s more?  No pressure to participate.  No hurt feelings.  No non-smiley face posted on a blogger’s home page: BAD BLOGGER.

The work will be finding a quotation…

 oxford quotations

And that is all.  However, if a blogger non-participates, well then John Milton covered that: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”  Something will come along–to make something different a better thing to do.

So it goes.

KURT VONNEGUT Kurt Vonnegut

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“WHO IS JOSEPH EPSTEIN?” “SHOULD I CARE?”

February 3, 2016
AUTHORS, READING
1 Comment

“VIRTUCRAT”: “any man or woman who is certain that his or her political views are not merely correct but deeply, morally righteous in the bargain.”

“After all these years, I may have found my own best reader, and he turns out to be me.”

Some selected works:
Divorced in America: Marriage in an Age of Possibility (1974)
Familiar Territory: Observations on American Life (1979)
The Middle of My Tether: Familiar Essays (1983)
With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essays (1995)
Snobbery: The American Version (2002)
Friendship: An Exposé (2006)
In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage (2007)
Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet (with Frederic Raphael) (2013)
A Literary Education and Other Essays (2014)

“I read in the hope of discovering the truth, or at least some truths. I look for truth in what some might deem strange places: novels and poems, histories and memoirs, biographies and autobiographies, letters and diaries.”

“I’m not so sure that statistics have much to tell us about a cultural activity so private as reading books.”

“Serious readers…when young they come upon a book that blows them away by the aesthetic pleasure they derive from it, the wisdom they find in it, the point of view it provides them.”

“For myself, I have come to like books that do not have photographs of their authors, preferring my imaginings of their looks to the reality.”

Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein

“Books are an addiction.”

“Nearly all modern stories or memoirs of growing up are accounts of sadness, loss, secret terror.”

“Many people write or become psychoanalyzed in order to bury the ghosts of their childhood. I wish, as best I can, to revive the ghosts of mine….”

“Thinking too much about the future resembles thinking too much about breathing–the result is to make one feel very uncomfortable. Best to glory in what was finest in the past, to concentrate on the present, and to allow the future to fend for itself.”

“…without friendship, make no mistake about it, we are all lost.”

“. . . I seek clues that might explain life’s oddities, that might light up the dark corners of existence a little, that might correct foolish ideas that I have come to hold too dearly, that might, finally, make my own stay here on earth more interesting, if not necessarily more pleasant.”

[See http://memoriesofatime.com/2013/05/27/why-i-read/%5D

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