What’s the key to a good book? A good title, of course. And what’s the best way to get a good title? Steal one.

Fifty of the following works took their titles from the other fifty. The relevant phrases are mostly there in plain sight; some were altered in the process of stealing.

One link is slightly tenuous, going via the title of the original piece. In a few instances, the stolen title is the title of the collection the newer piece first appeared in.

Some non-fiction (often autobiography). Translations marked [*].


The authors:

James Agee, Dante Alighieri, Apuleius, Isaac Asimov, W. H. Auden

Francis Bacon, William Blake, Samuel Beckett, J. L. Borges, Thomas Browne, Robert Browning, Charles Bukowski, John Bunyan, Robert Burns

Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Agatha Christie, Noël Coward, Harry Crews, e. e. cummings

Roald Dahl, King David, Colin Dexter, Philip K. Dick, Emily Dickinson, Joan Didion, Isak Dinesen, John Donne

T. S. Eliot, James Ellroy

William Faulkner, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Edward FitzGerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald

J. W. von Goethe, William Golding, Thomas Gray

Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway, O. Henry, Homer, Horace, A. E. Housman

Clive James, Robinson Jeffers, James Joyce

John Keats, Rudyard Kipling

Andrew Lang, T. E. Lawrence, C. S. Lewis, Clarice Lispector, H. W. Longfellow, Saint Luke

Louis MacNeice, Thomas Mann, Christopher Marlowe, Saint Matthew, W. Somerset Maugham, Gavin Maxwell, Cormac McCarthy, John Milton, Iris Murdoch

Friedrich Nietzsche, David Niven

Wilfred Owen

Saint Paul, Plato, Pliny the Elder, Ezra Pound, Terry Pratchett

Kathleen Raine

Friedrich Schiller, William Shakespeare, G. B. Shaw, P. B. Shelley, Jesus Son of Sirach, Solomon, Baruch Spinoza, John Steinbeck, William Styron, Han Suyin, Jonathan Swift

Donna Tartt, Alfred Lord Tennyson, W. M. Thackeray, Francis Thompson, James Thurber, Olga Tokarczuk, John Kennedy Toole

Virgil, Kurt Vonnegut

Evelyn Waugh, Walt Whitman, P. G. Wodehouse, William Wordsworth, Ludwig Wittgenstein

W. B. Yeats, Edward Young

1)
‘It does not matter which we take first.’

‘You are fond of Dickens?’

‘Why, yes, of course. More than fond, far more. You see, they are the only books I have ever heard. My father used to read them and then later the black man... and now you.’


2)
When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in cedar trees smells. It has to set at least six hours, and be drunk from a gourd. Water should never be drunk from metal. And at night it is better still. I used to lie on the pallet in the hall, waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get up and go back to the bucket. It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank.


3)
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.”


4)
Now the Olympian magic mountain opens itself before us, showing us its very roots. The Greeks were keenly aware of the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to be able to live at all they had to place before them the shining fantasy of the Olympians.

[*]


5)
I was careering bravely along, skimming over the studio heather at the head of my Highlanders pursuing the fleeing redcoats, when suddenly, claymore in hand, I found myself flying through the air. I still believe Jack Hawkins tripped me. In any event, my sword sank deep into the leg of the redcoat in front of me. It went in with an appalling ‘thonk’ just behind the knee and pinned him to the ground.

‘Cut!’ yelled the director (an unnecessary observation). Several women, hairdressers and other camp followers, screamed.

I pulled out the blade, trying not to throw up. The man got up and ran off with a pronounced limp. I chased after him.

‘Are you all right? ... I’m terribly sorry! ... We’ll get a doctor!’

‘Wot’s the matter, mate?’ asked the man.

‘Your leg,’ I blabbered, ‘my sword! ... It went right in! We’ll get a doctor!’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘thought I felt something ... not to worry though, David.’ He rolled up the bottom of his trousers. His name was Bob Head. He had lost the original leg at El Alamein.

6)
Help yourself to some meat there if you’re hungry, the man said.

Holme swallowed and glanced at him again. In the up-slant of light his beard shone and his mouth was red, and his eyes were shadowed lunettes with nothing there at all.

What kind is it?

The man didn’t answer.

Holme looked to the fire. I really ain’t a bit hungry, he said, but I’d admire to dry this here shirt if you don’t care.

The man nodded.

He started to pull the wet shirt off and as he jerked his arms forward he felt the cloth part soundlessly down the back. He stopped and reached behind him gingerly.

Looks like you about out of a shirt, the man said.


7)
Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars:

She hath killed her beasts; she hath mingled her wine; she hath also furnished her table.

[*]


8)
Katy is very quick. Last summer, when she was only eight, she picked a hundred and ten pounds in a day in a race with Flora Merry Lee. This summer she has had runarounds and is losing two fingernails but she is picking steadily.


9)
Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc’d by fate,
And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,
Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan shore.
Long labours, both by sea and land, he bore,
And in the doubtful war, before he won
The Latian realm, and built the destin’d town;
His banish’d gods restor’d to rites divine,
And settled sure succession in his line,
From whence the race of Alban fathers come,
And the long glories of majestic Rome.

[*]


10)
“There's good and just reason for ivry rope aboard, or else ’twould be overboard. D’ye follow me? ’Tis dollars an’ cents I’m puttin’ into your pocket, ye skinny little supercargo, so that fwhin ye’ve filled out ye can ship from Boston to Cuba an’ tell thim Long Jack larned you. Now I’ll chase ye around a piece, callin’ the ropes, an’ you’ll lay your hand on thim as I call.”

He began, and Harvey, who was feeling rather tired, walked slowly to the rope named. A rope’s end licked round his ribs, and nearly knocked the breath out of him.

“When you own a boat,” said Tom Platt, with severe eyes, “you can walk. Till then, take all orders at the run. Once more — to make sure!”

11)
A tall man stood in the doorway. He held a crushed Stetson hat under his arm while he combed his long, black, damp hair straight back. Like the others he wore blue jeans and a short denim jacket. When he had finished combing his hair he moved into the room, and he moved with a majesty only achieved by royalty and master craftsmen. He was a jerkline skinner, the prince of the ranch, capable of driving ten, sixteen, even twenty mules with a single line to the leaders. He was capable of killing a fly on the wheeler’s butt with a bull whip without touching the mule. There was a gravity in his manner and a quiet so profound that all talk stopped when he spoke.


12)
I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.


13)
His Nibs skedaddled yesterday per jack-rabbit line with all the coin in the kitty and the bundle of muslin he’s spoony about. The boodle is six figures short. Our crowd in good shape, but we need the spondulicks. You collar it. The main guy and the dry goods are headed for the briny. You know what to do.

BOB.


14)
Be wise to-day; ’tis madness to defer;
Next day the fatal precedent will plead;
Thus on, till wisdom is push’d out of life.
Procrastination is the thief of time;
Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves
The vast concerns of an eternal scene.


15)
The truth is that organised and compulsory games had, in my day, banished the element of play from school life almost entirely. There was no time to play (in the proper sense of the word). The rivalry was too fierce, the prizes too glittering, the ‘hell of failure’ too severe.

The only boy, almost, who ‘played’ (but not at games) was our Irish earl. But then he was an exception to all rules; not because of his earldom but because he was an untamable Irishman, anarch in grain, whom no society could iron out. He smoked a pipe in his first term. He went off by night on strange expeditions to a neighbouring city; not, I believe, for women, but for harmless rowdyism, low life, and adventure. He always carried a revolver. I remember it well, for he had a habit of loading one chamber only, rushing into your study, and then firing off (if that is the right word) all the others at you, so that your life depended on his counting accurately. I felt at the time, and I feel still, that this (unlike the fagging) was the sort of thing no sensible boy could object to. It was done in defiance both of masters and Bloods, it was wholly useless, and there was no malice in it.

16)
You never saw a cavalry charge, did you?

How could I?

Ah, perhaps not — of course. Well, it’s a funny sight. It’s like slinging a handful of peas against a window pane: first one comes; then two or three close behind him; and then all the rest in a lump.


17)
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.


18)
Scotty Bennett got out of the car and kicked blood in his legs. He was six-five. He weighed 230. He worked LAPD Robbery. His tie had 18’s stitched in the weave.

The backseat was stuffed with six-packs and pizza. Bobby and Phil jumped in and helped themselves. Crutch looked in the car and checked the dashboard. Still there: the crime-scene photos, all taped up and yellowed.

Scotty’s fixation: that big armored-car job. Winter ’64. Still unsolved. Dead guards and scorched heist men — still unidentified. Looted cash bags and emeralds.

Scotty pointed to the photos. “Lest I forget.”

Crutch gulped. Scotty always loomed. He carried two .45’s and a beaver-tail sap on a thong. Bobby and Phil guzzled beer and snarfed pizza. They turned the backseat into a zoo trough. Crutch pointed to Scotty’s tie.

“You had 16’s last time.”

“Two male Negroes robbed a liquor store at 74th and Avalon. I just happened to be in the back, holding a Remington pump shotgun.”


19)
When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.


20)
don’t ever get the idea I am a poet; you can see me
at the racetrack any day half drunk
betting quarters, sidewheelers and straight thoroughs,
but let me tell you, there are some women there
who go where the money goes, and sometimes when you
look at these whores these onehundreddollar whores
you wonder sometimes if nature isn’t playing a joke
dealing out so much breast and ass and the way
it’s all hung together, you look and you look and
you look and you can’t believe it; there are ordinary women
and then there is something else that wants to make you
tear up paintings and break albums of Beethoven
across the back of the john; anyhow —

21)
PART IV: Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions

PREFACE

Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage: for, when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse . . .

[*]


22)
Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.

The Lord hath wrought great glory by them through his great power from the beginning.

[*]


23)
Profession? “Well, what shall we say?” The Passport Official had asked, pointing to the void. My mind remained empty. A few years earlier, an American hobo song called Hallelujah I’m a bum! had been on many lips; during the last days it had been haunting me like a private leitmotif and without realizing I must have been humming the tune as I pondered, for the Official laughed “You can’t very well put that,” he said. After a moment he added: “I should just write ‘student’”; so I did.


24)
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.


25)
“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”

“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco — ”

“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty-five.”

“No, he didn't — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”

26)
In vain have I striven
to teach my heart to bow;
In vain have I said to him
“There be many singers greater than thou.”

But his answer cometh, as winds and as lutany.
As a vague crying upon the night
That leaveth me no rest, saying ever,
“Song, a song.”


27)
Oblivion is not to be hired: The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man. Twenty seven names make up the first story, and the recorded names ever since contain not one living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the AEquinox? Every house addes unto that current arithmetique, which scarce stands one moment. And since death must be the *Lucina* of life, and even pagans could doubt whether thus to live, were to die; Since our longest Sun sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darknesse, and have our light in ashes; Since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementos, and time that grows old it self, bids us hope no long duration:— Diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.


28)
She was declaring that she knew how to make twentyeight different sauces to serve with fish; she would stake her reputation on the fact, though her own husband had warned her not to talk about it: “Don’t talk about it,” he had told her; “nobody will believe it, or, if they do, they will simply laugh at you!” And yet she would say it, say once and for all, that it was twentyeight fishsauces she could make.

[*]


29)
Surprised by joy — impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport — Oh! with whom
But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?


30)
The stories are endless, infinitely familiar, traded by the faithful like baseball cards, fondled until they fray around the edges and blur into the apocryphal. There is the one about the barber, Eddie Alexander, who was paid handsomely to remain on “day and night standby” in case Hughes wanted a haircut. “Just checking, Eddie,” Hughes once said when he called Alexander at two in the morning. “Just wanted to see if you were standing by.”

31)
The bowl was now brim-full, ringed round its edge by white rice in an embankment a foot wide and six inches deep, filled with legs and ribs of mutton till they toppled over. It needed two or three victims to make in the centre a dressed pyramid of meat such as honour prescribed. The centre-pieces were the boiled, upturned heads, propped on their severed stumps of neck, so that the ears, brown like old leaves, flapped out on the rice surface. The jaws gaped emptily upward, pulled open to show the hollow throat with the tongue, still pink, clinging to the lower teeth; and the long incisors whitely crowned the pile, very prominent above the nostrils’ pricking hair and the lips which sneered away blackly from them.


32)
Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!
Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason,
Resplendent daughter of the head divine,
Wise foundress of the system of the world,
Guide of the stars, who art thou then if thou,
Bound to the tail of folly’s uncurbed steed,
Must, vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd,
Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.
Accursed, who striveth after noble ends,
And with deliberate wisdom forms his plans!
To the fool-king belongs the world.

[*]


33)
Kamante, in all cooking matters, had a surprising manual adroitness. The great tricks and tours-de-force of the kitchen were child’s play to his dark crooked hands; they knew on their own everything about omelettes, vol-au-vents, sauces, and mayonnaises. He had a special gift for making things light, as in the legend the infant Christ forms birds out of clay and tells them to fly. He scorned all complicated tools, as if impatient of too much independence in them, and when I gave him a machine for beating eggs he set it aside to rust, and beat whites of egg with a weeding knife that I had had to weed the lawn with, and his whites of eggs towered up like light clouds.


34)
The moving finger writes, and having writ
Moves on; nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.


35)
‘You let me do all the work back there! You weren’t going to do *anything*!’
‘I was making sure I had their full attention,’ said Lu-Tze smoothly.
‘Why?’
‘So that *you* didn’t have their full attention. I had every confidence in you, of course. A good master gives the pupil an opportunity to demonstrate his skills.’
‘And what what you have done if I hadn’t been here, pray?’
‘Yes, probably.’
‘What?’

36)
Belacqua sat on the stanchion at the end of the Carlyle Pier in the mizzle in love from the girdle up with a slob of a girl called Smeraldina-Rima whom he had encountered one evening when as luck would have it he happened to be tired and her face more beautiful than stupid.


37)
I know thou hast been present at the slaying
Of many men, in single fight or press
Of battle, but thou wouldst have felt most sorrow
If thou hadst seen that sight — how round the bowl
And loaded tables in the hall we lay,
And all the floor ran blood. But in mine ears
Most piteous rang the cry of Priam’s daughter,
Cassandra, whom the treacherous Clytemnestra
Slew at my side, while I, as I lay dying
Upon the sword, raised up my hands to smite her;
And shamelessly she turned away, and scorned
To draw my eyelids down or close my mouth,
Though I was on the road to Hades’ house.

[*]


38)
“Awful!” he said. “No, it’s true. You just can’t love. You come up here on a pretext that you’re sorry and contrite when all you want me to do is to tell you that I’m the one who should be on my knees, begging your forgiveness for sins I didn’t commit. Isn’t that right, Peyton, isn’t that right?” “Yes,” I said. “I mean no. No, Harry, please believe me — ” But he said, “Why don’t you get out? Get out.” “Oh, Harry,” I said, “you just don’t understand.” “You can dry your tears, baby; they don’t work on me. Get out.” “No,” I said. “Get out,” he said, “get the hell out of here, you slut.”


39)
. . . . Thou hast committed —

— Fornication: but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.


40)
I did not stir or make a move for I knew that Sergeant Parkins was inside masked by the opening door, and I knew that Parkins was a good man and knew his job, and I knew that I couldn’t have trusted myself to keep quiet and not break out.

And waiting there, with my heart thudding, I saw Symmington come out with Megan in his arms and carry her downstairs, with Nash and myself a discreet distance behind him.

He carried her through to the kitchen and he had just arranged her comfortably with her head in the gas oven and had turned on the gas when Nash and I came through the kitchen door and switched on the light.

41)
“Plutonium-186? Plutonium-186?”
“The charge is +94. The mass is 186.”
“But that’s impossible. There's no such isotope. There can’t be.”
“That’s what I’m saying to you. But those are the measurements.”
“But a situation like that leaves the nucleus over fifty neutrons short. You can’t have plutonium-186. You couldn’t squeeze ninety-four protons into one nucleus with only ninety-two neutrons and expect it to hang together for even a trillion-trillionth of a second.”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Doc,” said Tracy, patiently.


42)
‘O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!’

‘And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’


43)
The frost brutally assailed our cheeks, and clouds of white steam came streaming from our mouths. The porch light went out automatically and we walked across the crunching snow in total darkness, except for Oddball’s headlamp, which pierced the pitch dark in one shifting spot, just in front of him, as I tripped along in the Murk behind him.

‘Don’t you have a torch?’ he asked.

Of course I had one, but I wouldn’t be able to tell where it was until morning, in the daylight. It’s a feature of torches that they’re only visible in the daytime.

[*]


44)
I saw all, and the thought of how near I had come to marrying a female novelist made everything go black for a bit.


45)
Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other’s character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship — *camaraderie* — usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death — that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.

46)
Why should having a cheese thing for lunch make me see my dead wife after supper?

You never know — it was rather rich.

Why didn’t you see your dead husband then? You had as much of it as I did.


47)
The angels keep their ancient places;
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.


48)
I have received your offensive communication. Do you seriously think that I am interested in your tawdry encounters with such sub-humans as folk singers?


49)
“Alas! alas!” a low voice, full of care,
Murmur’d beside me: “Turn and look on me:
I am that Rosamond, whom men call fair,
If what I was I be.”


50)
It was about this time that Mij delivered his first serious, intentional bite. He was fed now upon live eels – which I had learned to be the staple food of many races of otter – supplemented by a mixture of raw egg and unpolished rice, a sticky concoction for which he evinced a gusto no doubt influenced by his early life among the Arabs. The eels I kept in a perforated bucket under the kitchen tap, and fed them to him in the bath; it had become an established way of quieting him when he was obstreperous, to shut him in with a full bath of water and three or four eels. On this occasion I had closed the bathroom door imperfectly, and Mij elected to bring his second eel through and eat it in the studio. To this, though he was sodden with water and the eel very slimy, there seemed no alternative, for it is folly to try to take away from a wild animal its natural prey; but when after a few mouthfuls he decided to carry it upstairs to the gallery I determined to call a halt, visualizing a soaking and eel-slimed bed. I put on three pairs of gloves, the outermost being a pair of heavily-padded flying gauntlets. I caught up with him halfway up the stairway; he laid down the eel, put a paw on it, and hummed at me, a high continuous hum that could break out into a wail. Full of euphoric self-confidence I talked away quietly to him, telling him that he couldn’t possibly hurt me and that I was going to take the eel back to the bathroom. The humming became much louder. I bent down and put my heavily-gloved hand upon the eel. He screamed at me, but still he took no action. Then, as I began to lift it, he bit. He bit just once and let go; the canines of his upper and lower jaws passed through the three layers of glove, through the skin, through muscle and bone, and met in the middle of my hand with an audible crunch. He let go almost in the same instant, and rolled on his back squirming with apology. I still held the eel; I carried it back to the bath, where he refused to pay any further attention to it, fussing round me and over me and muzzling me with little squeals of affection and apparent solicitude.

51)
“Locative?” said Charles.

“Just add zde to karchido,” I said. “I think it’s zde. If you use that, you won’t need a preposition, except the epi if they’re going to war. It implies ‘Carthage-ward,’ so you won’t have to worry about a case, either.”

Charles looked at his paper, then at me. “Locative?” he said. “That’s pretty obscure.”

“Are you sure it exists for Carthage?” said Camilla.

I hadn’t thought of this. “Maybe not,” I said. “I know it does for Athens.”

Charles reached over and hauled the lexicon towards him over the table and began to leaf through it.

“Oh, hell, don’t bother,” said Bunny stridently. “If you don’t have to decline it and it doesn’t need a preposition it sounds good to me.”


52)
It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country:—
Death chases just as much the man that flees;
Nor does he spare the effeminate youth
With knees a-tremble; nor the coward’s back.

[*]


53)
What had seemed impossible and therefore unreal was now a fact and clear to them all. A figure had condensed out of the shuddering backdrop of the glare. It moved in the geometrical centre of the road which now appeared longer and wider than before. Because if it was the same size as before, then the figure was impossibly small — impossibly tiny, since children had been the first to be evacuated from that whole area; and in the mean and smashed streets there had been so much fire there was nowhere for a family to live. Nor do small children walk out of a fire that is melting lead and distorting iron.


54)
If Man, that microcosmic fool, can see
Himself a whole so frequently,
Part of the Part am I, once All, in primal Night, —
Part of the Darkness which brought forth the Light,
The haughty Light, which now disputes the space,
And claims of Mother Night her ancient place.

[*]


55)
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

56)
‘Do you drink a lot, Mr Morse?’
‘Well, most people have a drink or two most days, don’t they?’
‘Do you drink a lot?’ (The same words – a semitone of exasperation lower.)
As non-commitally as his incipient panic would permit, Morse shrugged his shoulders once more: ‘I like a glass of beer, yes.’
‘How many pints do you drink a week?’
‘A week?’ squeaked Morse, his face clouding over like that of a child who has just been given a complex problem in mental multiplication.
‘A day, then?’ suggested the houseman helpfully.
Morse divided by three: ‘Two or three, I suppose.’


57)
Resting her head against the cold, shiny window-pane, she looked into the neighbour’s yard, at the great world of the chickens-that-did-not-know-they-were-about-to-die. And as if it were right under her nose, she could smell the warm, beaten earth, so fragrant and dry, where she knew perfectly well, she knew perfectly well that some worm or other lay squirming before being devoured by the hen that humans were going to eat.

[*]


58)
And, behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him.

And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord’s Christ.

And he came by the Spirit into the temple: and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him after the custom of the law,

Then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said,

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word:

For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,

Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;

A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.

[*]


59)
He looked down at the bicycle chain he was locking around his waist. Ten pounds of the finest tempered steel. He was suddenly baffled. He had a three-hundred-dollar bicycle that weighed seventeen pounds. And a twenty-five-dollar chain that weighed ten. The bicycle was so expensive because it was so light. But because it was so expensive he had to have a heavy chain, one that would require a torch to cut. There were, after all, thieves in the world. And consequently everything seemed to cancel everything else out.


60)
My life closed twice before its close —
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me.

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

61)
I had no brothers and sisters, and my father was seldom home. So I was for many years the principal companion of my mother. She was a beautiful, talented, morbid person. I think she was drunk most of the time. I remember a time when she filled a saucer with a mixture of rubbing alcohol and table salt. She put the saucer on the kitchen table, turned out all the lights, and had me sit facing her across the table.

And then she touched off the mixture with a match. The flame was almost pure yellow, a sodium flame, and it made her look like a corpse to me, made me look like a corpse to her.

“There — ” she said, “that’s what we'll look like when we’re dead.”


62)
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.


63)
Let us imagine a white surface with irregular black spots. We now say: Whatever kind of picture these make I can always get as near as I like to its description, if I cover the surface with a sufficiently fine square network and now say of every square that it is white or black. In this way I shall have brought the description of the surface to a unified form. This form is arbitrary, because I could have applied with equal success a net with a triangular or hexagonal mesh. It can happen that the description would have been simpler with the aid of a triangular mesh; that is to say we might have described the surface more accurately with a triangular, and coarser, than with the finer square mesh, or vice versa, and so on. To the different networks correspond different systems of describing the world.

[*]


64)
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.


65)
For now the time of gifts is gone –
O boys that grow, O snows that melt,
O bathos that the years must fill –
Here is dull earth to build upon
Undecorated; we have reached
Twelfth Night or what you will ... you will.

66)
When captaines couragious, whom death cold not daunte,
Did march to the siege of the citty of Gaunt,
They mustred their souldiers by two and by three,
And the formost in battle was Mary Ambree.


67)
Then I saw in my dream, that, when they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town before them, and the name of that town is Vanity; and at the town there is a fair kept, called Vanity Fair. It is kept all the year long. It beareth the name of Vanity Fair, because the town where it is kept is lighter than vanity, and also because all that is there sold, or that cometh thither, is vanity; as is the saying of the Wise, “All that cometh is vanity.”


68)
I am past childhood, I look at this ocean and the fishing birds, the streaming skerries, the shining water,
The foam-heads, the exultant dawn-light going west, the pelicans, their huge wings half folded, plunging like stones.

Whatever it is catches my heart in its hands, whatever it is makes me shudder with love
And painful joy and the tears prickle . . . the Greeks were not its inventors. The Greeks were not the inventors

Of shining clarity and jewel-sharp form and the beauty of God. He was free with men before the Greeks came:
He is here naked on the shining water. Every eye that has a man’s nerves behind it has known him.


69)
We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Pioneers! O pioneers!


70)
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

71)
There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back. Like the plains of Lombardy, it seems to rise a little to meet the sun. The air and the earth are curiously mated and intermingled, as if the one were the breath of the other. You feel in the atmosphere the same tonic, puissant quality that is in the tilth, the same strength and resoluteness.


72)
The morning’s at seven,
The hillside’s dew-pearled


73)
“ . . . Only, as you say, promise to make another and better oration, equal in length and entirely new, on the same subject; and I, like the nine Archons, will promise to set up a golden image at Delphi, not only of myself, but of you, and as large as life.”

“You are a dear golden ass if you suppose me to mean that Lysias has altogether missed the mark, and that I can make a speech from which all his arguments are to be excluded. The worst of authors will say something which is to the point . . . ”

[*]


74)
Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;
Breath’s a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey’s over
There’ll be time enough to sleep.


75)
For perhaps a whole hour I worked away on this little square of black, proceeding more and more gently as I came closer to the layer below. Then, a tiny pink spot appeared, and gradually it spread and spread until the whole of my square inch was a clear shining patch of pink. Quickly I neutralized with pure turps.

So far so good. I knew now that the black paint could be removed without disturbing what was underneath. So long as I was patient and industrious I would easily be able to take it all off. Also, I had discovered the right mixture to use and just how hard I could safely rub, so things should go much quicker now.

I must say it was rather an amusing business. I worked first from the middle of her body downward, and as the lower half of her dress came away bit by bit on to my little wads of cotton, a queer pink undergarment began to reveal itself . . .

76)
That bowl of rack punch was the cause of all this history. And why not a bowl of rack punch as well as any other cause? Was not a bowl of prussic acid the cause of Fair Rosamond’s retiring from the world? Was not a bowl of wine the cause of the demise of Alexander the Great, or, at least, does not Dr. Lempriere say so? — so did this bowl of rack punch influence the fates of all the principal characters in this “Novel without a Hero,” which we are now relating. It influenced their life, although most of them did not taste a drop of it.


77)
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.


78)
And when many buiers came by and looked in my mouth to know mine age, I was so weary with opening my jawes that at length (unable to endure any longer) when one came with a stinking paire of hands, and grated my gummes with his filthy fingers, I bit them cleane off, which thing caused the standers by to forsake me as being a fierce and cruell beast: the crier when he had gotten a hoarse voice with crying, and saw that no man would buy me, began to mocke me saying, To what end stand we here with this wilde Asse, this feeble beast, this slow jade with worne hooves, good for nothing but to make sives of his skin?

[*]


79)
A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges . . .


80)
Think about Montana. *I can’t.* Think about Madrid. *I can’t.* Think about a cool drink of water. *All right.* That’s what it will be like. Like a cool drink of water. *You’re a liar.* It will just be nothing. That’s all it will be. Just nothing. Then do it. *Do it.* Do it now. It’s all right to do it now. Go on and do it now. *No, you have to wait.* What for? You know all right. *Then wait.*

I can’t wait any longer now, he said.

81)
Everybody in the ship menaces us with the prospect of a very “good time” in India. A good time means going to the races, playing bridge, drinking cocktails, dancing till four in the morning, and talking about nothing. And meanwhile the beautiful, the incredible world in which we live awaits our exploration, and life is short, and time flows stanchlessly, like blood from a mortal wound.


82)
In seed-time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.


83)
‘My sins were ghastly, yet I won parole:
For His unbounded goodness will embrace
Whoever humbly seeks the highest goal.

And if Cosenza’s pastor, sent to chase
Me down by Clement:— if he’d only known
And understood this page of heavenly grace,

You’d need not go abroad to see my bones;
They’d still be at the bridge, near Benevento,
Protected by their massive cairn of stones.

Now, though, they’re bathed by rain; the wind has sent
Them far off; near the Verde’s banks they’re seen,
Transported there by him with tapers spent.

Despite this curse, no soul has ever been
So lost that heavenly love cannot return,
If only hope still shows some glimpse of green.’

[*]


84)
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!


85)
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

[*]

86)
‘Look here, Madge,’ I said, ‘you can’t turn me out just like that.’

‘You arrived just like that,’ said Madge.

It was true. I sighed.

‘Come here,’ I told her, and held out my hand. She gave me hers, but it remained as stiff and unresponsive as a toasting-fork, and after a moment or two I released it.

‘Don’t make a scene, Jakie,’ said Madge.

I couldn’t have made even a little one at that moment. I felt weak, and lay down on the divan.

‘Eh, eh!’ I said gently. ‘So you’re putting me out, and all for a man that lives on other people’s vices.’

‘We all live on other people’s vices,’ said Madge with an air of up-to-date cynicism which didn’t suit her. ‘I do, you do, and you live on worse ones than he does.’ This was a reference to the sort of books I sometimes translated.

‘Who is this character, anyway?’ I asked her.


87)
His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad, meaningless facts of life: had he not seen also that the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.


88)
He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water
Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea,
He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter
Broadcast on the swift river.
He has married me with the sun’s circle
Too dazzling to see, traced in summer sky.


89)
I saw death rising from the earth, from the ground itself, in one blue field, in stubbled color.


90)
He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.

91)
What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.


92)
. . . The sexual passions of these animals are very violent, and render the male quite furious. This is especially the case in Africa, where, in consequence of the great scarcity of water, the wild beasts assemble in great numbers on the banks of a few rivers. This is also the reason why so many curious varieties of animals are produced there, the males and females of various species coupling promiscuously with each other. Hence arose the saying, which was common in Greece even, that “Africa is always producing something new.”

[*]


93)
Unlike my mother and my father, who were robbed by history of a rounding to their youth, I had come peacefully to my middle years and wanted to celebrate my good luck, or at any rate atone for it, by evoking a childhood blessed enough to be typical. But the typical, for even the most high-minded male child, does not exclude the revolting. I tried to leave some of that in. One might argue that I should have made a more thorough job of it. A Scots lady ninety-three years old sent me a charming letter saying that when young in Ayrshire she had done all the things I did. The book must have been read aloud to her, by someone who knew which pages to pass over in silence.


94)
And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment:

And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless.

Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

For many are called, but few are chosen.

[*]


95)
O love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven
Make simpler daily the beating of man’s heart; within,
There in the ring where name and image meet,

Inspire them with such a longing as will make his thought
Alive like patterns a murmuration of starlings
Rising in joy over wolds unwittingly weave;

Here too on our little reef display your power,
This fortress perched on the edge of the Atlantic scarp,
The mole between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea;

And make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching
The apple falling towards England, became aware
Between himself and her of an eternal tie.

96)
I remember so well the way Mark drove a car. His hands, which were to hold all my life given to him, were gentle with everything.


97)
who knows if the moon’s
a balloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky—filled with pretty people?


98)
It was dark in the room and still raining outside. He lighted a cigarette (not wanting one) and looked at her. He watched her lovely gestures as of old and she said he looked tired and he said he wasn’t tired and he asked her what she had been doing and she said oh, nothing much. He talked, sitting awkwardly on the edge of a chair, and she talked, lying gracefully on a chaise-longue, about people they had known and hadn’t cared about. He was mainly conscious of the rain outside and of the soft darkness in the room and of other rains and other darknesses. He got up and walked around the room looking at pictures but not seeing what they were, and realizing that some old familiar things gleamed darkly, and he came abruptly face to face with something he had given her, a trivial and comic thing, and it didn’t seem trivial or comic now, but very large and important and embarrassing, and he turned away from it and asked after somebody else he didn’t care about. Oh, she said, and this and that and so and such (words he wasn’t listening to). Yes, he said, absently, I suppose so. Very much, he said (in answer to something else), very much. Oh, she said, laughing at him, not *that* much! He didn’t have any idea what they were talking about.


99)
Sing unto the LORD, O ye saints of his, and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness.

For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

[*]


100)
Outside, the rain had stopped. I looked at my watch and saw with astonishment that it was almost two a.m.. I left the light on and began cautiously to climb back down the ladder. Climbing down what I had once climbed up was not impossible — climbing down before the inhabitant came back. I conjectured that it hadn’t locked the front door and the gate because it hadn’t known how.

My feet were just touching the next to last rung when I heard something coming up the ramp — something heavy and slow and plural. Curiosity got the better of fear, and I did not close my eyes.

[*]

9. Virgil, Aeneid
36. Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks (or Dream of Fair to middling Women perhaps)
63. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
82. Blake
85. 1 Corinthians
97. cummings I'd guess

File: Quite Right!.gif (471 KB, 300x164)

471 KB GIF

>>24081937
Good start:

>9. Virgil, Aeneid
Correct, Dryden translation.

>36. Beckett
Right.
>More Pricks than Kicks (or Dream of Fair to middling Women perhaps)
Yep, it’s one of these.

>63. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
More or less. ‘Tractatus’, 6.431

>82. Blake
Correct. ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’.

>85. 1 Corinthians
Right. Saint Paul. (No author is repeated, but the Bible has lots of different authors.)

>97. cummings I'd guess
Good guess.


The trick is to work out which ones are supplying the answers to other questions.

If you like quizzes, join us.
https://sketchful.io/room/mkAuz

File: supreme_champion.png (99 KB, 232x293)

99 KB PNG

Complete pairs:
11 (Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men) references 84 (Robert Burns)
48 (Toole's Confederacy of Dunces) references 19 (Jonathan Swift)
64 (Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori) references 52 (Horace, right?)
71 (Willa Cather's O Pioneers) references 69 (Whitman?)

Partial pairs:
51) Donna Tartt's Secret History (referencing 17)
23) Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts (referencing 65)
37) The Odyssey (referenced by Faulkner)
55) John Donne (referenced by Hemingway)
85 (thanks to >>24081937) is referenced by PKD's A Scanner Darkly, right?

Unpaired:
12) T.S. Eliot's Waste Land
42) Hamlet
46) Is this P.G. Wodehouse?
60) This reads like Emily Dickinson.
70) William Butler Yeats, right? And isn't it the same poem referenced by Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart?
79) Paradise Lost

>>24081166
>3)
This is Lewis Carroll. Alice in Wonderland Walrus and the Carpenter.

>>24081207
>56)
Pretty sure this is Sherlock Holmes.

>>24081219
>85)
I think CS Lewis is quoting the Bible here. Or maybe I am thinking of a different variation of this same Bible verse CS Lewis did

3 - Carroll - Alice Through the Looking Glass
4 - Nietzsche - Birth of Tragedy
9 - Virgil - Aeneid
12 - Eliot - The Waste Land
19 - Swift - A Modest Proposal
24 - Shelley - The Skylark
29 - Milton - Paradise Lost (?)
36 - Beckett - More Pricks than Kicks
39 - Webster - The Duchess of Malfi (?)
42 - Shakespeare - Hamlet
52 - Horace - Odes
55 - Donne - Sermons
58 - The Gospel of Luke
62 - Grey - Elegy for a Country Churchyard
67 - Bunyan - The Pilgrim's Progress
69 - Whitman (?)
70 - Yeats - The Second Coming
73 - Plato - Lysias (?)
76 - Thackeray - Vanity Fair
77 - Keats - Ode to a Nightingale
83 - Dante - Inferno
84 - Robert Burns
85 - Paul - Corinthians 1
94 - The Gospel of Mark (?)
99 - Psalms (?)
Titles I could recognise being name dropped but not identify the correct passage: Mann - The Magic Mountain, Lawrence - The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Waugh - A Handful of Dust, Tartt - The Secret History, Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces, Maugham - Of Human Bondage, Coward - Blithe Spirit (?), Lewis - Surprised by Joy (?), Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hardy - Far from the Madding Crowd, Apuleius - The Golden Ass, Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night, Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men

>>24083154
>>24081166
Actually 1 is the Waugh - A Handful of Dust (didn't look it up but did check my copy of the book)

File: Konata Likes It!.gif (597 KB, 380x280)

597 KB GIF

>>24082458
Duck Man gets to the heart of the matter (identifying the linked pairs). All correct but one:


>11 (Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men) references 84 (Robert Burns)
Burns poem = ‘To A Mouse’.

>48 (Toole's Confederacy of Dunces) references 19 (Jonathan Swift)
The Swift epigram comes in a collection called ‘Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting’.

>64 (Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori) references 52 (Horace, right?)
Slightly camouflaged by the translation of Horace into English. Book III of the Odes.

>71 (Willa Cather's O Pioneers) references 69 (Whitman?)
The W.W. poem title is ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!’


>51) Donna Tartt's Secret History (referencing 17)
Now we just have to find who wrote #17.

>23) Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts (referencing 65)
Right. #65 is tricky (a relatively obscure poet these days; not first-class, in my opinion).

>37) The Odyssey (referenced by Faulkner)
Translation by a guy called William Marris. Not one of the well-known ones but it seems pretty good. But where’s As I Lay Dying?

>55) John Donne (referenced by Hemingway)
Of course. An famous bit of thievery by E.H., but where’s FWTBT?

>85 (thanks to >>24081937) is referenced by PKD's A Scanner Darkly, right?
Yes it is . . . somewhere.


>12) T.S. Eliot's Waste Land
Correct, but is it referrer or referent?

>42) Hamlet
Of course. The other end of this is definitely one of the trickier ones. (I could have had e.g. Infinite Jest but that would have been too easy.)

>46) Is this P.G. Wodehouse?
Nope. This is a stage play; PGW mostly wrote novels.

>60) This reads like Emily Dickinson.
It sure does. And she didn’t do titles, so someone else is going to be referring to her. A hard one. (I’ve never seen the other work mentioned here.)

>70) William Butler Yeats, right?
Yes, it’s W.B.Y., ‘The Second Coming’.

>And isn't it the same poem referenced by Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart?
It is, but there’s no C.A. in the Authors List, so it’s someone else. (Everyone has quoted this poem.)

>79) Paradise Lost
Milton, of course. I’ve never seen the other work mentioned on /lit/ (except when I’ve mentioned it).

File: Akko Says Yes!.jpg (54 KB, 380x288)

54 KB JPG

>>24082858

>3)
>This is Lewis Carroll. Alice in Wonderland Walrus and the Carpenter.
Correct, more or less. It’s Alice Through The Looking-Glass. (‘Through The Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There’ to be precise.)

And L.C. made that title up himself, so that means someone else took a bit of this for his own title.

>>24082878

>56)
>Pretty sure this is Sherlock Holmes.
Nope. No Arthur Conan Doyle in the Author List. The character name is a help, maybe.

>>24082880

>85)
>I think CS Lewis is quoting the Bible here.
This one has already been ID’d. It *is* the Bible verse (St. Paul, letter to Corinthians) and it was used by Philip K Dick for ‘A Scanner Darkly’ (although we don’t know which number that is yet).

I’m sure C. S. Lewis did quote this passage at some point or other, since almost everyone has. But the CSL entry here is different.

File: Tohru Approves!.gif (504 KB, 360x252)

504 KB GIF

>>24083154
Another good fat list:—


>3 - Carroll - Alice Through the Looking Glass
>9 - Virgil - Aeneid
>42 - Shakespeare - Hamlet
>52 - Horace - Odes
>55 - Donne - Sermons
>69 - Whitman (?)
>70 - Yeats - The Second Coming
>84 - Robert Burns
>85 - Paul - Corinthians 1
All correct, although already ID’d.


>4 - Nietzsche - Birth of Tragedy
Right.

>12 - Eliot - The Waste Land
>Actually 1 is the Waugh - A Handful of Dust (didn't look it up but did check my copy of the book)
Both correct.

>19 - Swift - A Modest Proposal
It is Swift, but it’s from a collection of aphorisms (‘Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting’).
>Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
Right, although already found (#48)

>24 - Shelley - The Skylark
Correct.

>29 - Milton - Paradise Lost (?)
Nope. Milton has already been found (he’s #79).

>36 - Beckett - More Pricks than Kicks
Almost. It is indeed early Beckett, but it’s A Dream Of Fair To Middling Women.

>39 - Webster - The Duchess of Malfi (?)
Right general time & place, but not this particular play. (No J.W. in Authors List.)

>58 - The Gospel of Luke
Right. Luke 2:25-32 to be precise.

>62 - Grey - Elegy for a Country Churchyard
I think it’s Gray, and ‘in’, but yes.

>67 - Bunyan - The Pilgrim's Progress
Right.

>73 - Plato - Lysias (?)
It is Plato. It’s Phaedrus though.

>76 - Thackeray - Vanity Fair
Correct. Now where have we seen that phrase recently...?

>77 - Keats - Ode to a Nightingale
Right.

>83 - Dante - Inferno
More or less. It is the Divine Comedy, but the general tone is too upbeat for Inferno. It’s Manfred, in Canto III of the Purgatorio.

>94 - The Gospel of Mark (?)
Almost, but there’s no Saint Mark in Authors List.

>99 - Psalms (?)
Correct. Psalms 30:4-5. King David attributed as author.


>Titles I could recognise being name dropped but not identify the correct passage:
>Mann - The Magic Mountain
>Lawrence - The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
>Maugham - Of Human Bondage
>Coward - Blithe Spirit (?)
>Lewis - Surprised by Joy (?)
>Hardy - Far from the Madding Crowd
>Apuleius - The Golden Ass
>Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night
All correct. (This is omitting the ones other people have already ID’d.)

Bump.

Do I have this straight?
Half are quotes from books that reference another book.
The other half reference nothing but are quotes from what the first half reference.
So are the referred to quotes just random from the author or random from the referred to books or the exact quote the first half reference?
And the first half the reference could be in the quote or the title of the book quoted?

>>24084620
Take the first pair identified as an example.

#84 is a quotation from a poem by Robert Burns called ‘To A Mouse’.
Within that quotation is the exact phrase ‘Of Mice And Men’ (allowing for Scots dialect).
John Steinbeck used this phrase as the title for a book.
#11 has a (random) quotation from said book.

There are fifty pairs, all pretty much like this.

13 - O. Henry - Cabbages and Kings - references 3

File: Haruhi says Yes!.jpg (62 KB, 320x240)

62 KB JPG

>>24085243
>13 - O. Henry - Cabbages and Kings - references 3
Correct. /lit/ might enjoy the early American humorists. "The bundle of muslin he’s spoony about" is a good way to describe a fellow’s girlfriend.

Bump.

This is hard

6 outer dark by mccarthy which is a refrence to matthew

21 spinoza ethics


39 portrait of a lady by eliot, named after portrait of a lady by james

94 matthew

#39 The Jew of Malta by Marlowe

File: That is correct.gif (51 KB, 220x122)

51 KB GIF

>>24088656

>6 outer dark by mccarthy which is a refrence to matthew
>94 matthew
Correct. Matthew 22:11-14

>21 spinoza ethics
Also correct. Someone else correctly identified which work quotes this (W. Somerset Maugham, ‘Of Human Bondage’) but couldn’t find the quotation from that book.

>39 portrait of a lady by eliot, named after portrait of a lady by james
Nope. The T. S. Eliot quotation is #12, used for the title of #1 (Evelyn Waugh, ‘A Handful Of Dust’).

File: Kay says Yes!.jpg (86 KB, 400x510)

86 KB JPG

>>24088659

>#39 The Jew of Malta by Marlowe
Correct.

7. Proverbs by Solomon
22. Ecclesiasticus by Jesus
58. Luke by Luke
85. 1 Corinthians by Paul
94. Matthew by Matthew
99. Psalms by David

File: We Concur.gif (203 KB, 498x304)

203 KB GIF

>>24090027
All good. This is all the Bible authors I think. And of course with all these it's going to be something else using them for a title.

>7. Proverbs by Solomon
Proverbs 9:1-2
The other work is known to be T. E. Lawrence, ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’. But it’s not been found.

>22. Ecclesiasticus by Jesus
Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach, 44:1-2
A trickier one. Non-fiction; not so well-known these days.

>58. Luke by Luke
Luke 2:25-32
A very tricky one, because the newer work is not well-known *and* the title is using the Latin.

>85. 1 Corinthians by Paul
1 Corinthians 13:11-13
The linked work is known: Philip K. Dick, ‘A Scanner Darkly’. But as with #7 the quotation has not been found.

>94. Matthew by Matthew
Matthew 22:11-14
This one is fully solved. It’s Cormac McCarthy, ‘Outer Dark’, #6.

>99. Psalms by David
Psalms 30:4-5
No suggestions about the hidden title for this one yet. I would say it’s towards the tricky end of middling-hard.

>>24083235
>>12) T.S. Eliot's Waste Land
>Correct, but is it referrer or referent?
it's gotta be the referent because it sounds too good not to steal

>>24091409
Correct, but this one is already known. It’s A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh (#1).


>>24088498
>This is hard
There are some relatively obscure pieces in here. But you don’t have to solve everything in isolation. It’s mostly fairly obvious, I think, which fifty are quoting and which are being quoted. (The ones being quoted will be older; they’ll more likely be poetry; they’ll have phrases in them that jump out at you.)

The works being quoted will tend to be the more well-established (like the Bible). The obscure pieces are mostly the ones quoting. So you (sort of) have their titles; and you have their authors in the Author List. That’s quite a lot to go on.