Quotable Friday (11)

I love reading quotations. Whether they’re funny, wise or poignant, I love those snapshots into the human mind; I love the beauty of language. There aren’t always easy ways to crowbar great passages from novels or thoughtful quotations into ordinary blog posts, so on Fridays I’m letting them speak for themselves.

When I started doing this series, my dear friend Emma e-mailed a couple of quotations she really loves to me. If you want to do the same, feel free! My contact details are on the About Me page.

One of Emma's favourite quotations I'll leave for another time, but she had one from Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell which I'm considering putting on my "to be read" list. Have you read it? Would you recommend it? The quotation is really quirky and made Emma laugh, which reminded me of a quotation from A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, just because that, too, made me laugh, despite its short simplicity - I'm sure I've mentioned it before on this blog already. So here are two simple sentences that have brightened our days...

"Being a bit of a layabout, he lay about a bit." - from A Suitable Boy

"The fluffy bunny of incredulity zoomed around the bend so fast that it left the greyhound of language agog in the starting blocks." - from Cloud Atlas

Do you have any favourite lines that have made you laugh?

Icons in Literature

Let's play a game. Everybody likes games - especially when they're about icons in literature, right? RIGHT?

I am reading The Godfather by Mario Puzo at the moment. I didn't think I knew anything about it, until I started reading. Then, I realised two very famous parts were familiar to me already. Firstly, there was the scene where a man wakes to find a horse's head in his bed, and then there was the phrase "sleeping with the fishes" - to mean a body which has been dumped in the sea. I knew about both these things without ever having watched or read or discussed The Godfather before.

It got me thinking about how many other things in books become part of our common knowledge and language. I don't mean things like particularly famous titles, plotlines and characters. I mean iconic lines, images or scenes that have grown bigger than the books themselves. They become either phrases that people use without necessarily even knowing the book at all (think, Catch-22), or - as with The Godfather - ideas that somehow everybody knows about.

So, here are a few of those lines or images that I consider mini-icons from literature. I haven't looked anything up, this is all dredged from the corners of my brain. Do you know which books I'm thinking of? I bet you do, or at least have come across what I'm referring to, even if you don't know the book title! Pop your answers in the comments (and no peeking ahead before having a go yourself!).

1. A woman dressed in a wedding dress, sits amongst cobwebs and the rotting remains of a wedding breakfast.
2. "Curiouser and curiouser."
3. "Please Sir, can I have some more?"
4. "My dear, I don't give a damn." (The "frankly" often found at the start of the expression was added by the movie-makers and isn't in the book).
5. Don't panic.
6. "I don't think we're in Kansas any more." (I use this line every time I'm confused about something!)
7. A place where it's always winter but never Christmas.
8. "My precious."
9. Room 101.
10. "Bah! Humbug!"

Actually, because these things are so much in common useage, I found it quite hard to think of them! Can you think of any more icons that aren't just famous storylines but have somehow become more than that?

Book Tattoos

Recently, I've come across several online galleries of tattoos inspired by books. There's this one on Buzzfeed, or this one on Huffington Post, for example. All the images in this post are from the Buzzfeed gallery.

Slaughterhouse-Five chic.

I'm not a tattoo kind of person. The thought of having ink injected permanently into my skin doesn't fill me with feelings of excitement and possibility. If I was going to get a tattoo it'd have to be something I was certain I'd still like decades down the line. That limits my options to a very small selection of names and dates, or, just maybe, a line from a book.

There are some interesting literary tattoos out there - pictures of the Gruffalo, Winnie the Pooh, The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Ramona Quimby from the Ramona books, for example. I've even seen Agatha Christie's face on a girl's thigh (there's not a sentence I ever thought I'd be writing). The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery seems to be very popular tattoo inspiration, as does Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie. Harry Potter produced a good few for the galleries too - including a wrist tattoo of "9 3/4".

A rather sweet Harry Potter/Snape tribute.

Some word tattoos are whimisical. I was particularly taken with the gentleman who has "Don't" on one foot and "Panic" on the other (The Hitchhikers' Guide ot the Galaxy), and a beautifully-designed "We're all mad here" (Alice in Wonderland). I think I'd want to go for something a bit more beautiful or profound though. I've seen a few tattoos paying homage to Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, including the line "everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" (see first image). And there was a rather lovely tattoo of "not all who wander are lost" from The Lord of the Rings.

Heading to Neverland.

In the end though I am both too much of a wuss and too indecisive to actually get a tattoo. I'd never be able to make up my mind. But if I was forced to decide this minute on a tattoo celebrating a work of fiction or a particular writer, I would probably go for something by C.S Lewis  - having no time to trawl through Dickens! Perhaps something like "there is no other stream" or "do not dare not to dare" or "not safe, but good". What would you choose?

Lessons from Children's Writing

Did anybody else see this article from the BBC? Radio 2 ran a short story competition for children up to the age of 13 and received over 90 000 entries. And you thought the odds were stacked against you for Bridport or Bristol?!

The Oxford University Press fed all the stories - over 30 million words - into a database and analysed the words children were using in their creative writing. Here are a few of the facts from the article that interested me:

• the most common word (presumably excluding words like 'the' and 'a') was Mum. Mum and its variants were mention about twice as often as Dad, although dads tended to be more active - fighting aliens and the like.
• Some kids are pretty amazing at similes. Bearing in mind the kids are under 14 years-old, I was impressed with "As trustworthy as a fox with a chicken feather poking out of its mouth" and "As boring as a cake with no candles".
• Text language wasn't used very much at all (hooray!), or only used in the correct context - e.g. when actually writing texts or using slang as part of speech.
• Fantasy was the most common genre, with modern technology not playing a huge part in most stories.
• Somewhere in Britain there is a kid who wrote this sentence: "I approached an altitudinous manor, that looked like a blackened statue of a ghost, damaged by the years of betrayal."
• There is also a kid who wrote this: "Its hazy malachite skin gleamed with an amber slime, its emaciated tail propelling it through the tingling sea. It glanced only forward, its atramentous citron eyes fixating on its prey."*

Kids are pretty amazing. It heartens me that 90 000 stories were entered and that many of them show so much promise.

Of the whole article, however, the thing that interested me most was the comparison between adult writers and children. The car most likely to be mentioned by a child (both boys and girls) is a Ferrari. For adults its a Ford. When it comes to two-word nouns, adults talk about car parks and kitchen sinks; kids talk about space ships, time machines and tree houses. I know this is inevitable - children are less likely to worry about whether it's really believable their ordinary hero happens to drive a Ferrari - but it makes me a little bit sad. I feel that adults are letting the side down! Perhaps I'll try to include a tree house in my next short story.

Do you have children, or do you/did you teach primary-aged children? What sorts of things do children write about now and do you think it's different to 10/20/40 years ago?


*I'm sure you totally knew this already, but 'atramentous' refers to a substance, usually liquid, that is very black - such as the ink given off by a squid or octopus.

Guilty Pleasures and Comfort Reads

Are you sitting comfortably? Image by egoforall at sxc.hu

The husband and I are just back from a 10-day holiday, travelling around the north of England by train. Despite minor inconveniences such as a flooded track delaying a journey until after the last train for the day had gone, and a fire causing us to have to move out of our Bed and Breakfast, we had fun! For various reasons we were unable to be as active on this holiday as we usually are, however, this meant we had more time for reading.

While Paul got stuck into Dune by Frank Herbert, I chose something which was pure escapism. In the last couple of years I have waded through Ulysses, War and Peace, The Grapes of Wrath and A Suitable Boy. Just before we went away I read the epic (both in scope and length) novel The Pillars of the Earth. For my holiday I wanted something easy to read - a guilty pleasure, something that wasn't high literature and didn't require a lot of concentration. I chose a collection of Agatha Christie short stories.

I love Agatha Christie. Reading her now, as an adult, I realise her actual writing style isn't all that brilliant, but I don't care. I love cosy crime and she is definitely the Queen of Cosy Crime. I used to listen to Christie audiobooks as a kid while doing jigsaw puzzles in my bedroom on wet Sunday afternoons. Reading Agatha Christie is, to me, the book equivalent of wearing pyjamas and drinking hot chocolate while snuggled up in a blanket. Pure comfort reading.

Do you have a guilty pleasure, or comfort read? Helen Walker on Twitter told me she re-reads books from her childhood as her guilty pleasure. I tend not to re-read books very often (though I promise I am getting round toThe Great Gatsby very soon now), but I can see how that might work. Which authors or books do you turn to when you want to switch-off and unwind without stretching your brain?