Category Archives: quotes

Quote: ‘Proportion and order’

08 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by in quotes, writing

≈ 3 Comments

The fundamental elements of a story’s structure are proportion and order. Managing proportion is the art of making some things big and other things little: of creating foreground and background; of making readers feel the relative importance of characters, events, ideas. Often this means upsetting normal expectations by finding a superficially trivial detail or moment that, on closer examination, resonates with meaning.

– Tracy Kidder & Richard Todd, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction (2013), 40.

Quote: “A man of feeling…”

15 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by in quotes

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, ,

My father was a man of feeling who always wanted his family to show their feelings for each other too. That was why he started a sociable little custom we observed every morning without fail. We always shook hands at breakfast. None of your half-hearted shakes neither, but firm grasps to show how glad we were to see one another again after a good night’s sleep… “I don’t hold with reserve. Reserve is for Scandinavians,” my father said. “If we can’t express the emotions God give us then we don’t deserve them. We’re only on loan to one another, so let’s show our feelings while we can.”

-Peter De Vries, Reuben, Reuben (1964), 1.

‘The bits that have floated to the surface’: a quote about historical evidence

16 Saturday Apr 2016

Posted by in biographical method, quotes, Uncategorized

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

,

Toward the end of her biography of Randolph Stow, Suzanne Falkiner offers a beautifully expressed quote from Louis Menand:

How much one can accurately convey of a life lived so much on the interior is debateable. As the American academic Louis Menand has observed, in the matter of historical research (and by extension biography), what has been written about takes on an importance that may be spurious:

A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance – even though they are merely the bits that have floated to the surface. the historian clings to them while somewhere below the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight.

Suzanne Falkiner Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow (UWA Publishing, 2016) 726.

It’s more of a problem for a subject about whom little has survived – Shakespeare as an extreme example, the early Katharine Susannah Prichard as a less extreme example. Yet it subtly affects all biographies. Falkiner’s book would look very different if she her main source wasn’t Stow’s letters to his mother.

Quote on the task of the historian

10 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by in history, quotes

≈ 1 Comment

Much of this past has vanished from the landscape, and from memory. For Bottoms, one of the chief tasks of the historian is to re-create the texture of lost experience, or, as his great professional exemplar Robert Darnton writes, to “uncover the human condition as it was experienced by our predecessors.”

Nicholas Rothwell, reviewing Cairns by Timothy Bottoms in the Weekend Australian Review, 6 February 2016, 16.

Reading regrets: on realising one has read more Tom Clancy than Charles Dickens

28 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by in quotes, reading

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, ,

It pained me to think of all  those years when I simply devoured whatever fell into my hands, whatever struck my fancy at the local library or on my parents’ bookshelf: best sellers from the 1930s and 1940s, the names on the spines long forgotten; the comedic writers beloved by my father; and all those Agatha Christie and Stephen King novels, all that pulp. There had been good stuff, too, much of it by accident rather than design: Flannery O’Connor, Shakespeare, whose collected works I’d read in both Lamb précis and true form, the Brontës, Chekhov, and contemporary writers pulled from the “New Releases” shelf at the library, purely because I liked the titles or the covers. But when I thought about all the hours I’d spent lying on my bed or my parents’ couch or our lawn or in the backs of cars on family vacations, all those hours that could have allowed me the collected works of Dickens, into which I’d barely delved, or Trollope, or Dostoyevsky. Or Proust. The list went on and on, all that I hadn’t read, all that I didn’t know.
– Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year, p. 112.

This passage resonated with me, because I sometimes feel exactly the same, particularly when I’m confronted with all the great writers I haven’t read. Continue reading →

‘The terrible unbreathable cold’: Updike on plane crashes

23 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in politics and current affairs, quotes

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, ,

Lying in bed half asleep, the radio news from the crash site washing over me, I thought of this passage from Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, a novel soaked in death. Is part of the preoccupation with MH17 the unimaginable horror of dying in the air?

Just as the Lockerbie air disaster is the backdrop to late 1988 in literature, mid-2014 will have MH17, stirring memories in future years of those amateur militia, the fields strewn with luggage, the reporters with their noses covered outside the horror-trains full of bodies in the heat.

As the candy settles in his stomach a sense of doom regrows its claws around his heart: little prongs like those that hold fast a diamond solitaire. There has been a lot of death in the newspapers lately. Before Christmas that Pan Am Flight 103 ripping open like a rotten melon five miles above Scotland and dropping all these bodies and flaming wreckage all over the golf course and the streets of this little town like Glockamorra, what was its real name, Lockerbie. Imagine sitting there in your seat being lulled by the hum of the big Rolls Royce engines and the stewardesses bringing the clinking drinks caddy and the feeling of having caught the plane and nothing to do now but relax and then with a roar and giant ripping noise and shattered screams this whole cosy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually still feel packed into your suitcases, stored in the unpressurized hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them.
– John Updike, Rabbit at Rest 8

“That’s the only intelligence I shall convey to you except by word of mouth”: the difficulty of biography

04 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by in quotes, the nature of biography

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

He went down with Catherine to see his parents at the cottage in Alphington which he had found for them. “They seem perfectly contented and happy,” he told Forster. “That’s the only intelligence I shall convey to you except by word of mouth.” In that last sentence, of course, lies all the difficulty of biography, for how is it possible now to guess at what passed by mouth, by the sudden expression or by the unintentional phrase? The whole meaning of a life may be evoked in such moments which cannot now be reclaimed – like the life itself disappeared utterly, leaving behind just written documents from which we can only attempt carefully to reconstruct it. But the biographer does know some things which may not even have been clear to Dickens himself as eagerly he moved forward through the world, each day a new confirmation and extension of his being; we know that the parents were not happy, for example, and that John Dickens would soon be forging bills with his son’s signature.

– Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, 314.

In this excerpt, Ackroyd acknowledges the pain of the gap, of the clue in Dickens’ letter that he had something significant and sensitive to say which is now unrecoverable. (Ackroyd exaggerates; there are so many other difficulties too!) When Ackroyd talks of the ‘meaning of a life’, he is suggesting that the ‘true’ self is not the one presented in the documents which have survived. (But he probably means an inner state more than anything, and that may not be conveyed truthfully verbally either.)

Ackroyd also notes the consolation of a biographer – of knowing what will come, of knowing things about ‘characters’ in the subject’s lives which the subject does not yet know or may never know.

Bold or careless?

01 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by in biographical method, quotes

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

,

There is a deep resemblance always between a writer and his work, but it has nothing to do with his expressed opinions or sentiments; it is rather that the form of his work embodies the form of his personality.

– Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, 232.

It’s sentences like this that got Ackroyd in trouble with some reviewers when his monumental biography of Dickens appeared in 1990. It takes a boldness or carelessness to make pronouncements and generalisations like this one. I can think of possible ways in which he’s wrong about particular authors, but it also has a feel of truth; in this case, he is talking of the ‘variegated mixture’ of ‘humour; poetry; declamation; melodrama’ in not just Oliver Twist but all of Dickens’ novels. To extend the idea: Borges is enigmatic, brief, timeless. Auster is playful yet intense, full of life’s strangeness. Oh, this is getting very subjective. Counter-argument: we mainly know authors through their work; the ‘resemblance’ is inevitable and misleading. But maybe Ackroyd has a right to his judgement, given the preface tells us that he’s read every extant letter etc of Dickens.

Tragically eluded: a quote on the fear of the biographer

15 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by in biographers, biographical quests, history, quotes

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

What you encounter at last, after your metaphorical quest across regions of ice, might be not so much a visage as a sensation, an overwhelming feeling of frustration, of having been somehow tragically eluded; a feeling that includes the immense sadness with which the contemplation of an imperfectly glimpsed past suffuses the soul…

– Brian Matthews, Louisa, 296.

This is the great question that historians and biographers must face: is the past recoverable? Can we get past the fragments it has left behind to some sense of what it was?

I think of how differently people remember the same person who they all knew. Say, for example, rather innocuously, you get to talking about a former work colleague. To some, he could be a hero of sorts, a fine worker and a great contributor; to others, a man with a streak of nastiness. Who is right? I suppose both are right, but some might be more perceptive than others. How perceptive can we be about people we will never meet? And yet, the whole endeavour of writing and reading insists that we can, in some sense, know a person through the words they have left behind.

The temptations of autobiography and biography: a quote

12 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by in biographical method, quotes

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, ,

This is the temptation of the autobiographer: to put the past into the shape it should have taken; to make yourself cut the figure you should have cut. Likewise, the biographer, in relation to his subject, may behave as avenging angel, remorselessly straighening the record, or as a scourge, reducing the subject to insignificance or mediocrity. But it is less likely that the truth will lie so conveniently at one or other of those extremes than that it will be intricately ramified through the whole spectrum.

– Brian Matthews, Louisa, p. 103