“The Quote Verifier”<\/a> (St.<\/p>\nMartin’s; $15.95). “Misquotation is an occupational hazard of quotation,” Keyes<\/p>\n
advises, and both he and Shapiro have gone to considerable trouble to track<\/p>\n
down the original utterances that became famous quotations and their original<\/p>\n
utterers. Keyes finds that quotations tend to mutate in the direction of<\/p>\n
greater pith. He offers the original words of Rodney King as an instance:<\/p>\n
“People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along?<\/p>\n
Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids? .<\/p>\n
. . Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all<\/p>\n
stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s<\/p>\n
try to beat it. Let’s try to work it out.” This is the rambling outburst that<\/p>\n
became the astringent and immortal “Can’t we all get along?” Keyes calls the<\/p>\n
process “bumper-stickering.” It worked well for Rodney King.<\/p>\n
Shapiro gives us results of similar detective work, and he offers additional<\/p>\n
scholarly fruit in the form of citations for the first appearance of many well-<\/p>\n
known terms, slogans, and catchphrases. “This book takes a broad view of what<\/p>\n
constitutes a quotation,” he explains. The Internet has helped him out, and a<\/p>\n
lot of the stuff he has come up with is pretty irresistible. It is extremely<\/p>\n
interesting to know, for instance, that the phrase “Shit happens” was<\/p>\n
introduced to print by one Connie Eble, in a publication identified as “UNC-CH<\/p>\n
Slang” (presumably the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), in 1983.<\/p>\n
“Life’s a bitch, and then you die,” a closely related reflection, dates from<\/p>\n
1982, the year it appeared in the Washington Post. “Been there, done that”<\/p>\n
entered the public discourse in 1983, via the Union Recorder, a publication out<\/p>\n
of the University of Sydney. “Get a life”: the Washington Post, 1983. (What is<\/p>\n
it about the nineteen-eighties, anyway?) “Size doesn’t matter,” a phrase, or at<\/p>\n
least a hope, that would seem to have been around since the Pleistocene, did<\/p>\n
not see print until 1989, rather late in the history of the species, when it<\/p>\n
appeared in the Boston Globe.<\/p>\n
There are some neat finds and a few surprises (to me, anyway) in the Yale book.<\/p>\n
I did not know that Billy Wilder was the person who said that hindsight is<\/p>\n
always 20\/20. “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” is attributable to a<\/p>\n
journalist named Walter Morrow, writing in the San Francisco News in 1949. We<\/p>\n
owe the useful phrase “Sue the bastards!” to Victor J. Yannacone, Jr.,<\/p>\n
identified as a U.S. lawyer and environmentalist. It was Jack Weinberg, of the<\/p>\n
Berkeley Free Speech Movement, who first said “You can’t trust anybody over<\/p>\n
thirty.” Joey Adams gets the credit for “With friends like that, who needs<\/p>\n
enemies?” The phrase “You can’t go home again” was given to Thomas Wolfe by the<\/p>\n
writer Ella Winter. It was the wonderful story writer John McNulty, and not<\/p>\n
Yogi Berra, who was responsible for “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too<\/p>\n
crowded.” “I’m not really a Jew. Just Jew-ish”: Jonathan Miller, in “Beyond the<\/p>\n
Fringe.” And the first person to call a spade a spade? That’s right, it was<\/p>\n
Erasmus.<\/p>\n
Shapiro has a good ear for the quote bites of contemporary celebrity culture,<\/p>\n
and the courage to set out on this endless sea. Donald Trump appears twice, for<\/p>\n
“Deals are my art form” and (in a section headed “Television Catchphrases”)<\/p>\n
“You’re fired!” Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPierre, known to most of us as Cher, is<\/p>\n
included for the lines “Mother told me a couple of years ago, ‘Sweetheart,<\/p>\n
settle down and marry a rich man.’ I said, ‘Mom, I am a rich man.’ ” (The great<\/p>\n
Sonny Bono, on the other hand, is sadly missing and deeply missed. What about<\/p>\n
“The beat goes on”? “I got you, babe”? Jingles that got us through some unhappy<\/p>\n
hours.) Zsa Zsa Gabor, asked how many husbands she has had, said, “You mean<\/p>\n
apart from my own?” Tug McGraw, asked what he would do with the salary he was<\/p>\n
making as a pitcher, said “Ninety percent I’ll spend on good times, women, and<\/p>\n
Irish whiskey. The other ten percent I’ll probably waste.” “I ate a whole<\/p>\n
chocolate bar” was Claudia Schiffer’s comment after her retirement from the<\/p>\n
catwalk. There are separate sections in the Yale book for “Star Trek” (ten<\/p>\n
items, including “Live long and prosper” and “He’s dead, Jim”; Gene Roddenberry<\/p>\n
has a section of his own), for “Advertising Slogans” (immediately fol-lowing<\/p>\n
the section for Theodor Ador-no, who would have grimly appreciated the irony<\/p>\n
and probably composed an incomprehensible aphorism about it), for “Sayings”<\/p>\n
(“No more Mr. Nice Guy”: New York Times, 1967), for “Political Slogans,” and<\/p>\n
for “Film Lines.” I’m not sure that the sentence spoken by L. Paul Bremer III<\/p>\n
upon the capture of Saddam Hussein, “Ladies and gentleman, we got him,” is all<\/p>\n
that deathless, but I’m quite pleased with the single quotation attributed to<\/p>\n
Richard B. Cheney, iden-tified as a U.S. government official, and dated May 30,<\/p>\n
2005: “The insurgency is in its last throes.”<\/p>\n
It is tiresome to encounter, for the millionth time (J. Joyce), George<\/p>\n
Santayana’s tiresome mot “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to<\/p>\n
repeat it” (manifestly untrue any way you look at it). And it is annoying to<\/p>\n
reread Alfred North Whitehead’s pompous bouleversements: “There are no whole<\/p>\n
truths; all truths are half-truths”; “Everything of importance has been said<\/p>\n
before by somebody who did not discover it.” But if sententious paradoxes get<\/p>\n
endlessly circulated, that is not the editor’s fault. Wilde was an epigrammatic<\/p>\n
genius, it’s true, but too large a dose may cause stomach upset. Shapiro is<\/p>\n
interested in the sociology of knowledge (which is precisely where the study of<\/p>\n
quotation belongs), so there are quotations from Robert K. Merton, George<\/p>\n
Sarton, and Talcott Parsons, but relatively less attention is given to other<\/p>\n
academic figures. (Stanley Fish does not appear, though it can’t be for lack of<\/p>\n
material. Edward Said does.) There is inevitably a problem in the case of<\/p>\n
people who are the quotation equivalent of vending machines. Charles Dickens,<\/p>\n
for example, or Bob Dylan, who is represented by a list of twenty-seven<\/p>\n
quotations that will seem, to anyone who is a Dylan listener, hopelessly<\/p>\n
arbitrary. It should all be here, every line!<\/p>\n
In fact, though it is ungracious to say, a lot of the fun of this fun book is<\/p>\n
in second-guessing the editor. Virginia Woolf’s quotations include the first<\/p>\n
sentence of “Mrs. Dalloway” (“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers<\/p>\n
herself”) but not the equally famous last sentence of “To the Lighthouse” (“She<\/p>\n
had had her vision”). Franz Kafka, a deep mine of quotability, has just eleven<\/p>\n
entries, and it is disappointing that one of them is not “It is enough that the<\/p>\n
arrows fit exactly in the wounds that they have made.” There are two quotations<\/p>\n
from William James on the subject of truth, but not the most elegant of his<\/p>\n
formulations: “The true is the name for whatever proves itself to be good in<\/p>\n
the way of belief.” Guy Debord, a brilliant aphorist who coined the phrase<\/p>\n
“society of the spectacle,” is represented only by a late and dubious quotation<\/p>\n
about quotations. (“Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or<\/p>\n
obscurantist beliefs.”) The section for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—<\/p>\n
like his father an inexhaustible fount of one-liners—lacks the always apt<\/p>\n
reminder that “certitude is not the test of certainty.” The philosopher Sidney<\/p>\n
Morgenbesser, whose offhand remarks were celebrated enough to have been<\/p>\n
collected, is here only for his famous retort to a speaker who had said that<\/p>\n
although there are many cases in which two negatives make a positive, he knew<\/p>\n
of no case in which two positives made a negative (“Yeah yeah”). Samuel Beckett<\/p>\n
has only nine quotations, most of them from “Waiting for Godot.” We miss his<\/p>\n
remark about what it will be like in the afterlife: “We’ll sit around talking<\/p>\n
about the good old days, when we wished that we were dead.” Goethe has twenty-<\/p>\n
six entries, including one that was new to me (the attribution, not the<\/p>\n
sentiment): “He can lick my ass” (1773). But a line from “Wilhelm Meister” that<\/p>\n
has given me resolve is not here: “Action is easy; thought is hard.” We miss<\/p>\n
Henri Bergson’s gnomic observation “The universe is a machine for the making of<\/p>\n
gods.” There is a large woodpile of Robert Frost lines, but the couplet that<\/p>\n
ends “The Tuft of Flowers”—“Men work together, I told him from the heart, \/<\/p>\n
Whether they work together or apart”—is not in it.<\/p>\n
Poetry is, admittedly, an insuperable problem for quotation compilers. The<\/p>\n
feeling that the top of your head has been taken off, a definition of what<\/p>\n
makes a quote quotable that Shapiro takes from Emily Dickinson (who took it,<\/p>\n
basically, from Kant and Burke, who took it from Longinus—a nice example of<\/p>\n
the sociology of quotation), is a feeling that readers of poetry expect from<\/p>\n
every poem they read. They are in the game to look for the strong line. But—<\/p>\n
and now we are getting to the theoretical heart of the Problem of Quotation—<\/p>\n
the experience of sublimity is subjective and associational. For some reason, a<\/p>\n
string is plucked and it never stops vibrating. Who knows why, exactly?<\/p>\n
Everyone has a list. “My glass is full, and now my glass is run.” “But one man<\/p>\n
loved the pilgrim soul in you.” “In the gloom, the gold gathers the light<\/p>\n
against it.” “Led by a blind and teachit by a bairn.” “And softly said, Dear<\/p>\n
heart, how like you this?” “The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.” “I<\/p>\n
bleed by the black stream\/ For my torn bough.” “There’s a stake in your fat<\/p>\n
black heart.” “This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.” “Drive, he said.”<\/p>\n
“You must change your life.” None of these are in the Yale book, but why would<\/p>\n
I expect them to be? They’re from my book.<\/p>\n
“You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye,” the younger<\/p>\n
Holmes once wrote. He thought that you could find wisdom and felicity even in<\/p>\n
advertisements if you knew how to tweak them properly. And when you start<\/p>\n
taking phrases out of context and recasting them as quotations, you begin to<\/p>\n
feel (Shapiro must have undergone this sensation) a little vertiginous. What is<\/p>\n
not, potentially, a quotation? The dullest instructional prose, with the right<\/p>\n
light thrown on it, can acquire the gleam of suggestiveness or insight.<\/p>\n
“Objects in the rear-view mirror may appear closer than they are”: that one has<\/p>\n
been appropriated many times. Whenever I take a plane, I am struck by “Secure<\/p>\n
your own mask before assisting others” as advice with wide application. And I<\/p>\n
have often found myself imagining ways of fitting tab A into slot B.<\/p>\n
Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It’s quotable because<\/p>\n
it’s been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority. Quo-tations<\/p>\n
are prostheses. “As Emerson\/Churchill\/Donald Trump once observed” borrows<\/p>\n
another person’s brain waves and puts them to your own use. (If you fail to<\/p>\n
credit Emerson et al., it’s called plagiarism. But isn’t plagiarism just the<\/p>\n
purest form of quotation?) Then, there is a subset of quotations that are<\/p>\n
personal. We pick them up off the public street, but we put them to private<\/p>\n
uses. We hoard quotations like amulets. They are charms against chaos, secret<\/p>\n
mantras for dark times, strings that vibrate forever in defiance of the laws of<\/p>\n
time and space. That they may be opaque or banal to everyone else is what makes<\/p>\n
them precious: they aren’t supposed to work for everybody. They’re there to<\/p>\n
work for us. Some are little generational badges of identity. Some just seem to<\/p>\n
pop up on a million occasions. Some are razors. “I see a red door and I want it<\/p>\n
painted black.” “Devenir immortelle, et puis, mourir.” “Much smaller piece.”<\/p>\n
“You’re two tents.” The quotation I have found most potent in warding off evil<\/p>\n
spirits is the motto of the Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx (1624-69): “Ubi<\/p>\n
nihil vales, ibi nihil velis.” “Where you are worth nothing, you should want<\/p>\n
nothing.” That’s mine. You can’t use it.<\/p>\n
Is there anything that is not a quotation?<\/p>\n
From: The New Yorker. New York: Feb 19, 2007. Vol. 83, Iss. 1, p. 186 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Louis Menand reviews two recent books of quotations in the New Yorker. After reading his fun review, I really want these two books for my [Read More]<\/a> ![\"image\"](\"http:\/\/localhost:8000\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Bergman_Bogart.jpg\")
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