Liz Smith | 08/16/2009 11:00 pm

Liz Smith: 'For the Last 40 Years, I Introduced My Column With a Quote'

In response to: What passage or passages from a book, poem, short story or other literary work moved you so much that you've never forgotten it?

There is so much in so many of the books I’ve read that I feel like a parent with many children trying to say something that I’m sure will make them feel loved equally. I have already given my embrace to the thousands of quotations I have selected to open my column for the past 40 years.

I like E. L. Doctorow on writing: "It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights. But you can make the whole trip that way." This seems to me would apply to any long-term chore.

Or Raymond Chandler: "Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder."

Or William Faulkner: "We will be judged on the splendor of our failures."

Or Emily Dickinson: "The pedigree of honey dost not concern the bee; A clover, anytime, to him is aristocracy."

And then I have loved an anonymous limerick:

"There once was a man from St. Paul, who went to a fancy dressed ball. He said, ‘Yes, I’ll risk it. I’ll go as a biscuit.’ And a dog ate him up in the hall."

Read more about: Books, Entertainment, Literature, Words Move Me

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John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave is only begottem son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

By Howmeister Kaiser on 08/17/2009 6:36 am

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A friend is a present you give yourself — Robert Louis Stevenson

By Judith Marshall on 08/17/2009 11:36 am

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They had gone through hell, and come out on the other side. John Steinbeck, The Pearl.

By Mary Mooney on 08/17/2009 3:14 pm

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"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

From A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor

By Mary Mooney on 08/17/2009 3:16 pm

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"Never miss a good chance to shut up". Mark Twain

"What goes around, comes around". Supposedly an American quotation, but for me it seems the same as Karma, which is much older.

By Carole Del Monte on 08/17/2009 4:45 pm

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You become more like your friends

And your friends become more like you

By Myr Nielsen on 08/17/2009 10:15 pm

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"All of them, except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against the enemy they thought they saw across the frontier. This enemy who never attacked that way - if he attacked at all, if indeed he was the enemy" John Knowles, A Separate Peace (1959)

By Lady Jane on 08/18/2009 12:15 pm

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Memorized when I was in the 3rd grade -

I loved my friend He went away from me There’s nothing more to say The poem ends soft as it began - I loved my friend

I loved it so much, I tore the page out of the book - and I still have it tucked away in that box of special childhood treasures. I didn’t know who wrote it then, but the internet tells me now that it was Langston Hughes.

By Jennifer Bruce on 08/20/2009 12:15 pm