Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("Quotations")

January 21—27, 2024 | THIS WEEK'S THEME: “Quotations”

Opening Line of the Week

The opening words come from narrator and protagonist Michael Rogers, a former English chauffeur with dark secrets in his past. He begins by quoting a saying that has clearly lodged in his mind—and then goes on to wonder if he has correctly understood its meaning.

Even when we don’t fully grasp a quotation’s meaning, though, it can still serve as a valuable stimulus to our thinking. In this case, for example, Rogers continued:

“Is there ever any particular spot where one can put one’s finger and say: ‘It all began that day, at such a time and place, with such an incident?’”

For nearly 2,000 memorable opening lines from every genre of world literature, go to www.GreatOpeningLines.com. And if you’d like to receive a daily dose of famous first words, follow me on Facebook.

This Week’s Puzzler

On February 25, 1918, this woman was born in Filer, Idaho. Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, she went on to attend Antioch College in Ohio, graduating in 1940. After college, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she married a chemical engineer and began to work as an advertising copywriter. Over time, with the arrival of children, she found it a challenge to meet the demands of her work with the equally demanding roles of wife, mother, and homemaker. In the 1950s, as her children grew older, she also began to write humorous pieces for assorted newspapers and magazines.

She burst on the literary scene in 1960 with The I Hate to Cook Book, a surprise bestseller (over three million copies sold) that advanced an idea that many traditionalists considered heretical—for many women, cooking was a joyless chore, and even something of a nightmare. She began the book memorably, writing:

“Some women, it is said, like to cook. This book is not for them.”

She went on to reveal her great wit by writing: “This book is for those of us who want to fold our big dishwater hands around a dry Martini instead of a wet flounder, come the end of a long day.”

In the book, while providing recipes for dishes with names like “Sole Survivor” and “Spinach Surprise,” she offered step-by-step instructions that had never before been seen in a cookbook: 

“Add flour, salt, paprika, and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.”

Over the next several decades, she wrote a dozen more books, including five sequels to her original I Hate to Cook book and the rest on such topics as housekeeping, travel, and etiquette. In 1986, she came out with a memoir, A Window Over the Sink. Her final book, Getting Old for the First Time, was published 1997, when she was 79. 

In 2007, this week’s Mystery Woman died at age 89, and she kept her wry wit right up to the end. Shortly before her 86th birthday, after a reporter asked her how old she was, she answered honestly, and then added: “My birthday’s this month, and I feel great except for a tendency to want to throw up when I look in the mirror.”

She also offered quotable observations on many other subjects including quotations:

Who is this person? (Answer below)

What Role Have Quotations Played in Your Life?

Whether you write or speak for a living—or only every now and then—you’ve certainly heard advice similar to that presented in this week’s Puzzler. And it makes a lot of sense, when you stop to think about it. To keep your audience engaged and interested, occasionally include a memorable quotation from a respected source or notable figure. Even better, make it a wry or witty quotation that elicits some laughter. People love to be entertained, even when they’re reading an obituary or listening to a eulogy.

In Edward F. Murphy’s The Crown Treasury of Relevant Quotations (1978), the compiler—a New York City high school teacher and avid quotation collector—included a quotation similar to the one in this week’s Puzzler, but more powerfully phrased:

“A quotation in a speech, article, or book is like a rifle in the hands of an infantryman. It speaks with authority.”

In the book, the quotation was attributed to Brendan Francis. Not surprisingly, the well-crafted quotation became quite popular, but it was almost always mis-attributed to the Irish writer Brendan Behan. Many years would elapse before a clever quotation sleuth discovered that Edward Murphy was himself the author. Turns out, he secretly inserted sixty-two of his own creations into the book, attributing all of them to his pen name, Brendan Francis.

The two quotations we’ve just seen can be filed under the categories of helpful or useful, but there are many people in the world who don’t view quotations as merely desirable, but as necessary, or even essential. I’m one of them. And so is the writer Cheryl Strayed, who wrote in her 2015 book, Brave Enough:

“I think of quotes as mini-instruction manuals for the soul.”

For centuries, countless people around the world have viewed quotations as vitally important, providing indispensable guidance about how to live a more productive and meaningful life. This was most certainly true for the Scottish poet Robert Burns, who expressed it beautifully in a 1792 observation:

From 1783 to 1794, Burns kept three commonplace books, in which he wrote early drafts of his creations, observations on a variety of subjects, excerpts from books he’d read, and quotations that had a special meaning for him. His view that quotations could be stored in his mind as ready armor is a remarkable testimony about the value of a few well-phrased words—and one that resonates deeply with all people who view quotations as life-enhancing, life-altering, and sometimes even life-changing. In a 1923 speech, Rudyard Kipling was thinking along these lines when he wrote:

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

In my case, it all started when, as a 20-year-old college junior, I was in the middle of a major “identity crisis” that precipitated a dark and deep depression. I will not recount the full story here, but if you’d like to read something I wrote about it ten years ago, you can see it here. In brief, at the suggestion of my college counselor, I was reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden when, in the very last chapter of the book, I came across a passage that almost seemed to leap off the page:

In these two sentences, Thoreau summed up my current life situation perfectly and provided a glimpse into a different future. I was so moved by the words, I immediately wrote them down on a three-by-five inch index card and thumb-tacked it on the wall above my desk. That simple exercise was strangely therapeutic, and I immediately did something I’d never before—I went back and re-read the entire book, this time searching for quotations I had loved but quickly read over. I recorded another half-dozen or so quotations on index cards and tacked them up near the first one. By the time, I finished my second reading, the depression that had consumed me for the past several months had begun to lift.

Over time, as I continued with my reading regimen, I continued this simple index card ritual, and, by the time I graduated, my entire wall was wallpapered with quotations. After graduation, I assembled them together like a deck of cards and wrapped a rubber band around them. That method eventually proved a bit unwieldy, so I re-copied them by hand into a lined notebook. In the early 1980s, when the notebook got filled up, I moved the quotations into an electronic format on my brand-new Apple IIe computer, naming the floppy disc on which they were stored: Words to Live By. And today, four decades later, the tradition continues.

My original experience with Thoreau’s distant drummer observation was so personal to me—and so idiosyncratic to my world—that there was no way for me to know then what I know now. Over the centuries, untold numbers of distressed people have had an experience similar to mine. It may have been with different authors—and completely different observations—but at a moment in time when they really needed it, a powerful, deeply moving quotation appeared in their lives. In his 1844 novel, Coningsby, Benjamin Disraeli captured this phenomenon when he had the narrator say:

“All of us encounter, at least once in our life, some individual who utters words that make us think forever. There are men whose phrases are oracles; who can condense in one sentence the secrets of life….”

As a therapist for many decades, I always kept an eye out for quotations I could occasionally share with clients. Of the many I offered over the years, by far the most effective was the opening line of Louis L’Amour’s 1980 novel, Lonely on the Mountain:

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished.  That will be the beginning.” 

Some clients found the wording of the saying so perfectly fitted to their situation they immediately said, “Hold it! I’d like to write that down so I can remember it in the future.” Many taped the saying on their refrigerator doors. And two clients in particular—a husband and wife who were trying to find a way to continue after the death of their only child—told me years later that they likely wouldn’t have made it through their ordeal without L’Amour’s words as a constant reminder.

This week, take a few moments to reflect on the role that quotations have played in your life. Do you find them to be occasionally useful or helpful, or would you say that they’ve played an important, valuable, or even essential, role? If there’s one particular quotation that started it all for you, please share it in the comments section below. The more contributions I receive, the more other subscribers will be introduced to quotations that might be of future value to them.

This week, let me end in a slightly different way. Instead of providing quotations on the subject of quotations, let me offer a dozen quotations that can all be legitimately described as Words to Live By:

• I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well. — Diane Ackerman

• Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the color of the thoughts. — Marcus Aurelius

• If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

• If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome. — Anne Bradstreet

• In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. — Albert Camus

• To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting. — e. e. cummings

• The deepest principle of human nature is the craving to be appreciated. —  William James

• One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself. — Jack London

• How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man’s city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else’s life? — Thomas Merton

• And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. — Anaïs Nin

• Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows. — Henry David Thoreau

• Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.  —  Paul Tillich

For quotations specifically on the topic of QUOTATIONS, go here.

Cartoon of the Week

Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:

Peg Bracken (1918-2007)

Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week:

Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “Dreams.”

Mardy Grothe

Websites: www.drmardy.com and www.GreatOpeningLines.com

Regarding My Lifelong Love of Quotations: A Personal Note