My Day So Far

[ellenkushner]

"Strike a light or light a lantern! Something I have hold of has no head."


Can you identify this quote?

Comments

[puppetmaker40.livejournal.com]

James Thurber the 13 clocks which is the first book that my father bought my mother as a gift when they were dating.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

the first book that my father bought my mother as a gift when they were dating.

How very odd -- when I was 17, and involved in an odd relationship that was transitioning from "friends" to "dating," I brought my copy along on the first visit after we'd agreed that we were dating, with the unspoken notion that reading it aloud could somehow pave the way for physical affection, since that was going to be very awkward.

Wonder of wonders, it worked.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Oooh! That was the Golux in James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks!

"I am on the side of Good, by accident and happenstance. I had high hopes of being evil when I was two..."

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

That's from the most fabulousest book ever, that is. *^_^*

(I need a 13 Clocks icon . . . .)

[puppetmaker40.livejournal.com]

Like this? Feel Free to use if you want to

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Nice! Not, I think, what my subconscious wants -- but until my subconscious tells me what it wants, then it will have to put up with not having an icon.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

"I only resemble half the things I say I don't. The other half resemble me."

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

I read that very scene to my son the other night. The Thirteen Clocks, indeed, and the Golux says it to Zorn of Zorna (then still in disguise) in the Duke's dungeon.

[ewein2412]

oh please, are you kidding me?

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Let's not always see the same hands....

[ewein2412]

Natalie Babbitt once did an acrostic crossword for The Horn Book Magazine using a quotation from The Thirteen Clocks. It is the only acrostic I've ever done where I could just fill in the whole damn puzzle without looking at the clues once I'd worked out what the title was.

[pameladean]

"A wandering minstel I, a thing of shreds and zatches."

P.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

The Thirteen Clocks, of course.

I should go back to threatening to slip people from guggle to zatch.

[puppetmaker40.livejournal.com]

That's standard practice in my family *grin*

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

The typo is "slit" - and I WANT YOUR (p....40's) ICON!!!!!

[puppetmaker40.livejournal.com]

You can have it. I just made it today.

Now I have to figure out how you can grab it.

[mantichore.livejournal.com]

In the French version, you'd slit them « de la gargouille au zouzou ».

I've read (and enjoyed) Les Treize horloges for research purposes; I have to read the English original. I hear Neil Gaiman is going to headline a collection of fantasy classics. He's starting with Richard Garnett's Twilight of the Gods, and The Thirteen Clocks should be close behind.

[alethea-eastrid.livejournal.com]

awwwww. Thirteen Clocks.

The older girls at camp did that play my...er, must have been second year there, when I was 11. (We, the younger girls, did Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which was all sorts of fun, aside from the bit where I flung my glasses inadvertently across the stage and had to do the last third blind.)

I had such a crush on the leading, er, lady.

"Hark, hark, the dogs do bark, the duke is fond of kittens...."

[krismcd59.livejournal.com]

"Place-kicking pups and punting kittens...."
My first theater role in college was The Tosspot! Of course, since my school was in South Carolina, The Thing Without a Head quickly became The Thang Without No Haid.

Miss Thang

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

lol!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

And as well as being in The Thirteen Clocks, it's quoted in Pamela Dean's The Secret Country.

The Secret Country

[auroramama]

Oh thank you. I've read both, but the latter about ten years more recently, and I was remembering those words as an island, connected to nothing (not even Thurber) and in an atmosphere of giddy disconnection. I was all, um, did the Butterfly quote Thurber in The Last Unicorn?

[scottedelman.livejournal.com]

I'd thought it was from the 1859 short story "What Was It?" by Fitz-James O'Brien ... but I can see by what everyone else had to say that I was wrong.

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

Of course I can. What sort of silly question is that?

[oleander9999.livejournal.com]

Lauren Bacall did the most FABULOUS reading of The Thirteen Clocks. I wish it would come out on CD!!!

[oleander9999.livejournal.com]

Oh, my. Look what I found!!!

MP3's!!!!

http://www.artsreformation.com/records/

[badgerthorazine.livejournal.com]

ooooh! Thanks!

Something to cheer me up on a bad fender-bender day. :-)

lauren bacall recording of 13 clocks

[morpheusrex.livejournal.com]

Does anyone know when this was recorded? Sometime post-1953 is my only clue.

[saralinda.livejournal.com]

Sounds Thurber-esque to me. "The Thirteen Clocks"?

[saralinda.livejournal.com]

(It would have been pretty sad if I'd gotten that wrong... :D)

[redbird]

Of course--it's from The Thirteen Clocks.

[carbonel]

Yes, but only because Pamela Dean referred to it in The Secret Country. I hunted down The Thirteen Clocks after your quote at the front of Swordspoint. And I use it as a sig file for e-mail.