“QUOTE ... UNQUOTE”
SEARCHING FOR LOST QUOTATIONS
An important function of the Newsletter – and, indeed, of the radio show – is the tracking down of sources for quotations that have been asked about by readers and listeners. The same research method is applied to the origins and use of phrases and sayings. Since the list was begun in December 1987, there has been something like a 47% clear-up rate – though recently thanks to e-mail, the Internet and some dedicated sleuths – the rate has gone up to 59%. Many people have turned to it as a last resort, having exhausted all other lines of inquiry. But some queries resolutely remain unsolvable – or at least that is how it seems until someone stumbles across the answer, in some cases years after the query was originally posted.
In response to requests from ardent sleuths, I have drawn up a list of what one of them termed the ‘hard core’ of queries that are still giving problems.
If you can supply chapter and verse – and that is what we are after, not
vague surmise – for any of these quotations or phrases, then you may rest
assured that you will put someone out of his or her misery. It is helpful if you can refer to the query
number when providing information about it.
E-mail your information to the addresses given in HOW TO GET IN TOUCH WITH
“QUOTE ... UNQUOTE”. All contributions will be acknowledged
individually. Selected highlights from
the results are printed in the Newsletter.
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Q20 A precise source for the 4th Earl of
Q43 Any pre-1938 use of the phrase, ‘The butler did it!’
Q103 Who wrote: ‘Il mondo in parte disegnar si puole: / Ma pazzo è quel, che dominar lo vuole’?
Q232 An original source for Augustus John’s remark to Nina Hamnet: ‘We have become, Nina, the sort of people our parents warned us about’? Or the identity of the person who quoted it in a British newspaper in 1975-6?
Q247 A source for: ‘Everything’s done in my own little way / My own little tea-set, my own little tray’?
Q376 ‘Hello birds, hello sky, hello clouds’ – origin or
citations before the Nigel Molesworth books in the
1950s.
Q416 Georges Feydeau, the French writer of farces (1862-1921), said: ‘In comedy there are only two main parts. He who slaps and he who gets slapped.’ What is the connection, if any, between this remark and He Who Gets Slapped – the English title of the play (1914) by the Russian dramatist Leonid Andreyev?
Q524 Who referred to a woman of generous proportions as being ‘designed to give shade to her young’?
Q572 ‘When there is a great cry that something should be done, you can depend on it that something remarkably silly probably will be done’ – this was once attributed in the Herald Tribune to ‘a great English statesman from the nineteenth century’ – who he?
Q579 Gemma O’Connor once presented a delightful entertainment with the title Ferocious Chastity. This was taken from a remark – ‘the ferocious chastity of Irishwomen’ – reputedly contained in a letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels. But where is it?
Q597 The film of Evita has made me think again of
Tim Rice’s lyrics for the song ‘Don’t Cry for Me,
Q764 ‘Having distributed our guineas [?] to the populace, we drove on to the sound of renewed cheering’ – what is this? I recall someone using it in 1965.
Q788 Was the slogan ‘He’s back – and he’s angry!’ used for a film? Before 1996, that is.
Q862 Precise sources, please, for two widely-quoted sayings of John Ruskin: (1) ‘There is nothing in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little more cheaply. Those who buy on price alone are this man’s lawful prey’; (2) ‘It is bad to pay too much, but it is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all; but when you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought is incapable of doing the thing it was b(r)ought to do. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better’?
Q899 A source for: ‘It is within the province of all of us to be great or small, according to the degree of service we render, service of one man to another, to a community, to a nation, to all mankind. It is by service we are born, we live, and we are carried to our last resting place. It is therefore not just an obligation, it is the very purpose of life – to serve’ – a British Royal perhaps?
Q914 ‘The trouble with socialism is that it would take up too many evenings’ – Wilde? And, if so, where?
Q955 Did a leader of the 1916 Easter Rising say: ‘Nothing fails in
Q962 ‘Keep alive in our hearts that spirit of adventure which makes men scorn the security of the familiar to wrestle with the challenges of the unknown’ – what is this, a prayer or some other exhortation, presumably quite recent?
Q1368 Where did the phrase ‘not a happy bunny’ originate? The earliest example I have so far found is from 1989 in the UK.
Q1748 Which
1940s / 50s film noir begins: ‘It was hot.
The only kind of hot you can get in
Q1976 What is ‘’Arry’s At Was Anging On the Atstand In the All’ – a poem or song? A source, please.
Q2186 Any thoughts on the origin and use of ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor’ (first citation found in a 1954 novel) or ‘Trust us, we’re doctors’ (in use by 1993)?
Q2487 Who said: ‘A revolutionary must always have
clean fingernails’?
Q2571 The expression ‘pipe isn’t fooling pussy’ occurs in Alan Bennett’s film An Englishman Abroad (1983). Presumably it refers to sex, but was it an
established coinage?
Q2800
P.G. Wodehouse more than once uses the
expression ‘sleep poured over me in a healing wave’ – where is this from? ‘Sleep which does something which has slipped
my mind to the something sleeve of care poured over me in a healing wave’ – The
Code of the Woosters, Chap. 14 (1938) – last line
of book; ‘It wasn’t long before sleep poured over me in a healing wave, as the
expression is’ – Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, Chap. 6 (1974).
Q3205 Origin of ‘when hardy comes to hardy’ or ‘when Hardy comes to Hardy’, meaning
the same as ‘when push comes to shove’?
Is it Irish?
Q3534 A source for the anecdote about Lord Palmerston saying (to Queen Victoria?): ‘Change, change,
all this talk about change. Things are
quite bad enough already!’?
Q3649 Where is this to be found in P.G. Wodehouse: ‘If it were not for quotations,
conversation between gentlemen would consist of an endless succession of “What hos”’?
Q3670 Did the Duke of
Q3677 A source for ‘Out of my way, peasants!’ – and
usage, perhaps in a film?
Q3737 ‘He ran a pin in Gwendolyn / In
Q3742 That LUFTHANSA is an acronym for ‘Let us f---
the hostesses and not say anything’ was reported in an American book and quoted
in Godfrey Smith’s Sunday Times
column some time before 1983. What was
the book and who was the author?
Q3746 Tolstoy is often quoted as having written ‘Whilst there are slaughterhouses
there will be battlefield’ – but where did he say it?
Q3752 Where does the phrase ‘Hordes, Frobisher, hordes’ come from – a sea captain
in a film?
Q3758 Who in particular said, ‘Irony is wasted on the stupid’? Swift has been mentioned.
Q3766 Was it Ben Jonson who said something about everyone who lives in
Q3779 From a Victorian diarist? – ‘ ... had a glance at
a cold chicken and a bottle of claret before retiring to bed.’
Q3856 Did
Byron really write (and if so where?): ‘The most beautiful contact between the
earth and sea took place at the Montenegrin littoral. When the pearls of nature were sown, handfuls
of them were cast on this soil’? And is
there any proof that he called
Q3869 Edward
Lear, the poet and artist, quoted many times: ‘We come no more to the golden
shore where we danced in days of old’. Where did he get it from?
Q3902 An
origin for this exclamation: ‘May courage abound with cheerfulness and the day
end well’?
Q3916 ‘The
mistake often made by the young is to assume that the old know what they are
talking about’ has been ascribed to Henry Kissinger. Any firmer attributions?
Q3925 Did
Marcus Aurelius say something to this effect: ‘That which does not constantly
strive to advance will not remain the same, it will inevitably regress’ – and
if so, where?
Q3946 Where did George Cadbury (of the chocolate firm) say that he wanted the
business to be ‘A force for good in a troubled world’?
Q3952 ‘Common sense is nothing but undiagnosed ignorance’ – is this Nietzsche or
somebody?
Q3963
Does anyone know the origins of the (?) poster poem ‘The Animals
of Drink’ – ‘After one hour he is a monkey / After two hours he is an ass /
After three hours he is a tiger / After four hours he is a sloth ’?
Q3987 ‘Glory is fleeting but obscurity is forever’ – always attributed to Napoleon
– but when and how did it enter circulation?
Q3989 Children’s rhyme: ‘The tower of toys for a minute / Stood steady and firm and
tall ... ’, ending, ‘No wonder that Teddy refuses / To build up that tower
again’ – more, please? (There was a
Q4014 Who said something to this effect: ‘Imprisonment is a long term process
with an uncertain outcome whereas hanging is sure and takes only a moment’?
Q4042 Which British political figure used the expression ‘the consistency of the
grave’?
Q4045 What was the exact date of the Giles cartoon in the Daily Express with the caption: ‘There was only one man who entered
Parliament with good intentions – Guy Fawkes’?
Probably very late 1940s.
Q4057
A source for the expression, ‘Get back in
your hole, it’s rat week’?
Q4059
A source for the saying ‘Manners, pianos,
tables and chairs, all belong to the man upstairs’?
Q4062
Origin and full text of the parody of ‘Devon,
Glorious Devon’ including: ‘In Devon, glorious Devon, / Where it rains six days
out of seven, / Where barefaced hags. / Pursue the stags. / It’s their idea of
heaven’ etc?
Q4066
In The Green Hat, Michael Arlen writes:
‘Mr H. G. Wells says that there is no
money to be made out of any book that cannot bring a woman in within the
first few thousand words.’ The
source of this remark, please.
Q4099 ‘Man knows not what the day bodes but must abide what it brings’ – what is
this?
Q4105 In
The Letters of Noël Coward, there is
this in a c. 1956 letter to Marlene Dietrich: ‘A very brilliant writer once
said (Could it have been me?), “Life is for the living” ... ’ Coward used the shorter version ‘Life is for
[ ... ] living’ in the introduction to ‘A Bar on the Piccola
Marina’ in his 1959 Las Vegas cabaret recording – which version he had already
put in his play Design for Living (1933). But why is this near-proverb not more widely
recorded? Google Books has the shorter
by 1888.
Q4106 Early examples of something like ‘the world is made for those not blessed
with self awareness’?
Q4107 Is SMOBELMABEES – or something like it – an acronym/mnemonic for
remembering – what? Fallen Angels?
Q4111 What is the poem about the story shown on a willow pattern plate that ends
something like ‘and patter paling round the sun’?
Q4112 Bertie Wooster (in P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves
stories) apparently invokes Captain Scott’s last messsage
at some point? Where?
Q4117 Origin of ‘Which part of the word “no” don’t you understand – the “n” or the
“o”?’ – a film perhaps?
Q4118 ‘How cowardice rushes in where courage once ruled’ – or words to that
effect. Source?
Q4119 In the film Sex’n’Drugs’n’Rock’n’Roll,
Ian Dury says to his son that the painter Delacroix
said, ‘Inspiration is about getting to one’s desk at 9 a.m.’ Did he really?
Q4127 In a 1986 book Wetland – Life in
the Somerset Levels, an unattributed quotation is: ‘The slimed, light
bodies of the secret eels’. Where is
this from?
Q4178 Did John Buchan say something to the effect that the epitome of adventure
was ‘journeys made in haste by night’?
Q4204 Who called the Bible ‘a collection of self-aggrandizing myths of a nomadic
tribe of unruly Semites’?
Q4205 About which politicians (perhaps) was it said that, ‘Beneath that bluff,
unprepossessing exterior lies an equally unprepossessing interior’?
Q4214 Text of ‘Prayer from a Sick Room’, beginning ‘Think on me, Lord, and be
very answerable to my necessities’?
Q4215 Does this mean anything to anybody ‘Abercandi Day
[spelling?] – it was the day Napoleon seduced his coachman’?
Q4218 Origin of ‘Remember that night by the compost heap; two weeds in the garden
of love’?
Q4220 An origin for the saying, ‘Where ignorance prevails, vulgarity generally
asserts itself’ or ‘ ... vulgarism predominates’ or ‘ ... vulgarity invariably
inserts itself’?
Q4246 Was ‘Easy mistake to make’ somebody’s catchphrase?
Q4252 Why were Bohemian Concerts (popular music recitals from, say, 1890-1930),
so called?
Q4263
What is the Arabic origin of ‘Ye Benn Gudana
[sons of Ghudaneh / Ghudineh]
are neither gold nor pure silver but ye are pottery’?
Q4275 Louis Armstrong famously replied to someone who asked, ‘What is jazz?’ – ‘If
you have to ask, you ain’t got it’ (or words to that
effect). Are there other (perhaps
earlier) examples of put-downs in which someone is told that if they have to
ask about a certain topic, it means they’ll never understand it?
Q4286 Someone’s grandfather was fond of saying, ‘There’s many a man, though poor, hard
up’. Anyone else know this?
Q4292 ‘Success isn’t always what you know or who you know but sometimes what you know
about who you know’ – has been attributed (after 1964) by Fletcher Knebel. Any other claimants?
Q4294 This exchange between a surgeon and a nursing sister is reported from a
Q4295 A source for this saying by Dr Spooner to Roy Harrod:
‘You mustn’t think you aren’t the man you once used to think you were’?
Q4299 What is the origin of the phrase ‘sugar me pink!’?
Q4301 ‘It is better for a man to dream of many beautiful women than to awake
next to one ugly one’ – what is this? A modern proverb?
Q4304 How well-known is the expression ‘Where were we when the rope broke?’ said
between two people who have temporarily interrupted a job they are doing
together? A date for
its origin?
Q4310 David Skinner wants to know about the saying, ‘I’ve just washed my hair and I can’t do a thing with it!’ and thinks it must be from a TV commercial ‘from my youth.’ Well, I am sure that it must have been used somewhere in advertising copy at some time (possibly for Kreml Shampoo in the US) but it was being described as ‘an old saying’ as long ago as 1929 (in an American book, Secrets of Charm by Josephine Huddleston) and it appears in A Weaver of Dreams by Myrtle Reed (1911). Any ideas?
Q4311 ‘We are ordinary people yet in our mother’s eyes, we tread the earth like
princes’ – from an episode of Rumpole of the Bailey,
but an origin? Or uses of the final phrase on its own.
Q4312 Tony Craddock writes: ‘My late grandfather who
died in 1972 was fond of quoting “Fantasia
Weeks
is on the march” when referring to the
feminist movement. A self-educated working-class socialist he was fond of quoting Bernard Shaw, Robert Burns and the like.
I can’t find any reference to this quote at all or to the lady in
question and I can’t say if the spelling is correct. There was a saying that
“John Wilkes is on the march” and Wilkes did write a poem on women. Is this a
clue?
Q4321
Who said, ‘The
greatest love story in Western Literature is the story of Martin Luther and
Jesus Christ, as told by Johann Sebastian Bach’?
Q4342
‘The secret of
happiness is to count your blessings while others are adding up their troubles’
– William Penn? A proper source, please.
Q4347
Are there any pre-20th
century appearances of Napoleon’s instruction to Josephine, ‘Home in three
days; don’t wash’. Indeed, where did it
originate?
Q4348
Origin of ‘I thought
we were the good guys’?
Q4350
Lord (‘power tends to
corrupt’)
Q4369
What is the origin of
‘rien s’empêche comme le papier vide’ which
roughly translates as ‘nothing puts off [a writer] so much as a blank sheet of
paper’?
Q4404 It is a while since I have descanted on the
enjoyableness of the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters – exchanged between
George, Eton master and father of Humphrey, and Rupert, the publisher – and
published in six volumes from 1978 onwards.
Tim Riley likes them so much that he has even established a webpage
where he chases up some of their references.
On one, he came to me: ‘Lyttelton quotes these lines:
“When were you chipped from the blue bowl of air
To haunt our vernal valleys, kingfisher?
Love moves through valleys even more enchanted,
Where rivers of the heart are halcyon-haunted.”
‘Neither he nor Rupert Hart-Davis could identify the author. By the way, Lyttelton
was a serial misquoter, but he always had the essence
of the thing – from three millennia of literature.’ Any offers?
I have drawn a complete blank.
Q4405
Mark Holmes asks: ‘I wondered if you can help me with the origin of a quote: “It serves as
a reminder that well-deployed silence is a thousand times more devastating than
any sound”?’ Nothing showing up on the
radar so far but I did find this Seeing Senses: On Film
Analysis (1998): ‘Silence as a plot device.
Silence can often be even more devastating than any sound effect.’
Q4406 James Hogg wonders who first described journalism as ‘Better than
working’? It seems that Patrick Skene Catling was quoting his
father – more precisely on ‘writing’ – when he took the phrase for his 1960
memoir. But beyond
that? Well, the format ‘ … is better than working’ seems long established. I have seen a 1690 ‘Praying is better than
working’ …
Q4407 Edel Smith introduces me to an expression that perhaps I have heard before,
but more likely not. ‘There is a joke
about a bloke dying and going to hell and being asked to choose a permanent
dwelling from a variety of nasty looking torture rooms. However, in one room people
were standing ankle deep in manure while drinking tea. “This one doesn’t look too bad,” he
says. “I think I’ll stay here”. Two minutes later comes the order, “Right tea
break over, back on your heads”. Does
the expression come from the joke or does it pre-date it? And is it even a very common phrase or just
one we use in our family?’ I rather
think the phrase does not pre-date the joke – even though it may not be very
old. All I have been able to establish
is that in about 1975, a British group I had never heard of, with the name ‘If’,
apparently brought out an LP with the title Tea
Break Over, Back On Your Heads’. Curious.
Q4408 Rachael Harris’s grandfather was an RAF pilot killed in action in 1941. His widow (no longer alive) had this inscribed
on his grave in Germany: ‘Nor too closely approach the margent of things beyond
our ken’. This happened before 1956 when
she herself died. Rachael wants to know
if this is taken from somewhere. It
certainly seems like a fragment – but of what?
Incidentally, the phrase ‘beyond our ken’, though now
rather tainted by its use as the title of the late 1950s BBC radio comedy show,
goes back to the early 18th century.
The OED has a 1691 citation of
‘beyond all ken’ but there is an Isaac Watts line ‘Glories beyond our Ken of
mortal Sight’ in approximately 1715.