In case you've been expiring of curiosity, here are the author-quote matches from the quiz I posted yesterday:
A. Azar Nafisi
"On the first page of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck informs us that the Widow Douglas decided to take him up and 'sivilize' him, but 'it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer, I lit out.'"
B. John Updike
"The American idea, as I understand it, is to trust people to know their own minds and to act in their own enlightened self-interest, with a necessary respect for others."
C. Joyce Carol Oates
"How heartily sick the world has grown, in the first seven years of the 21st century, of the American idea!"
D. David Foster Wallace
"Are some things still worth fighting for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment?" [I feel bad about this quote, in that I may have made it harder than it should have been because I used an asterisk instead of a footnote. I don't know the HTML for footnote numbering. Sorry!]
E. Tom Wolfe
"Since you asked... the American idea was born at approximately 5 p.m. on Friday, December 2, 1803, the moment Thomas Jefferson sprang the so-called pell-mell on the new British ambassador, Anthony Merry, at dinner in the White House."
F. Judith Martin (aka Miss Manners)
"The original American idea was that everyone should be treated with equal respect and dignity."
G. Eric Schlosser
"My idea of America was formed by stories about the Founding Fathers that my grandfather told me when I was a boy, by road trips through the Rockies with my parents, by reading almost everything by Mark Twain, by Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, especially Whitman, by Kerouac and John Dos Passos, by Frank Capra films, Coppola films, Jimmy Stewart, and Billy Jack, by childhood memories of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and their murders, by the war in Vietnam and the protests against it, by Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, underground comics, the 1977 New York Yankees, loud music of all kinds, fireworks, hamburgers, and French fries."
I tried to tabulate scores, but since my laptop only has a 12" monitor, I went insane three times trying to flip back and forth between everyone's answers. So let's say everyone who commented wins! Including you, b*babbler, for honourably bowing out of the competition. If each of you would like to get a little sumpthin-sumpthin in the mail, fire me your mailing coordinates at 50books [AT] gmail [DOT] com.
3 comments:
I had this awful dream last night that David Foster Wallace died and nobody knew but me. It was odd, I'm not even a huge fan, but in the dream I was distraught.
I was too lazy to participate in the full quiz, but you had to know the one with the footnote was David Foster Wallace. That guy probably makes footnotes when he signs cheques, makes grocery lists, and takes phone messages.
The HTML tag for making superscript numbers is < sup > < / sup >(without the spaces of course - Blogger won't let me write it here without the spaces). I only know this because I write a DFW-esque amount of footnotes on my blog.
And, for the record, I'm totally going to use footnotes when I write cheques from now on - great idea Prolix!!
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