The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.
And so starts Charles Williams‘s War in Heaven. It’s a murder mystery. It’s a Grail quest. It’s a very British take on … ? Whatever it is, its beginning had me gripped—for about ten pages. The opening line isn’t today’s Quote, although, it has merit: there’s the urgency (the wildly ringing telephone), a conflict and contrast (but without results), and the kicker in the most emphatic position of a sentence (but the corpse).
Moving on. A character called Kennet Mornington is caught in a drizzle as he exits the train station. He takes refuge under a shed.
Quote:
“Oh, damn and blast!” [Kenneth] cried with a great voice. “Why was this bloody world created?”
“As a sewer for the stars,” a voice in front of him said. “Alternatively, to know God and to glorify Him for ever.”
Kenneth peered into the shed, and found that there was sitting on a heap of stones at the back a young man of about his own age, with a lean, long face, and a blob of white on his knee which turned out in a few minutes to be a writing pad.
“Quite,” Kenneth said. “The two answers are not, of course, necessarily alternative. They might be con-con consanguineous? contemporaneous? consubstantial? What is the word I want?”
“Contemptible, concomitant, conditional, consequential, congruous, connectible, concupiscent, contaminable, considerable,” the stranger offered him. “The last is, I admit, weak.”
“The question was considerable,” Kenneth answered.
What makes the Quote quiver?
A list,
a pile,
a heap,
a stack,
an assemblage,
an accumulation,
an aggregation,
an agglomeration.
A Quiver Of Quotes 