Name That Author

[bfh]

Yup, that's the description of Uriah Heep from Dicken's novel David Copperfield.

You're up, Raf.

[Raf]

"Once, in a kingdom called Delain, there was a King with two sons. Delain was a very old kingdom and it had had hundreds of Kings, perhaps even thousands; when time goes on long enough, not even historians can remember everything."

[bfh]

The Eyes of the Dragon - Stephen King

King Roland and his sons Peter and Thomas, and Flagg too.

And it all ties back to the Dark Tower.

[Raf]

EVERYTHING ties back to the Dark Tower. :)

[bfh]

Agreed!

All roads may not lead to Chicago,

however,

All roads do indeed lead to the Dark Tower.

I'll post another clue in a bit.

[bfh]

New Author:

They killed the white girl first.

[bfh]

Another Clue:

The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind.

And if it didn't stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.

Slave life; freed life-every day was a test and a trial.

Nothing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem.

[anotherDan]

clueless

[bfh]

Some more clues:

Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it

because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon-everything belonged to the men who had the guns. . . .

So you protected yourself and loved small. . . . A woman, a child, a brother-a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. . . .

To get to a place where you could love anything you chose-not to need permission for desire-well now, that was freedom.

For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially

if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit;

everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well,

maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.

[GeorgeStGeorge]

Alex Haley ("Roots")?

George

[bfh]

No, not Haley.

[bfh]

One more:

[that's] what Baby Suggs died of, what Ella knew, what Stamp saw and what made Paul D tremble.

That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind.

Not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore.

Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up. The best thing ... was her children.

Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing.

[wrdsandwrks]

One more:

[that's] what Baby Suggs died of, what Ella knew, what Stamp saw and what made Paul D tremble.

That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind.

Not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore.

Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up. The best thing ... was her children.

Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing.

Alice Walker?

[Raf]

Toni Morrison

Edited April 28, 2008 by Raf

[bfh]

Toni Morrison is correct.

The first quote (post #131) is the opening line of Morrison's novel Paradise.

The rest of the quotes are from Beloved.

Toni Morrison received the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1988 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

You're up, Raf.

[Raf]

"In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the Army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as assistant surgeon. The regiment was stationed in India at the time, and before I could join it, the second Afghan war had broken out. On landing at Bombay, I learned that my corps had advanced through the passes, and was already deep in the enemy's country. I followed, however, with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself, and succeeded in reaching Candahar in safety, where I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties."

...

"How are you?" he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive."

"How on earth did you know that?" I asked in astonishment.

[wrdsandwrks]

"In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the Army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as assistant surgeon. The regiment was stationed in India at the time, and before I could join it, the second Afghan war had broken out. On landing at Bombay, I learned that my corps had advanced through the passes, and was already deep in the enemy's country. I followed, however, with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself, and succeeded in reaching Candahar in safety, where I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties."

...

"How are you?" he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive."

"How on earth did you know that?" I asked in astonishment.

Could it be Arthur Conan Doyle?

[Raf]

However did you deduce that.

First graf is the opening of A Study in Scarlet.

The quotes are the first exchange between Holmes and Watson.

You're up.

[wrdsandwrks]

However did you deduce that.

You're up.

It was elementary my dear Raf.

I'll post a quote in a bit.

[wrdsandwrks]

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. “Book love,” Trollope called it. “It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.” Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort--- God, sex, food, family, friends—reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running away from home while sitting in that chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room. I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.

[wrdsandwrks]

The writers of books do not truly die; their characters, even the ones who throw themselves in front of trains or are killed in battle, come back to life over and over again. Books are the means to immortality: Plato lives forever, as do Dickens and Dr Seuss, Soames Forsyte, Jo March, Scrooge, Anna Karenina, and Vronsky. Over and over again Heathcliff wanders the moor searching for his Cathy. Over and over again Ahab fights the whale. Through them all we experience other times, other places, other lives. The only dead are those who grow sere and shriveled within, unable to step outside their own lives and into those of others. Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.

[GeorgeStGeorge]

I think the only other time I've seen the word catafalque was in a Batman comic featuring Catwoman...

George

[wrdsandwrks]

I think the only other time I've seen the word catafalque was in a Batman comic featuring Catwoman...

George

George, Amazing what you can learn from comic books...

Here are a few more.

Years later I would come to discover, as Robinson Crusoe did when he found Man Friday, that I was not alone in that world or on that island. I would discover (through reading, naturally that while I was sprawled, legs akimbo, in that chair with a book, Jamaica Kincaid was sitting in the glare of the Caribbean sun in Antigua reading in that same way that I did, as though she was starving and the book was bread. When she was grownup, writing books herself, winning awards for her work, she talked in one of her memoirs of ignoring her little brother when she was supposed to be looking after him: “I liked reading a book more than I liked looking after him…"

"I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pill box hat and matching coat."

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."

[Raf]

I don't know ANY of the quotes, but I'm starting to recognize that voice (and that says a lot about a jou--- I mean, author).

[wrdsandwrks]

I don't know ANY of the quotes, but I'm starting to recognize that voice (and that says a lot about a jou--- I mean, author).

So do you have a name for the journalist/author?

Maybe these will be more recognizable...

“The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed,”

“...there came a time when a scrap thrown in his direction usually bounced unseen off his head. Yet put a pork roast in the oven, and the guy still breathed as audibly as an obscene caller. The eyes and ears may have gone, but the nose was eternal. And the tail. The tail still wagged, albeit at half-staff. When it stops, I thought more than once, then we’ll know.”