Quote of the Day (Eudora Welty, on a Teenaged Girl’s Winter ‘Visit of Charity’)

“It was mid-morning—a very cold, bright day. Holding a potted plant before her, a girl of fourteen jumped off the bus in front of the Old Ladies’ Home, on the outskirts of town. She wore a red coat, and her straight yellow hair was hanging down loose from the pointed white cap all the little girls were wearing that year. She stopped for a moment beside one of the prickly dark shrubs with which the city had beautified the Home, and then proceeded slowly toward the building, which was of whitewashed brick and reflected the winter sunlight like a block of ice. As she walked vaguely up the steps she shifted the small pot from hand to hand; then she had to set it down and remove her mittens before she could open the heavy door.

“ ‘“I’m a Campfire Girl. ... I have to pay a visit to some old lady,’ she told the nurse at the desk.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern novelist, short story writer, and photographer Eudora Welty (1909-2001), “A Visit of Charity,” in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1983)

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, With a Terrifying Churchyard Scene)

“ ‘Hold your noise!’ cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. ‘Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!’

“A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Great Expectations (1861)

The other day, while in a coffee shop, I picked up a copy of the Dickens classic and opened it to its second page, with the above passage. Wow!

The description grabs you by the scruff of the neck, not unlike the convict who appears out of nowhere and terrifies young Pip. You can imagine the terror of this orphan who just wants to mourn the family members buried here.

You’re fully expecting a crime story, but this is a novel in which things are not what they seem, and so it is here. Right after the threat in the dialogue, and that sentence about the “fearful man,” we are bombarded with verbs that suggest the vulnerability of this convict named Magwitch: “soaked,” “smothered,” “lamed,” “cut,” “stung,” and “torn.”

It’s no wonder that so much of Dickens’ work has been adapted for film and TV: any director worth his salt has an unforgettable picture to work with here.

(The image accompanying this post comes from David Lean’s magnificent 1946 adaptation of the Dickens novel, with Finlay Currie as Magwitch and Tony Wager as young Pip.)

Quote of the Day (Eve Babitz, on Two Sisters and a Friend)

“Just then, Haily arrived, Kate's best friend who nobody but Kate could stand. Haily was the kind of woman who took people's boyfriends when they weren't looking and then wanted you to feel sorry for her because she had no friends. Except for Kate. Haily was even more in love with Kate than everyone else, and attempted to look just like her, dying her own dishwater brown hair dark red like Kate's was naturally, even though Kate was so nonchalant about her beautiful hair that that day she just wore it in a long braid down her slender back. Kate was so otherworldly in her beauty that it was hard for me to believe her sister Vicky looked just like her except that the things Kate did to accentuate her beauty, Vicky refused to even consider. Kate, for example, used silvery eye shadow to bring out the silvery lime of her eyes; she often let her hair cascade down her back in a darkened red cloud, whereas Vicky chopped hers off at chin length and shoved it off her face in a bandanna…. [W]hile Vicky always wore either loafers or tennis shoes or else terrible low-heeled black scuffed pumps if she was really backed into a corner and had to go to a dinner party, Kate's shoes were all silver, including the boots she wore that day with her Moroccan pants. Haily looked like a smudged charcoal drawing of Kate done by someone with no talent.”— American artist, author and muse Eve Babitz (1943-2021), “Expensive Regrets,” in Black Swans: Stories (1993)

Quote of the Day (Charles Portis, on a Most Unlikely Western Hero)

“He stirred as I came through the curtain. His weight was such that the bunk bowed in the middle almost to the floor. It looked like he was in a hammock….The brindle cat Sterling Price was curled up on the foot of the bed. Rooster [Cogburn] coughed and spit on the floor and rolled a cigarette and lit it and coughed some more. He asked me to bring him some coffee and I got a cup and took the eureka pot from the stove and did this. As he drank, little brown drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.”—American novelist and journalist Charles Portis (1933-2020), True Grit (1968)

It can be pretty fascinating to see how two different actors portray the same character. Both John Wayne and Jeff Bridges kept Deputy U.S. Marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn’s character-defining eyepatch. Both the 1969 adaptation of the Portis novel and the Coen brothers’ 2010 version featured this bedroom scene with the cat.

But, while Wayne embodied the character’s considerable heft, Bridges—at least as pictured here—depicted him as grungier. He’s not only got the mustache that Wayne decided not to grow, but a beard.

This Rooster Cogburn is just the kind of “billy goat” that the narrator of the above quote, Mattie Ross, would have recoiled from—if, that is, she wasn’t looking for the toughest U.S. deputy marshal in the district.

Cogburn, having killed more than a few men in the line of duty (all justified, he claims), more than meets her requirements—and then some.

Bonus Quote of the Day (Thomas Mann, on a ‘Luminous’ Munich on the First Day of June)

“Munich was luminous. A radiant, blue-silk sky stretched out over the festive squares and white-columned temples, the neoclassical monuments and Baroque churches, the spurting fountains, the palaces and gardens of the residence, and the latter’s broad and shining perspectives, carefully calculated and surrounded by green, basked in the sunny haze of a first and lovely June day.”—German Nobel Literature laureate Thomas Mann (1875-1955), “Gladius Dei” (1902), in Death in Venice and Other Tales, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (1998)

This quote was too beautiful not to highlight on this day.