At a London party in 1883, Oscar Wilde was complimenting one of the guests on a singularly pithy and well-turned remark.
"How I wish I'd said that!" the great Irish wit exclaimed.To which the painter James MacNeil Whistler was heard to murmur, "You will, Oscar, you will."
Nowadays, we all will.
Check out the reference section of any bookstore and you'll find whole books full of quotes about lawyers, quotes about writing or quotes about Mozart. Jewish quote books, movie quotes, TV quotes; political and business quotes and quotes about women, pro and con.
Since 1855, when the first, modest edition appeared, "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations" has been the bible of quote books. Whether settling bar bets or seeking oratorical inspiration, John Bartlett's collection of humankind's most memorable sentiments has been the authority. But 16 editions later, "Bartlett's" is suddenly engulfed in competition, and not all of it is so high-minded.
"I've noticed that in the last three or four years there's been an absolute epidemic of specialized quotation books," says Justin Kaplan, who wisely kept the badinage between Wilde and Whistler when he edited the latest edition of "Bartlett's."
Why our sudden hunger for the good one-, two- or three-liner?
"I think we live in a short-take culture," Kaplan theorizes. "Everything has been quickened down to sound bites, and even the sound bites are getting shorter."
Judging by the new breed of quote books, they're also getting meaner, and what's been lost in virtue is more than made up for in vitriol. We like a clever remark, it seems, but we like a snide one even more, and so Jon Winokur's "The Portable Curmudgeon" naturally begat "The Portable Curmudgeon Redux."
If you want "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast," reach for Bartlett's, but for H.L. Mencken's definition of a cynic, Curmudgeon's your guide.
"A cynic," the great cynic said, "is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin."
But curmudgeons differ from cynics, Winokur insists.
"Curmudgeons are people who are really repelled by the humbug and pettifoggery around them," he says, "and as it increases with political correctness, they get more curmudgeonly. They're really softies who've been disappointed one too many times, and their wit is their defense."
When David Olive, a Canadian journalist, set out to gather history's most sexist quotes into "GenderBabble: The Dumbest Things Men Ever Said About Women," his own success surprised him.
"The biggest shock was that a lot of women have said some awful things about women," he recalls, "and the second was that people I've always revered have also said awful things about women."
Olive, who also edited "Business Babble" and "Political Babble," cooled the sting by interspersing laudatory thoughts among the barbs. So to balance Katharine Hepburn's "I think every woman wants to look up to a man, if she has any sense," there's also Margaret Thatcher's advice: "When you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman."
For the newest "Bartlett's," Kaplan has dropped 245 authors, added 340 and brought a slightly lighter tone to the more modern entries. William Shakespeare remains the star with 1,960 quotations, but Clint Eastwood is in there, too, with, "Go ahead, make my day."
The shift in tone was intentional.
"I always thought one thing wrong with `Bartlett's' was that it was too high-minded," Kaplan explains. "It tended to deal with sentiments to which no one could possibly take exception, and I thought one of my functions as editor was to bring it more in line with what I thought of as our current mood, and that's going more in the direction of the colloquial, the ironic, the sardonic, the humorous."
A good quote is fresh, concise, original and punchy, but today's high-speed, disposable culture posed a special challenge for Kaplan.
"One of the traps `Bartlett's' presents the editor has to do with that word `familiar' in the title,' " he says. "It doesn't really mean anything. People do not share the same book culture any longer. If they share anything, they share the same sort of rather tacky television culture."
And despite the impact of tacky television on our lives, he says, the medium has yielded few quotes worth including, and advertising even fewer. For a while, Kaplan considered including "Where's the beef?" before finally deciding the phrase was fading from use so fast it would soon be as antique as "Twenty-three skidoo."
To edit "Bartlett's," after all, is to serve a higher standard of scholarship than the average, entertaining quote book. Each entry is sourced and often cross-referenced. Hence, "Go ahead, make my day" is credited not to Eastwood, who made it famous, but to Joseph C. Stinson, the screenwriter of "Sudden Impact," and a further footnote reminds the reader that on March 13, 1985, President Ronald Reagan paraphrased the quote in a pointed challenge to tax increasers.
Books like "The Portable Curmudgeon" and "GenderBabble" offer no sources. The reader must take it on faith that Wilfred Sheed really did say, "If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English."
Winokur concedes he's no Bartlett, but he doesn't pretend to be. When he first started collecting quotes, he didn't keep citations, and when he began, the publisher didn't want them.
"I want my books to be accurate," he says, "but beyond that I make no pretense of being scholarly."
With so many quotable quotes competing to join the 20,000 in `Bartlett's,' were there any Kaplan regretted dropping, any he wishes he'd included?
"Every once in a while I come across something I wish I'd put in," he concedes. "There's a great line from "Silence of the Lambs": `I ate her liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti. . . .' "