"Quote Me": How to Add Wit and Wisdom to Your Conversation

Peter Martin is a senior projects editor at the University of Ottawa
Press.

Because I love collections of quotations, I am outraged by this one. And
puzzled. How did the compiler of “Quote Me” get cover blurbs from
such sensible folk as Pierre Berton, Don Harron, Michael de Pencier, and
John Robert Colombo?

The book is mean-spirited, racist, uninformative, banal, sexist,
inaccurate, slovenly, wit-free, and unfunny. Here are a few of the
grounds for my judgment: Under the heading “Stupidity,” four entries
(unattributed) begin, “She’s so dumb that. . . .” On page 172, a
quotation is attributed to Dante Alighieri, but on 176 (twice!) and 266
he’s called Aligheri [sic] Dante. There are typos on pages 393, 431,
438, and 448 (two there): “An oft used guote,” and “They keep
gong. . . .”; and these are only a tiny sample. Unsourced and almost
certainly invented quotations in fractured English display contempt for,
among others, the Japanese, the Chinese, Mexicans, and Germans. A
plethora of nasty, tired one-liners which the sleaziest Vegas comic
would scorn pollute these pages—for example “I’d like to help you
out. Which way did you come in?” and “If I tell you you have a
beautiful body, will you hold it against me?” And finally, a little
cross-checking with the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations reveals that
Breslin misquotes, among others, Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare,
General Sherman, Isaac Newton, Thomas Carlyle, Abraham Lincoln (from the
Gettysburg Address!) William Cowper, and Winston Churchill (twice).

When I got to the page where Breslin attributes a Dorothy Parker line
to Alexander Woolcott and gets it wrong, I stopped checking. And when I
found the author writing “A University degree often means little as
against an ordinary man with ‘fight’,” I stopped reading.

One of Breslin’s quotations is “She’s so ugly that when she takes
off her makeup her dog throws up.” This book has a similar effect on
me.