‘What,’ asked my husband, with a peculiarly annoying tone of archness in his voice, ‘is the highest kite that can fly?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied.
‘What,’ asked my husband, with a peculiarly annoying tone of archness in his voice, ‘is the highest kite that can fly?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied.
‘Imagination. Imagination is the highest kite that can fly, according to Lauren Bacall. It says so in the new Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations,’ he said, waving at me the book I had intended to look at after doing the washing-up.
There may be much in what Miss Bacall says. The words come from her autobiography of 1979. I have never heard anyone quote them. I have, however, heard people quote her in To Have and Have Not saying, ‘You just put your lips together — and blow.’ That is not in the new dictionary, although it says in the preface: ‘This is the dictionary where you can find the quotations people really use today.’
However, the multitude of unreliable sites on the internet that purport to provide quotations call imagination ‘the highest kite you can fly’, ‘that you can fly’ or ‘one can fly’. They copy mistakes one from another, and have no judgment about what is a quotation on many a lip and what is merely a sententious formulation.
The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations does give quotations from films, just 51. I should have thought that these were precisely ‘the quotations people really use today’. The only other quotation from Lauren Bacall that it gives is: ‘I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.’ That is not from a film either, but from the Daily Telegraph in 1988. I looked up that other thing, about having the face you deserve, and there it was: ‘At 50, everyone has the face he deserves,’ George Orwell — the last words in his notebook, 17 April 1949. He died the following January, aged 46.
I thought at first that there were no quotations from Bogart, but a couple come among the film quotations and another (‘Play it again, Sam’) under a select section of 24 misquotations, which include ‘Hug a hoodie’. Vernon Coaker MP, no household name, formulated that one: ‘Cameron’s empty idea seems to be “Let’s hug a hoodie”.’ I wonder how many editions it will weather before it is quietly dropped.
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