“I never promised you a rose garden.”

THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMOUS LINE: “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”         Hannah Green (pen name of Joanne Greenberg; 1927–1996)        American author        Title of her 1964 novel                      This novel is the apparent source of the saying, though it was made even more famous by country music singer Lynn Anderson’s 1970 hit song of the same name. The well-known opening lyrics of the song, written by singer/songwriter Joe South, are: “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden.”         Greenberg’s novel is a semi-autobiographical account of her struggle with schizophrenia as a teenager. In an emotional scene in the book, psychotherapist Dr. Clara Fried tells the main character, Deborah Blau: “I never promised you a rose garden. I never promised you perfect justice and I never promised you peace or happiness. My help is that so you can be free to fight for all of these things. The only reality I offer is challenge, and being well is being free to accept it or not at whatever level you are capable. I never promise lies, and the rose-garden world of perfection is a lie...and a bore too!” Dr. Fried is based on Greenberg's real psychiatrist, Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, who treated her at the Chestnut Lodge hospital in Rockville, Maryland.        The novel was adapted into a movie in 1977. It starred Kathleen Quinlan as Deborah and Bibi Andersson as Dr. Fried. Mel Gibson made his screen debut in the film, in a small uncredited role as a baseball player. Many years later, Mel uttered his own scary quote about a garden. (See below.)

THE BADASS MARINE SLOGAN: “We don’t promise you a rose garden.”         U.S. Marines recruiting slogan used from late 1971 until mid-1984         The “Rose Garden” slogan was used in the first series of posters and ads that featured the tagline “The Marines are looking for a few good men.” Several posters in series showed Marine Drill Instructors yelling at new recruits, like the one shown here. The drill instructor in it is Sgt. Charles A. Taliano, who passed away in 2010.

THE BADASS JUDGE VERSION: “Nobody promised them [prison inmates] a rose garden…They have been convicted of crime, and there is nothing in the Constitution which forbids their being penalized as a result of that conviction.”        William Rehnquist (1924-2005)        Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court         From his written decision on the 1981 U.S. Supreme Court case Atiyeh v. Capps, explaining why the court rejected a lawsuit brought by a group of Oregon prison inmates against the State of Oregon. The inmates wanted Oregon prisons to be forced to reduce prison overcrowding conditions they contended were inhumane and illegal.

THE PASSION OF MEL VERSION: “Apparently Mel Gibson did promise his babymama Oksana Grigorieva a rose garden…But totally not in a good way. In the latest round of the seemingly endless parade of embarrassing tape leaks purporting to capture the Passion of the Christ helmsman in full meltdown mode, a new snippet of conversation has emerged, in which Gibson reportedly threatens to bury Grigorieva in the flower bed of his Malibu, California, mansion.”        From a now-deleted post on the PEACE FM Online site, July 9, 2010

THE PRESIDENTIAL VERSION: “I never promised you a rose garden but I guess [Press Secretary] Ron Nessen did. So, I hope you enjoy this new setting and the new format, and I hope I enjoy it, too.”        President Gerald R. Ford (1913-2006)                      Comment in a news conference on October 9, 1974        Ford was joking about his newly announced plan to hold press conferences in the White House Rose Garden. When Ford and other presidents later started using this option during campaign periods to avoid the usual campaign travel grind while still generating news stories and looking presidential, it was dubbed the “Rose Garden Strategy.”

THE BIONIC VERSION: Col. Steve Austin (actor Lee Majors): “Now wait a minute, Jaime, you're not going out a torpedo tube. Now you felt the sub, it’s gonna be rough out there.”  Jaime Sommers (actress Lindsay Wagner): “You never promised me a rose garden.”                      Banter from the “Kill Oscar: Part 3” episode of the American TV series The Bionic Woman (Season 2, Episode 6, first aired in 1976).

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

       

“Children of the night. What music they make!”

THE CLASSIC BOOK AND MOVIE QUOTES: “Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!” [1924 novel] “Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make!” [1931 movie]        Dracula         One of his most famous lines in the novel by Bram Stoker and the popular Universal Studios movie adaptation         In Stoker’s novel and the 1931 film Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula, the title character says the “children of the night” lines about the wolves howling outside his castle in Transylvania. The book and movie versions of the quotation are almost identical, with the exception of the word the in front of children in the book.        Dracula says the lines to Jonathan Harker, a British legal solicitor who is sent to Dracula’s home to facilitate the Count’s purchase of a property in England. The quote comes early in the book (in Chapter 2) and in the movie, as do two other famous quotes that are well known to Dracula fans.        As Harker enters the Count’s spooky castle, Dracula greets him with the words: “I am Dracula, and I bid you welcome.” In the 1931 movie, this is broken into two lines, separated by a comment by Harker.        In the movie, as Dracula is standing on the huge stone stairway after welcoming Harker, they hear the wolves howling and Lugosi speaks the famous “children of the night” lines. Shortly thereafter, in the next scene, Dracula serves some food to Harker, then pours him a glass of “very old wine.”        “Aren’t you drinking?” asks Harker. Lugosi, smiling, says a third line immortalized by the movie: “I never drink – wine.”        This chuckleworthy nod to the fact that Dracula survives solely by drinking human blood is not in the novel. In that, as Harker is preparing to eat, Dracula apologizes for not joining him, saying: “I have dined already, and I do not sup.” He does offer Harker some “very old tokay wine.” But he says nothing about never drinking wine himself.

CLASSIC COMEDY SPOOF VERSION #1: “Children of the night – shut up!”        Actor George Hamilton as Dracula, in the comedy movie Love at First Bite (1979)        Hamilton says the line in the opening of the movie as he’s playing the piano and the howling of wolves interrupts and annoys him.

CLASSIC COMEDY SPOOF VERSION #2:     “Children of the night. What a mess they make.”        Actor Leslie Nielsen, as Dracula, in Dead and Loving It (1995)        In this campy version, Nielsen says the line after pointing to some bats flying above him as he stands on the stone stairway of his castle. The camera briefly shows a dollop of bat poop on one of the stone steps. Then we see Nielsen’s shoe step on the poo, causing him to slip and fall down the stairs.

NOT-SO-CLASSIC MOVIE VARIATION #1: “Fame has bitten Robert Pattinson...His mere arrival at a promotional autograph session is enough to set off a sonic frenzy of squeals and shrieks. Tweens, teens and Twilight moms scream en masse with pent-up desire and devotion, delighted to just gaze upon their idol in the flesh. Listen to them. Children of the night. What a racket they make.”        Susan Wloszczyna        American movie reviewer        In an article about Pattinson in USA TODAY published in 2008, at a time when the first movie in the Twilight series was suddenly making him a huge celebrity – at least among teenage movie fans.        Pattinson has suggested he’s not personally a fan of the movies that made him world famous. In one interview, when asked what his view of the series might be if he weren't in it, he responded: “I would just mindlessly hate it.”

NOT-SO-CLASSIC MOVIE VARIATION #2: “The entertainment value in Argento’s sad, befuddled decline wears thin before long; after that it’s just boring. It isn’t until the 70-minute mark that the promise of the opening credits – ‘and Rutger Hauer as Van Helsing’ – is fulfilled, and by then it’s too late for anything to salvage the wreck. Listen to the children of the night! What garbage they make.”        Eric D. Snider        American movie reviewer        In his review of Dario Argento’s movie Dracula 3D, posted on Movies.com site on May 20, 2012

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading and viewing…

“The rich are different”… The real story behind the famed “exchange” between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

If you’re a quotation buff, you’ve probably heard of a legendary exchange about “rich people” that supposedly took place between the American novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961).

Fitzgerald is usually quoted as saying either “The rich are different from you and me” or “The rich are different from us.”

Hemingway is quoted as responding: “Yes, they have more money."

In fact, this quote-counterquote repartee never actually occurred. But it is based on things written by Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

Here’s how it became a legend…

In 1925, Fitzgerald wrote a short story titled “The Rich Boy.” In 1926, it was published in Red Book magazine and included what became a very popular collection of Fitzgerald's early short stories, titled All the Sad Young Men.

The third paragraph of the story says:

     "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different."

Clearly, that’s not a favorable view of rich people.

But years later, Ernest Hemingway, who had a sometimes-warm, sometimes-acrimonious relationship with Fitzgerald, decided to mock those lines from “The Rich Boy” in his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Hemingway’s original version of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was printed in the August 1936 issue of Esquire magazine. In a passage in that original version, Hemingway wrote:

     “The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him.”

Understandably, Fitzgerald was shocked and offended.

He expressed his dismay to Hemingway in a letter. He also complained to Maxwell Perkins, the editor who oversaw publication of both writers’ novels and story collections at the Charles Scribner’s Sons book company. Hemingway responded with what Fitzgerald described as a “crazy letter,” a rambling diatribe that offered no real explanation or apology.

Perkins tried to smooth things over between his two prized writers and used his editorial power to fix the source of the problem when Scribner’s reprinted “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in the 1938 anthology of Hemingway stories, The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories.

In the version of the story in that book, the name “Scott Fitzgerald” was changed to “Julian.” It has appeared that way in most subsequent reprintings.

Unfortunately for Fitzgerald, he made the mistake of writing a cryptic entry in a personal notebook that cemented the legendary version of his “exchange” with Hemingway into literary history.

The entry said simply: “They have more money. (Ernest’s wisecrack.)”

After Fitzgerald died in 1940, his friend, the noted critic and book reviewer Edmund Wilson, compiled a collection of his essays and unpublished writings in a book titled The Crack-Up. It was published in 1945. Wilson included various entries from Fitzgerald’s notebooks in the anthology.

One of them was the brief note about “Ernest’s wisecrack.”

Wilson decided to add an explanatory footnote for that entry in the book. He wrote:

     “Fitzgerald had said, ‘The rich are different from us.’ Hemingway had replied, ‘Yes, they have more money.’”

Then, the famous literary critic Lionel Trilling repeated what he called this “famous exchange” that “everyone knows” in a review and essay about The Crack-Up, published in The Nation.

After that, many other articles and books cited this “exchange” as if it were an actual conversation between Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

And thus a famous quote-counterquote myth was born.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

      

 

“Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.”

THE ORIGINAL INSPIRATION FOR THE SIXTIES SLOGAN: “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”        Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)        American poet and writer        A line from Sandburg’s epic prose poem The People, Yes (1936)        In the 1960s, several variations of an anti-war slogan began appearing on posters, in print and in songs. The version that became most common (as shown by the comparatively huge number of Google hits it gets) is “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.” Other variations include “Suppose they gave a war and no one came” and “What if they gave a war and nobody came.” It’s not certain who coined the most familiar version, but this much is clear: all of the various iterations of the saying are ultimately descended from a line in Carl Sandburg’s book-length ode to America and it’s citizens, The People, Yes, first published in 1936.        In the poem, the line is said by a little girl who sees a group of soldiers marching in a parade. It’s from a part of the poem in which Sandburg seems to foresee the potential devastation of a second and possibly a third world war:        “The first world war came and its cost was laid on the people.        The second world war — the third — what will be the cost.        And will it repay the people for what they pay?...        The little girl saw her first troop parade and asked,         ‘What are those?’        ‘Soldiers.’        ‘What are soldiers?’        ‘They are for war. They fight and each tries to kill as many of the other side as he can.’        The girl held still and studied.         ‘Do you know ... I know something?’        ‘Yes, what is it you know?’        ‘Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.’

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SIXTIES SLOGAN: “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.”         Possibly coined by James R. Newman         American mathematician, writer and editor of Scientific American magazine         In the 1960s, several updated versions of Carl Sandburg’s line became popular. They were often used in the context of opposition to the Vietnam War. The most common version, “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came,” was used as a slogan on posters that were sold in Hippie shops in the late Sixties (like the blacklight poster shown at left). It was also used as the title of a comedy movie in 1970, giving it even broader recognition. Some posts on the Internet claim the now familiar words were first written by Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s. However, they give no source and I couldn’t find one, so I deem that claim doubtful. (As Abraham Lincoln said, “The problem with Internet quotations is that many are not genuine.”)         In contrast, the origin of the variation “Suppose They Gave a War and No One Came” is well documented. It was used as the title of a widely-read article written by the American poet and author Charlotte E. Keyes (1914-1980). The article, about her growing admiration for the anti-war activism of her son Gene, was published in the October 1966 issue of McCall’s magazine. Charlotte’s other son happens to be the quote and phrase maven Ralph Keyes. He noted in his excellent book The Quote Verifier (2006) that his mother saw the phrase “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came” in a 1961 letter to the editor in The Washington Post, written by James R. Newman. Newman was referencing, but apparently misremembering, Sandburg’s line. Charlotte cut out and kept the letter for future reference and later adapted the title of her article from it. Newman may or may not have coined “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.” That paraphrase of Sandburg may already have been floating around at the time. However, I found no use of those words dated earlier than Newman’s 1961 letter in any newspaper archive or anywhere else online. So, he may deserve credit for creating the Sixties slogan (though perhaps inadvertently.)         Another variation, “What If They Gave a War and No One Came,” surfaced in 1968 as the title of a song by the now forgotten "Symphonopop" composer and musician Jonna Gault. And, in 1972, poet Allen Ginsberg echoed her version in his 1972 poem “Graffiti,” which included the lines “What if someone gave a war & Nobody came? / Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy and Forever be Itself again.”

A VARIATION ABOUT A DONALD TRUMP DEBATE NOBODY REMEMBERS: “What if they gave a debate and nobody came?”        Brad Knickerbocker        Staff writer and editor for the Christian Science Monitor         His humorous question in an article about the December 2011 Republican “debate” hosted by Donald Trump, which all but two Republican presidential candidates declined to participate in. (Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum were the only candidates who agreed to appear.)

THE VIAGRA VARIATION: “What if You Took Viagra and Nobody Came?”         Double entendre title of an article in the Jan.-Feb. 1999 issue of Mother Jones magazine        The tongue-in-cheek article discussed some non-drug alternatives to Viagra, such as an artificial nylon-polypropylene penis, penile implant surgery — or a Corvette.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Post them on the Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading…

“The past is a foreign country...”

L.P. HARTLEY’S OFT-QUOTED APHORISM: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”        Leslie P. Hartley (1895-1972)        British novelist and short story writer        The first sentence in his novel The Go-Between (1953)        This is one of the most famous opening lines in modern literary history. It sets the stage for a story about class differences, sexual mores and love in England during the early Twentieth Century. The novel is written as the reminiscence of Leo Colston, a British man in his sixties. In looking through some of his old possessions, Colston comes across a diary he wrote in 1900 when he was thirteen. This sparks memories of the role he played as a fairly clueless “go-between” who carried messages back and forth for an older, upper class girl who was having a socially taboo affair with a “lower class” tenant farmer.        The opening words of the novel have essentially become a modern proverbial saying.

THE JOE BIDEN DILEMMA: “To young progressives, Biden is a voice of the past. The English novelist L.P. Hartley once wrote, ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ Like bipartisanship and compromise. And collaboration with outright racists. To older Democrats, however, the past is when things used to work — before Trump came along to cause chaos and disruption. They’re counting on Biden to restore that past.”         Bill Schneider         Political journalist, Professor at George Mason University and author of Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable         In an opinion piece published on The Hill website, July 7, 2019

THE NOSTALGIC VIEWPOINT: “The past may be a foreign country where they do things differently as the L. P. Hartley line has it, but it is one to which many would readily immigrate given the opportunity.”        Michael Sacasas        American writer and theologian        In a post about the Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris (2011) on his blog “The Fairest Thing”

ANTI-NOSTALGIA VIEWPOINT #1: “It’s easy to get washed along in nostalgia, to end up overshadowed by the past, because the past is a perfect country, a place we’ve made better in our heads through selective amnesia.”                       Emily Todd VanDerWerff        American TV reviewer and critic         Reflecting on the HBO series about mobsters, The Sopranos, in a post on the AV Club website

ANTI-NOSTALGIA VIEWPOINT #2: “If the past is a foreign country, it is a shockingly violent one. It is easy to forget how dangerous life used to be, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence. Cultural memory pacifies the past, leaving us with pale souvenirs whose bloody origins have been bleached away. A woman donning a cross seldom reflects that this instrument of torture was a common punishment in the ancient world; nor does a person who speaks of a whipping boy ponder the old practice of flogging an innocent child in place of a misbehaving prince. We are surrounded by signs of the depravity of our ancestors’ way of life, but we are barely aware of them. Just as travel broadens the mind, a literal-minded tour of our cultural heritage can awaken us to how differently they did things in the past.”        Steven Pinker        Canadian-born Harvard psychologist and author        From his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2013)

THE BEAT WRITER’S VIEWPOINT: “All of life is a foreign country.”        Jack Kerouac (1922–1969)        American writer and founding father of the Beat movement in literature        In a letter he wrote on June 24, 1949, cited in the book The Beat Vision: A Primary Sourcebook

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading, watching and listening…

Hemingway’s “grace under pressure” – original uses & interesting variations...

  

THE USE THAT MADE IT FAMOUS: “Exactly what do you mean by ‘guts’?” “I mean,” Ernest Hemingway said, “grace under pressure.”                     Ernest Hemingway‘s definition of guts (or courage), as quoted by Dorothy Parker in her profile of Hemingway in the November 30, 1929 issue of New Yorker magazine.                     Some books and websites mistakenly claim that Hemingway said, “Courage is grace under pressure.” He didn’t. However, according to Parker, what he did say was part of a conversation about courage.        Here’s the full context of the quote in Parker’s article:        “That brings me to the point which I have been trying to reach all this time: Ernest Hemingway’s definition of courage...Mr. Hemingway did not use the term ‘courage.’ Ever the euphemist, he referred to the quality as ‘guts,’ and he was attributing its possession to an absent friend.        “Now just a minute,” somebody said, for it was one of those argumentative evenings. “Listen. Look here a minute. Exactly what do you mean by ‘guts’?”        “I mean,” Ernest Hemingway said, “grace under pressure.”        Parker’s profile of Hemingway, titled “The Artist’s Reward,” made the phrase “grace under pressure” famous. But Hemingway had used it before. One previous recorded use was in a letter Hemingway wrote to his fellow writer and frenemy F. Scott Fitzgerald on April 20, 1926.        Fitzgerald had mentioned to “Papa” that he’d told a mutual friend something Hemingway once said about the bravery involved in bullfighting. Interestingly, in the 1926 letter, Hemingway specified that he “was not referring to guts but to something else. Grace under pressure. Guts never made any money for anybody except violin string manufacturers.”        Thus, either Hemingway later changed his mind about the meaning “grace under pressure” or Parker put that spin on it in her New Yorker piece.        In the book Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, author Sally Cline documents a third reported use of “grace under pressure” by Hemingway and suggests it may have been a favorite phrase he liked to use. It also appears that Hemingway coined the phrase, since his is the earliest documented use.        EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks to my friend, environmental activist Tamela Fish, for asking me about the origin of “grace under pressure,” which led to this post.

A BULLFIGHT OPPONENT’S COUNTERQUOTE: “I went to a bullfight once in Mallorca. It was ghastly; horrific. No grace under pressure, no death with dignity. Just cruelty and butchery and degradation of man and beast.”        Peter Murtagh                     Irish journalist and author.        An observation he makes in the book Buen Camino!, co-written with his daughter Natasha

CLARK’S COUNTERQUOTE: “Real courage is not grace under pressure. It’s doing the right thing when it’s frightening and hurts.”        Ramsey Clark        American lawyer and activist who served at U.S. Attorney General under Lyndon B. Johnson         A comment he made about feisty attorney Stephen Yagman, who is known for taking unpopular cases, particularly lawsuits against local and federal law enforcement officials, in an article in George magazine, June 1998.

THE GRACE VS. DISGRACE APPLICATION: “It is a bonus for baseball fans that Derek Jeter’s final season as a New York Yankee will be one that Alex Rodriguez spends in baseball banishment. Jeter will be feted in 2014, A-Rod will be forgotten. It would have been indecorous and incongruous to see them sharing the left side of the Yankees infield, Jeter at shortstop and Rodriguez at third base, the captain and the charlatan, grace under pressure next to disgrace under pressure.”        Christopher L. Gasper        Sports columnist for the Boston Globe        In his February 14, 2014 column in the Boston Globe        Gasper went on to explain: “Jeter will be remembered as one of baseball’s classiest competitors and a consummate winner. A-Rod, sitting out the 2014 season with the longest performance-enhancing drug suspension in major league history, will be remembered as one of baseball’s biggest frauds and fallen heroes.”

THE KITTEN KILLER APPLICATION: “When they make the Bill Frist biopic, it's got to be called Disgrace Under Pressure. (Either that or Silence of the Kittens, given his med-school penchant for adopting shelter kitties and then dissecting them for ‘science.’)”        Shelley Lewis        American journalist, news producer and writer                     One of the comments Lewis makes about William H. Frist in her book Naked Republicans: A Full-frontal Exposure of Right-wing Hypocrisy and Greed        Frist is a doctor who became a Conservative Republican politician, serving two terms as U.S. Senator for Tennessee. As noted by his political opponents and critics like Lewis, when Frist was a medical school student in the 1970s he performed fatal medical experiments on cats he acquired from animal shelters by falsely claiming he wanted to adopt them.

KUSHNER’S ARGUABLY IRONIC CLAIM: “It took real courage for Ivanka to stand before 35 million Americans...to help advance substantive policies that will dramatically improve U.S. law in favor of all women, parents and children. Grace under pressure is what she does best.”        Jared Kushner                     Wealthy businessman and husband of Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump        In an he wrote article titled “Why Ivanka Trump Is the Perfect Champion for Women’s Issues,” published in Variety magazine in September 2016        (Cartoon by the great political cartoonist Jeff Danziger. To read some of the news stories behind it, click this link.)

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Email me or Post them on the Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading and viewing…