October 19, 2010

Quotation Q & A

Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words

From The November-December 2010 Issue

I. Allen Chirls asks if there is an earlier source for the avowal that Paul Child makes to his wife in the movie Julie and Julia: “You are the butter to my bread, you are the breath to my life.”

“Wisdom…comes late.” (July-August). After reading the comment by Justice Felix Frankfurter, Eliot Kieval wrote to share words along similar lines from Robert F. Kennedy’s address to a crowd in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968, informing them of the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King. Kennedy said, “My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’” The Kennedy Presidential Library states that the quotation, as recited by Kennedy, “is derived from Edith Hamilton’s classic study, The Greek Way.”

Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge 02138, or via e-mail to chapterandverse@harvardmag.com.

Published in the November-December 2010 print issue under the headline “Chapter and Verse,” in the Montage section.

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