Tuesday, July 01, 2008

I'm picking up good quotations


I thought I'd lost my Mind. The Chess Mind, Gerald Abrahams' great old book, of which I have a cherished copy: I couldn't find it and spent much of last week scrabbling about trying to work out what I'd done with it. That's the problem when you move too many times, or find yourself crossing half a continent with all your books packed into the back of a transit van: no matter how hard you try, there's always something that was there when you started that isn't there at the end.

In the end, I found it: relief. (Mind you, I still can't find my copy of John Prebble's Glencoe.) But, as one of the most remarkable minds in European intellectual history once nearly observed, I still couldn't find what I was looking for.

Chess Notes is currently inviting its readers to provide famous chess quotations with the intention, in part, of producing a list, from which the editor of the Yale Book Of Quotations may then make a selection. There's a quotation that I'd like to put forward for consideration - not least because it serves as commentary on so many of my disasters - and I was sure it was in The Chess Mind. But reading through it, I couldn't locate it.

The quotation goes - perhaps precisely, perhaps not - like this:
Chess games are won not by good positions but by good moves.
Good, true (if not the whole truth) memorable - and requiring a precise reference before I can submit it. Is it, in fact, from The Chess Mind, or from somewhere else? Are there any readers of the blog who can help me with a precise reference, with phrase, page, edition, in the form set out in the Chess Notes piece?

11 comments:

Tom Chivers said...

Should it in fact be: "Good positions don't win games, good moves do." - ?

ejh said...

I don't know for sure, that's kind of the point....

Glenn Wilson said...

“Good positions don't win games, good moves do”
(Gerald Abrahams)

link

google

ejh said...

Thanks, Glenn, but that doesn't give me the reference I'm asking for.

Anonymous said...

"Good positions don't win games..."

No, but in my case bad positions often do! ;)

Richard

Jonathan B said...

A few quotes collected by Jim Plaskett here.

ejh said...

The problem with online quotation banks, of course, is not just that they're incomplete, but that they don't provide any means (edition, page number) of checking that they're correct - quite important, since they're often wrong. Moreover, they often just lift their material directly from one another, so you can find the same wrong quotation in many, many different sources - none of whom have engaged in any verification process, either because they couldn't be arsed or because they thought that if someone else has put the quote on the web then it must be right. (Every year a number of students, under the same impression when they're trying to skimp on their research, find out, in a variety of hard ways, that they are wrong.)

Incidentally, I'm half-inclined to reuse that book cover in the Chess in Art series. I think it's superb.

Glenn Wilson said...

My links were not meant as authoritative references but merely as research aids. One of the 226 google hits might give an actual reference you could check...

ejh said...

No offence Glenn. It's just that I was rather hoping somebody would actually know the answer! Speaking as a qualified information professional, it's my opinion that "asking people who might know" is a much under-rated search strategy in the information age...

Anonymous said...

But I clarified matters for him.
-You-,I said,-get good positions.I, on the other hand, make good moves.Games of chess are won by good moves, not good positions.-

Not Only Chess (A Selection of Chessays) by Gerald Abrahams, George Allen and Unwin 1974,Hardback ,p.45

ejh said...

Ah, fab. I've got that book, though I am temporarily some distance from it.

Many thanks.