I’m picking up good quotations no comments
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?