I am currently engaged in writing a new dictionary of quotations, following the international success of Buchanan’s Dictionary of Quotations for right-minded people, published in 2010. It has a memorable photograph on the front cover of former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown at Kabul airport during the war in Afghanistan. My new dictionary will probably exclude most of the political quotations in that book but will probably include pages of them from Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.

I’ve just copied a quotation from that dictionary into the new one. Firstly, by way of explanation, the start of the Wikipedia page on The Prophet:

“The Prophet is a book of 26 prose poetry fables written in English by the Lebanese-American poet and writer Kahlil Gibran. It was originally published in 1923 by Alfred A. Knopf. It is Gibran’s best-known work. The Kahlil Gibran Collective says that The Prophet has been translated into over 100 languages, and is one of the best selling books of all time. It has never been out of print.”

A parody – The Profit – was written by Kehlog Albran (sadly, not Kellogg All-Bran, maybe he couldn’t get trademark clearance?) and published in 1973. The Amazon page here. The extract I’ve copied from my old dictionary to the new:

A priest asked, ‘What is Fate, Master?’

And he answered, ‘It is that which gives a beast of burden its reason for existence. It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs. It is that which has caused nations to build byways from city to city upon which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns have come to be built to stave off hunger, thirst and weariness.’

‘And that is Fate?’ said the priest?

‘Fate? I thought you said Freight,’ said the Master.

‘That’s all right,’ said the priest. ‘I wanted to know what Freight was too.’

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