ending quotation in CAPOTE

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 1/22/06, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> At 2:53 PM -0500 1/22/06, James Landau wrote:
> >I have encountered (sorry, I have no citations) a proverb "Never wish
> >[pray] for something; you might get it."  Is this proverb related to the
> >Wilde/St. Teresa quote?
>
> I've usually heard it as "Be careful what you pray for; you just might get it."

We discussed a similar Goethe quote a while back...
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0506A&L=ADS-L&P=16096

Though it's best translated as "What youth desires, age receives in
abundance," it has often been paraphrased as "Be careful what you pray
for...":

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Outlook, Feb 28, 1903, p. 499 [HNP Doc ID 699278302]
"It was the wise Goethe," quotes Mr. Henderson in his "Education and
the Larger Life," "who said, 'Be careful what you pray for in your
youth, lest you get too much of it in your old age.'"
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And then there's the "wish for" variant, attributed in these articles
to Florence Morse Kingsley:

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New York Observer, Aug 2, 1906, p. 150 [HNP Doc ID 758885632]
New York Observer, Jul 4, 1907, p. 22 [HNP Doc ID 409521001]
"Be careful what you wish for, because you are going to get it."
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--Ben Zimmer

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