Weird mystery about book called "The Secret History"!

[badger2005]

Can anyone help me solve this mystery by checking their copy? It's so weird!

I read this cult-ish book by Donna Tartt as a 20-something year old and distinctly remember a line from it. But my son has just finished reading the book (new copy that I bought him - I've lost my old one), and when I quoted the line to him, he did not recognize it. We checked, and it's not in his book, nor in any version that we can find online! So you'd think that I dreamt this - except that it is also quoted in just one place - a single obscure essay on the book that I found online.

The line is in this part where the college students are assigned a new tutor, and when he tries to teach them something one of the students says (in perfect 'attic Greek'): "Without your patience my excellent friend, we should wallow in ignorance like pigs in a sty". Or something pretty much like that...

My son thinks that I'm misremembering - but how I can be when it also is in this obscure essay? His alternative theory is that this is Mandela syndrome and me and some random scholar are having a collective hallucination!

When was the online essay written? Is it possible that you read the essay at the same time/shortly after you read the book and it's the essay you are remembering?

Something similar happened to me, but it was an entire passage in a book that just wasn't there upon re-reading a few years later.

I think I'd focused on a particular theme that was threaded through the book and I thought that there were a few paragraphs written about the theme specifically, but they don't exist other than in my head.

Was it in Greek? I read the book when it came out and I'm pretty sure that line isn't in it in English. I'm a bit obsessed with that novel and have read it many times. It certainly isn't in the copy I re read two or three years ago.
You could contact the US publisher and ask them if the US edition was different.

I've just checked my (old) copy. It's there!

I've got a copy from the original printing (or very close to) but you're going to have to give me the exact page or at least chapter before I'm going to bother to go looking.

How can you even know that a single sentence isn't in a book? That's amazing.

Ooh! Intrigued. Will have a look tomorrow, my copy may be in DD room or the loft.

Yay to @Needhelp101

I've got an old copy, what page number is it please @needhelp101

@Needhelp101

Publishing can be so woke. Perhaps they took it out of later editions in case it offended people who identify as pigs. 😉

Yes, it's in my copy too - p616. Mine is the Penguin edition from 1993, and has been read so many times it is falling apart. I remembered the line. Such great characters.

That is so weird!

Is it — this is a reach, but — could it be that the line is borrowed from a real-life translation and they didn’t clear copyright properly, so had to excise it from some editions?

I've also got the 1993 Penguin edition.
Very top of p616

"Henry said, quite coolly, and in beautiful Attic Greek:" Without your patience, my excellent friend, we should wallow in ignorance like a sty full of pigs."

In my copy, it's on page 488.

How VERY odd that it's disappeared!

I loved this book. I probably should read it again. I wrote a compare and contrast essay on it along with Atonement by Ian McEwan for my A level English.

Page 488 in my copy - Viking 1992

Wonder why it was removed & if anything else has been changed.

What a star @Needhelp101 !
I hope I still have my original copy somewhere.

I'm looking in my 1992 penguin copy - what stage in the story is it in?

It’s not in mine! Page 587.
I’m probably being spectacularly thick, but I can’t work out when it was printed. 2013? Penguin edition.

My copy is actually inherited from my late best friend and has this wonderful, haunting cover.
Absolutely love this book. Still can't believe there's never been a film adaptation.

Mine was printed in 1992.

Bloody hell, I was 100% sure I read this book in 1988 on a trip to America. I can "remember" talking about it to my boyfriend at the time. But just checking because of this thread and it wasn't published 1992 and I was no longer with that boyfriend by then.

I've found it!

Wrong quote!!
That's the same as mine, I've always loved it. What a lovely