I’ve never been much of a collector. I like my small accumulation of books. I would like it to be much bigger but space and money have limited that – for now. I see my kids collecting things. They leave these in piles around the house. It’s just payback for the piles I left around my mother’s place. I remember gathering rocks. I moved onto comics. I also built up an extensive selection of quotes.
I find something mystical about quotes. They are so short but express ideas so well. Albert Einstein gives an example: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” This sentence takes on extra weight as we listen to what’s going on in North Korea.
There is such a variety of quotes. There is the motivational: “By perseverance the snail reached the ark.” (Charles Haddon Spurgeon) Goofy: “When you get to the fork in the road, take it.” (Yogi Berra) And there are those that just make you scratch your head: “Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that bears me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, alas, is real; I, alas, am Borges.” (Jorge Luis Borges)
I liked quotes so much that I once dreamed of being a quote writer. Give me a break, I was young. I soon realized the difficulties in this. Number one is coming up with short and witty ideas. The other was that the market for quotes is really non – existent. The only people that make any money doing anything remotely similar are writing fortune cookie fortunes. I even tried that but it was very hard getting the little strips of paper into my mom’s typewriter.
So, I grew up and came to the understanding that quotes were nothing more than little snippets taken out of these people’s writings. I learned that with each quote there is a much broader context. I began to pick up a few books by some of the names that showed up. I finished very few of those books. Some are on my shelf waiting. My collecting came to a standstill. I still pull a few out to use every once in while. As Kenneth Williams noted, “The nice thing about quotes is that they give us a nodding acquaintance with the originator which is often socially impressive.”
