quotation
I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.
Henry Miller on Writing (New York: New Directions, 1964), 86.
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words & sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the blast of a trumpet out of Shakspear [sic], Seneca, Moses, John, & Paul.
July 1936 diary entry, in Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 148.
I find quotes everywhere. In books of course, but also in less likely places like dedications, speeches, ads or even words jotted down on the back of an envelope, like this one from Emily Dickinson: “In this short life that only lasts an hour, / How much—how little—is within our power.”
“Diane Keaton: By the Book,” The New York Times, May 1, 2014.
Do quotes count as a literary genre? Or maybe a subgenre? I confess I’m a bit of a quote hoarder.
“Diane Keaton: By the Book,” The New York Times, May 1, 2014.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
Notewise, whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like.
“By the Book,” New York Times, April 12, 2012.
Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me.
The Essays of Michel de Montaigne (London: Allen Lane, 1991).
In a real sense, we are what we quote—and what can any of us hope to be but a tiny component of that hubbub of voices distilled by books of quotations and epigrams? I have always found such volumes the most irresistible reading. They make it possible to channel-surf millenniums of cultural history, moving forward or backward at will, and plucking out whatever perfectly formed fragment turns out to be precisely what you were looking for. The endlessness of it all is enough to make your head spin, but that dizziness is arrested by the steadying compactness and solidity of the ideal quote—the one that stands there bare and isolated and unencumbered, tiny enough to be grasped all at once, yet unfathomably wide and deep.
“We Are What We Quote,” Opinionator, The New York Times, March 2, 2013.
She [Katie Roiphe] is an excellent quoter, a gift I once saw referred to as “arranging other people’s flowers.”
“Defending the Unruly Realm,” New York Times, November 27, 2012.
In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.
“My Life’s Sentences,” Opinionator Blog, New York Times, March 17, 2012.
Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus instructed them how to do it; and if they did not have access to his popular De Copia, they consulted printed models or the local schoolmaster. The practice spread everywhere in early modern England, among ordinary readers as well as famous writers like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Locke. It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end (unless they are digital natives and click through texts on machines), early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.
Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010), 149–150.
Originally, feathers evolved to retain heat; later, they were repurposed for a means of flight. No one ever accuses the descendants of ancient birds of plagiarism for taking heat-retaining feathers and modifying them into wings for flight. In our current system, the original feathers would be copyrighted, and upstart birds would get sued for stealing the feathers for a different use. Almost all famous discoveries (by Edison, Darwin, Einstein, et al.) were not lightning-bolt epiphanies but were built slowly over time and heavily dependent on the intellectual superstructure of what had come before them. The commonplace book was popular among English intellectuals in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. These notebooks were a depository for thoughts and quotes and were usually categorized by topic. Enquire Within Upon Everything was a commercially successful take-off on the commonplace book in London in 1890. There’s no such thing as originality. Invention and innovation grow out of rich networks of people and ideas. All life on earth (and by extension, technology) is built upon appropriation and reuse of the preexisting.
David Shields, “Life Is Short; Art is Shorter, The Los Angeles Review of Books, May 2, 2011.