I began collecting quotations some time in the
11th grade without any grand purpose or sense that this might
become a decades-long interest. I was part of a school exchange
program, visiting a high school in Glen Cove, Long Island, and
I trailed my host through his school day on a Friday, to be followed
by a weekend of dialogue on racism and the Vietnam War in those
politicized days of the late 1960s. In his Social Studies classroom,
two quotes on mini-posters were mounted over the blackboard, and
they moved me to copy them onto a piece of scrap paper I had in
my shirt pocket.* I brought them home, put the scraps in a desk
drawer, and, from time to time, added other quotes on other scraps
of paper to the modest pile.
It is hard to be a collector when you grow up
in a small apartment or cracker-barrel-sized house, as I did.
I had a very few books that were my own and a stack of back issues
of MAD magazine. I also had four separate coin collector’s
books (one each for pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters) to
hold what, in retrospect, was the most ridiculous of collections
– coins indistinguishable one from the next except for numerals
showing the date each coin was minted. Of greater interest were
my H. E. Harris stamp album filled with canceled postage stamps
organized alphabetically by country and, my pride and joy, a few
used school loose-leaf binders that I filled with U.S. plate block
stamps arranged chronologically.
Each of these boyhood collections, I now realize,
had common elements: They were compact enough to fit in a drawer
or on a shelf. It was easy to determine where a gap existed. And,
these collections could be assembled at little or no cost. In
addition, no special skills were needed in cataloging, selecting,
sorting, or record keeping.
Most collections, I suspect, also fill a similar
psychological need, helping the collector make order out of a
chaotic world. Within the confines of a well-tended collection,
the collector can take leave of the disorder of everyday reality
and enjoy periods of structure, comfort and security. For the
young collector, especially one for whom most key decisions are
made by parents, teachers or siblings, a collection is also empowering,
making the child the ruler of a real, if compact, universe.
Although none of my hobbies required much in
the way of intellectual reach, my stamp collection did offer me
the added pleasure of taking me to places far from my circumscribed
Queens home and upbringing. I not only carefully filled a hole
in the series of stamps by affixing a hinge to my canceled stamps
or inserting my plate blocks into a protective plastic sleeve
before mounting them in their proper place on the printed collector
pages, but I also often used the occasion to read about the country
that issued the stamp, or the person or event commemorated on
the stamp. I didn’t yet love books, encyclopedias, almanacs,
atlases, or historical abstracts, and I wouldn’t travel
overseas until I graduated from college, but with my stamps, I
had the opportunity to visit places and eras far from the Flushing
of the 1960s.
In a sense, my quotations collection now serves
a similar role: Each brings me to a particular insight or worldview,
without the need for a philosophy class or the immediate need
to reread the work from which it was derived.
By the time I was a college sophomore, it became
clear that my quotations collection needed some organization and
structure, as well as a home more permanent and secure than a
desk drawer. I then had a few dozen random quotes, all of which
had been scribbled down on the first piece of paper I could find.
If I discovered the quote while in the library, I would likely
copy it on to the back of a University Library stacks search request
card; if in a coffeehouse or laundromat, on the back of a flyer;
and if in a reading room or student lounge, on a magazine subscription
card likely from the very publication where I read the enchanting
words. And, whenever I found a quote in that day’s newspaper,
instead of copying it down, I would tear out the quote from the
page, leaving me with many tiny scraps of newsprint in danger
of disappearing in a hole in my decrepit frat house desk.
Trying to make some order out of this mess,
I began typing up the quotes on 3x5 index cards and putting them
– as best as I could – into categories, which I then
arranged in alphabetical order. The small batch of index cards
were stored in a metal card file box in which I had earlier kept
duplicates of my plate block stamps in glassine envelopes (which
were now in a shoe box in my dresser at home).
Since the quotes reflected my recently awakened,
but now voracious appetite for serious books and articles, and
also what had become my daily, near-religious habit of reading
The New York Times, they were as eclectic as my own reading had
become. Disciplined as I was in so many realms, I never considered
reading something in the hope of finding a quote, or giving myself
a quota (a quote quota?) whereby I would be obliged to add a certain
number of new quotes every week. Likewise, though it might have
been tempting had I been trying to build a large collection, I
never combed through published volumes of quotations and copied
any of those found there to add to my collection.
The rules for me then (as they are today) were
self-evident: Any quotation added had to be from the fruits of
my own life experience, in most cases from my own reading. If
something I read or heard moved me, I copied it down or tore it
out, and reread it several times over the following days. If I
hadn’t fallen out of love with it, I would find a category
to put it in, type it up, and place it in the metal box.
Since all of my other collections, such as they
were, were back in my parents’ home, my quotations became
my collection at hand. Almost every time I added a new quotation,
I would also read through the previous entries, giving me the
chance to memorize most of my early collection. (I can only imagine
how profound I must have sounded to classmates and dates when
I shared these beloved thoughts!) I also had the chance periodically
to weed out quotations that no longer moved me or to rethink the
category in which I’d put them.
Being at an impressionable age, taking mind-expanding
courses at a university that took learning seriously, now reading
at every spare moment, and being eager to go about shaping the
soul and character of the adult I was to become, I found many
inspiring sentiments and big ideas that, in one form or another,
were sage advice on how I might approach the world, or some facet
of it that had become important to me. But, unfortunately, not
all of these sentiments and ideas were felicitously composed.
Thus, to make it into the collection, it had to be both a concept
I wanted to preserve and one presented in a more or less artful
manner.
The early years of my quotations collection
coincided with a time of extraordinary activism by people my age.
The civil rights struggle was largely completed, but protests
against the war in Vietnam had roiled campuses everywhere. Likewise,
students tried to assert their independence by owning a type of
music completely different from that of our parents’ generation
and by using mood- and mind-altering drugs. I was aware of all
of this, but, for a variety of reasons, I was essentially a non-participant
in these great cultural activities. My dynamic life was the life
of words, ideas, books, and a consciously planned, never-ending
search for self-improvement.
Although I took no part in antiwar activities,
missed Woodstock and lots of other concerts, and chose not to
join my classmates in a variety of drug experiences, I did not
intend, either, to be a passive bystander in life’s great
affairs. My plan, even if I kept it to myself for fear of being
seen as pompous or grandiose, was to ready myself for future leadership
and activism of some then still-to-be-determined sort. As I now
see, but could not fully understand when I began compiling them
in my teens, the quotations would help me shape my adult inner
self and also be a way for me to give voice to opinions that I
would come to hold as my own.
But I have always understood the quotations
as representative of the nexus between two worlds, each of equal
importance in moving the world and the individual forward: On
one end of the spectrum, there are ideas; on the other, there
is action. In the middle, and the place where I have always felt
most comfortable, are the words that give form to the ideas and
that present a road map for action. Words are the necessary partner
for both ideas and action. And aside from the lone acts of individuals,
words are necessary to inspire groups of individuals to follow
a new idea and a new path.
I am excited by new ideas and honor great minds
who originate them. I am similarly awed by people of action who,
in ways great and small, transform the world, step by step, and
help in the intellectual and spiritual evolution of humanity.
Though this collection selectively honors both of these types,
it is most significantly a tribute to the words that serve as
the hinge between ideas and action.
After I married my beloved life partner, Rachel
Ringler, to whom this collection is dedicated, technology and
the busy-ness of parenting and adult life served to put the collection
into a moribund state. Childrearing and building a career jointly
conspired to rob me of the chance to read the kinds of books and
articles in which these quotations are largely found. My metal
box and my plate block stamps both took up residence in the bottom
of a cabinet with childproof locks. In these many years, typewriters
became obsolete, and I discarded mine. When I began reading again
and found a quote I liked, I had no way of typing up the thought
on an index card – and the idea of retyping hundreds of
quotations on our computer simply seemed too daunting.
Just a few years ago, my busy schedule and technology
came to the rescue: I had been thinking of resuming my collection
just as I had to leave for a long business trip. Concerned that
my assistant would be out of things to do after a few days, I
brought in the metal box and asked her to type the quotations
if she had any down time. As it turned out, finding the necessary
time to enter all of the collection required several business
trips (and a vacation or two, as well). But, following that, the
collection grew and shrank, as I was able to add and delete quotations
with ever-greater ease.
One weekend, I was reading through a printout
of the entire collection while sitting at the kitchen table, and,
to my utter – if concealed – delight, my children
began to read it, too. In the days that followed, Talia volunteered
to help me proofread the Author Index and with typical passion
threw herself into it. Sam made use of several of the quotes in
random conversation. Alana asked if she could have a copy to take
back to college with her. The thought occurred to me that akin
to an ethical will, I would now have something beyond material
support to some day bequeath to my children. But unlike an ethical
will, the quotes would be a way for me to share a world of exciting
ideas that had motivated me in my own life journey, on a range
of subjects far too wide to address in a post-mortem document
of my own living hand.
With my 50th birthday approaching, Rachel and
I discussed several ways in which we could mark it. I mostly wanted
to spare our friends from some potentially tedious event focused
on me. But I kept coming back to the idea of freezing in place
whatever my quotations collection was on my 50th birthday and
having it published in book form. And that – after many
months of editing, proofreading and getting advice on how to get
a manuscript into book form – is exactly what I did.
Other People’s Words is both my belated
50th birthday present to myself and an early bequest to my beloved
children, who will, no doubt, find some of these quotes inspiring,
some absurd, some infuriating, and some ridiculous, and surely
many irrelevant to their own life issues. I began this collection
with needs and gaps that may be largely different from their needs
and gaps. I hope they will view this as a jumping-off point for
their own search for a personal philosophy and for a life of meaning,
and should it be of interest to any of them, that they would feel
free to continue this collection and to transform it as they see
fit.
Perhaps Benjamin Franklin was right in saying,
“Well done is better than well said.” But for many
years, I’ve taken delight in “well said,” too.
I hope you will share some of my enthusiasm.
December 2004
* In case you were wondering, they were:
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for
good men to do nothing” (Edmund Burke), and “They
came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because
I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I
didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they
came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because
I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they
came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up”
(Martin Niemoeller). Neither quote appears in the body of this
collection, both having been weeded out years ago because, with
time, I came to believe them both to be melodramatic and, worse,
untrue.
