Becoming a Collector

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All of us have collections of one sort or another. I used to collect rolling pins and cookbooks; my husband collected mugs; and my children collected pins, key chains, frogs, and thimbles--and most recently, shot glasses and travel stickers. Presently, and for many years, I have been a collector of quotations.

I can’t remember when this fascination with quotes began. I think it can be traced back to a line in a poem that stuck in my head as a child, “I think that I will never see, a poem as lovely as a tree,“ from “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer which I had to memorize in elementary school. I also clearly remember a line from “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, which we were forced to read in high school.

“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

As a freshman in college, when the Vietnam War was raging, the poem "Patterns" by Amy Lowell expressed what many young people were feeling: “In a pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?“ In my freshman English class I chose to analyze T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as my major project. For some reason the “song” of an aging man who “measured his life with coffee spoons” resonated for me.

My real “collecting days” began when I worked at the reference desk at a law library. I had access to “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” and other similar works and read through them whenever I had a free moment. Years later, I found quotations to include in letters we were asked to write when my children went on their senior high school retreats. Currently, I collect quotes to post on my website and to send to my daughter whom I have been emailing every night while she is away at college. The quotes I send to my daughter usually relate to something I mentioned in the email or a line or two to inspire.

I don’t know what the appeal of quotes is, but I find it somehow comforting to know that others share my thoughts and feelings - and have expressed them in a form worth remembering and repeating. The quotes capture a moment, an idea, a feeling, or a goal we would like to accomplish. I will never say or write anything worth remembering, but I am still a work in progress.

"Love the earth and sun and animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others...
And your very flesh shall be a great poem."

~Walt Whitman

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