“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”*

I love quotations and have been filling “quote books” since I was in the eighth grade. I have no idea where that first book is, but I remember it clearly. It was a plain spiral notebook with a brown cardboard cover. I wish I could find it. I have no doubt the contents are priceless.

Forty-three years later, I am still at it. I have lots of quote books in every shape and size. Trouble is, there is no rhyme nor reason to my books and I have no idea where any particular quote is.

But as Melville writes: “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”

Whenever I go back and look at one of these books, I find great things, which I have inevitably forgotten.

Here’s a quote from Mark Helprin’s Soldier of the Great War, which I read many years ago:

“Alessandro, in memory, things, objects, and sensations merely stand in for the people you love.” He had to rest and breathe before he continued. After a while, he said, “If I long for a thunderstorm in Rome sixty years ago, or seventy, for the heavy rain and the disheveled lightening, for the wet trees that were completely free and completely abandoned, it’s not because of the rain, or the quiet, or the ticking of the clock in the hallway–all of which I remember–but because of my mother and my father, who held me at the window as we watched the storm.”

Do you have a quote book?

*Said by the ever-so-quotable Ralph Waldo Emerson