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From the age of eight until sometime in my twenties, I kept notebooks of quotations. When I found a passage in a book I was reading, or saw a famous quote, or overheard someone in a conversation, if I was struck by the words I wrote them down.
I don’t remember exactly when or why I stopped. It was probably because I also stopped writing very much that wasn’t related to my work or petition/protest letters.
In the last decade of my working days, I reclaimed a little of those notebooks when I began making cards for co-workers’ birthdays, searching the Internet for a perfect quote to suit each person and each birthday. This evolved into the group-signed cards given to staff and volunteers for any occasion being made by me. Then some people asked me to do special cards for friends and relatives, which turned into custom cards as a fundraising project for my last non-profit.
One of my biggest undertakings was for the man who was president when he hired me for that job. I made an encouraging card each week for him during his fight with cancer. A small but steady part of my salary went back into the non-profit’s coffers as I donated for my own cards. I heard many times from him and his wife how much their spirits were lifted when they found a card amidst the bills and junk mail.
It was a good reminder that words have power. So when everything shifted with a new board, and it was no longer possible to do the job I had been hired by that good man to do, I retired. Looking around for what to do with the rest of my life, it occurred to me that writing was a possibility.
And I found myself collecting quotations all over again, but this time in a virtual notebook:
Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age
is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
― Margaret Atwood
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain
“I know nothing in the world that has as much power
as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it,
until it begins to shine.”
– Emily Dickinson
“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner
“You must stay drunk on writing
so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury,
Zen in the Art of Writing
“We write to taste life twice,
in the moment and in retrospect.”
– Anaïs Nin
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship,
stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman,
author of the Dark Materials trilogy
“Don't tell me the moon is shining;
show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs
and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut,
If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young
“There are three rules for writing a novel.
Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham
"Writing saved me from the sin
and inconvenience of violence."
– Alice Walker
"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job:
it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper
(or a blank screen) and quite often the blank
piece of paper wins.”
― Neil Gaiman
It’s a funny kind of “Second Childhood.” The notebooks of my youth are long lost, but when I come across quotes now, I still recognize the ones that were scribbled in them.
Lately, I’m been trying to find a poem that’s the origin of a concluding line I’ve never forgotten: “all the bright courage that you never spent.”
Internet searches have yielded nothing. I think the poem had an unpromising start, something like “Not naked on a mountain top were you born,” but I don’t remember the rest of it, or its author. It was in a “favorite poems” type of anthology belonging to my mother, one of many books she sold when my dad retired, and they set sail on the Pacific Ocean. If anyone knows this poem, please let me know.
Lord, we know what we are,
but know not what we may be.
― Ophelia,
Hamlet Act 4, Scene 5
- William Shakespeare