A Commonplace Book

I am no special fan of most books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, The Yale Book of Quotations, and The New Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations, to name three dependable reference books, are invaluable, for sure, as repositories of literary and verbal history. (Countless other books of quotations aren't reliable at all, and the less said about quotation sites on the Internet the better.) But even the best contain a good deal of dead weight. They lean, sometimes necessarily, on canned and overused thought and, grievously, are skewed to the upbeat. So many of the lines they contain seem to vie to be stitched onto throw pillows or ladled, like soup, over the credulous soul. "Almost all poetry is a failure," Charles Bukowski contended, "because it sounds like somebody saying, Look, I have written a poem." The same is true of quotations and aphorisms. So many have a taxidermied air, as if they were self-consciously aimed at posterity.