Quote Roundup #1: On art, uncertainty, and authenticity

I'm sharing four of my favorite quotes with you today.

I’ve been calling myself a quote collector since high school. I loved one-liners in song lyrics or poems or overheard conversations. Occasionally, I would record them in a journal or notebook for posterity and so that I could eventually retrieve the spawn of inspiration from each one. But regular note-taking did not happen until much, much later, when I was newly married and in limbo after graduating with fresh ideas about how to be the best school counselor.

During that time, I had a crappy temporary job as a data entry clerk in a trailer on the campus of A.M. General. An older woman who had been there for years initially took me under her tutelage, since our shared boss, Anita, was constantly screaming —either at the shop guys, or someone on the phone, or us.

I can’t recall her name, but she was quick-witted, sarcastic, and brought more than enough levity to our work milieu. I was young, nervous, and discouraged that I had to work in a manufacturing environment with a master’s degree. (Big takeaway: Nobody cared that I had a master’s degree, of course.)

The woman who mentored me offered to take me to a book sale at the local library during our lunch break, and I eagerly agreed. While there, she found a book about terns that used the play-on-words technique, like tac-i-tern instead of taciturn and an accompanying image of a bird (tern) standing on the beach with its little tern friends and choosing not to join in their conversation.

It was at this book sale where I discovered, and purchased, a fat tome called 10,000 Quips and Quotes. Somehow flipping through its pages gave me the bright idea to start diligently writing down as much as I could remember from books, music, and conversations.

Today, I have piles of notebooks filled with the words of others I want to revisit and ponder more deeply. And, like a good little college graduate, the system I now use is very specific, so that I do not neglect to assign proper attribution. And you, dear reader, now have the privilege of receiving the results of my diligent note-taking here, in what I will call the monthly Quote Roundup.

In my roundup, I will select four quotes that run along a similiar thematic thread and offer my brief reflection of each. Today, it’s about art, uncertainty, and authenticity. I hope you enjoy them.