I began recording some of these quotes in the back of one of my notebooks. I intended to use them to emphasize the points I made in my English essays. (Incidentally, this is why I'm so concerned with finding accurate citations for the quotes in my collection.)

        Owing to some as-yet-undiscovered gene inherited from my mother, even then I was an addicted reader. In addition to my schoolwork (and sometimes, as my grades occasionally showed, instead of it), I'd polish off at least two books a month. Back then they were mostly Stephen King, Douglas Adams, and Tom Clancy novels. By the end of my high school career, I'd filled an entire notebook and moved the collection to my computer.

        With college came even more genres of literature, even more assigned books, and even more books I read instead of what I was being graded on. My collection grew to fifty pages, then a hundred, then two hundred. Now it covers over 250 pages, with over 2000 individual quotes.

        A significant part of my interest in collecting these things has come from the Usenet newsgroup alt.quotations. It's a group dedicated to discussing, researching, and bringing to light any sort of quotation. We've got Americans, Brits, Aussies, Germans, and Canadians. We've got professors, students, "domestic maintenance engineers", and authors. There are "experts" on Christianity, the Gold Standard, Samuel Johnson, and Jack London. It's an eclectic group of intellectuals. And it's one of the nicest places on the Internet.

        A few warnings are in order about my collection. First, there is only one thing that warrants their inclusion here, and that is that I find them interesting. I don't agree with them all, and I certainly don't disagree with them all. They're not all from authors I like, although the majority are. Some are included only because I think they're a clever turn of phrase, or they present an old idea in a new way. The standard essentially is, "Do I want to read this line again?" More to the point, it's "Is this quotation worth getting up out of my seat and finding a pen so I can underline it?"

        Second, the Subjects, and the quotations I put into them, are purely of my devising. Not everyone would agree that certain quotes belong under certain subjects. I've tried not to use any quote out of context in this way. Any that have been misused like this, I regret, and I'll change it if I'm shown that it's wrong.

        Third, a quick note about citaions. (A less quick note about them can be found on my Citations page.) I got a great many of these quotes from other on-line collections, which are sadly not very authoritative sources for finding who said what and where. Most of the quotes that don't have anything more than an author's name are ones I found like that. I'm trying to fix that....but it's a slow process.

        One more thing: This page isn't "Under Construction". I didn't launch it until it was ready to be seen. However, this doesn't mean that it won't change. I'm always reading new things (and so are the people in alt.quotations). I'm constantly putting new quotes into my file. Right now I can see twenty-eight books that each have quotations waiting to be put into the file. So check back. I should be putting fifteen or twenty new ones in each month.