Favourite Quotations, in Conversation

For nearly four decades I've kept what is known as a commonplace book – a bound notebook, and later a long computer file, passed from desktops (1990s) to laptops (2000s) to my cell phone, into which I've poured verbal delicacies, “blasts of a trumpet”, as Emerson put it, and bits of scavenged wisdom from my life as a reader. Yea, for I am an underliner, a destroyer of books, and maybe you are, too. Commonplace books are not so uncommon. John Locke kept one, as did Virginia Woolf. W. H. Auden published his, as did the poet J. D. McClatchy. E. M. Forster's was issued after his death. The novelist David Markson wrote terse and enveloping novels that resembled commonplace books in many regards; they were bird's nests of facts threaded with the author's own subtle interjections. For fans of the commonplace book genre, many prize examples have come from lesser-known figures like Geoffrey Madan and Samuel Rogers, both English, who produced books that are notably witty and illuminating. These have become cult items. Christopher Ricks noted about Rogers that, although he may not have been an especially kind man, “he was very good at hearing what was said”.