I love quote books, probably because of ADD, the Attention Deficit Disorder which affects so many of my generation. I was born in, or I should say “was brought to you by” 1958, for this was my first sentence fragment. I like to thumb through magazines, and books, from the back to the front and my eye tends to only stop on bite-size chunks. So quote books are, for me, just the thing for leisurely intellectual entertainment.

The first quote book that completely arrested my attention (the cover design by Paula Scher features a tasty looking yin-yang pretzel) was Zen To Go, edited by Jon Winokur. This little book managed to influence my thinking and my teaching profoundly and probably for all time. I began to collect quote books, such as another great Winokur collection, The Portable Curmudgeon, and dozens of ‘gift books’ from the Peter Pauper Press that I found in thrift stores, and classics like the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.