“This is where I write down favorite sentences. Lines that made me sit up in my seat; lines that jolted me awake.”

From an essay in the New York Times headlined “Dwight Garner Shares From His Stash of Other Writers’ Words”:

For nearly four decades, I’ve kept what’s known as a commonplace book. It’s where I write down favorite sentences from novels, stories, poems and songs, from plays and movies, from overheard conversations. Lines that made me sit up in my seat; lines that jolted me awake. . . .

I began keeping my commonplace book in the 1980s, when I was in high school. In the 1990s, when I was working as the arts editor for an alternative weekly newspaper in Vermont, I typed the whole thing into a long computer file. I’ve moved it from desktops to laptops and now onto my iPhone, too. Into it I’ve poured verbal delicacies, “the blast 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. Virginia Woolf kept one. So did Samuel Johnson. 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; they were bird’s nests of facts threaded with the author’s own subtle interjections. . . .

In my commonplace book, for handy reference, I keep things in categories: “food,” “conversation,” “social class,” “travel,” “politics,” “cleanliness,” “war,” “money,” “clothing,” etc. I use it as an aide-mémoire, a kind of external hard drive. It helps me ward off what Christopher Hitchens, quoting a friend, called CRAFT (Can’t Remember a F— Thing) syndrome. I use my gleanings in my own writing. Like Montaigne, I quote others only “in order to better express myself.”. . .

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. . . . But even the best include 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. . . .

My book, “Garner’s Quotations,” is an attempt to break with the conventions of commonplace books and volumes of quotations. . . .

In this book there are few life lessons and little uplift, except by accident. I’ve selected lines mostly from books and writers I admire, and it’s my hope that a reading list might present itself over the course of the proceedings. This book is a way of saying thank you to many writers for the pleasure they’ve brought me. Obviously I don’t agree with everything said; retweet does not always, as they say on Twitter, equal endorsement. . . .

Writing in the April 1904 issue of The Atlantic, Walt Whitman declared that he was tired of “gloved gentleman words.” He admired “unhemmed latitude, coarseness, directness, live epithets, expletives, words of opprobrium, resistance.” I have tried to put Whitman’s words to use in regard to quotations. There is more blaspheming in this book than there is in most collections of quotations. (Until fairly recently, most did not permit profanity.) It is a truth universally acknowledged among book critics that the most memorable lines in many novels contain the word f—. These cannot be printed in newspapers. I have saved these lines up, and present some of them in this book.
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Dwight Garner is a staff book critic for The Times. This essay is adapted from the preface to his new book, “Garner’s Quotations: A Modern Miscellany.”