QuoteMe Wednesday
There’s no shortage of places to find lists of quotes on the Internet, I know.
Some lists are long, others short. Stand-alone, and adjuncts to things larger — like the site that covers movies, including special areas for each where key utterances are gathered.
Most lack the sort of value-added that makes for much more than idle self-indulgence.
Why does the fact that you like this quote or that mean that I will or should? What do we have in common that’ll give me some assurance that the next quote I click after will be as meaningful to me as your last? Who are you, anyway?
The most important ingredient is context.
Abraham Lincoln is revered for his wisdom based on what we (may think we) know about his upbringing and the state of our nation during his presidency. JR Ewing is the sum total of what Larry Hagman brought to the role, the writers, and the whole of those television episodes in which this fictional character appeared.
With Yogi Berra, the common denominator is the way he said whatever he was saying.
I’ve “collected quotes” for as long as I can remember. It raises an eyebrow when I say this to people for the first time. I guess they have a hard time figuring out how something that seems impossible to monetize in any way — ie, quotes are free for the taking through whatever one might read or hear. I could argue that keeping track of those little scraps of paper or finding a way to read those 5¼” floppy disks onto which I wrote a lot of great ones some three decades ago ain’t as easy as you think.
But that’s not where we’re going with this.
Rather, whenever I make a QuoteMe posting here, my overarching objective is gonna be to leave you in the end with a much larger, rich impression for which the quote serves much the same purpose as an established brand name.
You’ll see what I mean after a few posts. Then, if you choose to reply with something of your own, know that one of my approval criteria will be that you do the same.
Merry Christmas!
