If You Enjoy Quotations...

"Stronger than an army is a quotation whose time has come."

    - W. I. E. Gates

I've been collecting quotations for years, gathering them from a wide range of sources--quotation books, works of fiction and non-fiction, magazines, newspapers, movies, plays, songs, radio, television, friends, enemies, family, acquaintances, and the internet. I've even coined a few myself.

I use to record my finds on slips of paper and store them in manila folders. Many of my priceless treasures got lost this way and it was virtually impossible to put my hands on a particular quotation very quickly. I decided to get better organized and began putting them on 3 x 5 index cards which I stored in little plastic boxes designed for the purpose. That worked for awhile, then I developed an interest in calligraphy and began transcribing them into journals, one to a page. I continue doing that to this day.

Last year when I began this weblog, I decided I would introduce each of my posts with what I thought was an appropriate bit of wisdom from my collection, hopefully from someone of greater notoriety than I. This entailed searching through my quotation journals, often for great lengths of time, to find just the right words for your entertainment and edification. With nothing arranged by topic or author, it has often been a pain to dig up something appropriate, so this week I decided to devise a better system.

I discovered my solution at this site. The free (donation appreciated) software that anyone may download contains a data-base of over 43,000 quotations sorted by subject. You can delete or edit quotations, and even add your own to the data-base, a feature I had to have. You can search by author, quotation or subject, and look for a phrase or part of a phrase if you don't know the entire quotation. You can change fonts, backgrounds and other properties of the program. There are many other features that anyone who writes or gives speeches, professionally or otherwise, will find useful. Take a look, and have some fun with it.