I call myself a word collector. It’s my hobby much like people who collect rocks, or postcards, or antiques.
What does a word collector collect? Poems, quotes, books, passages from books, my own thoughts on paper. I love when someone expresses an everyday thought in an extraordinary way. I love when I’m reading a book and a sentence or a paragraph jumps out at me and grabs my soul.
I have been collecting my own words in journals for 30 years. My journals help me sort out my own thoughts and feelings. I can let things go more easily once I have worked through them on paper. I keep a paper journal because it feels like it’s more therapeutic to put pen to actual paper than to type.
I have collected quotes since I was a teenager. I kept them in notebooks and in my journals. Then in documents on the computer. Now on Pinterest boards.
Awhile back I decided to go through the boards and see if I could verify who actually said one or two of the quotes. This led me into a time consuming, but fascinating project. So many of these quotes were either attributed to the wrong person, or I could find no proof of who said them. Many of them had been “dumbed down” and when read in their entirety took on a completely different meaning. So few people seem to care if they are properly attributed. They, like me, just shared them and didn’t think about who said them.
One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, is, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” But, according to the website Quote Investigator, there is no proof he ever said it. In fact, many of the Emerson quotes that I love, and through which I had built an opinion of Emerson, didn’t actually come from Emerson.
In researching these I learned so much about people I never knew existed. And they are just as interesting as the famous people that are supposed to have said some of these things.
I’m a collector of words, of information and of ideas. I wouldn’t have it any other way.