In his memoir “My Early Life,” Winston Churchill wrote: “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s ‘Familiar Quotations’ is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.”
Like Churchill, I too am a longtime fan of quotations. Though I have packed most of my books in anticipation of a move this summer, two books of quotations sit close at hand: “The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations” and John Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations,” given to me as a Christmas gift by my mother in 1975, a detail I know only because Mom recorded the date and her love for me on the volume’s first page.
