by Helen Kidd

Created on: May 09, 2009   Last Updated: May 11, 2009

Quotes, whether realized or not, are a way to keep our heritage intact. We start at the earliest age quoting, "Mommy said..." We quote someone because we admire them. We quote people as good examples or bad examples. We sometimes quote experts on particular subjects to prove a point, as if that person would somehow agree with me if he or she were standing in the same room. And, we may even change a word or two of a famous quote to somehow make it our own (it's still plagiarism!) thinking people won't remember the originator but hoping that someday we will be the one known in history for that quote.

Except for plagiarists, I don't believe people set out to be quoted. How many times has a woman stopped and said, "I just sounded like my mother!"? Many people we quote didn't have a college education and even fewer took creative writing classes. And those who chose to put their words to paper weren't doing it to be quoted; they did it because they had something to say. Just mentioning the names of Thomas Payne or Charles Dickens or C.S. Lewis or Benjamin Franklin or Edna Ferber or Margaret Mitchell would bring not only quotes, but also stories to mind. These authors had something to say and they said it.

The process of writing for these people came out of life experience and they were willing to work to put on paper. It didn't come easily and many of them shared nuggets of wisdom that we can appreciate even more as we read their works and perhaps welcome as we work and labor on what we need to say.

"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man" (Sir Francis Bacon, 1561-1626).

"None can truly write his single day, and none can write it for him upon earth" (Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1809-1892).

"Few men make themselves masters of the things they write or speak" (John Selden, 1584-1654).

"Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it" (Robert Benchley, 1889-1945).

"Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove; you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain" (Elie Wiesel,

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