I Actually Have One Of These

I came to James Hynes' Commonplace-Book by leaping from one blog to another. You know how that happens. His Commonplace-Book is a page on his website on which he "records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement."

As soon as I saw it, I realized I've had one for years. Mine's a notebook, not a webpage, though, and it's about half full now of quotations on writing, art, and all kinds of painful stuff (sometimes sappy on the subject of pain, too) that I thought meaningful at some point or another. I was inspired to do this a great many years ago when a friend who used to live here in town gave a winter solstice party (She used to do it every year--those were the days!) and presented all the guests with sheets of paper with, essentially "passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement."

I just opened my commonplace book and saw, "Everything you do is screamed at by what you haven't been doing...Grace Paley" Holy Moses. I've been recalling that line over and over again these last few weeks, I just no longer knew where I'd seen it. I still don't know how I came to see it in the first place, but for years it's been in my commonplace book.