The Little Beige Book of Quotations

In this follow-up to The Dog-Eared Book of Dog-Eared Quotations, readers are again invited to delight in a compilation of quotes from dog-eared pages of personal reading (fiction and non-fiction) as well as gems taken from movies, TV shows, overheard conversations, public utterances, poems, songs, and articles in newspapers or magazines. My selections are quirky and wildly subjective. Most are modern.

For readability, I have taken some liberties with respect to capitalization, punctuation, spacing, and line breaks. I sometimes removed "and" or "but" at the start of a quote so that it's more, well, quotable. In some cases, I have converted British spellings to American spellings for consistency, but not if it involved a title. Nevertheless, in all instances, I have faithfully tried to respect the authors or speakers and have labored to avoid doctoring the quotes or altering them to serve my purposes. I have tried to stay true to the original text or spoken words, but recognize that by the nature of what I am doing words are taken out of context. I am giving them a new and prolonged life.

For consistency and continuity, I organized the quotations into the same categories as in the dog-eared predecessor. Even within my chosen framework, quotations could have been slotted into any number of alternative categories. Each was a judgment call.

Again, I invite readers to ruminate over, recoil from, debate, ponder, brood over, or savor these morsels. But above all, quote them! Let them be conversation starters (or enders); let them find new life in accordance with each speaker or writer who cites them.