Alice Bolin fondly remembers the summer she stumbled upon Rudolf Flesch’s The Book of Unusual Quotations and its eclectic passages about religion:
I read attempts to expand the bounds in which God can be encountered: “We can never see Christianity from the catechism,” Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “from the pastures, from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of the wood-birds we possibly may.” And attempts to understand how spirituality might work in the absence of God: according to Søren Kierkegaard, “Prayer does not change God, but changes him who prays.” There were also cryptic sayings that mostly served to misdirect, like H. L. Mencken’s cheery epigram, “Every man is his own hell.” At this point in my life, I had never heard of any of these people.
How she now thinks about this random approach to reading:
It is, of course, a childish approach to meaning. As I grew older, I started to understand the importance of insights accumulated and laid over one another, rather than isolated. But I think the teen-age quote fetish is ultimately a good thing. It is evidence of the way a mind is built: randomly, piece by piece, working slowly through the dark with the few truths one finds or has been given. Children are experts on negative capability—in their comfort with what they don’t know, with not seeing the full picture, with moving without knowing what they are moving toward.
The Dish 