Up: [[Life Writing]] Created: 2025-01-19 ## Quotes I've collected quotes forever, long before I heard of commonplace books. You know those page a day quotation calendars? I had made my own for quotes about writing and the writer's life two years before Writer's Digest published the first one. I think I was sixteen. Darn that I wasn't born with an entrepreneurial spirit! So don't be surprised to find lots of Quotes files in this vault. But my purpose for collecting has changed. Rather than just accumulating inspiring bits of wisdom, my intention now is to use each quote as a jumping-off point for my own thoughts and reflections. I've explained more about the benefits of this in [[They Said, I Said Strategy]]. ## Poems Poems are a different story from quotes. When I was in elementary school, I thought that poems had to rhyme. When I was in high school and university, I struggled to make sense of their metaphoric language. My poem collecting days didn't start until half a dozen years ago when I discovered [[David Whyte]], [[Rumi]], [[Rainer Maria Rilke]] and [[Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer]]. I now have lots of poems in my personal vault. I don't want to infringe copyright so you are just getting the ones from my collection that are available online. My intention for including poems, besides them giving a rich, sense-based and metaphoric perspective on the topic, is that I'd like to write reflections and make pieces of art that amplify the feelings I get from each poem.