The Methodless Method: On the Teen-age Quotation Fetish: The New Yorker The summers I spent at my grandmother's house were defined by reading - particularly reading, with extreme interest and feeling, the oddest and most unsuitable things I could find lying around: an ancient issue of Good Housekeeping or a collection of Dave Barry columns or the "Catechism of the Catholic Church." It's not like I had nothing to choose from. The house contained hundreds of books. I could have easily selected from my grandmother's cache of Agatha Christie and Bess Streeter Aldrich, or from any of the books left by my grandfather, who, when he was alive, was known for reading a book a day. It's baffling now to think of the things I chose to read, and it was baffling to my family at the time. But these choices were evidence of an important beginning. Growing up can mean growing into a sense that what one reads has a larger personal and cultural significance, starting to read into things. For so many adolescent readers, this process of forming deeper connections and insights is about random discovery, following boredom, never analyzing or judging - which is how the summer I turned thirteen came to center on Rudolf Flesch's "The Book of Unusual Quotations." "The Book of Unusual Quotations" was published in 1957, and I probably found it in the room that had been my grandfather's study, and my grandmother didn't know exactly why it was in her house. The book is organized by topic - "Fault," "Favor," "Fear," "Feeling," "Felicity" - and populated by famous wits and critics and philosophers, men like Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Omar Khayyám, and Oscar Wilde. In the book's preface, Flesch says that the book was compiled "by the methodless method of "determined browsing," " which also happened to be my approach to reading that book - and all books. I just leafed through it, hour after solemn hour. Browsing the book now, I find its contents inexplicable and irritating: under the heading "Austen, Jane," Mark Twain says, "To me, Poe's prose is unreadable - like Jane Austen's. No, there is a difference. I could read his prose on a salary, but not Jane's. But at the time, I trusted the book to guide me to a proverb that spoke exactly to my twelve-year-old troubles. I used "The Book of Unusual Quotations" like an oracle, or a prayer book. I usually concentrated on quotes categorized under the headings "Christian," "Christianity," "Church," "Belief," "Faith," "God," "Heaven," "Prayer," "Worship." Not coincidentally, I also spent much of that summer laboring with my eighth-grade French skills over a French-language New Testament published in the nineteen-seventies that had once belonged to my mom. It was called "La Bonne Nouvelle" and was geared toward young adults, and so was written in fortunately simple language. The fragmented ideas I received about faith and religion from a weird old book of quotes and the scattered passages I could decipher from a French Bible seem emblematic now, or at least fitting, for my spiritual life at the time, my ardent, confused Catholicism. My family is Catholic, but church was not enforced, so my religion was completely personal - a pebble to turn over in my mind. There were many mixed messages in "The Book of Unusual Quotations." I read from Thomas à Kempis that "those who attempt to search into the majesty of God will be overwhelmed with its glory." But the book mostly showcased skepticism, like this from Samuel Butler: "People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced." Or, even better: "God and the devil are an effort after specialization and division of labor." 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. These phrases knocked around in my mind, free of history, shards of a substance that might one day coalesce to become my convictions. This is all, in a broad sense, typical. A twelve-year-old compulsively reading a fifty-year-old book of quotations is odd, yes, but an adolescent obsession with paradoxical or pseudo-profound quotes isn't. The Internet is a repository of them, and at that time my friends and I hoarded them on Livejournal and other early social-networking platforms. Yearbooks, I assume, still abound with "Not all who wander are lost" and "What a long, strange trip it's been." 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. "It's weird when you start to think by yourself," I wrote in my diary when I was twelve. And later, "To be seen in the eyes of God as someone who tries hard to glorify him, that's important to me." "I've been thinking a lot lately about what things mean," I wrote. Like, really mean. What's our life for? These are the first stirrings of a person who was seeking something, who no longer wanted to take everything as a given. I sought that something down what now seems to me an eccentric path: an unorthodox but fervent, charismatic Catholicism, informed by a book of obnoxious sayings picked for no reason off of my grandfather's shelf. But maybe that's how it's works. The self at first is diffuse; it is gathered together in the form of the ideas one chases after or happens to come by and the ways of thinking one learns by encountering those ideas. Books of quotations might be the shallowest approach to depth, but they are somewhere to start, as good a stopping place for the mind as any. "The book will, paradoxically, become more useful to you the more you browse in it without any immediate purpose," Flesch says in his introduction to "The Book of Unusual Quotations." So it is, I think, with the intellectual activities of childhood: no immediate purpose, nothing to do, just long afternoons sitting around in the air-conditioning, thinking about anything, reading anything. Alice Bolin is a writer living in Missoula, Montana Illustration by Philippe Petit-Roulet