Why Quotes, Why Quodid

October 1, 2015

Quodid is a passion project for its founder, David Hayes. And I’m going to stop writing in the third person now.

I started Quodid a few years ago, as a very part-time thing. It remains so to this day. While I do hope it eventually could be my livelihood, I know that it’ll need a lot more time and energy than I’m currently able to give for it to really reach that peak. But I do know that this is one of the most interesting and valuable things I can make.

To me, most of the most valuable and life-changing advise, wisdom, whatever I’ve received in my life was from simple ordinary banal quotations. Part of this is that I drifted away from the religion I was raised with to never return. So in my life the quotes like this utterly seminal one form Henry Miller are just the most important things.

The best quotations are long enough to say something important, but short enough for you to contain them in your head. Poems, too, can have this quality but I live in a culture where poetry is even more niche than quotations, and I’m not that strong at swimming against the stream to have really ever become knowledgeable in the subject.

It feels banal to say — but then I think banal things are also the most profound — but there’s a lot of solace and reassurance that one can find in a quotation. My mind is rushing to that Robert Frost line:

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.

This is both really really ridiculously simplistic and banal, and so reassuring for my when I’m really going through an experience that seems difficult and dark and without end.

That solace. That humor. That reframing. That few words that makes you think, and then think again about how you see the world. That’s why Quodid exists. That’s why I publish it. That’s why I work, when I can, to build the best quotation repository on the internet.