Collector Quotes & Sayings

The two Reds crewing the old trash collector are giving us a countdown. When it reaches one, Sevro says, "Tuck your sacks and pop your cloaks." I — Pierce Brown

I started getting back into buying old analog gear while we were recording. Lots of old drum machines and synths. It wasn't a conscious thing. I didn't consider myself a collector, but boxes of vintage gear would turn up virtually every day. — Martin Gore

Truth was, I didn't really want to die today. I was in the middle of a really good book, and being alive had always worked out for me ... — Jessica Fortunato

I've been a book collector since I was young, since I was a kid. — Brett Ratner

Perhaps he even needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatist and an historian, and in addition a poet and collector and traveller and puzzle-solver and moralist and seer and 'free spirit' and nearly all things, so that he can traverse the range of human values and value-feelings and be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into every wide expanse. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I adore forgotten words, long lost folk tales, and books with pages soft and crumbling. I am a collector of scents and memories. The things that others bury are the things I hold most dear. — Nichole McElhaney

The Collector [John Fowles book] does such a good job of capturing the mindset of a capturer, and also that's become a banal trope of every second crime novel: the weirdo, fetishistic watcher/stalker/kidnapper/kidnapper of women or children. — Emma Donoghue

Having access to the library was all well and good, but as a collector you had to own the book. — John Baxter

Cops today are nothing but an armed tax collector — Frank Serpico

The collector attempts always to acquire the best, and his knowledge of what is best is always widening. His is the task of judging between degrees of perfection. — Arthur Davison Ficke

Be a collector of good ideas. Keep a journal. If you hear a good idea, capture it, write it down. Don't trust your memory. — Jim Rohn

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging ... He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand -like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery -in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding. — Walter Benjamin

Yet the laboriously sought musical epiphany rarely compares to the unsought, even unwanted tune whose ambush is violent and sudden: the song the cab driver was tuned to, the song rumbling from the speaker wedged against the fire-escape railing, the song tingling from the transistor on the beach blanket. To locate those songs again can become, with age, something like a religious quest, as suggested by the frequent use of the phrase "Holy Grail" to describe hard-to-find tracks. The collector is haunted by the knowledge that somewhere on the planet an intact chunk of his past still exists, uncorrupted by time or circumstance. — Geoffrey O'Brien

Birth of the Cool' became a collector's item, I think, out of a reaction to Bird and Dizzy's music. Bird and Diz played this hip, real fast thing, and if you weren't a fast listener, you couldn't catch the humor or the feeling in their music. Their musical sound wasn't sweet, and it didn't have harmonic lines that you could easily hum out on the street with your girlfriend trying to get over with a kiss. — Miles Davis

As a collector, you will discover that surrounding yourself with art can enrich not only your visual experiences, but instill a sense of vitality to your life and uplift your soul. — Ernest West Basden

The true artist and the sane collector never will tolerate insincerity and impudence. — Walter J. Phillips

I was working out at a gym in Montreal when I was doing 'The Bone Collector.' I walked in and said 'Where do I sign in?' Somebody behind me, without even seeing my face, said 'Excuse me, are you on 'Star Trek'?' They recognized me from my voice. — Leland Orser

Elias Ashmole, a seventeenth-century book collector and alchemist whose books and papers had come to the Bodleian from the Ashmolean Museum in the nineteenth century, along with the number 782. — Deborah Harkness

Her name is Emmilina. She is quite eccentric and was Thomas's best friend. — Jessica Fortunato

If you're smart enough you realise that your possessions possess you in their turn. Collecting has a neurotic aspect. I find it boring when collectors found their own private museums or try to establish a memorial to themselves in the form of their collections, it's part of the old aristocratic mentality. I think a collection ought to be dismantled after the collector's death. — Thomas Koerfer

I like sneakers. I guess I could call myself a collector. — Mike Shinoda

He's a collector. That's the great dead thing in him. — John Fowles

If you're wondering if you're a collector, ask yourself two questions. Do I own too many records? Do my friends and family feel I own too many records? If your respective answers are No and Yes, you're a Collector. — Steve Almond

The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past. — Susan Sontag

Luckily for me, my father had impeccable taste. No contemporary collector was he. His treasure trove of comics included gems such as 'Little Lulu,' 'Frontline Combat' and 'Classics Illustrated.' But the works that stood head and shoulders above the rest were Carl Barks's 'Donald Duck' and 'Uncle Scrooge' comics from the 1940s through the 1960s. — Jeff Kinney

Every snapshot collector has obsessions. Some only collect photos of cars. Others like World War II, or babies, or old-timey girls in old-timey swimsuits. I happen to collect the weird stuff: photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a little. The uncanny. — Ransom Riggs

My mother wanted me off her hands. She was a working woman. She designed clothes, and she was a celebrity collector. It's my mother's ambition to be a celebrity. — Stephen Sondheim

Sussman had the ability to seize facts and lock them in his memory, where they remained poised for instants recall. More than any other editor at the Post, or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a reference source to be summoned when even the library failed. On a deadline, he would pump these facts into a story in a constant infusion, working up a body of significant information to support what otherwise seemed like the weakest of revelations. In Sussman's mind, everything fitted. Watergate was a puzzle and he was a collector of the pieces.

-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward — Carl Bernstein

The tax collector must love poor people, he's creating so many of them. — Bill Vaughan

I am a big book collector. I love books. — Andrew Zuckerman

It's nice that all the composers have said that nobody interprets a lyric like Fred Astaire. But when it comes to selling records I was never worth anything particularly except as a collector's item. — Fred Astaire

One should not be obstinate even in worldly interaction. If you are obstinate with a 'collector', what will he do? He will throw you in jail. So then what will happen if you are obstinate with God? God won't put you in jail, but his happiness upon you will break (will go away). — Dada Bhagwan

I definitely was a big comic collector as a kid. — J. August Richards

I'm a huge poster collector. — Illeana Douglas

You panic button collector. You clock of beautiful ticks. You run out the door if you need to. You flock to the front row of your own class. You feather everything until you know you can always, always shake like a leaf on my family tree and know you belong here. You belong here and everything you feel is okay. Everything you feel is okay. — Andrea Gibson

I'm at like 325 pairs right now, give or take. But I've given away about 200 pairs of sneakers. I'm not as big of a collector as I used to be, because I think the game just got weird. Everybody likes to collect now, so it's kind of corny. But I got the essentials. — Wale

I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. — Walter Benjamin

Not everyone, the Collector was aware, is improved by the job he does in life; some people are visibly disimproved. — J.G. Farrell

(Sebastian, for all his moodiness, at times devised some piece of ghoulish fun, as when in a crowded tramcar he had the ticket-collector transmit to a girl in the far end of the car a scribbled message which really ran thus: I am only a poor ticket-collector, but I love you); — Vladimir Nabokov

Bryce looked like a California underwear model. Not that I'd thought about him in his underwear.
Much.
He was talking with his friend Nathan. Where Bryce had the whole tan, blond, hazel-eyed thing going on, Nathan was fair with dark hair and dark eyes. They looked like opposite sides of the same coin. A really hot, totally unreachable coin that a collector would keep in a special locked case, which normal girls like myself were not allowed to touch. — Chris Cannon

Lavater told Goethe that on a certain occasion when he held the velvet bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual the shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and individually characteristic. — Anna Brownell Jameson

He fancies himself as a collector. Really, he is a peasant. — Torquil MacLeod

You're naming your collector's-item, kick-ass sword that's made to maim and kill, specifically designed to bring your ginormous enemies to their knees and hear the lamentation of their women-Pooky Bear?"
"Yeah, you like it? — Susan Ee

A folklore study differs from most writing, in that the tale is told in the voice of the individual telling the story, not by the collector. — Karen Jones Gowen

Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis. — Hilary Mantel

The CD is now the wax album and so it is a collector's item for people who collect music and love to look at the liner notes and feel paper. I don't know what would turn them on about having to go through that terrible exercise of trying to open the packaging - it's unbelievable when you're trying to open a CD, right? You need a box cutter . — MC Hammer

I am a sort of collector of religions: and the curious thing is that I find I can believe in them all. — George Bernard Shaw

God often uses failure to make us useful. When Jesus called the disciples, He did not go out and find the most qualified and successful people. He found the most willing, and He found them in the workplace. He found a fisherman, a tax collector, and a farmer. The Hebrews knew that failure was a part of maturing in God. The Greeks used failure as a reason for disqualification. Sadly, in the Church, we often treat one another in this way. This is not God's way. We need to understand that failing does not make us failures. It makes us experienced. It makes us more prepared to be useful in God's Kingdom -- if we have learned from it. And that is the most important ingredient for what God wants in His children. — Os Hillman

I'm a collector, a tinkerer, and a tweaker, like a lot of people, and recording equipment is really easy to fetishize. — John Vanderslice

At that moment Sonny noticed that the other car had not kept going but had parked a few feet ahead, still blocking his way. At that same moment his lateral vision caught sight of another man in the darkened tollbooth to his right. But he did not have time to think about that because two men came out of the car parked in front and walked toward him. The toll collector still had not appeared. And then in the fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone he knew he was a dead man. And in that moment his mind was lucid, drained of all violence, as if the hidden fear finally real and present had purified him. — Mario Puzo

I screeched with frustration, which in hindsight is never okay when there are people trying to kill you. — Jessica Fortunato

Nobody can give you advice after you've been collecting for a while. If you don't enjoy making your own decisions, you're never going to be much of a collector anyway. — Charles Saatchi

Nothing compares to pizza, and you discover and rediscover it when you are much too old, and you have got too much cholesterol and triglycerides ... A collector is someone who is ready to devour the work of art that he wants to possess at all costs. — Augusto De Luca

Have you thought about His (God) handling of the gospel? God needs to get a message out to the human race, without which they will perish ... foreve r. What's the plan? First, He starts with the most unlikely group ever: a couple of prostitutes, a few fishermen with no better than a second-grade education, a tax collector. Then, he passes the ball to us. Unbelievable. — John Eldredge

As his dark closet shows, Bluebeard was a collector at heart, and even after dispatching a wife, could not let her fully depart. — Shuli Barzilai

I've never been a collector - just a consumer - and these days unless a book is signed to me by another author, I don't normally have any qualms about passing it to a friend or donating it to the library. — Rick Riordan

I am a collector of many things, but I particularly love the sterling silver mint julep cups, each engraved with the titles of the Broadway shows in which I appeared. — Bryan Batt

named for a man who became a saint but worked as a tax collector. — Matthew Minicucci

Whenever you try to do good with someone else's money, you are committed to using force. How can you do good with somebody else's money, unless you first take it away from them? The only way you can take it away from them is the threat of force: you have a policeman, tax collector, who comes and takes it from them. — Milton Friedman

A library represents the mind of its collector, his fancies and foibles, his strength and weakness, his prejudices and preferences. Particularly is this the case if, to the character of a collector, he adds - or tries to add - the qualities of a student who wishes to know the books and the lives of the men who wrote them. The friendships of his life, the phases of his growth, the vagaries of his mind, all are represented. — William Osler

Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls ... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist. — Alice Neel

A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm a comic nerd. I'm a former serious collector for much of my childhood and early teen years I wanted to draw underground comics. — Anthony Bourdain

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time ... — Sylvia Plath

The cities, which had been the bearers of culture, were especially hard hit; substantial citizens, in large numbers, fled to escape the tax-collector. It was not till after the death of Plotinus that order was re-established and the Empire temporarily saved by the vigorous measures of Diocletian and Constantine. Of all this there is no mention in the works of Plotinus. He turned aside from the spectacle of ruin and misery in the actual world, to contemplate an eternal world of goodness and beauty. In this he was in harmony with all the most serious men of his age. To all of them, Christians and pagans alike, the world of practical affairs seemed to offer no hope, and only the Other World seemed worthy of allegiance. To the Christian, the Other World was the Kingdom of — Bertrand Russell

I was 16 before I met another passionate collector. One summer, I visited England; a new friend took me calling on his dotty, brilliant old aunt. She occupied a quaint house in Kent. Its walls were lined with glass-fronted cases full of what? Ancient shoe buckles. — Allan Gurganus

I'm definitely a vintage collector. I have a wardrobe of core basics that I like to spice up with different colors, new accessories, and I love to try on new things to invite something different. I find, with every new stage of my life, my self-image shifts with new duties and responsibilities, and so does my fashion style. — Camila Alves

For a day or two Fleury became quite active. He had his book about the advance of civilization in India to consider and this was one reason why he had taken an interest in the behaviour of the Collector. He asked a great number of questions and even bought a notebook to record pertinent information.
"Why, if the Indian people are happier under our rule," he asked a Treasury official, "do they not emigrate from those native states like Hyderabad which are so dreadfully misgoverned and come and live in
British India?"
"The apathy of the native is well known," replied the official stiffly. "He is not enterprising."
Fleury wrote down "apathy" in a flowery hand and then, after a moment's hesitation, added "not enterprising". — J.G. Farrell

An espionage organization is a collector: it collects raw information. That gets processed by a machinery that is supposed to resolve its reliability, and to present a finished product. — Aldrich Ames

I'm not an artist or a collector. I'm a skateboard kid with no one to tell me if I'm not doing things the right way. — Leo Fitzpatrick

I'm beginning to realise that I'm either overly sentimental, or am a hoarder who struggles to part with things. In all honesty, I'm probably both. — Fennel Hudson

I still can't spend a lot of money on records at collector prices. There's something in me that just won't allow me to do that. But I will trade my artwork, which I know is worth thousands of dollars. — Robert Crumb

Naming your packaged products helps call attention to how the deal is special. Call the product bundle a collector's set, a gift basket, or holiday set, and give each one a name; something like The Artisan's Selection or Your Name's Gift Set. — James Dillehay

ANTHONY DOERR is the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won numerous prizes both in the United States and overseas, including four O. Henry Prizes, three Pushcart Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Raised in Cleveland, Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons. — Anthony Doerr

What an advantage that knowledge can be stored in books! The knowledge lies there like hermetically sealed provisions waiting for the day when you may need a meal. Surely what the Collector was doing as he pored over his military manuals, was proving the superiority of the European way of doing things, of European culture itself. This was a culture so flexible that whatever he needed was there in a book at his elbow. An ordinary sort of man, he could, with the help of an oil-lamp, turn himself into a great military engineer, a bishop, an explorer or a General overnight, if the fancy took him. — J.G. Farrell

[Google is] an omnivorous collector of information, a hyperencyclopedic vault of human knowledge, an unerring auctioneer, an eerily skilful student of languages, behaviour, and desires. — Steven Levy

My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don't buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed. — Lev Grossman

Seeking more information, I walked through the market listening to the gossip and discovered that our new general, the man sent to quell the unrest in the east, was the second son of a provincial tax collector whose only claims to recognition were that he had commanded some legions in Britain in the heady, early days of the invasion, that his brother had once stood for consul, and that he had been a governor in some African province, where the locals had thrown turnips at him.
Despairing, I returned to the house, and that despair deepened later when Horgias came home with the news that our new paragon of martial virtue had until recently been hiding in Greece, in disgrace for having fallen asleep during one of Nero's recitals in the theatre. — M.C. Scott

I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book. — Lev Grossman

I'm an anorak. I've always been an obsessive collector of things. Richard Briers collects stamps. I collect cars and guns, which are much more expensive, and much more difficult to store. — Michael Gambon

Every collector is potentially (if not actually) a thief. — Susan Sontag

A painting walks into the room supported by the collector. It is the painting of a nude by a contemporary artist. She is scarred by shadows from venetian blinds. "The ritual scarification of light and shadow," I say. But am thinking, silently, the female nude is the self-ironization of the male. She, in his shadow, by design. — Carla Harryman

I think that the genes for being an artist and mentally ill aren't just related, they are the same gene, but try telling that to a bill collector. We — Neil Hilborn

Cabinet is a conscious, explicit attempt to portray the Doctor himself as myth. "He's a mischief, a leprechaun, a boojum," says one character, bookseller and collector of incunabula, Syme. "The Doctor is a myth. He's straight out of Old English folklore, typical trickster figure really."29 Neither part of an ongoing narrative, nor specifically located within the series' past, Cabinet is in a position to challenge the portrayal of the Doctor. — Anthony Burdge, Jessica Burke, Kristine Larsen

Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility. — Mary McCarthy

God can use anything, and anyone - even a king or a president, even a tax collector or a businessman, a priest or a prostitute, a Republican or a Democrat. — Shane Claiborne

The sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look. — Marianne Moore

I was the girl in the background, the just-friend, or - worse - the friend of a just-friend, the you-sit-next-to-her-in-geometry-but-can't-remember-her-name girl. It would have been better if some middle-aged collector of Star Wars action figures had found me in that snowbank. — Rick Yancey

As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend. — Walter Benjamin

I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I'm a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them. — Tom Wolfe

I never stopped thinking about the Alamo from that day to this. I'm a huge collector of memorabilia. I've got Davy Crockett's bullet pouch. I've got Colonel Travis's belt. — Phil Collins

Be wary of strong drink, it can make you shoot at the tax collector ... and miss. — Robert A. Heinlein

I'm fascinated by the narrative of geology, and I'm a veritable pack rat of a collector on the road. I keep a rock hammer in my car. — Marianne Wiggins

All right. Maybe I can get you one soul. Perhaps a tax collector...'cept they ain't human. Would they work? Or would you need, like, three of them to make up one normal person's soul? -Lift — Brandon Sanderson

I download, like, forty songs a day, I'm a big music collector and a big record collector. — Jesse Williams

Fighting corruption is not restricted to naming and shaming a few corrupt officials. If we think it is okay to cheat in exams, lie to a ticket collector in the train about our kids' ages and pay a bit of money to avoid a big traffic fine, then at some level we clearly don't care about eliminating corruption all that much. At best, we hate the politician who gets to steal (while we don't!). — Chetan Bhagat

I had a guitar when I was 6 or 7, a plastic guitar with the Beatles' faces on it. It would be a collector's item now. It would fetch a hefty sum, I imagine. — Gary Oldman

One of them stepped from the crowd. It was Zeebo, the garbage collector. "Mister Jem," he said, "we're mighty glad to have you all here. Don't pay no 'tention to Lula, she's contentious because Reverend Sykes threatened to church her. She's a troublemaker from way back, got fancy ideas an' haughty ways - we're mighty glad to have you all." With that, Calpurnia led us to the church door where we were greeted by Reverend Sykes, who led us to the front pew. First Purchase was unceiled and unpainted within. Along its walls unlighted kerosense lamps hung on brass brackets; pine benches served as pews. Behind the rough oak pulpit a faded pink silk banner proclaimed God Is Love, the church's only decoration except a roto-gravure print of Hunt's The Light of the World. — Harper Lee