The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations 3rd ed

Dean Tudor is a professor of journalism at Ryerson University and author
of Finding Answers: The Essential Guide to Gathering Information in
Canada.

The first edition of this reference book, published in 1981, weighed in
at 340 pages. This new edition stands at 528 pages. The preface cautions
that “in the inexact business of quotations collecting, one must be
aware that men and women —especially famous ones—may not be the
authors of quotations attributed to them.” These quotations are
unencumbered by bibliographical information of any kind (even dates). In
the words of the compiler, they “represent a distillation from 50
years of reading books and manuscripts and magazines and book reviews
and advertisements and epitaphs and signs in store windows.” In other
words, this is an eclectic and idiosyncratic miscellany. Nor does the
book “have the rich indices of keywords or first lines for any of
those seeking detailed and valuable aids.”

There are 202 categories (Birth, Goals, Illusion, Intellect, Justice,
Love, Power, Sorrow, Sport, War, and the like), with 6000 quotations
randomly distributed within. Conspicuously absent from the authors
represented in this book is Pierre Berton, surely Canada’s most
prolific writer of bons mots.