I’ve been storing quotes in my phone since 2014.

Anytime I hear something that stops me in my tracks, I pop it in. There’s probably a hundred or so in there, which across 12 years gives a sense of how infrequently I am compelled to jot one down.

The first ever entry was “eighteen-year-old boys think they’re bulletproof - that’s why they make good soldiers.”

Having been a teenage boy, and knowing plenty of gung-ho lads, this resonated - then and now. Not the part about them being bulletproof, but that their perceived invincibility is used against them to go and fight older men’s wars.

Don’t worry, they’re not all that heavy though. In fact, the collection is broad. Some are profound, others funny.

“Your reputation is everything. If you get a reputation for being an early riser, you can stay in bed all day” (unknown) and “People who read tabloids deserve to be lied to” - Jerry Seinfeld.

The best somehow manage to do both.

“I don’t like that man, I must get to know him better” (widely attributed to Abe Lincoln). It’s those that really sticks with you.

Now that I look back, I realise I wasn’t collecting quotes so much as piecing together a version of myself I want to become.

Ten years after the list began, I paused Marc Maron’s WTF podcast and added this one - Don’t kill yourself in the first five years - you’ll be killing the wrong person.

Maron was telling his guest, Keith Urban, that this was something he was told in AA.

Aging is something I’m forever wrestling with, being blessed to have gotten this many good years, while also spending parts of every day fearing it can all be over in an instant. With fresh eyes, this must’ve been what caused me to take these two down.

You can have a thousand problems until you have a health problem. Then you have one.

And:

A person turns thirty and they’re old. A person dies at thirty and they’re young. That is the world we live in.

Then there’s my personal favourite.

David Letterman asked his friend, the musician Warren Zevon, if his terminal diagnosis had taught him something about life he’d not previously realised. Zevon took a moment.

Enjoy every sandwich.

May we all do that today, and always.

NpG.

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Want to tell me your favourite quote, you can do so at [email protected]