1,060 Reasons to Keep Reading: John Robert Adair Has a Lot to Say in Just Saying

New quote collection serves up wisdom, wit, history, humor, and the occasional line that may stop you in your tracks

Some quotes make you think, some make you laugh, and others make you wonder why nobody managed to say it quite that well before. John Robert Adair has collected 1,060 of them in his new book, Just Saying: 1060 Utterly Fantastic Quotes, bringing together memorable words from writers, leaders, artists, athletes, thinkers, military figures, entertainers, and a few voices readers may never expect to find sharing the same pages.

This is not the kind of quote book meant to sit untouched on a coffee table looking sophisticated. It is meant to be opened, explored, revisited, and occasionally flipped through just to see what turns up. Readers can jump from courage and leadership to love and friendship, wander into art and science, spend some time with history, visit the Wild West, explore faith and spirituality, pick up a lesson about success, enjoy a little humor, and possibly stumble across exactly the sentence they needed that day.

Adair also gives many of the quotations something collections of this kind often leave out: the rest of the story. A significant number of selections include annotations that explain where the words came from, what was happening when they were spoken, why they matter, or what makes the quote especially interesting. Sometimes that background adds historical weight. Sometimes it delivers the punch line. Occasionally, it changes the way the reader sees the quotation altogether.

The collection grew out of years of reading, listening, saving, researching, and refusing to let a good line disappear. Adair gathered quotations from books, speeches, newspapers, magazines, films, conversations, personal experiences, and other sources. Along the way, he also discovered how easily a great quote can end up attached to the wrong famous person. The internet, it turns out, is very good at sharing quotations, but it is not always quite as good at remembering who actually said them.

The collection grew out of years of reading, listening, saving, researching, and refusing to let a good line disappear. Adair gathered quotations from books, speeches, newspapers, magazines, films, conversations, personal experiences, and other sources. Along the way, he also discovered how easily a great quote can end up attached to the wrong famous person. The internet, it turns out, is very good at sharing quotations, but it is not always quite as good at remembering who actually said them.

Readers can move through Just Saying from beginning to end, although Adair probably will not complain if they completely ignore that idea. Open it anywhere, find a favorite subject, hunt for something clever for a speech, look for inspiration, or simply turn to a random page and see who has something to tell you. After all, sometimes a few well-chosen words are enough.