The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.

"I hate quotations," Ralph Waldo Emerson confided to his diary. Yet, that very statement, along with scores more by the sage of Concord, was collected by John Bartlett in his famous anthology of familiar quotations. Familiarity breeds contempt--to quote Publius Syrus--but it also keeps editors of quotation books away from honest labor.

Emerson is absent from Rosalie Maggio's new collection, and so, too, are Shakespeare, Lincoln, Churchill, Jesus, and every other man who ever said anything worth remembering. The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women excludes the unfair sex, the half of the species that has been dominating conversation since Adam began to name the fowl of the air and the beasts of the field. Women's sounds barely have registered. Although he acknowledged Louisa May Alcott and Queen Victoria, Bartlett was partial to tenor, bass, and baritone.

The Beacon Book buzzes with the voices of more than 1,300 women, most from 20th-century Britain or the U.S. Maggio explains her selection of 5,700 entries "for their memorability, their original use of language, their brevity, their ability to shatter conventional patterns of speech or thought and their potential usefulness to readers needing quotations for speaking and writing."

Political reputations often are nourished by media bites, and Maggio quotes utterances by Phyllis Schlafly, Margaret Chase Smith, and Barbara Jordan, while omitting Sharon Pratt Kelly, Peggy Noonan, and Anita Hill...