Question: Where do CoolQuotes come from?

Answer: Who truly knows?

Sure, CoolQuotes are lifted from books, newspapers, magazines, speeches, comics, movies, TV shows, blogs, podcasts, snatches of conversation, etc. But how did they find their way to wherever we’ve found them in the first place? The answer to that is buried in the mystery of metaphor, poetry, language, ideas, maybe even from within depths of the Big Idea.*

Snatches of coolness have been trickling into the Collection for many years, but only in the last year or two has the Collection begun to balloon to proportions which begin to hint at the notion of a true Conversation Through the Ages.

Our theory is that very cool writers, poets, songsters, and translators are constantly harvesting these, by bits and pieces, out of the ether, the universe, or the Big Idea; each slicing off a sliver here or there, and then dropping that sliver into the world, and, on rare occasions, creating quite the ripples. Here at the Collective, we just do our best to pull as many of them together as we can where they can speak to each other and to us.

But the only way these can edge closer to representing, in any meaningful way, that Big Conversation is through more diversity of voices. Coolness, after all, is in the mind of the beholder, and the more we can behold and share, the more connection we make with each other, and perhaps even with the Big Idea.

It is our contention that the Big Idea is wild and free, and every little slice which may have peeled off through the ages is just as wild and free. Why, another sliver of the Wild and Free may just have slipped into this very essay unobserved, just waiting for one of us to engage in our Collective practice of Catch and Release! But rather than muck around here in this little puddle, let’s launch into the annals of language and literature and the billions of human interactions exploding around us every day and see if we can capture another sliver of absolute coolness and release it into the wild and churning cauldron of the Collective where it can continue to cross-breed and spawn ever more intriguing threads of coolness.

* The Big Idea is hidden somewhere in the tiny singularity at the center of The Big Bang where the laws of Newtonian and Quantum physics don’t apply and we are left, as far as anyone knows, with philosophical speculation.

The Evolution of CoolQuotes

The experience that eventually became CoolQuotes began in the early 90’s as a little self-imposed exercise in learning the Unix operating system. As a collection of a thousand or two various familiar and not-so-familiar quotes were soon randomly popping up on my monochrome terminal screen, it began to feel a little bit like a fascinating conversation amongst fascinating people, past and present.

Dial forward a few decades as technology continued to evolve, and the list of quotes slowly grew toward six thousand entries, got dumped out to a spreadsheet, and was eventually uploaded into the ubiquitous cloud. I had moved on to new adventures and the old Unix script was left behind.

New website tools had also emerged which would allow the old random conversation to evolve into something a bit less random. I laboriously picked quotes, one by one, from the growing collection and manually hyperlinked key words to other hand picked quotes. The result began to feel more like a true conversation, but after much work, only about seven hundred quotes had been hyperlinked together, even as the collection had grown into the thousands.

In 2024 I decided it was time to spend some money on this little hobby. I had decided by then to promote the Proctor Charlie Collective, and I hired someone adept at newer technologies. My hired techie uploaded the spreadsheet into a Content Management System and installed code to create all the hyperlinks in real time. 

Legacy Conversation	CoolQuotes
Around 700 quotes	Around 7500 quotes
Manually hyperlinked	Auto-hyperlinked in real time
Manually built	Still manually built
Very labor intensive	Less labor intensive

The list had grown to over seven thousand and a handful of prospective Collective members began submitting suggestions from literature, pop culture, pod casts, daily comics, and everyday conversations at the rate of some three hundred items a month. It feels like the Conversation Through the Ages is finally within sight.

What’s next?

• Once the list grows past ten thousand it will need a more robust vehicle.
• To get the feel of a true conversation it will need to include many more and varied voices.
• It will need a much more robust interface in order to support a great experience.
• It will also need a secure and usable multiple user interface for a growing number of Cooperative members.

In the meantime, while CoolQuotes gradually grows up, by fits and starts, let’s click away and enjoy what has been built thus far as we dream much bigger.

If any of this has struck a harmonic chord with you, pop over to the Connect to the Collective page and join the Conversation as an active contributor.

Copyright 2026, The Proctor Charlie Collective