One Delicious Compound

We also, I say, ought to copy the bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us...we could so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.

---Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 84 "On Gathering Ideas"

Seneca discusses the art of commonplacing and the alchemy of composition.  His words reassure the shaky and insecure young writer that although he/she gathers pollen (quotes) from flowers (the writing of other authors) the "honey" he/she produces from this raw material will indeed be something new--and more importantly, something delicious. 

[Note Seneca's  reference to the word care in this quote.  The word care and the word curate have the same root. To care for something is to preserve or maintain--but it also suggests selection, arrangement, and exhibition. Thus copying quotes is not meant to be a derivative act but a generative one--much as a museum exhibition makes a new argument through the presentation of pre-existing objects, so too do authors produce new ideas by drawing upon those already in existence. ]