I was in Iceland, talking with Stein, the eleven-year-old son of some friends. His English was dauntingly good—and all the more so given that he’d never spent any real time off the island. I’d just flown over in a packed plane, and I said that tourism seemed to be exploding, and he, deliberating, looking older than his years, replied, “Yes, they come from the hot countries.”

I loved the remark partly because he had an Icelandic way of elongating a short “o.” His pronunciation was closer to “hoat” than “hot.” But I loved it even more because, from Stein’s vantage, the “hoat countries” included pretty much every place on earth. The tourists were streaming into Iceland from sultry Scotland, torrid Denmark, blistering Finland, sweltering Norway…

Unbeknownst to Stein, his phrase became a sort of shorthand in my family. It turned out to be useful for explaining almost any crazy behavior. You’d see something outrageous on TV (all-but-naked flesh-painted Mardi Gras revellers parading in Rio, or shirtless Middle Eastern religious pilgrims flagellating themselves on the way to a shrine, or crowds at a state fair milling before a booth selling deep-fried bubble gum), and you’d say, with an explanatory shrug, “Well, in the hoat countries…”

Far more often than we quoted Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln or Yogi Berra or Madonna—figures who might plausibly be thought to shape the modern American argot—we quoted eleven-year-old Stein Sigurdurson. And most of all I loved his remark because it illustrated how weird and wayward are the paths whereby words, whether casually uttered or rigorously composed on a page, chance to endure.

My grandfather was fond of the phrase “Now, I’m not lecturing you.” It sent a sinking feeling into the chests of his children and grandchildren alike, for it reliably heralded a lengthy and dour disquisition on the hardships of life. He came by his lessons honestly. A powerful and athletic figure in young manhood, he was laid low by emphysema in early middle age. Though he was a smoker, I suspect his illness was largely brought on by chemical exposure as a construction rigger back in pre-OSHA days. In any case, pulmonary problems were a grim motif in his life; he lost his first wife to tuberculosis while she was still in her teens.

Of all the helpful lessons he imparted to me, I recall nothing in any detail. No, after all these years, I can retrieve verbatim only one thing he ever said, and this didn’t originate in his dutiful tutoring. It was a spontaneous remark. One December day, he and I were sitting in the family room. I was probably seven or eight. I glanced out the window and beheld a miracle: the first snowflakes of the year. I uttered an ecstatic cry: “Look! Look! It’s snowing!” And my grandfather replied, “Never be glad to see the snow.”

I loved my grandfather dearly and felt the loss sharply when he died. That I fail to recall anything else he said sometimes seems like a moral failure. But mostly I see it as an example—again—of the fateful caprices by which certain word clusters survive the decades. For this particular advice reverberates within me still: “Never be glad to see the snow.” It’s an apt follow-up to “You think you’re happy now,” or “This may look like a good thing.” And it’s a line that would fit neatly into any iambic tetrameter verse. It would make a perfect refrain in an old-fashioned poem about the disillusionments of youth: “The road is longer than you know. / Never be glad to see the snow.” Or “We hear his echo as we go: / Never be glad to see the snow.”

Similar catchphrases, in which casual comments are promoted into a sort of immortality, doubtless exist in nearly every family, every close friendship. I find this notion deeply heartening—that people are everywhere being quoted for lines they themselves have long forgotten. And of course each of us is left to wonder whether, right at this moment, we’re being quoted in some remote and unreckonable context.

One of my closest friends is a lifelong academic who has often spoken to me, illuminatingly, about his deepest literary passions: Simone Weil, Emerson, Montaigne. But the only line of his I regularly quote—and I do so frequently—is “It’s a fucking mall!” This was his exasperated cry when a mutual friend of ours led a group of us, in a caravan of cars, to a distant French restaurant. The drive was endless—more than an hour—and snowy and dangerous, and at its bedraggled end we turned into the accusatory glare of a strip mall.

“It’s a fucking mall” turns out to be a wonderfully abbreviated way of saying that some elaborate plan has revealed itself—immediately, on its face—as grossly unsatisfactory. You’ve just spent two hundred dollars, say, on a pair of tickets to a deplorable Broadway show that everyone else seems to adore. During the intermission, as you step into the lobby, you remark to your companion, “Why, it’s a fucking mall.” What else need be said?

Much the same thing happens in one’s reading: seemingly ancillary words and images take on an unforeseeable, robust second life. Long ago, in my teens, I read and loved Frank Norris’s San Francisco novel, “McTeague” (1899). But I realized the other day that I recalled absolutely nothing of the plot. No, what I recalled was a single, fleeting, grotesque tableau, in which burly McTeague, in an impulsive act of bravado, places a billiard ball in his mouth and can’t get it out. (“McTeague sweated with terror; inarticulate sounds came from his crammed mouth; he waved his arms wildly.…”) I had no notion at the time that for me the book’s legacy would be one solitary act of asphyxiating clownishness.

Years ago, at a roommate’s urging, a friend of mine repeatedly tried to read Ken Kesey’s novel “Sometimes a Great Notion.” She never got through the whole of it. She says she now recollects absolutely nothing about it, except that one of the characters mounted above a baby’s crib a plaque with a family credo: NEVER GIVE A INCH! Somehow this stayed with her—perhaps because the ungrammatical “A” lodged in her mind, burr-like, as a kind of irritant.

Novelists naturally hope that their scenes and phrases will lodge in the memory, but it’s chiefly poets who strategically seek, balancing syllable against syllable, to embed specific cadences, individual verbatim phrases. Most of their work is for naught, of course, and there’s something especially moving about those poets who, in the mind of the individual reader, have effectively created only one poem, or one phrase. Their souls hang so tenuously in our heads! I’ve read most of what Conrad Aiken published, both poetry and fiction, but for me he is, like John McCrae (“In Flanders Fields”) or Chidiock Tichborne (“Tichborne’s Elegy”), a poet who effectively wrote one poem. Aiken’s “Morning Song,” from “Senlin,” enthralled me in high school, and all these years later the spell hasn’t lifted. Back then, it seemed to integrate, in a way I’d never experienced, the lushest romanticism with a cool, even astronomical detachment: