The Final Blog, A Couple of Quotes

While looking around the two websites:
http://www.agentquery.com
and
http://misssnark.blogspot.com

I picked up a couple of quotes that I found interesting in relation to learning things about publication. The first I noticed was actually a question by a reader posted on "Miss Snark", it read: "I've heard that no agent is better than a bad agent, but everyone has to start somewhere, right?"
To this, my thoughts were immediately, is a bad start really starting at all? Anyway... the rebuttal I found on Agent Query: "Good literary agents are worth every penny."
I would assume that if they're "worth every penny" then they would be worth starting with; they're worth the wait. And then, as I read on through the different articles, I noticed how they both mentioned the quality of "new" agents. They both said that it doesn't matter how new the agent, what to look at is the past experience in the field of literary publishing. On this, Miss Snark herself said:
"An inexperienced agent is not a bad agent by default. And 'experience' isn't some sort of universal either. I'm pretty experienced but if you hand me category romance, I'd be a VERY bad agent since I don't know the genre, don't read it, and don't know the editors who buy it."

As I've recently gathered MUCH information on publishing, and agents and how to go about the entire process, from these current readings I would say, the rule for agents is much like our motto for Trillium. The QUALITY of an agent goes before their QUANTITY (quantity in the sense of how many years they've been an agent, or perhaps the quantity of "moo-lah" they require from you for them to be your agent). And yet, in opposition to our motto, perhaps for agents the rule of quantity and quality go hand in hand (this quantity being of how many books they've had published in their repertoire and how many people they work for). And thus, we are encouraged to look towards the quality and reliability of an agent before simply "starting somewhere".