Quotes.

"I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself."


-Marlene Dietrich

I should start by explain that I'm kind of a quote slut. I can liken everything to some obscure quotation I heard when I was 7 years old or a paragraph from that dog-eared Winterson novel I keep in the glove compartment of my car and have read nearly one hundred times. My brain is like an intellectual fly trap - the things that matter go in on ear and out the other but the other things, song lyrics and quotations, are there for the ride.

It's just that quotes say so much about a moment in time. Quotes, to me, are like hearing that song from 7th grade that just takes you back. I can remember where I was when I read it, what I was feeling and how it hit me. 

Some days, though, I feel like a hack using other people's words to describe my feelings. I'm a creature of sensation and I get really wrapped up in feeling what's going on, letting it wash over me like waves in the ocean, and I can't.... quite... place the feeling into words. It's there, it is, and only later do I find that specific formation of words from someone else's lips that *BAM* hits me in the gut.

Forming my own voice, trusting my own take on the subject, is far more difficult for me. I've dropped off writing lately, as it's been overwhelmed by the mundane and far less satisfactory parts of life. But I'm back now and hoping to develop my own quotations, my own style, my own expression. 

It's an exciting and terrifying undertaking.