Quotable Quotes and Things

There are certain quotes you read or melodies you hear that stay with you for life. They define you and you define them. They become a part of you, reminiscent of some mantra that you keep close to your heart. I’m very attached to quotes, lyrics and melodies of songs. When I hear one that’s just so fantastic, I feel like a small part of the Universe explodes, because it’s so great. Like when you listen to Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1. It melts me, that song. It’s like everything turns into slow motion. If you’re ever in a bad mood, or you’ve been crying, or you just don’t feel well, listening to Gymnopedie No. 1 will make things just a little bit better. It’s therapy.

If you look at the “Quotes” category of this blog, you can see that I really do love quotes. Today, a co-worker and I were discussing quotes. I don’t like calling the people I work with “co-workers,” if I’m being honest. They’re more friends than just people I work with, but I digress. He mentioned a quote that I can’t stop thinking about.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.

It’s by Rainer Maria Rilke, the German poet I was first introduced to in English class in high school. I can’t remember what poem it was of his that we read, but I just knew that I loved it. In college, I read “The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God,” in a religion class that I took. The quote above was taken from Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.” It’s so simple, yet so significant. It’s been a long time since I just stopped and thought about anything semi-philosophical.

A lot of my other favorites come from Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” quite possibly my favorite book of all time.

He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

Still, I have more, like this one from William Saroyan…

Try as much as possible to by wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Or this one from Robert Fulghum…

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge-myth is more potent than history-dreams are more powerful than facts-hope always triumphs over experience-laughter is the cure for grief-love is stronger than death.

Going back to songs, Camera Obscura’s “Country Mile” usually fills my eyes up with tears. For the first few weeks of my new job, I would listen to it while I was dying a slow death in traffic. Traffic is not only bad because, well it’s traffic, but because it gives you time to think and examine and over analyze certain aspects of your life that you usually don’t think about or want to think about.

I wish you could be here with me
I would show you off like a trophy
The road it winds, it twists, it turns, oh my stomach burns

I won’t be seeing you for a long while
Oh I hope it’s not as long as these country miles
I feel lost, I feel lost.

Or Bob Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love”

I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue
I’d go crawling down the avenue
There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do
To make you feel my love

The storms are raging on the rollin’ sea
And on the highway of regret

The winds of change are blowing wild and free
You ain’t seen nothing like me yet

If you haven’t heard Adele’s version of “Make You Feel My Love” yet, you should be ashamed of yourself.

All these quotes and songs, they’re just snippets of things that inspire me, that I stand for and believe in, that help me. I can’t explain it, but whatever I’m going through, they make the stress and pain or whatever it is that I’m feeling, a lot less intense. To know that four lines of words helped you overcome some kind of angst, or taught you something knew or changed your perception of things, well, that’s why I decided to be a writer.