I don’t remember when it was that I became so fascinated with quotes, but, I know that I have had this fascination for a while. I believe that quotes are underrated and should be appreciated more; a good quote can do a lot for a person. I know that for me, if something makes me smile, I want to quote it…and so I do. I have a mini notebook in a desk drawer at work, where I store all of my precious quotations. If I’m not at work, than I type them into my phone and add them in the next time I am. I wasn’t always this organized. I remember when I was an adolescent, I used to write many a quote on the backs of notebooks and I’m sure that I have lost a bunch over the years, but the point is that I am organized now!

As I sat down this afternoon with a post-gym cup of tea, I noticed that there was a quote on the tea bag. At one point I used to collect tea bag quotes…until they began becoming repetitive, then I gave up, so I had forgotten that they existed. The quote simple says, “The beauty of life is to experience yourself.” When I originally read that, it made me stop and think about it. It doesn’t say that the beauty is to experience new things, it says “yourself,” and I think that that is something that a lot of people forget. Life is about you and at the end of the day if a situation doesn’t work for you, you need to change it, because it won’t change itself. This reminds me of what Samantha said in the first SATC movie, when she found herself in a relationship that wasn’t working for her, she ended it with these words, “I love you but I love me more. I’ve been in a relationship with myself for forty-nine years and that’s the one I need to work on.” It sort of goes with my tea bag quote. It’s hard to admit, but I feel like it is something that most people don’t do; most people don’t live for themselves.

Recently, I have been obsessed with a quote from Kazuro Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled. “That’s it, that’s it! All the way, take it all the way! Hold back nothing!” If you had no knowledge of the context of it whatsoever, you could still understand it. This sort of ties into the two quotes above as well. It is also saying to transport yourself forward; to stay on that path no matter what, though, the definition of what that “path” is can be ambiguous. If the exclamation points are too much for you, you can ignore them, but I like them; I feel that they add to the power of what the quote is trying to say.

There is so much more that can be read into these quotes above, I was just skimming the surface to show how great they truly are (these particular quotes and quotes in general). And, if you didn’t think that I was a nerd already…I even have a dictionary of quotations sitting on a book shelf at home ☺.