My sophomore year of high school I started a collection of my favorite quotes. Every time I found a line in a book, or a poem, or some other medium that particularly stuck with me, I would write it down so I could remember it later. Along the way, I started choosing one of these quotes to write on my palm each day. I would scroll through my list, and depending on how I felt, I would choose a phrase to trace with sharpie on my hand.
Considering the fact that my parents are 100% against tattoos, they weren't exactly thrilled about my temporary ink. But it was too late; collecting these quotes had become an addiction. I would aggressively interview people about their favorite lines in their favorite books. I became an active member on BrainyQuotes and GoodReads. I filled pages and pages with the words that I considered beautiful.
While I recognize that the phrases which stand out to me might not necessarily stand out to someone else, I want to share a small portion of my favorites. Maybe they will mean nothing to you. Maybe you will find them beautiful. And maybe one of them finds its way onto your hand at some point in the future.
1. “I asked myself about the present; how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)
2. “A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” Oscar Wilde
3. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” L.P. Hartley (The Go-Between)
4. “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen (Anthem)
5. “We all want to break our orbits, float like a satellite gone wild in space, run the risk of disintegration. We all want to take our lives in our own hands and hurl them out among the stars.” David Bottoms
6. “If the silence takes you then I hope it takes me too.” Death Cab for Cutie (Soul Meets Body)
7. “Be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.” Max Ehrmann (Desiderata)
8. “Who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?” Virginia Wolfe (To the Lighthouse)
9. “Wonder did not depend on gods and demons and the dream of an afterlife…It welled up out of a recognition that we are made of the same matter as the stars and the oceans and all things else.” Stephen Greenblatt (The Swerve)
10. “These are the days that must happen to you.” Walt Whitman (Song of the Open Road)
11. “Out past ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, and the world is too full to talk about.” Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi (13th century)
12. “One day I will find the right words and they will be simple.” Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)
13. “Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” Sarah Williams (The Old Astronomer)
As a result of my addiction, I have discovered something interesting. Almost everybody I asked could instantly tell me what their favorite quote was. As humans, we inherently store away the words that we identify with, and that hold meaning for us. So I encourage you to start your own list. Maybe you don't have to take it as far as I did, but next time you read a line in a book, or hear a phrase in a speech, that particularly stands out to you, write it down. There is something very beautiful in recognizing the power of someone else's words.
