Using a quote from a television show to introduce this blog is probably cheesy but, I love the cheese. Cheesiness might just be what makes my entertainment saturated mind work so well. Let me get to my point and I promise I have one. This is part one of the three week journey I’m going to take you on. I want to show you why I use quotes as my titles and how they really can say everything. This first part is about quotes from books.
I’m not going to use classic quotes from novels and plays. There will be no “to be or not to be.” I’ve chosen three quotes that I’ve had in my away messages at different times in the past year and will use these quotes to help prove my point.
The first quote is from the book The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart. The book is about friendship and if the title didn’t say enough about the grandness of friendship within its pages then the story will continue to prove why friendship grow and die and always remain in the back of our minds. The book shows that friendships like love never truly die and we will forever think back to the friend we left behind for whatever reason.
“I mean, you’re so familiar, but then you’re not. I don’t know the rules for how we should interact. When I saw you, my first feeling was relief, you know, like thank God, Camazon’s here, she’ll understand, I can tell her everything…but then I remembered that’s not who we are to each other anymore.” She looked up. “Is it?”
“There’s a reason for that,” I said.
When I read this book for the first time, I had just lost a not so nice best friend to not so nice circumstances and that line just explained everything in my life. A friend asking for forgiveness she doesn’t deserve and still just expecting you to be by her side. It’s also about holding onto grudges for longer than necessary. People grow up and people change and maybe what they did to you at 19 isn’t something they could ever do to you now.
The Saturday issue of the Journal News, the local paper in Westchester County, ran an article on cutting ties and how sometimes breaking off a friendship is just as bad as getting out of a relationship. The article says, “The dumped pal gets a free ticket on an emotional rollercoaster ride that can last for years. She might endlessly rehash the past, doubt herself, blamer her friend, seethe with anger, even go into therapy.” Gal-pals are what holds a woman’s life together when everything else has fallen apart and that is what the quote from The Myth of You and Me is trying to explain and what the entire book is about. It’s about the familiar in an unfamiliar situation.
The next two quotes are life lessons hidden as conversation or narrative. The first one is from God-Shaped Hole by Tiffani Debartolo. The quote says something that every person should realize and live by: “Fear won’t keep you safe from being hurt.” People spend a lot of time being afraid and yet fear does not really do anything for a person. Being afraid of something simply either prolongs the inevitable or leads down a path that can cause pain anyway. Whenever I read this book, which is at least once a year, I note this line. I try to apply it to my life because it’s so easy to be afraid of love, friendship, loss and life in general but, some of the best things I have done in life were scary and it took faith to do them.
The last quote I’ll give you is from my all-time favorite book and it also deals with fear. The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen is a book about overcoming fear and taking chances. The entire book leads up to this quote, the truth about forever.
“Forever was so many different things. It was always changing; it was what everything was really about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening.”
This quote says everything for me. We talk about being with people forever and how something took forever but this here, this quote is really want forever is. It’s whatever you want it to be. It is always happening. This quote makes me realize that forever is not this unattainable goal that we all wish to reach, but rather it is reality. It is this moment, it is your first love and your first heartache, and it is college. Forever is a smile.
I start my blog with a quote because it is the most universal and personal writing I can imagine. It is part of something else and yet every person reacts to want it says differently. Just as you all react different to my blogs. They come from within me but how you take them in is about you and only you. Those quotes might just find their way into your hearts and minds and became mottos for you – because I know they are mine life lessons.
