30 Days: Quoth the Raven

[owlmoose]

renay asked me to share some favorite quotations.

This is tough, because I enjoy a good quote, but I don't tend to save them. In fact, when I want to quote something, I usually have go dig into my archives, or the Internet. This wasn't always true -- as a teenager, I started keeping a book of quotes, which I would write down in colored marker in a blank book that I purchased specifically for that purpose. Song lyrics, mostly, although prose and poetry quotations as well. A quick dig through some storage boxes turned up the book, and the vintage of the song lyrics would suggest that it was mostly written during college. Most of them unattributed; the lyrics I recognize for the most part, but others come from sources I can't remember. If only I had noted whom I heard say Backrubs and blood drives are evidence that there is a god on earth or A curious sense of unreality suffuses most parts of my life.

Given that the last quote in the book is a Barenaked Ladies lyric that was almost certainly meant to be a dig at my ex-boyfriend, I probably stopped writing them down sometime in 1998, which is just around the time that any famous quotation or song lyric I wanted would have become findable on the Web. And so I stopped keeping track. When I do save a quotation, it tend to be about words or books or language, like the three that live in my journal profile. I enjoy matching a quote to a situation -- going through that quote journal, I was pretty well able to guess what (or whom) I was thinking about when I wrote each one down -- which makes it harder for me to pull out a quotation when I'm not thinking about anything specific.

So here is one perennial favorite, a line of poetry I have long loved, and an appropriate way to sum up any personal entry:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

-- Walt Whitman, A Song of Myself

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