number twenty six: a well timed quote

"We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you’ll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there’s still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of these loveable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really, want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else."

chuck klosterman, you speak to my very soul. or at least what's left of it...

i've always connected with words. i have a bit of a love affair with them at times... i get lost in how the letters tangle together to form such perfection. and sometimes, a mess of tangled letters combine to create a mesmerizing phrase that i get lost in for a moment.

who hasn't had this same experience? you're paging through a book and suddenly you get blindsided by three little lines. isn't that the way it is when you think you've fallen in love? you get blindsided by a portion of the person (sometimes overlooking the mediocrity of the rest of the person). the same can be said about connecting with a quote, we get entranced by a paragraph and forget the rest of the book leading to this point was a wash of bullshit.

well, i'm glad that i seem to fall in love with passages far more often than i do men.

the quote i posted above is one of my favorites. i've been thinking a lot about literature and men (two of my favorite vices). Klosterman is one of my favorite writers- i've gobbled up just about everything he's dished out (sans 'Eating The Dinosour' which i could NOT connect with). this quote to me sums up why i think quotes are so perfectly wonderful- if timed right they can make sense of your life in a way you hadn't been able to before. a few years back, i was in this black hole of a break up, unable to get a grasp on anything. reading this though, it cleared everything up and expressed everything i hadn't been able to find the words to.

isn't that the point about quotes- we identify with the ones that express our feelings/thoughts/ideas better than we can express them for ourselves.

i'm forever grateful for the little patch of words above... and i'm grateful to be writing about things that are 'utterly wonderful' again. please let me know if you all have any topics to suggest for me ;)