I love quotes. They are very often the best way to sum up whatever it is you are trying to say. And they do it with such panache. Which makes sense since that is precisely why they are quotes. There is something about the way the words are put together in that way that just rings. It’s like a beautiful melody that you wake up humming, yet barely remember until you hear it somewhere else. You can pretend to be serious, you can’t pretend to be witty, but you can steal wit effectively. And it is a great inside joke when you do it.
Reading lots of everything about everything and listening to whatever comes into range is a great way to pick up quotes, as long as you have some way to store all that information. It’s fine if you don’t, but only if everyone already knows that you read and listen to as much as you can. Inevitably you will misquote something, which is fine because misquotation is the pride and privilege of the widely-read. Obviously because a widely-read person never quotes accurately for the rather obvious reason that they are widely-read. So just learn to laugh at your mistakes and move on. There are always three good reasons to walk away from anything.
My one wish, though, is that I could be smart enough to actually come up with really good quotes. I guess I’d have to be a genius then. Well, everyone is a genius at least once a year it’s just that real geniuses have their bright ideas closer together. That’s what I wish would happen to me. But genius has its limits… The funny thing is that genius cannot be learned. I think that genius is more the application of an education — education being that which survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. Or perhaps geniuses are just those who have found out what the love doing with their life and have found people willing to pay them for it. Or maybe geniuses are those who dream things that never were and say, “why not?”
Or maybe I just like screwing with people and am really an intellectual kleptomaniac. I say a lot of things. I love thoughts and discussion and banter and parsing and playing the clown. I love nothing more that to find a weak spot in a statement and push it to see what happens. I am that person who will press your bruise to see if it hurts. The funny thing is that I will simultaneously be in pain with you and yet smile to see that my hypothesis was correct. Or maybe I just like to think that I am really like that…
I am more of an enigma than people give me credit for, and less of on than I would like to be. And I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say, but I love to see where the words lead. Once I get started, I’m hard-pressed to tell you where I’ll end. I wish more people had as much fun with language as I do; they might just laugh more and waste fewer days.