“I had never realized how crackling and alive someone’s papers could be. I always assumed that archives would be as dull as an accountant’s ledger. But instead, they made me feel as though I had drilled my way inside a still-humming life. It was all there—the details and the ordinariness, the asides and incidentals, and even the misfires and failures that might otherwise have gone unmentioned. These are the things that make up an actual existence, the things a person wouldn’t think to share because they seemed inconsequential, or wouldn’t be willing to share because they seemed too intimate, but they are at the heart of who we are. “—Rin Tin Tin, The Life and The Legend, Susan Orlean
“…the moments of our lives go out of existence before we’re conscious of having lived them. It’s only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives. Those moments are our lives. Or maybe it’s more like those moments are the dots and what we call our lives are the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves…We can never predict when those few special moments will occur…There are certain people, not that many, who enter one’s life with the power to make those moments happen. Maybe that’s what falling in love means, the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves.” – The Paper Lantern, Stuart Dybek
I think everyone should be forced to keep a notebook, a file, a document, a portfolio full of quotations. There are no further requirements but to have one. You choose where they come from and which or how many you keep. Then, when you meet someone, you exchange portfolios, and you explore everything that the new person treasures and holds dear. And you decide whether or not you’d like to continue talking, exploring the blank spaces in between the quotations they’ve written down to connect what they love with who they are.
