Walking the Wall

Somewhere I have an index card box full of quotes that I have collected over the years, it drives me crazy that I can’t find it. It’s not like I couldn’t find many of those quotes by typing in a word or a phrase on google along with the word “quote” and there it would pop up easy as anything–for the most part. But many of them were quotes from books I had read and bent the bottom corner indicating a passage I liked; when I was done with the book I’d put the best quotes into the box.Every once in awhile I’ll go on a stint of searching for it, I thought I’d lent it to my sister who was scrap booking, I thought it was in a box in my daughters room full of scrapbook supplies of hers, but no luck. I know I wouldn’t have thrown it away, so some day it will pop up and I’ll be overjoyed to open it up and flip through the alphabet and remember this that and the other about why that particular quote stood out enough for me to take the time to write it on a card and file it away.

I get the same pleasure, however, out of grabbing an old favorite off of my book shelf and running my finger nail along the bottom corner, stopping at the bent ends and looking over the page to see what pops out as something that might have caught my eye.

I just pulled one off randomly, Moonlight and Vines by Charles de Lint (one of my favorite authors, certainly my favorite short story author):

“Inside and out, same thing. The wheel doesn’t change, only the way we see it. Door opens either way. Both sides in, both sides out. Trouble is, we’re always on the wrong side” (196).

and/or

“It’s like the woman who feels the cage of her bones, those ribs they’re a prison for her. She’s clawing, clawing at those bone bars, making herself sick. Inside, where you can’t see it, but outside, too” (same page).

further along

“You can put aside all the unhappiness you’ve accumulated by opening a book. Listening to music” (230).

Anyway, I tend to write a lot in books now, but I enjoy going back to older books where all I did was bend the page…I wonder if when I look at them now I’m picking out the same passage I did when I first bent it, or if now that I’m a little bit (or a lot, depending on when I first read the book) of a different person.