I WONDER...ABOUT QUOTING AND "QUOTING" WHILE LOUNGING AND "LOUNGING"

A reoccurring question that has flitted throughout my adolescence has been the origin of the ability to make true and absolute claims. The, what has seemed to me, allusive capability to take things that are abstract, unintelligible and make them concrete; for example, while I was scanning a book at the library I came across a quote on love, an abstraction that many people have tried countless times to put into a box and label. The quote read, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” To this quote I nodded and read on thinking of how beautifully the comparison was made. Beside the quote lay another, which was shorter yet equally valued in the same text, “Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.” In comparison, this quote was silly. It was false in my eyes compared to the undoubted truth in the previous line. Why was this? Both stated about love something that I could not prove, for love is abstract and personal; if I could not prove it, I reasoned, how could Carl Jung or Charles M. Schulz, creators of the two quotes, have any expertise over one another on this same area?
The idea of expertise began to grow into a fascination. Who are these people making outlandish claims about the world when they themselves have as much factual evidence on love and creativity and being and self as I do? Are they older? Are they more educated? And more importantly, do I have the capability to make these wild and un-factual claims as well?
The end question is especially important because I had hit the time in my life where I should be able to start putting things together; my goal in life is X and I will do it by perusing Y and I will live with Z in my heart. What would the rest of my life be defined by? What word, what quote, would sum me up in a pretty little equation?

The sad thing is that we are too complex for pretty little equations that Einstein pulls from his hair; and life is too abstract to pin down in one hundred and forty characters or less. The truth is no truth; but how can we live with that? How can we live without a definition?
We can’t: that’s the simple answer. We need a word, a phrase, anything to guide us that seems greater than ourselves. We are bound by the words and transfixed by their meaning. We hear them, we swallow them, and then regurgitate them when needed all over the web and texts and books and yoga classrooms and school walls. It’s the sad replacement for a lack of an answer to a large and grandiose question, but it’s all we’ve really got. So I’ll leave you with another inspiring quote to fill the blank space where your love for quotes used to be: “I pick my favorite quotations and store them in my mind as ready amour, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence.”- Robert Burns