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Friends and family often joke that I "have a quotation for every ocassion". I cannot argue against this. It is true.

From a young age, I loved to read, write, learn, listen. I would devour books and memorise words and phrases I found in them. I would read poetry and recite it to myself, usually poems of love and, as I got older, poems of teenage angst, romance and passion. I would quote my favourite poets and authors, in class, with family, to myself. My first meaningful relationship with a quotation began at the age of fifteen, when I first read Christina Rossetti's "How Do I Love Thee?" How could anyone not fall in love with the thought of loving someone "to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach". This quotation has grown with me, becoming even more prominent in my life as I began to feel this way about the wonderful man who is now my husband.

My passion for words and meaningful quotations did not stop at the written word though; I soon began quoting films and tv characters, when the words meant something to me. All it takes is a few simple words to mean something, to tickle my fancy, to touch my emotions and they stick with me. The sources are various and extensive, from Sex and the City to Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, Gone With the Wind to the less well know The Family Stone. Novels, textbooks, poems, songs, magazines, celebrities, the people I meet every day- the quotations that I have loved and return to time and time again, come from so many different elements of my life.

Since 2003, I have collected the quotations that I have not wanted to forget, in a little book. I continue to return to them.

What matters most in a quotation is the effect it has on you. One sentence can affect two people very differently; one can see many different things in it that another might not. If a quotation can mean something to you, bring you solace, motivate you, bring a tear to your eye, recapture a memory, change your thoughts or even simply bring a smile to your face, then it has had it's desired effect. It is a quotation you will want to come back to again and again.

Here are a few quotations that I like to look at every once in a while. Hopefully, they will be to your liking. If I can bring one tear, one smile, one memory to the forefront with just one of these quotations, I, and the person who wrote it, will have succeeded.

"T'is strange Men should be so fond of being thought wickeder than they are."- Daniel Defoe

"They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."- Andy Warhol

"I'll not listen to reason. Reason always means what someone else has got to say."- Elizabeth Gaskell

"Always there remain portions of our heart which noone is able to enter, invite them as we may."- Mary Dixon Thayer

"Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you may look back and realise they were the big things."- Antonio Smith

"One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star."- Nietzche

"To be blessed with a mind that can write often means you'll be cursed with a mind that will torture you."- Caroline Aherne

"We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us."- Joseph Campbell

"I am someone who is looking for love, real love, ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-each-other love..."- Sex and the City

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-/ I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference."- Robert Frost

Learn more about this author, Michelle Harper Davies.
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