Since high school, I have collected quotes. My senior year, I started keeping a list of quotes inside my locker. All kinds of quotes: song lyrics, quotes from books, lines from movies and TV shows, funny things my friends and relatives said, Bible quotes, cheesy sayings that resonated with me nonetheless. As the year went on, my friends gave me suggestions for what to include, and I added to it as I went.

Before college, as I was arming myself with dorm room decorations (including a poster from the first Harry Potter movie and another of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”), I decided that I wanted to display the quotes in a more “artistic” way. So I got some white posterboard and skinny Crayola markers, traced a bowl on the posterboard, cut out a circle, and wrote out the quotes in a spiral. And thus the “quote wheel” was born!

(I’ve been meaning to write this post forever, by the way. It was Christiana Krump’s idea. She mentioned it in a comment almost three years ago!)

I just thought it would be a fun thing to hang up in my dorm room, but the friends I made throughout college LOVED it. And college lends itself to quotes—I mean, this was back in the days of AIM away messages, which were made for both melodramatic quotes and the funny things your friends say. So the quote wheels expanded, and eventually I made separate “BC quote wheels” made entirely of funny things my friends said.

Here are some notable quotables, and a glimpse at where my mind was at from the fall of 2001 to the spring of 2006:

Song Lyrics

“In the end, only kindness matters.”

-My high school yearbook quote, from “Hands” by Jewel

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

-“Closing Time” by Semisonic—a standard quote for a graduating senior.

“Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”

-“Beautiful Boy” by John Lennon

Books

“You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He’d see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. ‘Why,’ he’d say, ‘what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.’ He’d never guess we’re not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it.”

-from The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

“It is our choices, Harry, that show who we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

-from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves, or rather loved in spite of ourselves.”

-from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Movies

“Talking about love is like dancing about architecture.”

-from Playing by Heart

“Thank God for the model trains, because if it wasn’t for those they wouldn’t have got the idea for the big trains.”

-from A Mighty Wind

“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

-from Forrest Gump

TV Shows

“Joey takes naked pictures of us and then he eats chicken and he looks at them!”

-Rachel on Friends

“It’s like you took a gun and stabbed me in the back right in front of my eyes!”

-Shawn on Boy Meets World

“Never give up on a miracle.”

-Mulder to Scully on The X-Files

Funny things my friends/relatives say

“You should ask Caroline to show you her new breast.”

-My mom to my dad—our swim coach was showing my sister a new way to do breaststroke, and my mom didn’t realize how that sounded until I pointed it out to her.

Me: We get Easter Monday off…what is Easter Monday, anyway?
Caroline: I don’t know, I think it’s the day where everyone just kind of sat back and said, “Damn, that was a cool thing he did!”

“Damn, I would have been so cool if I had lived in the early nineties!”

-My sister (born in 1986)

Me Being Dumb

“Wow! There’s a big thing of ice!”

-Referring to a pond I saw in the distance from a mountaintop when I was skiing

“The most investigated performer…that must mean…he did something BAD!”

-Me reasoning my way through a Trivial Pursuit question

Cheesy Anonymous Quotes that Resonated Nonetheless

“Everything is always okay in the end, so if it’s not okay, it is not yet the end.”

“To the world you may be one person, but to one person, you may be the world.”

“Don’t criticize someone until you walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you do criticize them, you’ll be a mile away and have their shoes!” (Yes, I realize this one is grammatically incorrect.)

Miscellaneous Quotes

“Be who you are and say what you think because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”
-Dr. Seuss

“Sad. Nothing more than sad. Let’s not call it a tragedy; a broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy.”

-Angela Carter

“People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something that one creates.”

– Thomas Szasz

BC Quotes!

“There’s this girl in my philosophy class who has the same scarf as me except mine’s red and hers is blue, and I just want to go up to her and say, ‘Hey, we have the same scarf except mine’s red and yours is blue.”

“And on the seventh day, God COULDN’T rest…he created Oompa-Loompas!”

“Ben’s in Worcester and Dave’s in Washington and I gave up alcohol for Lent, so I have nothing and no one to do this weekend!”