I launched my website last night.   My husband and I had a private launch party at IHOP this morning.   Last year I had hinted that I wanted to have a website and he gave me a domain name for Christmas and then introduced me to a talented website developer.   I told her I wanted a quotation field, and yesterday, as I began to add content  to my site I also began to add my favorite quotations.   The first source I turned to was my “Quote Box,”  a small metal box filled with 3×5 index cards of quotations I collected in high school and through college.

I had filed them meticulously, with bibliographic references on the back of each card and the date I added it to the box.    As I sorted through the cards I was able to chronicle my eras of idealism, my period of interest in Chinese poetry, the influential class I took on Philosophy of Science at Bryn Mawr College.   I could see my handwriting deteriorate from its former neat printing or cursive writing.  Some quotes were even typed on an old manual typewriter.    Although I still love quotations,  I wish I had maintained the habit of collecting them.  What would have been the quotations for the thirty years since I stopped adding to my box until I started searching for quotations with renewed vigor yesterday?  I fear that the deterioration of my handwriting paralleled the change from the idealism of my youth to the too often cynicism of my adulthood.    One of the quotations I stumbled upon yesterday was from F. Scott Fitzgerald, “At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”   I am hoping that as I approach fifty-five I can climb again, not the hill of my youth, but a different hill of hope and optimism that I have forgotten for too long.