The Rest is Silence...

As an English Literature graduate, writer and Certified Poetry Therapist, quotations have had, and continue to have, a huge significance in my life. From the time I began to read, certain phrases attracted my attention, mainly because they were congruent with my own thoughts and feelings at the time.

As a teenager suffering from the anguish of jealous love I was both tormented and comforted with quotations from Othello.

 “But there where I have garnered up my heart,

Where either I must live or bear no life,
The fountain from which my current runs
Or else dries up—to be discarded thence!
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!”

 When my mother died I wrote on the card attached to her wreath, "Nothing left remarkable/beneath the visiting moon", from “Antony and Cleopatra”, and later, on my father’s, “And you my father, there on the sad height,/ Curse, bless me now”, from “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”, as it spoke to me of his sadness and isolation since my mother’s death and also of our ambivalent relationship.
 

When I first had a mobile phone, I had "The rest is silence" as my screen message. I wanted to remind myself that there is a finite amount of time "to live out loud". In times of stress and anxiety I come back to the simplicity of “Breathe my dear” and “This too shall pass”.

But the two quotations that I wish I had been aware of from a much younger age are “Know thyself”, attributed to numerous Greek sages and spoken by Plato's Socrates, and “Only connect” from E M Forster's "Howards End". So much wisdom contained in just four words.