Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, the movie that changed the way we all think about Post-Its, came out twenty years ago this April. Which makes two whole decades that I have been quoting this movie at every possible opportunity.
In honor of this important milestone, here are the top 20 times that Romy and Michele had the perfect thing to say for any occasion you can possibly think of:
What is it gilds the trees and clouds,
And paints the heavens so gay,
But yonder fast-abiding light
With its unchanging ray?Lo, when the sun streams through the wood,
Upon a winter’s morn,
Where’er his silent beams intrude
The murky night is gone. – “The Inward Morning” by Henry David Thoreau
“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes.
We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens.
And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
In the Summer 2016 issue of The Paris Review, Dag Solstad is asked about the line he wrote: “Since my father died, I have not been myself. I have been the writer Dag Solstad.”
“I had strong doubts about publishing that passage. Is it a little too grand, a little too clever? Is it a statement I can stand by? But I decided I had to leave it in. Is it true? Well, it’s there. That’s really all I can say. It’s there and it’s meant to be there.”
Dag Solstad has been called the Philip Roth of Scandinavian literature. His father died when he was eleven.
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