The perfect quote?

Don’t you hate that?

Sometime in the last three days, I read the perfect quote.  It summed up a concept that I have since given a lot of mental air time.  I have visited the idea at least once in conversation of the deep and meaningful kind, in my own imperfect and fumbling words.  The quote expressed with rare precision and delicacy the sort of paradox that only the most universal and enduring life truths hinge upon.  It was the type of perfect quote that you read to anyone who will let you, share on Facebook, and enjoy the bubbling forth of creative reply.

But I’ve forgotten where it was.

I have retraced my virtual steps, and even gone so far as to walk around my house and gaze about each room, in case the source pages should leap into focus in my refreshed memory.  But to no avail. 

I try to remember.  I recall the moment of deep, dizzy recognition, a sudden intake of breath, the feel of the smile spreading across my face, and I read it again, this time the swirling words absorbed more slowly. A pause as the crystalline weight of the idea spreads inside my mind.  And then, a distraction, the sudden need to tear myself away from the passage, and a choice to put it down. 

Somewhere in the intervening busy-ness, it has slipped away from me, like a cunning teacher, or a secretive sage.

But I still feel the energy of the message.  I feel it in my solar plexus, as if the words are still connected to my body.  Perhaps the quote has escaped me deliberately, so I must try harder to connect the dots, learn the lesson, know the truth of it in my own way.  Or maybe the wisdom has not left me at all, but has burrowed deeper into my consciousness, in order to expand and find new expression in me, in my words - in my own perfect quote.