And In That Moment I Swear We Were Infinite

About

"And In That Moment I Swear We Were Infinite" is a memorable quote from the 1999 coming-of-age novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. Being one of the most celebrated lines from the book, the quote has been incorporated into a variety of Inspirational Photo Quotes on Tumblr, as well as spawning a series of image macro parodies based on the snowclone "And In That Moment I Swear We Were (X)."

Origin

The famous quote can be found on page 39 of Stephen Chbosky's 1999 young adult novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower in a passage describing a car ride into downtown with a group of friends:

Anyway, Patrick started driving really fast, and just before we got into the tunnel, Sam stood up, and the wind turned her dress into ocean waves. When we hit the tunnel, all the sound got scooped up into a vacuum, and it was replaced by a song on the tape player. A beautiful song called "Landslide." When we got out of the tunnel, Sam screamed this really fun scream, and there it was. Downtown. Lights on buildings and everything that makes you wonder. Sam sat down and started laughing. Patrick started laughing. I started laughing.
And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.

Spread

While the quote had emerged as the most memorable line of the book from the early onset of the novel's popularity in the early 2000s, the phrase saw its most remarkable resurgence in early 2012, more than a decade after its publication, when it became heavily associated with inspirational photo quotes as well as Nebula GIFs on personal microblogging services Tumblr and Pinterest. The viral spread of the quote throughout the year was soon met by criticisms of triteness and satirical image macros replacing the word "infinite" with a substitute noun, examples of which can be found on Cheezburger^[7], Memegenerator^[8], DeviantART^[9] and Quickmeme^[10], among numerous other sites.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References