Quotations in my Cubicle

When things are not to crazy, I read at work. (When I am caught up of course). When I am reading at work and stumble upon an interesting or memorable line, I jot it on a post-it and hang it in my cubicle. Here are the quotations I have compiled in this way in the past 6 months. I love every one of them.

“The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that brutes cannot write books. In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet I remain myself… I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.” – CS Lewis

“The terror of the unforeseen is what the study of history hides. It turns disaster into epic” – Philip Roth The Plot Against America

“Normal humans run away from monsters… I never claimed to be normal, just human” – Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse

“The ocean is tolerant, except a couple of times a day it gives up in disgust and goes off by itself and hides, And that my dear accounts for the tides” – Ogden Nash

“Lost, there, struggling against death, it was hard to accept the presence of another, even more insidious enemy: men like you” – Alessandro Baricco Ocean Sea

“Near and Far, near and far, I’m happy where you are” - Ogden Nash

“A conscious, rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown” – James Joyce, Ulysses

"There is a man sleeping in the grass. And over him is gathering the greatest storm of all his days. Such lightning and thunder will come there has never been seen before, bringing death and destruction. People hurry home past him, to places safe from danger. And whether they do not see him there in the grass, or whether they fear to halt even a moment, but they do not wake him, they let him be” – Alan Paton Cry, the Beloved Country

“Catastrophic cataclysms which make terror the basis of human mentality” – James Joyce Ulysses

“A clattered milk can, a postman’s double knock, a paper read, reread while lathering, re-lathering the same spot, a shock, a shoot, with thought of aught he sought thought fraught with naught. Might cause a faster rate of shaving and a nick” – James Joyce Ulysses

“In every space there is a hint of more” – Gertrude Stein

“The enemy was within her, not before her, and all of her strength was as nothing against an enemy like that. U have seen many lives wrecked in that absurd way. But a ship, never” – Alessandro Baricco Ocean Sea

"Show the choice and make no more mistakes than yesterday" - Gertrude Stein