Quotes

When I was changing careers and going part-time to Chubb Institute for computers I kept with me a small copy of a Monet print: Girl With Parasol. I also kept several quotes and literary passages. Both helped me get through all the technical stuff by balancing the left side of my brain with the right.

As a reminder, I was an English major in college and not completely technical. I've add several quotes and passages since. Below are the words I still have hanging in my cubical at work.

You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever. The living are not what they were, the dead die again and again, and at last for good.

Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March)

How strange to think there was a time when all those first times were yet to come. The first time we kissed...the first time she shed her clothes for me; the first time my bare palms pressed her bare breasts; the first time...Then suddenly all these first times were passed through, like a dizzy mist; there was this woman who had stepped out of the possibility into actuality, as if I had validated her existence. To put your arms around another. To say, be mine, be here, always be here. And then one day, she was gone; where she had been there was air.

Graham Swift (Ever After)

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.

Benjamin Disraeli

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.

William Osler

You're only out when you stay out and you stay out when you don't believe.

David + David (Swallowed by the Cracks)

The clouds above us join and separate,

The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns.

Life is like that, so why not relax?

Who can stop us from celebrating?

Lu Yu

His death was quiet; rain on the sea.

I know only fragments of what Athos' death contained: no less than all the elements and their powers, ten thousand names for things, the humility of lichen. The instincts of migration: stars, magnetism, angles of light. The energy of time that alters mass. The element that reminded him most of his country, salt: olives, cheese, vine leaves, sea foam, sweat. Fifty years of intimacy with Kostas and Daphne, his memory of their bodies at twenty; his own body, as a child, at fifteen, at twenty-five and fifty, the selves that remain as we age, just as words remain on the page though darkness erases them. Two wars, which are both the rotten part of the fruit that can't be cut away and the fruit; that there's nothing a man will not do to another, nothing a man will not do for another. But who was the woman who first unbuttoned for him the two birds of her breasts in a night garden? Did he remember Helen's hands holding his or were they in his hair or were her arms outstreched when his head rested on her thighs? Did they imagine children, what words did they regret? Who as the first woman whose hair he washed, what song could have been his own voice singing of love when he first heard it?

When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.

Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)

There was a wall in him that no one reached. Not even Clara, though she assumed it had deformed him. A tiny stone swallowed years back, that had grown with him and which he carried around because he could not shed it. His motive for hiding it had probably extinguished itself years earlier...Patrick and his small unimportant stone. It had entered him at the wrong time in his life. Then it had been a flint of terror. He could have easily turned aside at the age of seven or twenty, and just spat it out and kept on walking, and forgotten it by the next street corner.

So we are built.

Now there is a moat around her he will never cross again. He will not even cup his hands to drink its waters. As if, having travelled all that distance to enter the castle in order to learn its wisdom for the grand cause, he now turns and walks away.

Michael Ondaatje (In the Skin of a Lion)