There’s an old, wooden box in our attic. It looks like a treasure chest. What’s actually inside it is not nearly as interesting as what I find when I open it only in my mind. The last time I did, it was full of…sentences.
Not the kind of sentence you hope will have a lot of impact when you say it. Like “I do” when you get married or “I quit” when you resign from a job you hate. The kind of sentence a friend might drop only in passing, but that will mysteriously visit you again at just the right time.
When Einstein said that “two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, but I’m not so sure about the universe,” he wasn’t gunning for a place in the books of history. He was probably making a joke at dinner. It was a line and then we turned it into a quote. All quotes start as sentences, but very few as bold declarations. It is that second kind, the inconspicuous kind, that life is truly made of.
That’s why I find something different each time I open the box. Some are things people have said to me, others have found me along the way, but they all made me think a lot when they did. From third grade until today, here’s my life in 77 quotes.
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