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Gretchen Lamb

"The most insane pride is that which oscillates between deifying oneself and despising oneself." --Kierkegaard

April 8th, 2007 Update: I have since ceased work on this website. I am also currently pursuing doctoral degree in Chemical Engineering at Princeton University. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am a Chemical Engineering undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Besides turning molecules in my head, I play in the Hopkins Symphony Orchestra, take lessons at Peabody Conservatory and cook. A friend once observed that I like take pleasure from the simplest things. I don't know if she's right but I love my French violin. I like to go to quiet coffee shops with a book or a good friend. I enjoy good food, coffee, music, books, peaceful naps, and good conversations. Albert Camus is a very special writer to me. Some of my favourite books include Stranger, Catch-22, Steppenwolf, La Historia de Cronopios y Famas, Immoralist. The list goes on. I adore the paintings of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. I like to look at pretty things, especially furnitures, buildings, antiques, dresses, stationary, mugs, postcards, and bookmarks. A letter from anyone brightens my day. My bedroom walls are covered by black and white postcards of portraits and theatrical scenes. I love film and wish I have more time to be better acquainted with them. I like flowers in my room, especially white roses with a blush of pink. These days I can usually be found sleeping at MSE Library (D Level), cooking, watering or talking to my plant "Plato," practicing, day dreaming, and wondering what my friends are doing at other universities. This is my first website and it was opened on January 1998. I hope you enjoyed your stay.

Some of my favourite quotes:

"When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter."--Albert Camus

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy"--Albert Camus, "An Absurd Reasoning" The Myth of Sisyphus

"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole time"--Albert Camus, Notebooks

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life." --Albert Camus.

"The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it." ---Albert Camus, Notebooks, June 1938

"I do not want to believe that death is a gateway to another life. For me, it is a closed door. I do not say it is a step we must all take, but that it is a horrible and dirty adventure."-- Albert Camus

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us . . . We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieves us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. " -- Franz Kafka

"Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come" -- Franz Kafka, The Diaries: 1910-1923, entry for 18 Oct. 1921.

"For, believe me, the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and enjoyment, is to live dangerously!"-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

"There are no moral phenomena at all, but onlya moral interpretation of phenomena"--Friedrich Nietzsche

"Every error, of whatever type, is a result of the degeneration of instinct and vitiation of the will: one has thereby nearly defined the bad. Everything good is instinct" Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

"La vida es sueno! Pero el dolor lo es tambien?" -- Miguel de Unamuno

"Longevity of life is weighed by events, experiences and impressions, not time. "

"A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep." -- W. H. Auden

"Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit"--Secession Building

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1998-9 by Gretchen Lamb
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