How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
The possibility of finding a live mouse behind every door I opened each morning filled me with nausea and made me tremble. It was not that I was afraid of the mouse itself (I'm not that silly), but if I ever did find one, I knew I would have to do something about it. (1.19)
Before Slocum earned enough money to live in his Connecticut suburb, he lived with his family in a New York apartment. There was a mouse problem, and it made him uncomfortable that his wife wanted him to do something about all the critters.
Quote #5
In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by at least one person. Each of these one hundred and twenty people is afraid of the other one hundred and nineteen, and all of these one hundred and forty-five people are afraid of the twelve men at the top who helped found and build the company and now own and direct it. (2.1)
Just about everyone in the company is afraid of somebody else in the company. A lot of this stems from a lack of communication, but it also probably stems from the fact that when you get right down to it, the office is a dog-eat-dog kind of place. There's all kinds of competition going on behind those smiles, and nobody is that concerned about wrecking another person.
Quote #6
But this feeling of failure, this depressing sense of imminent catastrophe and public shame, persists even here, where I do good work steadily and try to make no enemies. It's just that I find it impossible to know exactly what is going on behind the closed doors of all the offices on all the floors occupied by all the people in this and all the other companies in the whole world who might say or do something, intentionally or circumstantially, that could bring me to ruin. (2.5)
Slocum tortures himself with the thought that what lies behind closed doors is out to get him. Perhaps there are people conspiring to find out something about him that will mean the end of him, though he can't imagine what that something is.