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All I Quotes

“I talked to Llewellyn and got a thick briefing packet with the key arguments on both sides. The problem, for those who wanted to stay in the EU, was that many of the arguments for Brexit were built on lies: about how much the UK paid into the European Union; about how Brexit wouldn’t hurt the British economy. Another problem was that the Brexit campaign was tapping into the same sense of nationalism and nostalgia that the Trump campaign was promoting back home: the days of Churchill, the absence of immigrants and intrusive international institutions. The arguments for staying in the EU were grounded in facts, not emotion: The EU was Britain’s largest market. The EU offered Britain a stronger voice in global affairs. Even the name of the campaign—Remain—sounded like a concession that life wasn’t going to be all that you hoped it would be.”

“I talked to my friend Frank on the phone that evening. Frank used to live in Vermont and would come to Springwater occasionally for retreats, and then he moved out to California to be a cook, which is where I met him. “I was at work chopping onions yesterday,” he says, “and suddenly I was filled with sadness … because here I am, I’ve got my dream, exactly what I wanted, I’m working at the restaurant I wanted to be at, I have a terrific place to live, and suddenly I was really sad because now I just have to chop the onions, you know?” Isn’t that exactly it? Chopping the onions.”

“I talked to my mother about it a lot. I asked her what it was like to grow up in New York and Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and I asked her about a woman leaving her husband. I asked her about how she would feel about that woman, and my mother grew up in the Church Of God In Christ, and she told me that the woman might be isolated because the other women thought she might go and come after their husbands. That's how they thought then.”

“I talked to my nephew today, he's afraid of the dark. Or was. I said, "Why are you afraid of the dark? In the darkness we find many beautiful things!" He said, "Like what?" And I said, "Like the Moon and the stars! We would never see them without the darkness! And have you ever been to a movie house before? Do you think it would be as fun if it wasn't dark inside? And all the creatures under the sea— they're always there, swimming beautifully in the darkness of the waters!" And he said, "Bad things like ghosts are just fairy tales, right?" Then I told him, "Even if there were ghosts all around, they would not change in the darkness; they would be just the same as they are in the light. Look, we live in a world where there are bad things but there's no difference between these things whether they are in the darkness or in the light! Everything good and bad is always there; what changes is what and when we can see them. And the darkness brings us many beautiful experiences that we wouldn't be able to see in the light." And then I gave him a piece of my son's meteorite stone, I told him that whenever he feels afraid in the dark, he can hold onto it and it should remind him that many beautiful things, like that meteorite, come from the darkness so there's really nothing to ever be afraid of.”

“I talked to one accountant, a very nice fellow who I would have been glad to have his family marry into mine. He said, "What these other accounting firms have done is very unethical. The [tax avoidance scheme] works best if it's not found out [by the IRS], so we only give it to our best clients, not the rest, so it's unlikely to be discovered. So my firm is better than the others." [Laughter] I'm not kidding. And he was a perfectly nice man. People just follow the crowd...Their mind just drifts off in a ghastly way.”

“I talked to over two hundred patients and family members about their experiences with aging, serious illnesses, and the big unfixables. But I also spoke with scores of physicians, and especially geriatricians, palliative care doctors, hospice nurses, and nursing home workers. The biggest thing I found was that when these clinicians were at their best, they were recognizing that people had priorities besides merely living longer. The most important and reliable way that we can understand what people's priorities are, besides just living longer, is to simply ask. And we don't ask.”

“I talked to people that I'd done theater with, older actors and stuff. There's a lot of people who go into the business, and they must think they're good, or they wouldn't be in it. Why do you think that you're good enough to go into the business and make money at it? So I really wanted to ask myself that question a lot. Because it was an important kind of thing that I was going to do. I really wanted to do it, I loved it, and I thought that I was good enough that I could make money at it. And that's really what it came down to.”

“I talked to Shailene Woodley the next day [after arrest]. She was fine, and she was very happy. She knew that it brought attention to a cause that she cared very much about. She was in high spirits and knew that was a possibility when she was protesting. The people who arrested her, if they were trying to prove a point of not to protest, they only helped the cause.”

“I talked wih her about the help he was going to need. He was going to need nursing care, a hospital bed, an air mattress to prevent bedsores, physical therapy to prevent his muscles from stiffening. Should we look at nursing homes? She was aghast. Absolutely not, she said. She'd had friends in the ones around town, and they'd appalled her. She could not imagine putting him in any of them. We'd come to the same place I have seen scores of patients come to, the same place I'd seen Alice Hobson come to. We were up against the unfixable. But we were desperate to believe that we weren't up against the unmanageable. Yet short of calling 911 the next time trouble hit, and letting the logic and.momentum of medical solutions take over, what were we to do?”

“I talked with people starting up in the middle of the recession and employees, and supplies and office space were cheap. As far as companies that are already in existence, many became more creative with how they spent their money. A lot of them stopped wasting money that they didn't know they were wasting after they looked hard at their businesses. Some had to change business models because of the economy. Their market didn't exist or wasn't as big anymore.”

“I talked yesterday about caring, I care about these moldy old riding gloves. I smile at them flying through the breeze beside me because they have been there for so many years and are so old and so tired and so rotten there is something kind of humorous about them. They have become filled with oil and sweat and dirt and spattered bugs and now when I set them down flat on a table, even when they are not cold, they won't stay flat. They've got a memory of their own. They cost only three dollars and have been restitched so many times it is getting impossible to repair them, yet I take a lot of time and pains to do it anyway because I can't imagine any new pair taking their place. That is impractical, but practicality isn't the whole thing with gloves or with anything else.”

“I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.”

“I tap the link, and it opens up a bright, cheery, robin's-egg blue web page. P&P Bake, it's called. It's clearly one of those WordPress blogs converted into a website, but that doesn't make it any less captivating--- the pictures on the posts are so vivid, I can practically taste them through the screen. I scroll down, glancing at the dessert names, lingering on the pictures. The most recent is Tailgate Trash Twinkies, which are apparently a homemade cake roll infused with PBR; I scroll down and see A-Plus Angel Cake, and Butter Luck Next Time Butter Cookies, and then--- And then, on Halloween, there's an entry for Monster Cake. My breath stops before it can leave my chest, my entire body stiffening on the couch like a corpse. There's no mistaking it. I may have a bad habit of eating Pepper's baked goods so fast, it threatens the time-space continuum, but the bright colors and gooey mess of that cake are so distinct in my mind and in my taste buds, I could see it in another life and immediately identify it. Yet my brain still refuses to process it, and I'm still scrolling as if I'll blink and it will disappear, a vivid, sleep-deprived teenage hallucination. But the further I scroll the worse it gets. The So Sorry Blondies. The Pop Quiz Cake Pops she and Pooja were eating the other day. A few things I've never heard of before, with irreverent, silly names, some of which must be Paige's, but others that are so distinctly Pepper it stings to read.”

“I tapped a few keys, wrote, 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life,' and stared at the sentence. Who had initially said that? Honestly, it wasn’t all that inspirational. If you were in a really dark place facing an even darker future—for example, held hostage in a mountain cabin by a serial killer—wouldn't a message like that make you want to slit your wrists? (Natalie - Secondary Feathers)”

“I tapped around on my new Miracle Phone—a gift from Joseph—as I listened to the discussion about our next move. I wasn’t trying to be rude, but I’d recently become addicted to this one game on my Miracle Phone. Really, I was listening. I could multitask like no other. Trust me, there’s an app for that.”

“I tasted injustice and the special horror of seeing its perpetrators flourish. How frequent and how bitter is this aspect of human wretchedness. The wicked prosper in front of our eyes and go on and on and on prospering. What a blessing it must have been once to be able to believe in hell. A great and deep human consolation was lost to us when that ancient and respectable belief faded from our minds.”