Benjamin > Benjamin's Quotes

“Those who return are labeled retreads. Asked to explain why they’re back, they’d say it was because they missed the medicine: the IVs and the drugs, the competence, and the unquestioned confidence they earned through years of experience that did them no good anywhere else. Turns out in the real world, you don’t get to snake a breathing tube down a dying woman’s throat. When you have a regular job, no one gets shot dead in the clay or has back-to-back seizures in the county jail. No one hands you their limp child and places not only their trust but their entire world in your hands. Which is too bad. There’s a strange exhilaration not just in having done those things and done them well but in knowing that eventually you’ll be called on to do them again.”
― Kevin Hazzard, A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic's Wild Ride to the Edge and Back

“Everyone who sticks around and anyone who’s ever left and considered a comeback knows that there are better places—and better money—in almost any other aspect of the medical field. So why stay? Because the modern world is orderly and practical. The sun goes up, the sun goes down, bills are due, the carpool line starts over there. But it’s not so for everyone, and once I realized that, it was hard to walk away.”
― Kevin Hazzard, A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic's Wild Ride to the Edge and Back

“I miss the madness. I miss being out at night, running through streets alive with the dead and dying, the drunk, the crazy, the angry, those in need, and those who only think they are. I miss the distant pop of a pistol and the long fading howl of a dealer who’s spotted a cop. I miss fighting meth heads in seedy motels, I miss the crack houses and flophouses, the chaos of a shooting scene. I miss the projects after dark. I miss the sense of duty, of honor, of humor, the sense of having lost myself somewhere, somehow, in a very strange world. I even miss the fear of mistakes. Whatever it was that brought us here, it’s everything else that kept us around.”
― Kevin Hazzard, A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic's Wild Ride to the Edge and Back

“Medics don’t have to be heroic or tough or even good people. They simply have to enjoy the madness. The normal reaction to gunshots or screaming or house fires or someone collapsing in a messy heap is to get away, to back off, not necessarily to ignore it, perhaps, but not to stumble in half-cocked. And really—aside from a driver’s license and a high school diploma—that’s what this job takes. A willingness to walk in unprotected when we clearly should walk away. A desire to take part but just as often to bear witness.”
― Kevin Hazzard, A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic's Wild Ride to the Edge and Back

“So why are medics here? Because panic and death, near death, even your own, is a peculiar drug, and whether or not it’s what the injured and the sick and the desperate want to hear, the people who show up do so because they like it. Disasters, even the small ones, mean freedom. Freedom to bend the rules, break the rules, disregard the rules. Maybe I don’t even know the rules, just make them up as I go along. The people who stay are the ones who like those moments and all that comes with them, even the hard parts.”
― Kevin Hazzard, A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic's Wild Ride to the Edge and Back

“in moments of high emotion—whether they’re triggered by anger or envy, humiliation or resentment—if the next thing you’re going to say makes you feel better, then it’s probably the wrong thing to say. This is one of the finer maxims that I’ve discovered in life. And you can have it, since it’s been of no use to me.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“If we earn fifty cents an hour, we admire the rich and pity the poor, and we reserve the full force of our venom for those who make a penny more or a penny less.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“It took me a moment to realize that it was the sound of relief. He sounded like one who is sitting on the curb in a strange city in the aftermath of a hotel fire, having nearly lost nothing but his life.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“—Most people have more needs than wants. That’s why they live the lives they do. But the world is run by those whose wants outstrip their needs.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“—If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us, he said, then there wouldn’t be so much fuss about love in the first place.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“—Just like heaven: full of fine folk who mind their own business.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“I love Val. I love my job and my New York. I have no doubt that they were the right choices for me. And at the same time, I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“Times of upheaval throw off orphans like sparks.”
― Amor Towles, Table for Two

“We all have our flaws. Some large and some small. Some that come and go, others that persist. I, for one, don’t remember birthdays. I’m not always welcoming to perfectly nice people whom I’m meeting for the first time. When inconvenienced, even slightly, I can’t resist the temptation to let the person who’s inconvenienced me know that I’ve been inconvenienced. And I tend to allow my priorities to overshadow the priorities of others, even of those I love. Perhaps, especially of those I love.”
― Amor Towles, Table for Two

“Peggy stared at Nell for a moment to make sure she was understood.”
― Amor Towles, Table for Two

“to make matters worse”
― Amor Towles, Table for Two

“The limitations of choosing a twenty-pound turkey as the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving meal have only been compounded by the inexplicable tradition of having every member of the family contribute a dish. Relatives who should never be allowed to set foot in a kitchen are suddenly walking through your door with some sort of vegetable casserole in which the “secret ingredient” is mayonnaise. And when cousin Betsy arrives with such a mishap in hand”
― Amor Towles, Table for Two

“4. Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“You are an old man. Stop allowing your mind to be a slave”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The world is maintained by change—in the elements and in the things they compose. That should be enough for you; treat it as an axiom.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“They say that the mind cannot remember pain; I say it barely matters”
― Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

“Time is not wisdom; wisdom is not intellect. I am still capable of being overwhelmed; he overwhelmed me.”
― Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

“The island was yet to discover its role as a tourist temple”
― Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

“Right now we’re in the position of the Federal Navy”
― Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon

“It hadn’t worked out that way. He couldn’t even beat Porky Logan”
― Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon