Divya

“I never fail, because I never take on anything I’m truly unsure I can handle; even when it looks as if I were stretching myself, I keep a secret 10 percent in reserve. So if I take this job and I blow it, will it mean I destroyed myself out of hubris, and deserve whatever misery comes my way?”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“…for now I float in a sea of undifferentiated information and pray no one asks me something I should know, but don’t. That’s how I feel for weeks on end, actually, only I’m not floating on the water, I’ve been shot from a cannon to the bottom of the sea and have to make my way back to the surface, mostly unassisted, and weighted down by salt and seaweed, by figuring out which starfish and shells and old cannonballs I need, and how they fit together. It’s not that I’m being hazed, my coworkers are kind and helpful, but they are above the surface, so to reach one I have to stretch my arm up blindly and hope I’m grabbing at the right person, and that they have time to come hang with me under the sea. And even when they do, I can tell from their eyes that they don’t really have time. That every minute spent orienting me is one where something else might be blowing up, just out of sight. And Arjun is right, everyone here is operating on partial information, no one really knows what the fuck is going on.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“Here is how I got every single one of those jobs: I sat across a desk from a man old enough to be my father and I enveloped us both in a force field of earnest competence, the kind I’d been practicing since kindergarten with my hand permanently raised in class, the kind that says I will die before I let you down, and at some point in each of these interviews the man pronounced me “impressive” and gave me a job and the prophecy came true. I never let him down.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“Mors irrumat omnia. Death fucks us all.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House