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“After years of cancer [my husband] is in remission. ... Sometimes my husband will, at the end of the day, the end of the work week, tell me about something happening at his job. ... When I'm listening to a description of a task that I fear is a waste of time - normal bureaucratic assignments, sounds familiar - I feel an anger that returns me to any room in the hospital. I feel that if someone on the management level wastes his time, they're wasting the time of every doctor and nurse and visiting friend whose expertise and labor and care made it possible for him to be, today, alive and working. Each hour of his work bears within it these other hours. But then, I think - furiously I think - this is true of every one of us. Our labor isn't ours; it bears within it others' work, others' time, their years of frustration, boredom, achievement. And our work radiates through the living hours of those we in no other way know.”
― Hilary Plum, Hole Studies

“There was no feeling at all between Joan and me, so I talked about myself. I talked without stopping for two hours about myself, pulling little sounds of understanding out of poor Joan's mouth the way in prison we pulled plates of food from slots in the doors.”
― Wallace Shawn, The Designated Mourner

“I'm recovering from a nervous crack-up which visited me last summer and which has given me a merry chase. I never realized nerves were so odd, but they are. They are the oddest part of the body, no exception. Doctors weren't much help, but I found that old phonograph records are miraculous. If you ever bust up from nerves, take frequent shower baths, drink dry sherry in small amounts, spend most of your time with hand tools at a bench, and play old records till there is no wax left in the grooves.”
― E.B. White, Letters of E.B. White

“Consider suffering's simultaneous self-absorption and incitement to empathy. The former refigures the the self by reducing you to symptoms, conditions, enduring. The latter refigures the self by expanding it.”
― Zach Savich, Diving Makes the Water Deep