Meredith > Recent Status Updates

Wolfe: No man can commit so complicated a deed as a murder and leave no vulnerable points; the best he can do is render them inaccessible save to a patience longer than his own and an ingenuity more inspired.

Archie: Wolfe says that hat he feels phenomena and I collect the facts.

Nero Wolfe: I have told you before, Archie, that even for your amusement I shall not advise replies to hypothetical questions ... How the devil do I know what I would have done if anything?

Nero Wolfe: I believe though it is getting ready to rain.
Archie: Is it going to rain all over your clues?
Wolfe: Some day, Archie, when I decide you are no longer worth tolerating, you will have to marry a woman of very modest mental capacity to get an appropriate audience for your wretched sarcasms.

Agnieszka: I was no great cook.
I don't know why it is essential for modern heroines to brag about being unable to perform anything traditionally considered 'women's work.' Denigrating basic household tasks -- and by extension anyone who deigned to master them -- is sexism masquerading as feminism.

Jenkins: An AT-AT is essentially a Panzer tank mixed with a dog.
Me: AT-ATs always struck me as a tank mixed with a camel.

Loveday: I just sat there like -- well, like me, wordless without a book to rely on.

Our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer, that the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life, that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone's lives.

Elevator revised version 02F

Gawande: You took the most aggressive treatment available. It wasn’t a decision at all, really, but a default setting...the pressure remains all in one direction, towards doing more, because the only mistake clinicians seem to fear is doing too little. Most have no appreciation that...doing too much could be no less devastating to a person’s life.

Gawande: Our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality.

Loveday: Writing a new ending is all very well in the abstract. Some plot twists you just don’t recover from.

Loveday: Everyone is equal when they’re reading a book.

Loveday: Conversations outside books are horrible. The other person doesn’t know what they are supposed to say.

Gawande: For more than half a century now, we hav treated the trials of sickness, aging, and mortality as medical concerns. It’s been an experiment in social engineering, putting our fates in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs.

Loveday: If you’re going to start disliking someone, or at least letting them out of your life, it’s more helpful if they piss you off now and then.

Wilson: We want autonomy for ourselves and safety for those we love.

Gawande: Your chances of avoiding the nursing home are directly related to the number of children you have.

Loveday: The trouble with meeting new people is that they ask you a lot of questions, and when it comes to answering those questions, I don't have a many options. Either you have to be honest, which feels like too much for a 'nice to meet you' conversation, or you tell lies.

Loveday: And that’s the trouble with talking to people. They ask questions, and before you know it, you’re halfway to telling them everything.

Loveday: [My mum] used to say, 'I don't believe in margarine,' as though she was talking about yogic flying or ghosts.

Loveday: If you don't talk about your past, and you work in a bookshop, then your topics of conversation are basically:
1. Books I've read and liked and why
2. Books I've read and not liked and why
3. Books I want to read but haven't yet and why
4. Books I have decided not to read and why

Gawande: The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness.

Loveday: When you’re imperfect yourself, and you come across someone more obviously broken than you, it’s both heartening and comforting.

Loveday: It’s never ending, and that’s what I like about it: the circle of book-life. People come in to find them, other people bring in ones that have outlived their usefulness in that life but can be reincarnated into another one. I make the whole system work, like a Saint Peter of books...

Loveday: I reminded myself that a beginning and an ending are two different places, and, in real life, you might be able to make your own ending, whatever had gone before.

Loveday: The idea that people might want to relax in a relationship, that it wasn’t all for show, or about not being found out — bits of my brain were dying at the effort of thinking about how that might be true.

Loveday: I was still young enough to think/hope that love of books equaled fundamental decency.
Me: I still like to believe that, but, then again, I expect a lot from readers.

Loveday: There’s danger in trying to make everything fit with the story that you want to tell.

Loveday: When your family explodes (implodes?), it’s the big stuff that hurts, for a while, like the impact of a slap, but that fades, quite quickly, because you have to get used to it, and the way to get used to it is, basically, not to think about it. It’s the little things like this that get you, forever as far as I can tell.