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Favorite Trivia – VOCATIONS & AVOCATIONS
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| Regarding waitressing in my 20’s: “I am serving and earning while I am observing and learning.”
Patty Martino Alspaugh |
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“The statesman throws his shoulders back and straightens out his tie, Walt Mason |
| archaeologist: A scientist whose career lies in ruins. – John Amig
Leonard Louis Levinson – Webster’s Unafraid Dictionary: Defiant Definitive Put-Downs |
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“If you want to get rich, you son of a bitch, Anonymous |
| “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.”
Don Corleone (The Godfather) |
| “Let none be at the beck of another who can be his own master.”
A Dictionary of Classical and Foreign Quotations – (edited by W. Francis H. King) |
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“If only I get accepted at Cambridge! My whole life would explode in a rainbow.” [October 25, 1954]
Sylvia Plath – Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober Plath |
| “My very own brief career was, as I said, that of a night watchman [Transit Authority in NY]. Of course, since garbage collectors are sanitation engineers, and meter maids are traffic-enforcement agents, my title could not officially be Night Watchman. I was a Property Protection Agent. Really. On my first day I was issued a blue hat that looked vaguely police-ish and a little yellow plastic flashlight, and I was assigned the midnight to eight a.m. shift in the Coney Island yards, there to ensure, in the mid-1980s, that no one would place any graffiti on the thousand or so subway cars that were housed in my area of the seventy-five-acre yard. In a very small way, I understood the frustration of a border patrol officer with two hundred miles to monitor and nine hours of darkness to contend with. It was a job defined by acceptable levels of failure.
“Every night I would relieve the four-to-twelve man, sign in, and begin my clockwinds, which involved carrying a large, heavy, ancient clock sheathed in leather and outfitted with a shoulder strap, around the train yard once every hour. At five or six locations along the fence line, there were small metal containers, about the size of ashtrays in a car. Each container held a key secured by a chain. The key was to be inserted into a slot in the back of the clock and turned, causing an indentation in the tape that spooled its way through the innards of the gizmo, thus recording that you were where you were supposed to be, when you were supposed to be there. Sturdy as the clocks were, most of the watchmen figured out how to disable them pretty quickly and often spent the night sitting in the little phone booth-like shacks on the periphery of the yards. In East New York you learned to unscrew the lightbulb so that no one shot at you. In the morning the trains were covered in graffiti, you filled out a report, and went home. It was a full life.” Tim McLoughlin, “Opening Day” (The Subway Chronicles) |
| “One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going.”
Goethe |
| “Every day at TFD [The Financial Diet], we hear from young women who hate their well-paying jobs but have zero chance of leaving them in the next several years because those same jobs are the only thing allowing them to make their loan payments each month without having to Airbnb out their bedroom while they live in their shower.”
Chelsea Fagan – The Financial Diet: A Total Beginner’s Guide to Getting Good With Money |
| “Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him. I may very likely be condemning myself, all the time that I am writing this book, for I know that whether I like it or no I am portraying myself more surely than I am portraying any of the characters whom I set before the reader.”
Samuel Butler – The Way of All Flesh |
| “We met about ten singers today. Some of them could sing and some of them could dance. The ones that could sing couldn’t dance, the ones that were pretty couldn’t sing, the ones that were ugly sang like Janis Joplin. What a nightmare! We have more tomorrow. This one girl was dancing in front of us grinding on the mic, and then went over to Mick and was singing in his face. I had to look down and away so I didn’t burst out laughing I almost pissed my pants laughing after she left… good times.”
Nikki Sixx – The Heroin Diaries: A Year In The Life Of A Rock Star |
| “… nor did I care much for the ‘smarty’ manner of the deputy. He was puffed up by his office. You can expect that out of Federal people… ” [Mattie Ross]
Charles Portis – True Grit |
| “A committee takes hours to put into minutes what can be done in seconds.”
David Baird – A Thousand Paths to Enlightenment |
| “Most of my teaching hours the second year were spent with a group known as the 1983 English Medical Class… The first time I saw them I had to sit in front of the class while one of the Chinese teachers gave them a long speech about behaving well, entitled ‘The Twelve Be’s, the Twelve Don’t Be’s, the Eight Do’s and the Eight Don’t Do’s.’ After forty-five minutes of this he at last introduced Jan, my co-teacher for the year, and me. Jan and I stood up and said hello, but there was no response. We faced a mass of trembling paralysis.”
Mark Salzman – Iron & Silk |
| He [Billy Wilder] got his first job after writing to an Austrian paper asking to be their American correspondent. They laughed at that but Wilder showed up at their offices unannounced, he later claimed, and caught either the editor or the drama critic in flagrante with a secretary on the couch, a very Wilderian situation that also echoes a 1914 German short, The Pride of the Firm, which Ernst Lubitsch appeared in but did not direct, and which Wilder had probably seen. Why should I hire you? the editor-or-critic supposedly asked Wilder. Because I am a keen observer, he said. He got the job.”
A.S. Hamrah (Book Forum, Mar/Apr/May 2022) |
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Customer: “Do you have a book with a list of careers? I want to give my daughter some inspiration.” Jen Campbell – Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores |
| “I sometimes envy the zealot with a definite mission in life. Life without one seems void. The monotonous pursuit of our daily vocations—the soldier, sailor, candlestick-maker—so they go on, never living but only working, never thinking but only hypnotizing themselves by the routine and punctuality of their lives into just so many mechanical toys warranted to go for so long and then stop when Death takes them… It amazes me that men must spend their precious days of existence for the most part in slaving for food and clothing and the bare necessaries of existence. To sum up my despondency, what’s the good of such a life? Where does it lead? Where am I going? Why should I work?… Of course to the man who believes in the next world and a personal God, it is quite another matter. The Christian is the Egoist par excellence. He does not mind annihilation by arduous labour in this world if in the next he shall have won eternal life… He is reckless of today, extravagant in the expenditure of his life. This intolerable fellow will be cheerful in a dungeon. For he flatters himself that God Almighty up in Heaven is all the time watching through the keyhole and marking him down for eternal life.” [October 24, 1910]
W.N.P. Barbellion – The Journal of a Disappointed Man & A Last Diary |
| “We’ve just interviewed our third male applicant as a part-time baby-sitter.
“‘I’m very neat,’ this one says. ‘I’m very quiet.’ “‘What do you do when you’re not working?’ your father asks him. “‘Oh, I sleep. I watch television. I don’t have friends. Who can you trust these days?’ “‘What were you doing for the last year?’ I ask. “‘I was valet for a single gentleman.’ “‘He’s not gay,’ I tell your father afterward. ‘He’s an ex-inmate of some mental asylum.’ “‘You discriminate against ex-crazies?’ your father jokes with me. ‘Maybe you don’t like him because he’s a man?’ “‘He’s the weirdest of the lot… I sense enormous violence in him,’ I say. “‘Me too.’ Your father agrees. ‘How suspicious we both are of a man wanting this job.’” [September 13, 1978] Phyllis Chester – With Child: A Diary of Motherhood |
| “‘I don’t think I have ever wished that I were a man,’ she said after a moment, ‘but I often find myself envying a man’s opportunities.’
“‘Do not women have opportunities, too?’ he said. ‘Certainly they have greatly to do with the determination of affairs.’ “‘Oh, yes,’ she replied, ‘it is the usual answer that woman’s part is to influence somebody. As for her own life, it is largely made for her. She has, for the most part, to take what comes to her by the will of others.’ “‘And yet,’ said John, ‘I fancy that there has seldom been a great career in which some woman’s help or influence was not a factor.’ “‘Even granting that,’ she replied, ‘the career was the man’s, after all, and the fame and visible reward. A man will sometimes say, “I owe all my success to my wife, or my mother, or sister,” but he never really believes it, nor, in fact, does any one else. It is his success, after all, and the influence of the woman is but a circumstance, real and powerful though it may be.’ “‘I am not sure’ she added, ‘that woman’s influence, so called, isn’t rather an overrated thing.'” Edward Noyes Westscott – David Harum |
| “You don’t have to stay up nights to succeed, you have to stay awake days.”
David Baird – A Thousand Paths to Enlightenment |
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“I should think, if I do well at Cambridge this year, I should have no worry of a job there. But I have decided very definitely against applying for a job for Ted [Hughes] there too for many important reasons. First, I would have the responsibility for him, proving him, in a way, and my ties there are very emotional and deep with the place and professors both. In my first year of marriage and teaching, I don’t want to stack the odds against me, and the girls at Smith are unscrupulous (witness the two professors, still on the faculty, who have married three Smith girls in succession). . . . I would be absurd to throw Ted into such hysterical, girlish adulation. I shouldn’t have a minute’s peace, because I know how college girls talk and romanticize endlessly and how they throw themselves at men professors, be they ancient or one-legged.” [September 21, 1956]
Sylvia Plath – Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober Plath |
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“On the whole, my colleagues [at Smith College] have depressed me; it is disillusioning to find the people you admired as a student are weak and jealous and petty and vain as people, which many of them are. And the faculty gossip, especially among the men, over morning coffee, afternoon tea, and evening cocktails is very boring: all about the latest gossip, possible appointments, firings, grants, students, literary criticism—all secondary, it seems—airtight, secure community, with those who tenure getting pot-bellies.” [June 11, 1958]
Sylvia Plath – Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober Plath |
