nothing was ever challenging enough to tie him up for days or of course make him wake up in the middle of the night screaming. As soon as he had seen the trick, or the pattern, or—in the case of corporate decision-making and preening—the deep layers of bullshit, he was bored enough to need a drink.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]

Hermetic quote Ehrenreich Living with a Wild God nothing challenging enough to wake up screaming seen the trick pattern deep bullshit bored need a drink

Consider also:

  1. “Little fella mews and yelps when he sees her. Not-screaming, not-crying. He’s afraid but he’s hungry. Any girl in a storm.”
  2. “The endless job of packing so exhausted me that I almost burst into something between a scream and insane laughter.”
  3. “There! there is happiness; heaven in a teaspoon; happiness, with all its intoxication, all its folly, all its childishness. You can swallow it without fear; it is not fatal; it will in nowise injure your physical organs.”
  4. “If only to keep the supply of food and books flowing in, I would have to fake some sort of participation in a human environment that had never really made much sense.”
  5. “We began to use parties as a means of organizing: Invite everyone you can think of and dance, in any configuration except old-school heterosexual couples, late into the night. Or maybe we were using organizing as an excuse for parties, because we weren’t just trying to end the war; we were also trying to start a new and freer and more generous way of life”