“To cease from works
Is well, and to do works in holiness
Is well; and both conduct to bliss supreme;
But of these twain the better way is his
Who working piously refraineth not.”
″‘I been working on the generator for twenty years. it’s always managed to chug along, but this year...I don’t know. The thing seems to break down every couple minutes.’ He cracked a wry smile. ‘Of course, I hear we might run out of light bulbs before that, and then it won’t matter if the generator works or not.‘”
“PayPal cofounder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel—really the only significant Silicon Valley voice to support Trump—was warned by another billionaire and longtime Trump friend that Trump would, in an explosion of flattery, offer Thiel his undying friendship. Everybody says you’re great, you and I are going to have an amazing working relationship, anything you want, call me and we’ll get it done!”
“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted.”
“There are two ends to a stick, and there’s more than one way of working. If it’s for human beings - make sure and do it properly. If it’s for the big man - just make it look good.”
“When he’s finished giving himself a trim, he’ll want a broom to sweep it up. He’ll start sweeping. He might get carried away and sweep every room in the house. He may even end up washing the floors as well!”
This is me, Clarice Bean. I am not an only child, but I sometimes wish I was.
My family is six people, which is sometimes too many. Not always, just sometimes. My dad is mostly in an office on the phone, going, “I can’t talk now — I’m up to my ears in it.”
“ ‘It was all working out so nicely,’ the parson went on sadly, ‘but as it is, you’ll have to go in the morning. A church is no good without a congregation, is it?’ “
“Doctor De Soto stepped into the foxes mouth with a bucket of secret formula and proceeded to paint each tooth. He hummed as he worked. Mrs. De Soto stood by on the ladder, pointing out spots he had missed. He fox looked very happy.”
“I wash the salt and peppers and fill the ketchups. One time I peeled all the onions for the onion soup. When I finish, Josephine said, ‘Good work, honey’ and pays me. And every time, I put half of my money into the jar.”
“Sam, in 1798, is an eleven year old convict, sent to Australia from England for stealing a jacket because he was cold. He works for Mr. Owen, who sometimes beats him.”
“Sid Parker crouched on the floor, in front of a cage in which two mouse-like creatures had frozen into stillness on the instant. One had been working a little treadmill fastened to the inside of a cage wall. The other had been gnawing at one of the bars of the cage.”
“Nayasha kept a small plot of land, on which she grew millet, sunflowers, yams, and vegetables. She always sang as she worked, and some said it was her singing that made her crops more beautiful than anyone else’s.”
For Andrea Mitchell, an anthropologist working among the Sterkarms, none of this matters. In love with Per -- a young Sterkarm warrior -- and feted as a beautiful Elf-May, she’s never known such happiness in her own time.
“Those nights, like the other nights, she was at work, or at dinner with a client, what she called ‘pulling her weight’ when she was being kind, and what she called ‘being your cash cow’ when she wasn’t.”
“I’ve always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn’t worked hard enough. I knew this was a lie, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed.”
“Neither of the girls had ever heard of a poor working boy with three names. ‘You’re not making it up?’ Cilla asked, almost respectfully. ‘I’ve heard tell of folk with three names, but I never saw one before.’ ”