Filthy Rich Quotes

We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.

Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.

You look hot. The straight men will want you, the gay men will want beauty tips, and the women will want to scratch your eyes out. If that isn't the stuff of fairy tales, I don't know what is.

Why is it that for everything you gain in life, something is always lost?

The hardest hearts are forged in fire; the weakest bend under their will. And revenge … is wicked sweet.

Which is more messed up- that we have so much compared to everyone else, or that we don't think we're rich? That on any given day, we might flippantly call ourselves 'broke' or 'poor?' We are neither of those things. We are rich. Filthy rich.

... and time is the stuff of which a self is made.

You are a door to an existence she does not desire, but even if the room beyond is repugnant, that door has won a portion of her affection.

His lips were frantic and frenzied against mine, as though no matter how much a gave him-- and I gave him everything-- it wasn’t enough. It could never be enough.

Is getting filthy rich still your goal above all goals, your be-all and end-all, the mist-shrouded high-altitude spawning pond to your inner salmon?

For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.

For him, sex was not a way to connect with others. Sex was something separate. Connecting was something he didn’t do at all.

When you find whatever it is that makes you happy … hold on to it with everything you’ve got. Your heart will let you know.

Here’s the thing,” I would say. “Most people, wherever they’re from, whatever they look like, are looking for the same thing. They’re not trying to get filthy rich. They don’t expect someone else to do what they can do for themselves. “But they do expect that if they’re willing to work, they should be able to find a job that supports a family. They expect that they shouldn’t go bankrupt just because they get sick. They expect that their kids should be able to get a good education, one that prepares them for this new economy, and they should be able to afford college if they’ve put in the effort. They want to be safe, from criminals or terrorists. And they figure that after a lifetime of work, they should be able to retire with dignity and respect.

Many skills, as every successful entrepreneur knows, cannot be taught in school. They require doing. Sometimes a life of doing. And where money-making is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shit-just-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out.

We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so, we turn, among other things, to stories.

He'’s in my veins. So it doesn't matter what I'm thinking about, because he’s still coursing through my blood. Even when he thinks he’s walked away.

What they don’t know is that the hardest hearts are forged in fire. With their cruelty and their jokes and their laughter, they’ve forged me into something spectacular.

Love is worth so much more than money. There are so many people who are filthy rich, but have nobody to genuinely love them. Unconditional love is priceless. If you have someone who really loves you for your heart, without any conditions, then you are truly one of the wealthiest people in the world.

You wanted to know what you are.” “Okay.” “What you are is mine.

If you want to be rich, fit in; but if you want to be filthy rich, stand out.

Why do you do this to me?” I whispered. His lips hovered above mine. Dancing. Teasing. “Do what?” “Trap me like this.” “It makes me feel like I have you.” I ached at my core. “I don’t want you to feel like you have me.” “Are you sure of that?

Now I’m gaping at him, because is he for real? “Hey, asshole, you’re filthy rich. If anyone should be paying full price for movie tickets, it’s you.” “I was being nice, asshole. Waiting for the cheap day so you’d be able to afford it.” Then he flashes his trademark grin, the one that makes chicks drop their panties and dive onto his dick. “Don’t give me your sex grin. It’s creeping me out.” His mouth stays frozen in the sex-grin position. “I’ll stop smiling like this if you agree to be my date tonight.” “You’re the most annoying pers—” The grin widens, and he even throws a little wink in there. Ten minutes later, we’re out the door.

His eyes narrowed. “You’re so angry. It’s making me need to fuck you.

Is that my life outside of these walls was already a living hell. This is just another level of Dante’s inferno, and I’m not afraid—not of any of you.

My dad's filthy rich, and even though we're Irish Catholic I'm an only child. I've got more money than you do so I'll work for free. No charge. A free law clerk for three weeks. I'll do all the research, typing, answering the phone. I'll even carry your briefcase and make the coffee. I was afraid you'd want to be a a law partner. No I'm a woman, and I'm in the South. I know my place.

It is the first visit in many years for your son, finally a citizen of his new country and free to travel, and you try to suppress your undercurrent of resentment at his decision to absent himself from your presence in so devastatingly severe a manner. You feel a love you know you will never be able to adequately explain or express to him, a love that flows one way down the generations, not in reverse, and is understood and reciprocated only when time has made of a younger generation an older one.

To become a filthy rich, first you need to be filthy.

Present us with a silver cup for something when you're a filthy rich lawyer, I dare say? Yes. You'll be a lawyer. Magnificent memory. Sense of logic, no imagination and no brains.

[…]when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in reading that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books[…]

Donovan was a guy who took the reins, which was something I admired about him, and I waited anxiously for him to do so. That motherfucker, though, was as patient as the day was long.

The whole what-goes-around-comes-around thing is simply our way of trying to make sense out of things that make no sense. Great stuff happens to bad people. Bad shit happens to good people. This is just the way it is.

She sees how you diminish her solitude, and, more meaningfully, she sees you seeing, which sparks in her that oddest of desires an I can have for a you, the desire that you be less lonely.

Donovan filled me so uniquely. Like no one else ever had, completely and totally, but it was also how he filled me that made my pussy crave him, how he moved inside me, how he bucked and raged, how he managed to go wild and yet master me all at the same time.

I’ll tell you which demons to avoid.” She pauses and gives me another critical look. “Mostly though, you’ll want to stay away from the devils.

Trust me, after thirty-one and a half years of knowing what love doesn’t feel like, I think I’m a goddamn expert at recognizing when the real thing comes along to rip right into my heart. She swallowed, making the skin at her throat flutter. “I’ve ripped right into your heart?” “Uh-huh. Brutally. Savagely.” “But I didn’t mean to,” she said, sadly. “I know, baby. That was just fate doing its thing.

I learned that ruling poor men's hands is nothing. Ruling men's money's a wedge in the world. But after I'd split it open a crack I looked in and saw the trick inside it, the filthy nothing, the fooled and rotten faces of rich and successful men.

She will be busy writing novels. As soon as she had has gotten far enough away from this frighteningly puritanical country, her mind will be set free, and she will be able to turn all of her observations in richly drawn characters and intricately themed stories.” “But what will she eat, dear Grass?” Barnard leaned against the wall, his arms crossing his chest skeptically. “Baguette and red wine, pure art, filthy air. Look at her, she is made of rose petals, and the world will take good care of her. And if it does not, we will have our hearts moved by such an exquisitely gorgeous tragedy.

The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they’re not particularly fattening. So don’t share yours, and munch on those of others whenever you can.

It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past.

It’s never been like this. It was beautiful and savage – it was filthy and precious.

I’ve waited for nearly eight hundred years for Julian to find someone for me to shop with. This is my treat,” she said, waving off my objection. “Now, let’s get lunch.

You’re crazy, you know. That’s what falling in love is all about— being vulnerable. Leaning on someone else. You don’t lose yourself in the process— you grow.

He was a man who discovered love through his penis.

Where are we—” Kyungsoo yelps as Jongin practically throws him over the window pane of a filthy-rich looking convertible, a treacherous little thing parked up against the curb, all black exteriors and plush white interiors, not even bothering to open the door, “going?” “To see fireflies,” Jongin says muffling coughs in his sleeves, and it’s only when Kyungsoo buckles up and looks over does he realize that the boy is grinning from ear to ear, “Real ones.

Sam counts the money carefully. I watch him in the mirror. “You know what I wish?” he asks when he’s done. “What?” “That someone would convert my bed into a robot that would fight other bed robots to the death for me.” That startles a laugh out of me. “That would be pretty awesome.” A slow, shy smile spreads across his mouth. “And we could take bets on them. And be filthy rich.” I lean my head against the frame of the stall, looking at the tile wall and the pattern of yellowed cracks there, and grin. “I take back anything I might have implied to the contrary. Sam, you are a genius.

I barely touched her—” “You touched her period. She’s mine to touch,” I snarled, my temper snapping off its leash at his paltry excuse. “You don’t lay a fucking finger on her, or I’ll consider this my barely touching you, and the next time, I’ll blow your fucking head off. Do you understand me?

In the history of the evolution of the family, you and the millions of other migrants like you represent an ongoing proliferation of the nuclear. It is an explosive transformation, the supportive, stifling, stabilizing bonds of extended relationships weakening and giving way, leaving in their wake insecurity, anxiety, productivity, and potential.

Borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history. Inequality gaps between people living in the same country are nothing in comparison to those between separated global citizenries. Today, the richest 8% earn half of all the world’s income,24 and the richest 1% own more than half of all wealth.25 The poorest billion people account for just 1% of all consumption; the richest billion, 72%.26 From an international perspective, the inhabitants of the Land of Plenty aren’t merely rich, but filthy rich. A person living at the poverty line in the U.S. belongs to the richest 14% of the world population; someone earning a median wage belongs to the richest 4%.

Without being conscious of it, you have allowed yourself to become fond of him not for the content of his character but for the fidelity of his echo.

He worked up a pace that was uneven and unrelenting and to frenzied to call rhythmic.

Good tension. Bad tension. I wasn't sure if there was a difference when it came to Donovan.

I was in Donovan Kincaid's orbit. What else was there in the world?

He was an asshole even now. It was such a turn-on.

She liked men who adored her and were into public displays of affection. I liked a man who enjoyed rape play and apparently had a serious problem with stalking .

She was mine. I’d never put those pieces together until now. She belonged to me. This marriage would see to that. She was mine to protect, mine to defend, just fucking mine.

Maybe I was crazy. Maybe agreeing to drop everything and get on a plane to Paris was a bad idea. But at least I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant.

He whispers a benediction and breathes it into the air, spreading his hope for you with a contraction of the lungs.

Tell me Mr. Kincaid, what hobbies do you have? What occupies your weekends besides work?" "You." Okay. He won.

You feel a love you know you will never be able to adequately explain or express to him, a love that flows one way, down the generations, not in reverse, and is understood and reciprocated only when time has made of a younger generation an older one.

And that right there blew my fucking mind. Mine. No other fucker had touched her, tasted her, kissed her, screwed her. Every inch of her belonged to me. I never had to share her, hadn’t shared her with anyone. Every inch of her was innocent, mine to corrupt. Mine to teach. If brains could orgasm, then I’d just come.

Because I want you to scare me, and you know it. Because the way you’re vile fits the way I’m vile.” I sucked hard on his thumb. “You’re not vile,” he groaned. He drew his wet thumb from my lips and placed his hand firmly behind my neck so he could pull me down toward him. “Then neither are you,” I managed before his mouth crashed against mine.

Why couldn't Mr. Darcy, in the first half hour of the movie, simply walk up to Elizabeth and say, "Hey, I like you. Do you want to go out on a date? And, by the way, I'm filthy rich." I'll tell you why. Because that would defeat the purpose of a chick flick, which is to entertain women and torture men.

My mouth drops open, and his smile gets a bit wider, his eyes still half-lidded. Bedroom eyes, that’s what he has. I hadn’t figured out how to describe them before, but that’s the expression he’s always got on, like he’s about to have sex.

From the perspective of the world's national security apparatuses you exist in several locations. You appear on property and income-tax registries, on passport and ID card databases. You show up on passenger manifests and telephone logs . . . You are fingertip swirls, facial ratios, dental records, voice patterns, spending trails, e-mail threads.

You’re a banquet for my starving soul … You’ve completely owned me since I first laid eyes on you.

Thank you, Brooke, for accepting my invitation to stay here tonight,” I whispered against her lips … “And for giving me the chance to deserve you whenever you’re ready.

Why are you here?” He crossed his arms in front of him. “Because I can’t not be.

Did this bother him because he’d made rules about his life? Or did the rules about his life come because things like this bothered him?

He couldn’t make me feel guilty for hiding. I wasn’t his to find.

You’re an incredible asshole.” I smiled back. Begrudgingly.

It was human nature for the good to blur and for the bad to stick out like a sore thumb.

There was no divorce in our world. Only death. Either through the freedom of illness or violence.

She was loud. She screamed. A lot. Her moans would be overheard, and no one, no fucking one, was allowed to see her pleasure except for me. It was mine. I owned it.

The land of opportunity", "The American dream", "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness": these are the sounds of the great sucking mechanism of the American parasite. The reliance of seduction and persuasion over coercion that sold democracy to the American people eventually sold it to the rest of the world. Although there are a minority of examples of the direct parasitism of involuntary immigration, especially slaves from Africa and the "legal" incorporation of Native Americans, voluntary immigration through the lure of freedom and and equality is only a more indirect form of parasitic predation. What is voluntary can be no less predatory than coercion, just as capitalism can be no less predatory than military imperialism. From the point of view of competition among nations, the point is not whether a citizen or their ancestor originally arrived voluntarily or involuntarily, but whether a nation or ideology is successful in harnessing its human resources towards its national interest or way of life. American parasitism works because it offers the secular Judaism of liberalism rather than the secular Christianity of communism. Communism could never compete with the immigrant American hope that they themselves might one day be a filthy rich capitalist.

She is here. And she comes to you, and she does not speak, and the others do not notice her, and she takes your hand, and you ready yourself to die, eyes open, aware this is all an illusion, a last aroma cast up by the chemical stew that is your brain, which will soon cease to function, ad there will be nothing, and you are ready, ready to die well, ready to die like a man, like a woman, like a human, for despite all else you have loved, you have loved your father and your mother and your brother and your sister and your son and, yes, your ex-wife and you have loved the pretty girl, you have been beyond yourself, and so you have courage, and you have dignity, and you have calmness in the face of terror, and awe, and the pretty girl holds your hand, and you contain her, and this book, and me writing it, and I too contain you, who may not even be born, you inside me inside you, though not in a creepy way, and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end.

Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.

The people of former times [...] they're dead that's the only thing they have over the living but in their own day they were just as sickening. Picturesqueness: I don't fall for that not for one minute. Stinking filthy dirty washing cabbage-stalks what a pretentious fool you have to be to go into such ecstasies over that! And it's the same thing everywhere all the time whether they're stuffing themselves with chips paella or pizza it's the same crew a filthy crew the rich who trample over you the poor who hate you for your money the old who dodder the young who sneer the men who show off the women who open their legs. I'd rather stay at home reading a thriller although they've become so dreary nowadays. The telly too what a clapped-out set of fools! I was made for another planet altogether I mistook the way.

Unlike every other aspect of my life, I wouldn’t have to share her. Not with my brothers, not with the family, not with the Five Points. She belonged to me, and Eoghan O’Donnelly protected what belonged to him. That was a fucking fact.

In New York you could see the poor lying in the streets with the garbage. There were no sewers in the slums, and filthy water drained into yards and alleys, into the cellars where the poorest of the poor lived, bringing with it a typhoid epidemic in 1837, typhus in 1842. In the cholera epidemic of 1832, the rich fled the city; the poor stayed and died.

Everyone in the room knew about leveraged buyouts, often called LBOs. In an LBO, a small group of senior executives, usually working with a Wall Street partner, proposes to buy its company from public shareholders, using massive amounts of borrowed money. Critics of this procedure called it stealing the company from its owners and fretted that the growing mountain of corporate debt was hindering America’s ability to compete abroad. Everyone knew LBOs meant deep cuts in research and every other imaginable budget, all sacrificed to pay off debt. Proponents insisted that companies forced to meet steep debt payments grew lean and mean. On one thing they all agreed: The executives who launched LBOs got filthy rich.

And it’s the same thing everywhere all the time whether they’re stuffing themselves with chips paella or pizza it’s the same crew a filthy crew the rich who trample over you the poor who hate you for your money the old who dodder the young who sneer the men who show off the women who open their legs. I’d rather stay at home reading a thriller although they’ve become so dreary nowadays. The TV too what a clapped-out set of fools! I was made for another planet altogether I mistook the way.

Getting an education is a running leap towards becoming filthy rich in Asia. This is no secret. But like many desirable things, simply being well known does not make it easily achieved. There are forks in the road to wealth that have nothing to do with choice or desire or effort, forks that have to do with chance, and in your case, the order of your birth is one of these. Third means you are not heading back to the village. Third means you are not working as a painter's assistant. Third also means you are not, like the fourth of you three surviving siblings, a tiny skeleton in a small grave at the base of a tree.

It was stupid, reckless. But I didn’t give a fuck. I bit down, sucking on her throat like I was eighteen again and wanted my girlfriend to bear my mark. I knew my brothers would give me shit about it, I knew they’d know what it meant. I was a possessive motherfucker. And I’d just claimed her as mine in front of them.

As he got on with the ceremony, I tilted my head to the side. “I will make them pay for beating you.” She stiffened. “I-I…they didn’t.” “Bullshit.” Another flinch. “Don’t lie to me, Inessa,” I warned, and as Doyle droned on, I whispered, “They did a good job, but not good enough. You’ll dance in their blood if you want.

I knew, at that moment, I’d never been closer to someone than I was with her. To the world, she was my possession, but the sense of belonging I felt was different than ownership at that moment. I didn’t understand it, couldn’t explain it, but I figured some things didn’t need to be reasoned or defined. They just were. She was addictive, and she’d just reeled me in. Hook. Line. And sinker.

He took complete command. With the length of his body pressed against me, his erection pushing firmly at my pelvis, his lips molded mine. He sucked alternately on my bottom lip and then my top, leaving no part of my mouth untouched or untasted. When this wasn’t enough, he let go of one of my hands and grabbed a fistful of my hair in its place. Then he yanked my head back, opening my mouth wider. I let out a cry that he lapped up with a long swipe of his tongue. I’d remembered this about him. I’d remembered that he’d been a kisser, and there was something validating about having the memory confirmed. Something surreal about living again a time that had only been lived through recollection for so long. Experiencing it for real with all of my senses fully engaged already had me wild. And I needed more.

I reached down, rubbed my thumb over her snatch, that tiny line of hair, and rumbled, “Who did this for you?” She swallowed, her focus on my hand, and whispered, “Someone at a salon.” “I’ll do this for you from now on.” Inessa laughed, and her eyes sparkled when she looked at me. Then, when she realized I wasn’t joking, her mouth rounded into a perfect O that made my dick weep pre-cum. “You’re not serious?” she questioned. “I’m deadly serious. No one sees this pussy but me.

The Bluebloods of Burberry Prep A list by Miranda Cabot The Idols (guys): Tristan Vanderbilt (year one), Zayd Kaiser (year one), and Creed Cabot (year one) The Idols (girls): Harper du Pont (year one), Becky Platter (year one), and Gena Whitley (year four) The Inner Circle: Andrew Payson, Anna Kirkpatrick, Myron Talbot, Ebony Peterson, Gregory Van Horn, Abigail Fanning, John Hannibal, Valentina Pitt, Sai Patel, Mayleen Zhang, Jalen Donner … and, I guess, me! Plebs: everyone else, sorry. XOXO

It felt like a form of surrender, and for a few minutes at least, it seemed like I could give everything over to him—not just the path I walked, not just my body, but these stupid tangled up sentiments dwelling inside of me. I could give him my anger. I could give him my embarrassment. I could give him my hurt. And maybe he didn’t know any better what to do with them than I did, but for however long he held them, I wouldn’t have to feel them. And what an amazing gift that could be. That alone would be worth staying for.

When you watch a TV show or a movie, what you see looks like what it physically represents. A man looks like a man, a man with a large bicep looks like a man with a large bicep, and a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo "Mama" looks like a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo "Mama." But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it's approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm.

The moment I stepped out the front door I was faced again with Manhattan. There it was, oh splendid ship of concrete and steel, aluminum, glass and electricity, forging forever up the dark river. (The hudson - like a river of oil, filthy and rich, gleaming with silver lights.) Manhattan at twilight: floating gardens of tender neon, the lavender towers where each window glittered at sundown with reflected incandescence, where each crosstown street became at evening a gash of golden fire, and the endless flow of the endless traffic on the West Side Highway resembled a luminous necklace strung round the island's shoulders.

Just as negative self-paradigms can put limitations on us, positive self-paradigms can bring out the best in us, as the following story about the son of King Louis XVI of France illustrates: King Louis had been taken from his throne and imprisoned. His young son, the prince, was taken by those who dethroned the king. They thought that inasmuch as the king’s son was heir to the throne, if they could destroy him morally, he would never realize the great and grand destiny that life had bestowed upon him. They took him to a community far away, and there they exposed the lad to every filthy and vile thing that life could offer. They exposed him to foods the richness of which would quickly make him a slave to appetite. They used vile language around him constantly. They exposed him to lewd and lusting women. They exposed him to dishonor and distrust. He was surrounded twenty-four hours a day by everything that could drag the soul of a man as low as one could slip. For over six months he had this treatment—but not once did the young lad buckle under pressure. Finally, after intensive temptation, they questioned him. Why had he not submitted himself to these things— why had he not partaken? These things would provide pleasure, satisfy his lusts, and were desirable; they were all his. The boy said, “I cannot do what you ask for I was born to be a king.

EB: 'Ll showed me a long verse-letter, very obscene, he’d received from Dylan T[Thomas] before D’s last trip here [New York]—very clever, but it really can’t be published for a long, long time, he’s decided. About people D. met in the U.S. etc.—one small sample: A Streetcar Named Desire is referred to as 'A truck called F———.' RL: 'Psycho-therapy is rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.' RL: 'I have just finished the Yeats Letters—900 & something pages—although some I’d read before. He is so Olympian always, so calm, so really unrevealing, and yet I was fascinated.' RL: 'Probably you forget, and anyway all that is mercifully changed and all has come right since you found Lota. But at the time everything, I guess (I don’t want to overdramatize) our relations seemed to have reached a new place. I assumed that would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept. Yet I wanted it all to have the right build-up. Well, I didn’t say anything then.' EB: 'so I suppose I am just a born worrier, and that when the personal worries of adolescence and the years after it have more or less disappeared I promptly have to start worrying about the decline of nations . . . But I really can’t bear much of American life these days—surely no country has ever been so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time.

Sylvester says they sold their lefty student principles, if they ever had them, as soon as they left university and accepted an overpaid starter-salary in a morally objectionable corporate job offering lucrative career prospects and inflated annual bonuses which soon turned them into filthy-rich Tories with a hatred of the social welfare infrastructures they’re actively not contributing to through tax avoidance and evasion while hypocritically scorning the underclasses as the scourge of society who sponge off the state when they’re the ones who are the biggest scroungers on society with no sense of community responsibility other than a very self-aggrandizing, tax-deductible form of fashionable charity they like to call philanthropism!

My stump speech became less a series of positions and more a chronicle of these disparate voices, a chorus of Americans from every corner of the state. “Here’s the thing,” I would say. “Most people, wherever they’re from, whatever they look like, are looking for the same thing. They’re not trying to get filthy rich. They don’t expect someone else to do what they can do for themselves. “But they do expect that if they’re willing to work, they should be able to find a job that supports a family. They expect that they shouldn’t go bankrupt just because they get sick. They expect that their kids should be able to get a good education, one that prepares them for this new economy, and they should be able to afford college if they’ve put in the effort. They want to be safe, from criminals or terrorists. And they figure that after a lifetime of work, they should be able to retire with dignity and respect. “That’s about it. It’s not a lot. And although they don’t expect government to solve all their problems, they do know, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities government could help.” The room would be quiet, and I’d take a few questions. When a meeting was over, people lined up to shake my hand, pick up some campaign literature, or talk to Jeremiah, Anita, or a local campaign volunteer about how they could get involved. And I’d drive on to the next town, knowing that the story I was telling was true; convinced that this campaign was no longer about me and that I had become a mere conduit through which people might recognize the value of their own stories, their own worth, and share them with one another. —

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An elder sister came from the town to visit her younger sister in the country. This elder sister was married to a merchant and the younger to a peasant in the village. The two sisters sat down for a talk over a cup of tea and the elder started boasting about the superiority of town life, with all its comforts, the fine clothes her children wore, the exquisite food and drink, parties and visits to the theatre. The younger sister resented this and in turn scoffed at the life of a merchant's wife and sang the praise of her own life as a peasant. 'I wouldn't care to change my life for yours,' she said. 'I admit mine is dull, but at least we have no worries. You live in grander style, but you must do a great deal of business or you'll be ruined. You know the proverb, "Loss is Gain's elder brother." One day you are rich and the next you might find yourself out in the street. Here in the country we don't have these ups and downs. A peasant's life may be poor, but it's long. Although we may never be rich, we'll always have enough to eat.' Then the elder sister said her piece. 'Enough to eat but nothing but those filthy pigs and calves! What do you know about nice clothes and good manners! However hard your good husband slaves away you'll spend your lives in the muck and that's where you'll die. And the same goes for your children.' 'Well, what of it?' the younger answered. 'That's how it is here. But at least we know where we are. We don't have to crawl to anyone and we're afraid of no one. But you in town are surrounded by temptations. All may be well one day, the next the Devil comes along and tempts your husband with cards, women and drink. And then you're ruined. It does happen, doesn't it?