Mary Swanson Quotes

The thing is, there’s a big patch of blood on the grass where we got Mikey out.’ ‘Then we need a number of serious casualties to account for all the blood.’ ‘And you will have them. Step forward, Mr Bashford.’ I said, ‘Tim …?’ ‘And Mr Swanson, sir, if you would be so good.’ ‘Tim, don’t tell me what you’re going to do.’ ‘Wasn’t going to,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Talk to you later.

We sat at long tables side by side in a big dusty room where we laughed and carried on until they told us to pipe down and paint. The running joke was how we glowed, the handkerchiefs we sneezed into lighting up our purses when we opened them at night, our lips and nails, painted for our boyfriends as a lark, simmering white as ash in a dark room. "Would you die for science?" the reporter asked us, Edna and me, the main ones in the papers. Science? We mixed up glue, water and radium powder into a glowing greenish white paint and painted watch dials with a little brush, one number after another, taking one dial after another, all day long, from the racks sitting next to our chairs. After a few strokes, the brush lost its shape, and our bosses told us to point it with our lips. Was that science? I quit the watch factory to work in a bank and thought I'd gotten class, more money, a better life, until I lost a tooth in back and two in front and my jaw filled up with sores. We sued: Edna, Katherine, Quinta, Larice and me, but when we got to court, not one of us could raise our arms to take the oath. My teeth were gone by then. "Pretty Grace Fryer," they called me in the papers. All of us were dying. We heard the scientist in France, Marie Curie, could not believe "the manner in which we worked" and how we tasted that pretty paint a hundred times a day. Now, even our crumbling bones will glow forever in the black earth.

In the movie Dumb and Dumber, Jim Carrey’s character, Lloyd, asks the love of his life what his chances are of making her love him, too. “Not good,” replies Mary Swanson. “Not good like one out of a hundred?” asks Lloyd haltingly. Mary answers, “I’d say more like one out of a million.” Exclaims Lloyd: “So you’re telling me there’s a chance? Yeah!” It’s no different when you buy a stock or a mutual fund: Your expectation of scoring a big gain will typically elbow aside your ability to evaluate how likely you are to earn it. That means your brain will tend to get you into trouble whenever you’re confronted with an opportunity to buy an investment with a hot—but probably unsustainable—return.