Ripe Sarah Rose Etter Quotes

Maybe there must always be two of us—our real selves and the ones we create to survive in the world as it is.

When you're young, every part of life seems big and monumental. Once older you can see it for what it is: smaller pieces of a larger game you have no choice but to play.

Doesn't it overwhelm you sometimes -- To be alive? Don't you sometimes feel like at any moment you could be torn away from yourself? From your life?

If the brain is elastic and memory is faulty, maybe all of these stories are wrong. Maybe it happened a different way altogether. Maybe I was happy and I just forget that now.

My mind can make love out of anything, even the smallest of shards.

How does anyone bear themselves? How can anyone stare into the darkest corners of humanity and return to the office, enter the meeting room, and deliver the presentation? How do we all just keep working?

We make them familiar in order to understand them, to reduce our fear of what is beyond this life. There is safety in metaphors. The truth is far more terrifying:

My father says that capitalism is a chess match. We are only playing the same game of chess until we aren’t, until the paychecks stop.

Everyone struggles at first. I mean, I didn’t, but technology comes naturally to me. I was born with a brain for it. I think most men are.’ ‘I don’t think that’s how it works. Anyone can develop a skill. You don’t need to be born with anything.

The future is as cold and alien as the terrain of a newly discovered planet. Isn’t that the beauty of the future? If you push forward, if you aren’t too afraid, if you step into your space suit and enter the darkness, you will discover new and terrible worlds.

The amount of pain we can endure is spectacular. We are conditioned to withstand torture, to haul gray boulders of hurt on our shoulders, to confront the pressure endlessly, the heavy rough stone wearing away at us until our skin breaks open, revealing the bloody red flesh below.

The open office floor plan is a form of strangulation.

I have no control over the world around me, or the people around me, or how they regard me, or how they speak to me.

We look around the room. There are only three employees of color. We nod in their direction in sympathy and in solidarity.

Instead, it feels pathetic. The animal is sedated, weakened almost to the point of sleep.

Their white plastic earbuds override the sound of real life, their faces buried in their screens. They do not speak or make eye contact. They aren’t really here. The train is full of husks.

For a moment, just a moment, the man on fire is gone and there is nothing in my mind at all. For a moment, I am cold, still, a cadaver on a silver autopsy table.

Their pulses thrum from stocks, driverless cars, phones that collect the data of their lives in digital dashboards reporting: songs listened to, steps taken, places visited, workouts completed, hours slept. Those of us who aren’t

struggled with deadlines, overslept, performed poorly. Then, after a work event, a girl from our sales team pressed the first bag of white powder into my palm. ‘It’s how we all keep up,’ she said, her pupils black saucers. ‘You clearly need it.

VOYAGER is a unicorn start-up valued at $16 billion for its opaque use of data to target users, driving them to make purchases online. I am the head writer on the marketing team.

Today I write a report on how to capture and keep people’s attention online: how to leverage techniques first used on gamblers and how to appeal to our human love of games to encourage a user to click the buy button for increased gratification and keep them coming back again and again and again.

if through a chute, like a cow on the way to slaughter, to the right place, to the right action, at the right time.

I don’t know what you’re getting at. You’re too attached to your own feelings. Life isn’t so complicated as you make it for yourself.

Stop all this sad sea talk. For Christ’s sake. There are children dying in other countries. Go to Afghanistan and see how people live there before you walk around with all of this bullshit about the ocean taking you away.’ ‘Afghanistan?’ ‘Afghanistan. They know what sadness really is. No cell

By the way, your writing on the last report on digital conversion totally sucked. Redo the entire thing. I pulled it from the editorial calendar until you can fix it. We expect the best at VOYAGER, not piles of shit.

They promoted me every few years like clockwork. I could get lost in the thousands of other employees. I was bored, stagnating. We both knew if I didn’t take this start-up job, I would never become anything other than what I already was.

We watch his muscles grow each day alongside his power, his prestige. We talk about him as if we are talking about royalty. We are worshipful, terrified, enthralled.

we should buy up all of the Google search results related to their name,’ I say. ‘We’ll show up before they do on every search engine.

These were conflicts bathed in blood and vaporized by bombs. Our war consists of four people sitting around a conference room table.

Our bodies have been split down the center, our guts spilled across the conference room table. And for what?

We’re not fucking poor! I won’t live like we’re fucking poor!’ my mother shrieked. ‘I work too damn hard!’ ‘We’re not rich, either!’ my father yelled, pounding a fist on the table. The congealed brown sauce in the paper pan trembled as if in an earthquake. ‘You keep running around like we’ve got money to burn. Guess fucking

I shouldn’t have to give you feedback. You should be better at this. We hired you to be senior level.’ A tremor shoots through my chest. For a moment, I fear she’s going to fire me. Sweat breaks out under my arms and across my stomach. I pray it won’t leak through my shirt, that she won’t see how weak I am. ‘I understand,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘Don’t say you’re sorry. Just do better. And start interviewing for the Pakistan role. It’s approved.

They have frighteningly white teeth, clear eyes, and the smooth, calm foreheads of the wealthy.

Hope you’re getting all of this,’ he says. ‘Don’t fuck up his quotes this time. You got a few wrong in the last wrap-up. Nobody else noticed, but I did.

Sasha’s hair is freshly highlighted and her forehead is freshly frozen. She wears a new golden bracelet with the phrase Lean In hammered across the cuff, a VOYAGER hoodie, and designer yoga pants.

Yesterday I saw a man shoot heroin between his toes and then smear his own shit on a store window,’ Maria says. ‘Explain that. Tell me that’s incredible. You can’t, you fucking can’t.

Relax,’ Maria says. ‘Let her have some fun in this hellhole. We all need something to get by here.’ ‘This city is not a hellhole,’ Nicole says. ‘I have lived here for fifteen years, and it’s an incredible place. The culture, the music, the food. You are both too new to appreciate what this city has to offer.

Hard to live here?’ Nicole shoots back. ‘It’s sooooo hard for you, huh? Soooo hard to be in this beautiful city and make six figures. Nothing is good enough for you two! Nothing! You’re bottomless pits. You’re ungrateful bitches! You’re two black fucking holes!

Maybe there must always be two of us--our real selves and the ones we create to survive in the world as it is.

I swallowed. My anxiety spiked. I waited for it, the confession: he was married with children, a felon, a sex trafficker. The black hole swelled to the size of a melon. It began to sing its song.

After taxes, there isn’t enough money. My paychecks evaporate to rent and student loan payments. My savings account has dwindled since I moved.

You know, you should learn to code,’ he says. ‘It’s very helpful in this industry. I think people who can code, especially women, are more respected and have a deeper understanding of our product.

the way they actually want to be here working on a weeknight. I want to be at home, away from all of them. I want to forget their faces and their horrors.

Organic search? We don’t report those numbers until the team meeting next Monday morning.’ ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on it, since it seems like you can’t handle it.

They are confident and clear, passionate and alive, the gods of the Believers, dedicated to the industry, to technology, to their missions. I stare at them in horrified wonder as my fingers capture their words. I am a machine.

The way wild amounts of wealth brush up against extreme poverty and displacement here is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Maria and I are somewhere in the middle: neither wealthy nor displaced, just suspended in the air, writhing, having our little panic attacks.

They keep talking: new succulents, hot yoga class, stock options, making their own kombucha and yogurt. Usually I would sit in sullen rage and spend the night shooting eye daggers across the table at them. But in the drugged country of my newly softened heart, I can graciously accept their lives.

Yes, because you’re all fucked up,’ Nicole says. ‘You’re always fucked up. All you do is get fucked up!’ The eyes on us multiply. Shame floods my body, an ancient shame, a shame I know well. ‘I am not fucked up! This city is fucked up! Maybe you’re fucked up!!’ Maria shouts. ‘That’s what this city does to people.

The truth of the world bares itself when the tide goes down: devoured, used, rotting.

Here are the facts: I am thirty-three, almost a year into a job in Silicon Valley, waiting for the truth of my life to crack open and reveal itself.

Here, I am surrounded by all of the signs of money crushing the life out of a place: the rich live inside tall town homes, the poor live in faded dirty tents if they are lucky, there are boarded-up businesses next to new juice bars, people either defecating in the streets or buying gourmet groceries, eating at overpriced restaurants or out of the dumpsters in the back alley. It’s a city of extremes.

I have known sadness my entire life. I recognized the message: I would never have anything, not in a real way. The best I could do was the discount version.

We detach our faces from our phones and rise up when the train reaches a certain station. We spill out onto the sidewalk of a wealthy town overrun with the headquarters of every major tech company. The streets are lined with palm trees and boutiques, but even here, blanketed bodies dot the doorways.