Samantha E

“Oh, fine,' Ken said. He took the piece of yellow paper and flipped it over and wrote: 'Dear Mr. Reed, I'm sorry the client wasn't entirely satisfied with your draft prospectus. However, even sticklers for grammar are divided over the question as to whether it is necessarily incorrect to begin a sentence with the word 'and.' I hope that allays your concerns.”
― Paul Schmidtberger, Design Flaws of the Human Condition

“I'm just saying that I don't want to go through any of this anymore. With anyone. I want to buy a cat, or lease one, or do whatever it is that lonely people do these days. Call it quits. And that's what I don't get, because no matter how much I tell myself it's all useless and it's all a waste of time and energy, there just doesn't seem to be a way to stop myself from looking for the right person. You know? From looking at every face on every escalator that's going up while I'm going down and wondering whether the right guy for me just went by... Why isn't there a fuse box somewhere that I can go peer at with a flashlight until I find the fuse with 'Heart' written underneath it and then throw that switch and let the rest of them keep humming merrily along and just, I don't know, opt out of the whole thing?”
― Paul Schmidtberger, Design Flaws of the Human Condition

“The teacher asked once what did we talk about when we talked about happiness. And then one student said that happiness is what happens when you go to bed on the hottest night of the summer, a night so hot you can’t even wear a tee-shirt and you sleep on top of the sheets instead of under them, although try to sleep is probably the most accurate. And then at some point late, late, late at night, say just a bit before dawn, the heat finally breaks and the night turns cool and when you briefly wake up, you notice that you’re almost chilly, and in your groggy, half-consciousness, you reach over and pull the sheet around you and just that flimsy sheet makes it warm enough and you drift back off into a deep sleep. And it’s that reaching, that gesture, that reflex we have to pull what’s warm- whether it’s something or someone- towards us, that feeling we get when we do that, that feeling of being safe in the world and ready for sleep, that’s happiness.”
― Paul Schmidtberger, Design Flaws of the Human Condition

“Well, my boss said that having a tummy ache—his words—wasn’t the kind of thing that most people find disabling, so I had to tell him I had diarrhea shooting out of my asshole faster than lies coming out of a Republican National Convention. And then I thanked him for caring.”
― Paul Schmidtberger, Design Flaws of the Human Condition: A Novel