Life Equation Quotes & Sayings

I'm really good with problems. I can solve a differential equation in my head. I chew through trig angles like candy. I know this, and it just makes it worse. Because I don't know how to solve this one. — Kekla Magoon

Sex, once a law as undisputed as gravity, has been disproved. The equation is erased, the blackboard broken — Isaac Marion

When I first learned of the existence of pi, I knew immediately that we had something in common. We share a parallel path. Certainly there are many times when I too have been considered irrational. Often when alone in my room, I silently ponder the equation for the area of a circle. Area (A) equals R-squared (RR) times the constant pi (C). Then I thought, by assigning the designation (K) and assuming there was an nth or final numeric digit to pi, it all might somehow become rational. The random rolling numbers that could at some point define that ultimate integer, passed through my mind. To me they were like the consecutive series of episodes that define my life. It seemed that it was more than a coincidence that when I took the variables and the constants from the equation and put them all together, A-R-R-C-K, it spells my name. That is why I need to get to the truth. — John Lack

The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful equation, and then not: if x = y, if major = minor, if death equals part of life and life part of death, then what is the sum of the infinite notes of this one phrase? It asked, answered, reasked, its moody asking a refinement of reluctance or dislike. — Lorrie Moore

The world to him no longer seemed a math equation but rather a complex piece of art, a masterpiece of things not easily understood. — K. Martin Beckner

Life has only one equation. The equation of giving. — Amit Ray

H = L + F + G
Dedicated to those of us in need of a mathematical equation to explain the key to happiness in life.
Simply put, it means Happiness = Look for Good
Ie. Look for the good in life ... the silver lining in each of our experiences. — Lee Bice-Matheson

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97:
Wear sunscreen.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.
Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday. — Mary Schmich

It is our contemporary culture's tragedy to have lost any sense of suffering as a positive dimension of human existence. Beginning with the premise that life ought to be without pain, we make suffering something to be avoided at all cost. We consider the equation between evil and suffering so self-evident that we make avoiding suffering the equal of fighting evil. No wonder we are the most narcotized generation ever to inhabit the earth, searching for ever more effective addictive patterns to anaesthetize our existence. — Luke Timothy Johnson

[The Devil] And me? I suffer, and still I do not live. I am an x in an indeterminate equation. I am some sort of ghost of life who has lost all ends and beginnings, and I've finally even forgotten what to call myself ... You're eternally angry, you want reason only, but I will repeat to you once more that I would give all of that life beyond the stars, all ranks and honors, only to be incarnated in the soul of a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound merchant's wife and light candles to God. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fuck that: take shagging n peeve oot ay the equation n yir left wi the sqare root ay swee fuck all! — Irvine Welsh

Unconditional love = stress free life. Only those who receive or give can understand this equation. — Balroop Singh

Responding to John the Baptist's hard-line approach, Jesus maintains both sides of this equation when he says, "No man born of woman is greater than John the Baptizer, yet the least who enters the kingdom of heaven is greater than he is" (Matthew 11:11). Is that double-talk? No, it is second-half-of-life talk. — Richard Rohr

The most important equation to solve in life is the human equation. — Robert Zorn

You are not 'in the now;' you are the now. That is your essential identity-the only thing that never changes. Life is always now. Now is consciousness. And consciousness is who you are. That's the equation. — Eckhart Tolle

Suddenly Adam (Upton) hated death just as much as he hated life, and now he had absolutely no idea how to unsolve that equation.

-- From my upcoming novel "Streaks of Blue: How the Angels of Newtown Inspired One Girl to Save Her School. — Jack Chaucer

Here is an equation worth remembering: Five dollars earned minus seven dollars spent = Unhappy Life." (Life Hacks, p.51) — Jon Morrison

But if the Busyness = Status equation works, it's strictly because a social game has emerged wherein relatively privileged, educated people with all kinds of Choice disguise their decisions to be busy as manifestations of the universe's insatiable demand for their particular prowess. And the rest of us agree to be impressed. It's a stupid game. We can stop any time. — Tasha Golden

The equation of animal and vegetable life is too complicated a problem for human intelligence to solve, and we can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble into the ocean of organic life. — George Perkins Marsh

Have you ever been friends with a girl before?"
she finally asked. "Friends?"
"Yes. Friends."
"Have a beer and shoot some pool friends? Or the kind with benefits?"
She laughed out loud, shook her head and grinned. "Have you ever been friends with a girl without having sex mixed into the equation?"
"Not since I was sixteen," he admitted and then felt his neck heat. — Peggy Jaeger

It's interesting when you're old enough to take a new, objective approach looking at your parents, frame them in a way where you are actually taking yourself out of the equation and just look at the things that are true about their life. — Robert Downey Jr.

Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing. — Samuel Butler

Spirituality is much wider than any particular religion, and in the larger ideas of it that are now coming on us even the greatest religion becomes no more than a broad sect or branch of the one universal religion, by which we shall understand in the future man's seeking for the eternal, the divine, the greater self, the source of unity and his attempt to arrive at some equation, some increasing approximation of the values of human life with the eternal and the divine values. — Sri Aurobindo

THE MIRACLE EQUATION: Unwavering Faith + Extraordinary Effort = Miracles. When you maintain unwavering faith in your dreams and give extraordinary effort toward your goals, that is how you create miracles in your life. — Hal Elrod

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation
it is part of the equation. — Jeanette Winterson

I really, really wanted to be successful in my life just based on me and my mind alone ... I didn't ever want it to be an equation that amounted to a result coming from my brain plus something else. — Steve Wozniak

I don't have very many regrets, not because I lived a perfect life but because life is a bunch of rolling hills, not mountains, or speed bumps instead of stop signs, and so you come to a situation and it's neither good or bad, it just is, and what it means to you is what's your take on it. But the second part of the equation is what are you going to do about it. A lot of times I'm completely wrong, but all you do is back up and start over. — Bill Russell

Before and after you do your best, know it that you must rely on God. Your best - no matter how great - is nothing if you minus God from the equation. — Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Aunt Anne's lips quirked up in a smile. "Life is not a neat equation to be solved," she said. "It's messy and wild and unpredictable. That's the heartbreak of it, but that's also the glory of it. — Heather Vogel Frederick

But there was no equation or series of questions that could turn this moment into an answer. — Catherine Lacey

Innards came out crossed and complex, like a tumble of plus and minus signs--the equation of human life. — M.P. Johnson

My father had to flee from what is today Pakistan when he was a child, and he became a manager at IBM, and any item of consumption he would acquire was a direct measurement of his success in life. But that same equation wasn't going to work for me - I was quite clear about that in my early teens. — Tino Sehgal

Figuring out what to do with your life is only Half of the equation, the more important half is, whom you are doing it with — Sel

From time to time we may all face a hardship that is inescapable. If there's nothing you can do to change your current circumstance, then cancel the surrounding environment out of your Happiness Equation and solve the equation by using the rest of your life. When — Mo Gawdat

If I could simplify the whole game of power and strategy in one equation, it would all hinge on the capacity to see events around you exactly as they are. The closer your mind is to reality, the better your strategies, your responses in life. — Robert Greene

Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Amazingly when you add life and consciousness to the equation you can actually explain some of the biggest puzzles of science. — Robert Lanza

could say it over and over how much I loved him. How profoundly he changed my life. I could cover all my skin with tattoos representing something about him I truly loved, but there still wouldn't be enough room. I couldn't possibly explain to Hopper just how much my entire universe revolved around him because there wasn't an equation that existed big enough to compute the sum. "You — Cambria Hebert

An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of bone and flesh, 124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000 years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children that will never be born (the last we can afford: there are too many starving children in the world already). — Dalton Trumbo

I've made the most important discovery of my life. It's only in the mysterious equation of love that any logic or reasons can be found. — Sylvia Nasar

Most people, it seems like they've only got one part of the equation down. Caring for themselves, or caring for someone else. And I'v learned how important it is to have both. — Deb Caletti

Never ever go by the book. They will want you to, but you musn't. If the lust is too strong, tear one page from a hundred books and make your own way. There is no formula for life, no equation on how to be a human being. — Christopher Poindexter

All that hurry can blur the truth that life is a zero-sum equation. Every minute I save will get used on something else, possibly no more sublime than staring at the newel post trying to remember what I just ran upstairs for. — Barbara Kingsolver

I never did drama at school. I did it for one term, when it was compulsory, and I hated it. Tennis was the main thing in my life, and I was not open to anything else. When I removed tennis from the equation, I didn't know who I was. — Luke Mitchell

Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation ... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable. — Leonard Woolf

I'm a student of patterns. At heart, I'm a physicist. I look at everything in my life as trying to find the single equation, the theory of everything. — Will Smith

In my experience, take the Holy Spirit out of the equation of your life and it spells boring. Add it into the equation of your life and you never know where you are going to go, what you are going to do, or who you are going to meet. — Mark Batterson

Every time we prepare food we interrupt a life cycle. We pull up a carrot or kill a crab- or maybe just stop the mold that's growing on a wedge of cheese. We make meals with those ingredients and in doing so we give life to something else. It's a basic equation and if we pretend it doesn't exist, we're likely to miss the other important lesson which is to give respect to both sides of the equation. — Erica Bauermeister

I can control what happens in the chemistry lab. There's a formula and an equation, and I know exactly what the reaction will be when I mix one thing with another. Life, not so much. Love, not at all. No matter what elements you combine, you really have no idea what happens next. It's scary not knowing what comes next. But not knowing might also be the best part. — Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

Balance both sides of the equation to attain equilateral-balance your life — Ikechukwu Joseph

I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don't have the dispoisiton, the rage or whatever it takes to be a killer. We le death happen. We lie down and die. But think what it's like to be a killer. Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number of massacres, wars, executions. [ ... ] In theory, violence is a form of rebirth. The dier passively succumbs. The killer lives on. What a marvelous equation. - Murray (WN 290) — Don DeLillo

But what about me? I suffer, but still, I don't live. I am x in an indeterminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has lost all beginning and end, and who has even forgotten his own name. You are laughing- no, you are not laughing, you are angry again. You are forever angry, all you care about is intelligence, but I repeat again that I would give away all this superstellar life, all the ranks and honours, simply to be transformed into the soul of a merchant's wife weighing eighteen stone and set candles at God's shrine — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Pres,
I know you're going to say this is dumb, and I know you won't understand. Which is why I asked Bee and Ryan for help. Don't get me wrong, I like fighting with you, but there are some things you just can't argue. This is one, and I hope you'll come to accept that.
I have to leave Pine Grove. I have to leave Alabama, and I have to leave you. After tonight, that's all completely clear to me. This whole situation is effed up ... and it's clear to me now that the only way to un-eff it up ... is to take myself out of the equation. Without me, you, Bee, and Ryan can just be you, Bee, and Ryan. Not Paladins or Mages. People. With your own lives.
It's like you said at that time at Cotillion practice, you want to be a good woman who chooses the right thing for everybody. Well, so do I. (Minus the woman part, obviously.)
Have a good life, Pres. I love you. Always.
D — Rachel Hawkins

You can't be afraid of getting old. Old is good, if you're gathering in life. Our band is good at understanding that equation. — Bruce Springsteen

Whether or not Project Gilgamesh succeeds, from a historical perspective it is fascinating to see that most late-modern religions and ideologies have already taken death and the afterlife out of the equation. Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life. Beginning in the eighteenth century, religions and ideologies such as liberalism, socialism and feminism lost all interest in the afterlife. — Yuval Noah Harari

I have no hang-ups in life. I don't care about groups and camps. I have been brought up with certain values and ethics. I have never been egoistic about my stardom and lineage. I don't have any qualms about breaking the ice with my colleagues. I can walk up to any actor and greet him, irrespective of what kind of equation I share with him. — Abhishek Bachchan

In the equation of life, the limit does not exist. — A.D. Posey

When it comes to our own well being, it is not a matter of doing the math, it is a matter of choosing the formula. When you add up the numbers, keep the primary factors in mind. Then multiply all sums by a positive outlook. The numbers will inevitably change and so will any undesirable equivalence. The math is merely the meter for the moment in an ever changing flux of the dynamic human equation. — Tom Althouse

He who would prove all life, leaves it empty. To know the way of everything is to be left with the geometry of things and with the substance of nothing. To reduce the world to an equation is to leave it without head or feet. — Leopoldo Alas

The Intellectual Transcending Equation In Life:
Occurrence Plus Perception Minus Materialistic
Reasoning Divided By Nothing Equals Spiritual
Progression, With A Remainder Of Blessings. — Calvin W. Allison

By June 1949 people had begun to realize that it was not so easy to get a program right as had at one time appeared. I well remember when this realization first came on me with full force. The EDSAC was on the top floor of the building and the tape-punching and editing equipment one floor below on a gallery that ran round the room in which the differential analyzer was installed. I was trying to get working my first non-trivial program, which was one for the numerical integration of Airy's differential equation. It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that "hesitating at the angles of stairs" the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs. — Martin Campbell-Kelly

Something similar happens on the other side of the equation: Giving kindness does us as much good as receiving it ... The true benefit of kindness is being kind. Perhaps more than any other factor, kindness gives meaning and value to our life, raises us above our troubles and our battles, and makes us feel good about ourselves. — Piero Ferrucci

Zero is equation of life — Vitthal Jadhav

Before I sleep I normally lie awake and think of the future. I've resolved I can't understand life the way I can understand an equation or formula. For so long I've wanted to find concrete answers or die trying. It's hard at first to find comfort in not knowing or to make peace with it. But I think it is the only way to make it in this life. Getting stuck on a question only makes me estranged from the world. — Shane Crash

Life balance is a myth. It's an illusion and the very pursuit of it is driving us crazy. For me it's about proportion - it's really a work hard/play hard equation. — Danielle LaPorte

Here's an equation I want you to remember for the rest of your life: CZ = WZ. It means your "comfort zone" equals your "wealth zone." By expanding your comfort zone, you will expand the size of your income and wealth zone. — T. Harv Eker

I still think that everyone's life, no matter how unremarkable, has a singular tragic encounter after which everything that really matters will happen. That moment is the catalyst - the first step in the equation. But knowing the first step will get you nowhere - it's what comes after that determines the result. — Robyn Schneider

Aw, where we come from the Anti-Life Equation is one of many others
almost as awesome!! But they merely exist!! — Jack Kirby

I have come to see that an artist is not given a form - a style - but his nature merely gives him the ingredients wherewith to shape an equation of life. — Jack Shadbolt

Ah, paths of the soul, mysterious ways of the heart! One must walk their full lengths before facing the supreme equation of Eternal Life. It is essential for you to live all their conflicts and to know them fully in the long process of spiritual ascension. — Andre Luiz Moreira

We were to be the lightest of things, he and I, lifting each other up above the heaviness of life. If was because we knew that gravity is always part of the equation that we tried to defeat it. — Jeanette Winterson

I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves. — Pam Houston

[Men] suffer, of course... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it? ... But what about me [Satan]? I suffer, but still, I don't live. I am x in an indeterminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has lost all beginning and end, and who has even forgotten his own name. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But life is not evens and odds and solving for x. And sadness? Sadness is an equation made of all variables. — Emery Lord

People are born, they have a limited amount of time going around thinking life is dandy but then, inevitably, tragedy strikes and they realize life equals loss! The whole point of the game is to minimize the pain caused by that equation! Now some people do it by having kids, or making money, or taking up coin collecting, and others do it by getting wasted. — Dominic West

He had a particular facination with the I Ching, that art of tossing three coins three times and divining a pattern out of heads and tails. Pete would begin with questions:
What determined the pattern? Was it random? Was it a higher power? Was is mathematical? Wasn't poker based on mathematical probability and not just luck? Did that mean randomness was actually mathematical? And if the I Ching was governed by mathematics, hey, wouldn't that mean the I Ching was actually predictable, a prescribed answer? And if it was prescribed, did that mean that your life followed the I Ching, like some sort of equation? Or did the I Ching simply capture correctly what had already been determined as the next series of events in your life? — Amy Tan

I'm feeling really hopeful about it, like maybe I actually have a chance to get better. To be happy. It's funny, I just realized that my whole life, the whole time I've been trying to be perfect, I never once considered happiness as part of the equation. I guess it seemed so impossible I couldn't even let myself fantasize about it. But now, I don't know, things feel different somehow. Like impossible things might not be so impossible. — Amy Reed

So the professor takes the student's point seriously, and responds with a concise but adequate argument in defence of the disputed equation. The professor tries hard to show no sign of being irritated by criticism from so lowly a source. Most of the questions from the floor will have the form of criticisms which, if valid, would diminish or destroy the professor's life's work. But bringing vigorous and diverse criticism to bear on accepted truths is one of the very purposes of the seminar. Everyone takes it for granted that the truth is not obvious, and that the obvious need not be true; that ideas are to be accepted or rejected according to their content and not their origin; that the greatest minds can easily make mistakes; and that the most trivial-seeming objection may be the key to a great new discovery. — David Deutsch

I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. — Henry David Thoreau

There is an equation that I like to use when looking at my life's progress:
Current Worth - Past Worth = Progress or Regression — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

I've had down periods in the past few years where I haven't been writing or working on music, and during that time something always felt like it was missing, but when I bring it back into the equation, everything in my life makes sense again. As corny as that sounds. — Keiynan Lonsdale

Life is a balanced equation,Don't try to disorder the balance — Mohammed Sekouty

It's just I get this feeling
and I can't believe I'm telling you this
but I get this feeling that life with him will be really, really good, but that I'm not a key part of that. You could take me out of the equation, replace me with someone else, and it would be the same equation. — Scott Hutchins

Through the years of my life, the older I've gotten, the more sensitive I've become to the suffering of people and to my inability to really fix that. I wish that proportion was different. I wish I could help more. Unfortunately, that's not how the equation is working out here. — Caroline Myss

Architecture
is a small piece of this human equation, but for those of us who practice it,
we believe in its potential to make a difference, to enlighten and to enrich the
human experience, to penetrate the barriers of misunderstandin g and provide a
beautiful context for life's drama. — Frank Gehry

A vision flashed across Nick's mind. It was the image of a lipstick kiss his wife left for him on the mirror that morning. It hung there like the single digit sum to the chalkboard-crammed equation of his life. — Gary Ponzo

The conversation between Faithful and Talkative ends when Faithful challenges Talkative to show in his life the fruits of the truths he so easily talks about. This conversation exposes the matter, and the false pilgrim is soon separated from the true pilgrim.
To cry out against sin but to tolerate it comfortably in the heart is an equation that sums up the false pretense of Talkative. The work of grace in the heart offers proofs that cannot be denied. The eloquent Talkative simply lacks the experiential work of grace in his heart.
Again, Christians should be warned not to judge too quickly, since many Christians struggle with sin and surrender in the battlefield of life and often fail. The important thing to understand is that God will always produce a fruitful life in those He has conquered and occupies. The same Lord will disqualify those whose religion is only talk by ordaining that their life lacks the abundance of genuine good fruit while bad fruit abounds.
5. — John Bunyan

Jail sentences have many functions, but one is surely to send a message about what our society abhors and what it values. This week, the equation was twofold: female infidelity twice as bad as male abuse, the life of a woman half as valuable as that of a man. The killing of the woman taken in adultery has a long history and survives today in many cultures. One of those is our own. — Anna Quindlen

You don't have to be married to be whole. As a matter of fact a husband is an add-on, he is not the completion of the equation. — T.T. McClendon

Having begun my life in science searching for the equation beyond time, I now believe that the deepest secret of the universe is that its essence rests in how it unfolds moment by moment in time. — Lee Smolin

There are moments in life that change us irreparably. Sometimes those moments are grand and dramatic, tragic or beautiful in their intensity. Sometimes those moments are quiet and small like footsteps fading behind a closed door. The subtlety of those moments can sometimes camouflage their impact and sometimes the impact is felt profoundly, but the quietness of the moment is lost on everyone else around you adding loneliness to the equation. — Samantha Young

In one equation you can solve all the puzzles of life. It is the equation of giving. — Amit Ray

I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means of increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life. — William S. Burroughs

Michael is logical; he believes that every problem should have a solution. Unfortunately, life is not an equation; not everything does have an answer. Some things are unknown. — Emily Gillmor Murphy

I already fear for my life just because of who I am, you think adding a little inconsequential vampire to the equation will change any of that? — Amalie Howard

Her husband once said that he believed some sort of mathematical equation could be applied to life - since the longer you lived, the greater its seeming velocity. She always attributed this to familiarity. If you kept the same habits - and if you lived in the same place, worked in the same place - then you no longer spent a lot of time noticing. Noticing things - and trying to make sense of them - is what makes time remarkable. Otherwise, life blurs by, as it does now, so that she has difficulty keeping track of time at all, one day evaporating into the next. — Benjamin Percy

I won't tell," he said, his arms holding my waist with amateur stiffness. I smiled, thinking about the lover he'd become and all the things he'd try with me for the very first time. I'd be the sexual yardstick for his whole life: Jack would spend the rest of his days trying but failing to relive the experience of being given everything at a time when he knew nothing. Like a tollbooth in his memory, every partner he'd have afterwards would have to pass through the gate of my comparison, and it would be a losing equation. The numbers could never be as favorable as they were right now, when his naivety would be subtracted from my experience to produce the largest sum of astonishment possible. — Alissa Nutting

Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors. — Nikola Tesla

Like how there's this optimal money/happiness equation. Once you pass a certain amount of household income, life isn't any better. Apparently, money can't buy happiness, or it does, but it costs less than you imagined it would. — Catherine McKenzie

I killed that boy, Parks. If you turn my life into an equation, the number that comes out is a minus one. That's my lifetime score, you understand me? And you ... you and Caldwell, and Private Ginger fucking Rogers ... my God, whether it means anything or not, I will die my own self before I let you take me down to minus two. — M.R. Carey