Advaiti - Expatriate
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One of the first things they ask you in the ER is to rate your pain on a scale from one to ten. I've been asked this question hundreds of times and I remember once when I couldn't catch my breath and it felt like my chest was on fire… the nurse asked meto rate the pain. Though I couldn't speak, I held up nine fingers. Later, when I started feeling better, the nurse came in and she called me a fighter."You know how I know?" she said. "You called a ten a nine." But that wasn't the truth. I didn't call it a nine because I was brave. The reason I called it a nine was because I was saving my ten. And this was it. This was the great and terrible ten.
-- Hazel (The Fault in Our Stars)
Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort? … How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising! One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.
Leo Tolstoy
