“Devereaux is going with our pitch.”“Hey, that’s just great,” I said superperkily. “Wendell’s or mine?”“Yours.”“But you want to fire me. So fire me.”“We can’t fire you. They loved you. The head guy, Leonard Daly, thought you were, I quote, ‘agreat kid, very courageous’ and a natural to do a whispering campaign. He said you hadbelievability.”“That’s too bad.”“Why? You’re not quitting!”I thought about it. “Not if you don’t want me to. Do you?”Go on, say it.298 ♥elavanilla♥“No.”“No what?”“No, we don’t want you to quit.”“Ten grand more, two assistants, and charcoal suits. Take it or leave it.”Ariella swallowed. “Okay to the money, okay to the assistants, but I can’t green-light charcoalsuits. Formula Twelve is Brazilian, we need carnival colors.”“Charcoal suits or I’m gone.”“Orange.”“Charcoal.”“Orange.”“Charcoal.”“Okay, charcoal.”It was an interesting lesson in power. The only time you truly have it is when you genuinelydon’t care whether you have it or not.“Right,” I said. “I’m giving myself the rest of the day off.”

“when happiness makes a guest appearance in one’s life,it’s important to make the most of it.It may not stay around for long and when it has gone wouldn’t it be terrible to think that all the time one could have been happy was wasted worrying when the happiness would be taken away.”

“What doesn’t kill us makes us funnier.”

“It was ironic, really – you want to die because you can’t be bothered to go on living – but then you’re expected to get all energetic and move furniture and stand on chairs and hoist ropes and do complicated knots and attach things to other things and kick stools from under you and mess around with hot baths and razor blades and extension cords and electrical appliances and weedkiller. Suicide was a complicated, demanding business, often involving visits to hardware shops.And if you’ve managed to drag yourself from the bed and go down the road to the garden center or the drug store, by then the worst is over. At that point you might as well just go to work.”

“Failed relationships can be described as so much wasted make-up.”