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1 " I saw a news report recently that measured average video game use by American men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five: twenty hours per week. Do you mean the flower of America's masculinity can't think of anything more important to do with twenty hours a week than sit in front of a video screen? Folks, this ain't normal. Can't we unplug already? "
― Joel Salatin , Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World
2 " In 1988, a cave explorer named Véronique Le Guen volunteered for an extreme experiment: to live alone in an underground cavern in southern France without a clock for one hundred and eleven days, monitored by scientists who wished to study the human body's natural rhythms in the absence of time cues. For a while, she settled into a pattern of thirty hours awake and twenty hours asleep. She described herself as being " psychologically completely out of phase, where I no longer know what my values are or what is my purpose in life." When she returned to society, her husband later noted, she seemed to have an emptiness inside her that she was unable to fully express. " While I was alone in my cave I was my own judge," she said. " You are your own most severe judge. You must never lie or all is lost. The strongest sentiment I brought out of the cave is that in my life I will never tolerate lying." A little more than a year later, Le Guen swallowed an overdose of barbiturates and lay down in her car in Paris, a suicide at age thirty-three. "
3 " The storm through which you sail, called life, has no calm eye. There never is a “right time” for your big dreams. You never will, by magic, get an extra twenty hours a week when you can do that thing that you have always wanted to do. Start now! "
― Paul Gibbons , Reboot Your Life: A 12-day Program for Ending Stress, Realizing Your Goals, and Being More Productive
4 " For here, inside the crypt, was where he truly lived. Which is to say, for well over twenty hours a day in total darkness and in total silence and in total immobility, he sat on his horse blanket at the end of the stony corridor, his back resting on the rock slide, his shoulders wedged between the rocks and enjoyed himself. "
― Patrick Süskind , Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
5 " Even if I take him out for three hours every day, and go and chat to him for another hour, that leaves twenty hours for him all alone with nothing to do. Oh, why can't dogs read? "
― Nancy Mitford , The Pursuit of Love (Radlett & Montdore, #1)
6 " Having lived in a mythical country, a place neither here nor there, these intellectuals from Vilna and Gomel helped create another and called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Such a name! It was hardly a union. The Soviets - workers’ councils - ruled it for about six weeks; socialism impoverished everybody, and only machine guns kept the republics from turning into nations. But to Szarza and the rest it didn’t matter. He’d put his life on the line, preferring simply to die at the wrong end of a gun rather than the wrong end of a club, and for twelve years - until 1929, when Stalin finally took over - he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic, intellectual Jews actually ran things, quite literally a country of the mind. Theories failed, peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. Still they worked twenty hours a day and swore they had the answer. "
― Alan Furst , Dark Star (Night Soldiers, #2)
