"I make myself a bowl of instant oatmeal, and then I don't do anything for an hour. Why do I need the instant oatmeal? I could get the regular oatmeal and feel productive."

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All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse's pudgy face.

— Geraldine Brooks