“Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others, and this dame was one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them.”
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley
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“The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor. They are a people who can make you laugh, who do so deliberately because they like to hear you laugh. They like to see you feeling amused enough to forget that you really feel terrible about the whole thing, as many people do, from the beginning to the end of their lives, outraged first because they have been born, and then outraged because they must die.”
– William Saroyan, Chance Meetings
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It’s easy to be miserable.
Simple to find a grievance about something or other.
Quick to communicate displeasure to a fellow human.
A frown spreads quickly like mould through a loaf of bread.
A laugh can cut right through all that.
A smile radiates anti- misery matter.
A joke can upend all the seriousness with one yank.
You don’t need to be happy, just funny.
Jokes at a funeral are an emergency dose of life.
Laughter is a wonder drug.
A device to blow fresh energy into a room.
Avoid the human vacuums, who suck the fun out of any enclosed space.
They are more tolerable if you turn it into a game.
Avoid getting got.
You won’t be the only one dreading an encounter.
Create a team.
The Vacuum Dodgers.
It is your moral duty to recruit as many players into your team as possible.
It’s more fun to play with others.
Just try to avoid being cruel.
Don’t focus on the human vacuums.
You may find yourself complaining about them too much.
Negativity demoralises the team.
And if you aren’t careful, you could find yourself on the other side, wondering where everyone else is running to.
Slow to realise they are in fact running from you.
Conversations With Quotations 