“How’s your first week so far?” Isabele asks.“Well, let me see,” I begin. “Chloe says my penmanship is shit, and I was only thirty minutes early this morning, which apparently means I’m late, but on...”

“You really want my honest opinion?” I ask. Anton gestures for me to go on. “Please, this is why I hired you, devochka.” I detect a little hint of sarcasm, but I go ahead and say, “I hate restaurant...”

“Maybe I’ll never be able to figure out what I’m passionate about. But when I choose something, it has to be something that when I wake up it’s the first thing I think about, and it’s also the last ...”

“If you expect great things of yourself and demand little of others, youll keep resentment far away.”

“There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations”

“One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.' To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: 'This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”

“Nobody works better under pressure. They just work faster.”

“Youth, with all its accompanying risks, humiliations, and uncertainties, the pressure to do it all before its too late.”

“We feel a lot of pressure about looking silly or appearing weak, whatever that means, or being a failure. You have to keep in your head: what's the worst that can happen?”