"How Are Things Going, Joe?"

"People are sad. People are broke. People are worried about money, people are worried that they're not enough and not amounting to anything and they don't feel good about themselves. People have rough times, and everybody's pretending it's not true, and we need to break that veneer."

- Eve Ensler

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"You go up to a man, and you say, 'How are things going, Joe?' and he says, 'Oh fine, fine... couldn't be better.'  And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn't be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody's having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much." 

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."

- Kurt Vonnegut, "Mother Night"