The North Americans’ sense of time is very special.
They are short on patience. Everything must be quick,
including food and sex, which the rest of the world
treats ceremoniously. Gringos invented two terms
treats ceremoniously. Gringos invented two terms
that are untranslatable into most languages:
‘snack’ and ‘quickie,’ to refer to eating standing up
and loving on the run … that, too, sometimes
standing up. The most popular books are manuals:
how to become a millionaire in ten easy lessons,
how to lose fifteen pounds a week, how to recover
from your divorce, and so on. People always go
around looking for shortcuts and ways to escape
anything they consider unpleasant: ugliness, old age,
weight, illness, poverty, and failure in any of its aspects.
– Isabel Allende, My Invented Country