You never got everyone's attention, not if you were the Pope saying mass in St. Peter's Square or Renee Fleming in recital at Carnegie Hall or Czeslaw Milosz reading his poetry in Polish for the very last time. The only way to make everybody listen was to start a fire in the middle of the room and then identify the location of all the emergency exits. Even then, if you took the time to notice, there would always be someone running frantically in the opposite direction. Doyle knew this. Jesse Jackson knew this. But Teddy and Tip, at the ages of twenty and twenty-one respectively, each believed he was the only person there who had drifted off to other things.
A. Patchett, Run, (2007), 37
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