Ever wonder what’s on the mind of today’s most notable people? Well, don’t miss our unbelievable roundup of the best and most talked about quotes of the day:
“I hope I get to fight the mummy again sometime soon.”
—Tom Cruise
Unprompted
“I do my best to project a sense of loss, the ache of knowing that no matter how many chickens you kill, you can never bring back the pet tapeworm that a rogue rooster ripped out of your ass when you were a young boy.”
—Vincent Kartheiser
On playing Colonel Sanders
“Most people would have killed for Dennis Litwack’s office on the 20th floor of the Freedman Building. Most people, but not Dennis. It wasn’t that Dennis disliked the office itself. It was actually the best office he’d ever had. Mahogany desk, leather couch, flat-screen TV, fully stocked cocktail bar, and two giant windows looking out across downtown. All amenities designed to lure Dennis to the Logan Group from his comfortable job back in California. A ploy that had evidently succeeded. After all, here he was. But not without reservations. The problem was heights. Dennis did not like heights. And as he stood at the window of this new office looking down to the street so far below, he felt his stomach twist into that old familiar knot of fear and dread. Then, suddenly—SCREEEECH!!! The sound startled Dennis so much he jumped backwards and tripped over the coffee table. It was the window washer. As the man drew his squeegee across the window, streams of soapy water cascaded down the glass like blood from an invisible wound. The man smiled at Dennis through the watery glass, his face appearing slightly distorted. Dennis waved and picked himself up. For a moment he just stood there and watched the man work. There was a job he could never do: window washer. Even looking at the man outside the window with nothing to stand on except the few feet of his suspended platform made the knot in his stomach tighten. Then Dracula walked in. ‘Litvack, I vaaaant to get you druuuuuunk!’ said Dracula, handing Dennis a Solo cup of god-knows-what. ‘Really, Keith? It’s 2:30,’ said Dennis, taking a skeptical sniff of Keith’s alcoholic concoction. Rum, maybe? And something sickeningly sweet. ‘I don’t know how you guys do Halloween out in Cali, but here in the Midwest, we start early,’ said Keith. ‘Wait, where’s your costume, Litwack?’ ‘Don’t have one,’ said Dennis. Keith was dumbfounded. ‘You don’t have a costume for the office Halloween party? No, no, no, no, this won’t do. Come along, Litwack. We’re gonna set you up.’ As Keith led him out of his office, Dennis looked over his shoulder to catch one last glimpse of the window washer. But the man was gone. He must have moved on to another window. Dennis followed Keith into the hallway. ‘Here we are,’ said Keith, opening up a storage closet. It looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Holiday decorations of all shapes and sizes were slung this way and that. There was a plastic Christmas tree. A plastic cornucopia for Thanksgiving. Fake snow, or perhaps spider web. It was a little unclear. And everything was covered in a thin layer of dust. It appeared that no one had visited this place in a while. ‘Welcome to the holiday closet,’ explained Keith. ‘There’s gotta be something in here for you. Yup. Here we go. Someone must’ve left this from last year.’ Keith pulled a pig-nose mask from somewhere in the wreckage and plopped it in Dennis’ hand. ‘Seriously?’ Keith patted him on the back. ‘Happy Halloween,’ said Keith. Dennis put the pig nose on and together they joined the party, which was a few of their coworkers steadily working their way through a pint of whiskey in one of the conference rooms while a country version of ‘Monster Mash’ played from someone’s phone. ‘And then there was the year Matheson passed out after doing a keg stand and we had to call his wife to come pick him up, you remember that?’ said Shawn. Everybody did except Matheson, who swore that he didn’t pass out, but had just wanted to take a nap. ‘Sounds like you guys used to really go for it,’ said Litwack. ‘Work hard, play hard, Litwack,’ said Keith, taking a shot of something blue. ‘Yeah, but not anymore,’ said Dana. ‘Not since…well, you know.’ She trailed off, but everyone in the group seemed to know what she meant. Everyone except Dennis. He couldn’t tell if they were messing with him or not. Either way, he wanted to know. ‘No, I don’t know. What happened?’ asked Dennis. ‘The thing with the window,” said Matheson, his voice suddenly serious and slightly hushed. Dennis waited, expecting someone to explain this “thing” to him, but no one seemed up to the task. The whole mood of everyone in the room seemed to have shifted. ‘What happened with the window?’ he asked. ‘Screw it, I’ll tell him,’ said Shawn. ‘A couple years ago, at the Halloween party, some people were hanging out in an office and they wanted to smoke some weed. Our office is cool, but it’s not that cool. So, no problem, they figure they’ll open a window, blow the smoke outside. But when the guy whose office it was tries to push the window open, it won’t budge. Anyways, he just keeps working at it and working at it and suddenly the hinges on this thing just snap and the whole window gives and falls down, like, 10 stories or something, knocks a window washer off balance and the guy falls to his death. Splattered on the sidewalk, really gruesome. Anyways, the building manager brought the hammer down after that and now our Halloween party is a shadow of its former self. It’s too bad. Used to be a blast.’ Dennis sat there in the silence that followed the story, trying to process what he’d just heard. ‘Bullshit,’ said Dennis. ‘I swear to god, man, it’s true,’ said Shawn. Dennis looked around at the others and they all nodded. Something about their faces made him believe them. ‘What happened to the guy who opened the window?’ asked Dennis. ‘Disappeared,’ said Dana. ‘He just…disappeared?’ asked Dennis. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t take the guilt, I guess. Next day, all his stuff was gone. Oh, except one thing…’ Dana was pointing at Dennis. ‘What?’ But then Dennis realized what Dana was point at: his pig nose. Suddenly, a chill shot up his spine, and he swatted the pig nose off his face like a bug that had landed on him. Everybody laughed. ‘Relax, Litwack!’ said Keith. ‘Dana’s just messing with you. About the pig nose, I mean. The rest of it is true.’ Everyone was still laughing as Dennis sheepishly picked up his pig nose and put it back on, feeling not a little bit embarrassed at his dramatic reaction. ‘Ha-ha-ha,’ said Dennis. ‘I’m gonna go check some emails.’ Keith tried to block his path. ‘But I vaaaant to get you druuuunk!’ Dennis pushed past him. ‘It vill only take a vile!’ said Dennis. He entered his office and collapsed on the couch. Judging by how the room was spinning, Keith had evidently succeeded in getting him drunk. And it wasn’t even dark out yet. He suddenly realized how cold it was in here. ‘That’s strange,’ he thought. One of the windows was open. He didn’t remember doing that. Shrugging it off, he drunkenly shuffled over to the window and began to close it when he heard a voice. ‘Help!’ shouted the voice. It sounded strained, and it seemed to be coming from outside. He stuck his head out the window and, without thinking, looked down. He saw the window washer’s platform hanging there, empty. And below it, he saw all the way down to the street. He reeled back inside and gasped for air. Then he heard the voice again. ‘Help!’ it screamed again. Dennis stuck his head out the window once more. He still couldn’t see anyone, but he knew the desperate cry was coming from somewhere outside, near the other end of the platform. Dennis took a deep breath and swung one leg out the window and onto the platform. Then he took a deeper breath and swung the other leg over. He was now standing on the window washer’s platform, alone, 20 stories above downtown Chicago. One thing was crystal clear to him in the midst of all of his disorientation: He was way too drunk for this. He looked down at his feet and walked one foot in front of the other toward the end of the platform. ‘Help me! Oh god! Please, help!’ screamed the voice again. He followed the desperate noise to the end of the platform. ‘Hello?’ asked Dennis, looking out over the edge of the platform and down below. But no one was there. He was alone on the platform 20 stories in the air. All alone. He made his way back to the window and was about to climb back inside when a violent gust of wind suddenly snapped it shut. He tried to push the window open, but it wouldn’t budge. Through the open door of his office he could just barely see his coworkers in the conference room across the hall, laughing and drinking. A witch, a vampire, and two pirates. All blissfully unaware of his predicament. He pounded on the window. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Hey! Somebody help! I’m stuck out here!’ ‘That makes two of us,’ said a voice. Dennis turned and found himself face to face with the window washer he had seen earlier. The man was holding his squeegee and once again flashed a smile at Dennis. Something about him was still distorted, even though there was no glass between them this time. Then Dennis realized that the window washer’s face didn’t just seem distorted. It was actually quite lopsided. His facial features jutted out at odd angles and his smile spread across his face like a jagged crevasse. It was like he had been flattened with a rolling pin then stretched out once more. ‘Please,’ said Dennis. ‘I’m afraid of heights. Please, help me get back inside.’ The window washer took a step closer to Dennis, pushing him back toward the end of the platform. Somehow Dennis had not realized how windy it was up here. The platform was swaying. He clutched the railing. ‘What’s scarier?’ asked the window washer. ‘Heights? Or these?’ He then pulled out two glass knives as long as his forearm and brought them to Dennis’ pig nose. He lifted the nose off of Dennis’ face and let it slide off the edge of one of the glass blades. His heart almost beating out of his chest, Dennis watched the pig nose make the long journey down until it was indiscernible against the asphalt. ‘Please!’ shouted Dennis. ‘I asked you a question,’ said the window washer, pushing Dennis so far up against the platform railing that he was now leaning back over it. ‘What are you more afraid of?’ ‘I don’t know!’ cried Dennis. ‘I don’t know!’ The window washer then brought his knives to Dennis’ throat, and his crooked smile suddenly collapsed. ‘I’ll consider that your answer,’ he said. Dennis screamed. Inside the party, Keith was stumbling out of the bathroom and into the hallway. ‘Litwack!’ he called, his speech slurred. ‘Stop checking your email and come get wasted with your new coworkers! This is important bonding time, buddy! You don’t want to miss—’ Keith suddenly stopped talking. He was now standing in the doorway of Dennis’ office. He did not see Dennis. He saw windows. But he could not see out of the windows. The reason why suddenly dawned on him. The windows were covered in blood. Every inch of them, painted with a coat of dark red blood. Then there was a sound. SCREEEECH!!! And a patch of blood was wiped away. Through this patch, Keith could see the window washer’s face. His smile, slightly distorted through the glass. The window washer drew his squeegee along the length of the window, back and forth, back and forth, that horrible noise cutting through the glass with each stroke, sending rivulets of blood trickling down toward the ground.”
—J. Cole
On the scariest story he’s ever heard
