Brake Job Quotes

I felt the familiar warm tingling at the center of my chest and had just enough time to gasp as some invisible hand yanked me forward, smacking my forehead against the dashboard with enough force to stun me dumb. Chubs slammed on the brakes, forcing my seat belt to do its job and lock against my chest. I was thrown back into my seat, an explosion of colors bursting in my vision. "Oh, hell no!" Chubs roared, slamming a hand against the steering wheel. "That's it! We don not use our abilities on one another, goddammit! Behave yourself!

On teaching:...the job seems to require the sort of skills one would need to pilot a bus full of live chickens backwards, with no brakes, down a rocky road through the Andes while simultaneously providing colorful and informative commentary on the scenery.

When caffeine gets to the receptors first, however, it doesn’t let adenosine do its job. Caffeine doesn’t actively keep us awake—it just blocks the natural mental brake.

It was this philosophy that had Harvey taking the hovercraft Sagan had stolen, mounting it, and, after a few moments to glean the fundamentals of navigating it, rocketing on it toward the door of the Obin mess hall. As Harvey approached, the door to the mess hall opened inward; some Obin heading to duty after dinner. Harvey grinned a mad grin, gunned the hovercraft, and then braked it just enough (he hoped) to jam that fucking alien right back into the room. It worked perfectly. The Obin had enough time for a surprised squawk before the hovercraft’s gun struck it square in the chest, punching backward like it was a toy on a string, hurling down nearly the entire length of the hall. The other Obin in the room looked up while Harvey’s victim pinwheeled to the ground, then turned their multiple eyes toward the doorway, Harvey, and the hovercraft with its big gun poking right into the room. “Hello, boys!” Harvey said in a big, booming voice. “The 2nd Platoon sends its regards!” And with that, he jammed down the “fire” button on the gun and set to work. Things got messy real fast after that. It was just fucking beautiful. Harvey loved his job.

So who does run a company these days? Not the shareholders or the board. They largely find out after the fact that things have gone well or badly. Nor are firms cooperatives. Anybody who has tried to run a company by consensus will tell you how disastrously bad an idea that is. Interminable meetings follow hard upon each other’s heels as everybody tries to get everybody else to see his or her point of view. Nothing gets done, and tempers fray. The problem with consensus is that people are not allowed to be different. It’s like trying to drive a car in which the brake and the accelerator have to do similar jobs. No, what really works inside a big firm is division of labour: you do what you’re good at, I’ll do what I’m good at, and we’ll coordinate our actions. That is what actually happens in practice inside most companies, and good management means good coordination. The employees specialise and exchange, just like participants in a market, or citizens in a city. The

think my mother was wrong. Fate can be fought. You go to the doctor. You do your health checks. You don’t ignore symptoms. You eat your vegetables. You exercise. You take your medication. You stay on the marked trails. You wear your seat belt. You wear your sunscreen. You check your blind spots. You look both ways. You check your brakes. You download a dating app. You go to that party. You apply for that job. You speak to that person. You study as hard as you are able. You invest sensibly. You won’t necessarily win against fate, but you should at least put up a fight.

waiting for the bus waiting for a bus under shadeless tree, blacks, hispanics, asians ~ the tired, the poor, the great unwashed, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free ~ anchored with bags waiting for their ride home or to a wedding, funeral, baptism, maybe a second job they glance nervously, repeatedly at wristwatches, cell phones, the time-table, the axis of the sun, the bus is late as usual finally it stops, braking with an owl's screech, opening its door with a cobra's hiss they reach for their wallets, purses for coins and tokens to hand sharon martinez, the ferrywoman of 14th Street, to cross the broad way sticks i'm not too proud to draw my poetry from the crowd ~ from the wretched refuse, the tempest-tossed homeless the common people huddling under bus shelters ~ for the sacred, my friend, does not dwell in churches, temples, mosques or synagogues ~ it dwells most profoundly in the stink and sweat of poverty

the horses to the oak freight wagon, and McCloskey helped him load, distributing the weight evenly in the wagon. When they were done, Johnny got a tarpaulin, and as he'd done many times, he threw it over the load and tucked it in carefully to keep out any rain he might encounter. Finally he'd strapped it all down tight with ropes. McCloskey had looked over the load and said, "Good job, Johnny. You sure you can do this run by yourself?" He said, "I'm sure I'll be fine, Fleet. It's just 19 miles over there and mostly flat. I won't have to use the brakes at all."   "Be sure though and set the brake when you stop." Johnny nodded, and Fleet asked, "You got your book?" Nodding and smiling, Johnny said, "Yessir, got it," as he drove the wagon out of the warehouse yard, headed west to Forest City, which was often referred to as "Irish City" because it had been settled by Irishmen. The folks there were still mostly Irish, which was evident from the heavy Irish lilt to the speech of many of the folks living there. McCloskey's face showed tiny creases of worry as he watched Johnny drive off. He was a good boy, but he was still a boy being asked to do a man's job. In his year on the job, Johnny had grown to be a fine young man. He was only a few inches short of six feet, and he'd added a lot of muscle. He could lift as much as most of the teamsters. Even so, McCloskey worried about sending the boy out alone, but he'd had no choice in the matter. He'd promised the load would reach Forest City by tomorrow morning. Johnny had a brand-new Spencer repeating rifle leaning against his leg. Peter Sarpy, the owner, had used his contacts back east and gotten a shipment of the new rifles. Now, with his four drivers armed with repeating rifles, Sarpy worried a little less about being robbed. But the rifle made Johnny worry more because if outlaws did hit a wagon, they'd kill the driver if he lifted a rifle. Johnny had helped take a load to Forest City with old Monk Beeson two weeks before, and they hadn't had any problems, and he didn't expect any problems with today's load. But during that trip, Beeson had told Johnny about an outlaw gang living a few miles north of Forest City led by a man the Irish called Ranger Jones who collected tribute from prospective

Dr Jonathan Shay, who studies trust and cohesion for a living, once noted that: The machine metaphor of a military unit was never apt, especially in a fight—where it counts. When you replace the carburetor of a car, it works from the get-go, if it’s the right part. It doesn’t have to practice stopping and starting with the brake linings, or learn the job of the brake linings so that the brakes and the carburetor say they can read each other’s minds. This is the way members of a tight military unit speak of each other.114

Think of yourself as a ‘57 Chevy that just turned over two-hundred thousand miles. I know you love that car. It’s still got original equipment. You’ve changed the oil, lubed it and maintained it well all these years. Now it needs a valve job. Our bodies are like that car. Stuff wears out. You put it in the shop for a week, get the valves ground, a new set of brake pads and fan belts and you’re good to go for another hundred-thousand miles.

He knew no matter what he did while Jackson was President, his job was safe, for he was there for one specific task, one the American public could never know about, one that even his own wife knew nothing about. One that had been handed down to him by his own father. He pressed the talk button. “Masters.”  “Sir, we have an Umbra Gamma Prime document here for immediate review.” “I’ll be right there.” He hung up the phone and pressed the button to lower the glass partition separating him from the driver. “Jerry, turn us around, I need to get back to the office, fast.” His chauffeur of many years radioed the escort vehicles as he raised the partition, picked up his glass and gripped the overhead handhold. The mini-motorcade’s lead Lincoln Navigator cut left, jumped the median and blocked oncoming traffic. The Town Car limo locked up its brakes and followed, jostling its well-prepared VIP as the trailing Navigator cut across, assuming the role of lead vehicle. All three vehicles turned on their lights and sirens, leaving a trail of burnt rubber, smoke and a dozen confused drivers in their wake. Umbra Gamma Prime. It was one of the highest classifications of Top Secret there was in his business. In fact he had never had one cross his desk since he had taken the job, despite dealing with countless terrorist threats—both domestic and abroad—and having sent teams across the world in secret.

Kenzie Denune pedaled the bicycle harder, her thighs burning from the exertion. Thanks to a car that refused to start, she was going to be late for her job interview at Iverson Loch Manor. Grunting and pounding from the shrubs ahead, near the road's edge, snagged her attention. Naked shoulders glistened in the afternoon sun. Back muscles bulged and undulated with every thrust. “Bloody hell. Come fer me. Come.” In all of Mathe Bay in the Scottish Highlands, only one deep masculine voice had the power to raise the hair on her arms like this. A man with braided russet-colored hair that brushed broad shoulders inked with a bear's claw marks, woven into an intricate tribal design - Bryce Matheson. Damn him to hell. Who's he shagging in broad daylight? Out in the open, no less. Has he no shame? ... “I canna keep pounding at ye like this all bloody day. Me back is about to give out.” Bryce moaned and groaned again, obviously in the throes of ecstasy. The bear-shifting bastard. She eased up on the brakes to whiz past his love nest of bushes and brambles. “I'll not give up until I get ye wild cherry. Let me push both me thumbs and most of me fingers in here and....." My God, what's he doing to her? Kenzie couldna resist one fleeting glance over her shoulder. Her front wheel plunged into a pothole and the bike pitched... as she toppled across the grit. The force of the impact, combined with the slant of the narrow road, caused her to roll toward Bryce and his current conquest. No! No, God, no!

The encouraging news is that getting enough sleep will help you control body weight. We found that a full night of sleep repairs the communication pathway between deep-brain areas that unleash hedonic desires and higher-order brain regions whose job it is to rein in these cravings. Ample sleep can therefore restore a system of impulse control within your brain, putting the appropriate brakes on potentially excessive eating.

Software,” as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has proclaimed, “is eating the world.” It’s true. You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. There’s the obvious stuff, like your phone, your laptop, email and social networking and video games and Netflix, the way you order taxis and food. But there’s also less-obvious software lurking all around you. Nearly any paper book or pamphlet you touch was designed using software; code inside your car helps manage the braking system; “machine-learning” algorithms at your bank scrutinize your purchasing activity to help spy the moment when a criminal dupes your card and starts fraudulently buying things using your money. And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer—someone precisely like Ruchi Sanghvi or Mark Zuckerberg. Odds are high the person who originally thought of the product was a coder: Programmers spend their days trying to get computers to do new things, so they’re often very good at understanding the crazy what-ifs that computers make possible. (What if you had a computer take every word you typed and, quietly and constantly and automatically in the background, checked it against a dictionary of common English words? Hello, spell-check!) Sometimes it seems that the software we use just sort of sprang into existence, like grass growing on the lawn. But it didn’t. It was created by someone who wrote out—in code—a long, painstaking set of instructions telling the computer precisely what to do, step-by-step, to get a job done. There’s a sort of priestly class mystery cultivated around the word algorithm, but all they consist of are instructions: Do this, then do this, then do this. News Feed is now an extraordinarily complicated algorithm involving some trained machine learning; but it’s ultimately still just a list of rules. So the rule makers have power. Indeed, these days, the founders of high-tech companies—the ones who determine what products get created, what problems get solved, and what constitutes a “problem” in the first place—are increasingly technologists, the folks who cut their teeth writing endless lines of code and who cobbled together the prototype for their new firm themselves. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet.

The casting away of things is symbolic, you know. Talismanic. When you cast away things, you're also casting away the self-related others that are symbolically related to those things. You start a cleaning-out process. You begin to empty the vessel." Larry shook his head slowly. "I don't follow that." "Well, take an intelligent pre-plague man. Break his TV, and what does he do at night?" "Reads a book," Ralph said. "Goes to see his friends," Stu said. "Plays the stereo," Larry said, grinning. "Sure, all those things," Glen said. "But he's also missing that TV. There's a hole in his life where that TV used to be. In the back of his mind he's still thinking, At nine o'clock I'm going to pull a few beers and watch the Sox on the tube. And when he goes in there and sees that empty cabinet, he feels as disappointed as hell. A part of his accustomed life has been poured out, is it not so?" "Yeah," Ralph said. "Our TV went on the fritz once for two weeks and I didn't feel right until it was back." "It makes a bigger hole in his life if he watched a lot of TV, a smaller hole if he only used it a little bit. But something is gone. Now take away all his books, all his friends, and his stereo. Also remove all sustenance except what he can glean along the way. It's an emptying-out process and also a diminishing of the ego. Your selves, gentlemen--they are turning into a window-glass. Or better yet, empty tumblers." "But what's the point?" Ralph asked. "Why go through all the rigmarole?" Glen said, "If you read your Bible, you'll see that it was pretty traditional for these prophets to go out into the wilderness from time to time--Old Testament Magical Mystery Tours. The timespan given for these jaunts was usually forty days and forty nights, a Hebraic idiom that really means 'no one knows exactly how long he was gone, but it was quite a while.' Does that remind you of anyone?" "Sure. Mother," Ralph said. "Now think of yourself as a battery. You really are, you know. Your brain runs on chemically converted electrical current. For that matter, your muscles run on tiny charges, too--a chemical called acetylcholine allows the charge to pass when you need to move, and when you want to stop, another chemical, cholinesterase, is manufactured. Cholinesterase destroys acetylcholine, so your nerves become poor conductors again. Good thing, too. Otherwise, once you started scratching your nose, you'd never be able to stop. Okay, the point is this: Everything you think, everything you do, it all has to run off the battery. Like the accessories in a car." They were all listening closely. "Watching TV, reading books, talking with friends, eating a big dinner ... all of it runs off the battery. A normal life--at least in what used to be Western civilization--was like running a car with power windows, power brakes, power seats, all the goodies. But the more goodies you have, the less the battery can charge. True?" "Yeah," Ralph said. "Even a big Delco won't ever overcharge when it's sitting in a Cadillac." "Well, what we've done is to strip off the accessories. We're on charge." Ralph said uneasily: "If you put a car battery on charge for too long, she'll explode." "Yes," Glen agreed. "Same with people. The Bible tells us about Isaiah and Job and the others, but it doesn't say how many prophets came back from the wilderness with visions that had crisped their brains. I imagine there were some. But I have a healthy respect for human intelligence and the human psyche, in spite of an occasional throwback like East Texas here--" "Off my case, baldy," Stu growled. "Anyhow, the capacity of the human mind is a lot bigger than the biggest Delco battery. I think it can take a charge almost to infinity. In certain cases, perhaps beyond infinity." They walked in silence for a while, thinking this over. "Are we changing?" Stu asked quietly. "Yes," Glen answered. "Yes, I think we are.

Then though , I look around me at the airport hustle, with its irritable cab honkings and clank of baggage carts, the spit and hiss of bus brakes, the lamplit shades hurrying to and fro in a New York night that is black, raining, and cold, with, ahead of us, the inconceivable press and milling of unseen souls, New York, city of dreams, or so it still sells itself, though for most who walk its canyoned street it is where the dream died, leaving them in graffitied apartments with bad heating and dark stairwells, riding the treadmill of two part-time jobs, or even three, the unending, mean struggle for survival…

Just come back before it gets dark, okay?” “Yes, ma’am. I’ll handle this as fast as I can.” “Thank you, Doc.” Doc stood and smiled at Rhonda before leaving the kitchen and heading out to the barn to harness the mules. Before he did, though, he swung by the bunkhouse and picked up his Winchester ’73 and the Sharps along with a box of cartridges for each. He may not have expected that any visitors to arrive at the ranch, at least not anyone from the Double L, but it never hurt to be prepared. He walked back out to the barn, set the two carbines in the wagon’s footwell, then pulled an axe from the wall, checked its edge and found it acceptable, although it would need sharpening when he returned. He set it on the wagon’s bed then began harnessing the mules. After the mules were in harness, he stepped up, released the wagon’s hand brake and drove the team out of the barn and headed northeast to the stand of cottonwoods that he had seen near the creek. What made his job easier was that two of the trees were already down and were devoid of leaves meaning that they had been down for a while, and if they’d been down long enough, the wood would already be seasoned. _____ Rhonda finished cleaning up after lunch, still savoring the lingering taste of Doc’s choice in food. She entered her bedroom, took out her sewing

Kit feels a kink in his heart. His girl is in the shower, soaping her every inch of skin. He cannot see the maze of tubes and cavities inside her body. He cannot know what is pumping right and what is pumping wrong, how each of those slippery organs is tucked against its neighbor and whether something bad is truly blooming there. Whether, even if her body is perfect, a truck will lose its brakes, tumble off the road where Summer is walking. There are storms beginning to twist in the warm oceans to the south, and maybe they will whip this way, tearing the houses like paper. The ferry could sink beneath them; poisoned gases could leak into the air at any time. The melted ice caps are washing toward them. They’re both dying- everyone is. The schedule of death is not made public. Love’s job is to make a safe place. Not to deny that the spiny forest exists, but to live hidden inside it, tunneled into the soft undergrass

In honor of the new-guy-cooks rule, I made breakfast for the crew on C shift. A Mexican egg skillet, my specialty. I was on probation—the probie. Even though I was five years into the job, I was only five shifts into this station. That meant I was the last one to sit down to eat and the first one to get up and do dishes. I was practically a servant. They had me cleaning toilets and changing sheets. All the grunt work. Sloan and Kristen opted to help me, and Brandon took pity on me, so they all stood in the kitchen wiping counters and scraping food off plates while I washed the dishes and Shawn and Javier played cribbage at the table. Kristen had glared all through the meal, but only when she didn’t think anyone was watching. It was kind of funny, actually. I kept ribbing her. From what I gathered through my prodding, she’d told everyone the shirt was her boyfriend’s. I wasn’t going to say anything. Brandon didn’t need to have the thunder stolen from his new truck by learning it had already been defiled, but I was drawing untold amounts of enjoyment from giving Kristen shit. And she didn’t take any of it lying down either. She matched me tit for tat. “So, Josh, you drive the fire truck, huh?” Kristen asked casually, wiping down the stove. “I do.” I smiled. “Are you any good at it? No problems stopping that thing when you need to?” She cocked her head. “Nope. As long as someone doesn’t slam on the brakes in front of me, I’m good.” Glare. Smirk. Repeat. And Sloan and Brandon were oblivious. It was the most fun I’d had in weeks. Sloan handed me the cutting board to wash. “You’ll be walking Kristen down the aisle at the wedding.” She smiled at her friend. “She’s my maid of honor.” “I hope you walk better than you drive,” Kristen mumbled under her breath.