“
That’s the point. This healthy-feeling time now just feels like a tease. Like I’m in this holding pattern, flying in smooth circles within sight of the airport, in super-comfortable first class. But I can’t enjoy the in-flight movie or free chocolate chip cookies because I know that before the airport is able to make room for us, the plane is going to run out of fuel, and we’re going to crash-land into a fiery, agonizing death.
”
”
Jessica Verdi (My Life After Now)
“
She touches me
The jungle lights up with incinerating fire
Looks like a flaming serpent
I look into her eyes
I see a movie flickering
Car crashes
People kicking corpses
Men ripping their tracheas out and shaking them at the sky
I think to myself:
I don’t want to survive this one
I want to burn up in the wreckage
Cooking flesh in the jungle
”
”
Henry Rollins (The Portable Henry Rollins)
“
When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
It felt like a thousand memories of her—smiling at me, laughing with me, tangled up in my arms in my dorm room—swirled together and crashed into my lungs like a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball.
”
”
Lynn Painter (Nothing Like the Movies (Better Than the Movies, #2))
“
It's like we're in a movie and the music is swelling and waves are crashing around us.
”
”
Jenny Han (To All the Boys I've Loved Before (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #1))
“
We have a bad habit of seeing books as sort of cheaply made movies where the words do nothing but create visual narratives in our heads.
So too often what passes for literary criticism is "I couldn't picture that guy", or "I liked that part", or "this part shouldn't have happened." That is, we've left language so far behind that sometimes we judge quality solely based on a story's actions.
So we can appreciate a novel that constructs its conflicts primarily through plot - the layered ambiguity of a fatal car accident caused by a vehicle owned by Gatsby but driven by someone else, for instance. But in this image-drenched world, sometimes we struggle to appreciate and celebrate books where the quality arises not exclusively from plot but also from the language itself.
”
”
John Green
“
Nudity and explicit sex are far more easily available now than are clear images of death. The quasi-violence of movies and television dwells on the lively acts of killing – flying kicks, roaring weapons, crashing cars, flaming explosions. These are the moral equivalents of old-time cinematic sex. The fictional spurting of gun muzzles after flirtation and seduction but stop a titillating instant short of actual copulation. The results of such aggressive vivacity remain a mystery. The corpse itself, riddled and gaping, swelling or dismembered, the action of heat and bacteria, of mummification or decay are the most illicit pornography.
”
”
Katherine Dunn
“
They explained about the epidurals and drugs, but no one there was going to have drugs. They all wanted the natural experience. It all seemed wrapped in plastic, unreal, like stewardesses on planes demonstrating the seat belts and the patterns for orderly disembarkatation in case of a crash at sea, the people taking a glance at the cards in the seat pocket in front of them. Sure, they thought, no problem. A peek at the nearest exit and then they were ready for in-flight service, peanuts and a movie.
”
”
Janet Fitch (White Oleander)
“
Guess I'll have to crash here again with you," Wesley said with a grin.
"You planned it that way."
"Whatever would make you think that?" Lloyd's expression said 'really?' "You made us watch the 1964 movie Sleep.
”
”
Anyta Sunday (Gemini Keeps Capricorn (Signs of Love, #3))
“
He slowed to a walk. As he approached her he was surprised at just how pretty she was. She looked a little like Maureen O'Hara in those old pirate movies. His writer's mind kicked in and he thought, This woman could break my heart. I could crash and burn on this woman. I could lose this woman, drink heavily, write profound poems, and die in the gutter of turberculosis over this woman.
This was not an unusual reaction for Tommy. He had it often, mostly with girls who worked the drive-through windows at fast-food places. He would drive off with the smell of fries in his car and the bitter taste of unrequited love on his tongue. It was usually good for at least one short story.
”
”
Christopher Moore (Bloodsucking Fiends (A Love Story, #1))
“
Must you always speak with so many pop culture references?"
"I must, yes, but no one's making pop culture anymore, so I'm starting to feel dated. I haven't seen a new movie in two years. And you know what else I just realized?"
The doctor stared at him.
"I'm never going to find out what the hell was going on with Lost. I mean, was it just sheer coincidence their plane crashed on the island or was it this Jacob guy pulling the strings all along? And how did most of them end up back in the 1970s with the Dharma people?
”
”
Peter Clines (Ex-Patriots (Ex-Heroes, #2))
“
Crashing a pharmaceutical gala when you are a fugitive positively drenched in blood? This movie is from 1993, but that’s a 2020 mood.
”
”
Lindy West (Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema)
“
Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive.
”
”
Roger Ebert (Your Movie Sucks)
“
Teen drivers are more dangerous even than drivers in their eighties. And safety education, including showing teens gory movies of car crashes, has little effect.
”
”
Elly Blue (Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save The Economy (Bicycle))
“
So I began, feeling as if I was some elf in a Grim fairy tale climbing the corporate ladder of darkest whimsy, yet somewhere at the top lies the treasure of a pure maiden’s heart. Therefore it was my duty to do whatever it might take to win that pure maiden’s heart by returning that treasure to her hand. By the way, Spicoli, in the movie Fast Times at Ridge Mont High, said that people on ludes shouldn’t drive, that being shortly after crashing a car while he was high on ludes. Therefore, I will say this in advance, people still half drunk and stoned probably shouldn’t climb trees either.
”
”
Andrew James Pritchard (Sukiyaki)
“
The next few minutes were filled with more screams and bangs and crashes than a summer blockbuster movie. The dwarven guards made an excellent show of resisting before collapsing to the ground with defeated groans.
”
”
Shannon Messenger (Neverseen (Keeper of the Lost Cities, #4))
“
The second I get into a car and we start driving, I imagine a fatal crash to the last detail. When I’m in the liquor store, I imagine a robbery by the time the cashier tells me the total. Every plane ride is an 8-hour movie in my head of me planning what I would say to the stranger on my right if the pilot announced the plane was crashing. I always imagine these scenarios. Family dying. Earthquakes. The earth suddenly falling because gravity left the party. It’s exhausting. Yesterday someone was afraid of me. I was bicycling with Austin and we saw a dead deer on the road. It was so large. Austin nearly fell off his bike when he saw it. Then he looked over at me confused. He asked why I didn't react to it. I told him it was because I’d already imagined one six miles back. There are always two worlds playing in my head at once: what’s in front of me and what could be.
”
”
Kristian Ventura (The Goodbye Song)
“
Before I met Tommy, I would not have day-tripped to the spot where James Dean died. There would have been too many critical voices in my head telling me how dumb and pointless such a trip would be. Tommy, though, made me realize I could drive to James Dean’s crash site for the simple reason that I felt like doing it. He made me realize that doing such things was the whole point of being young. This was not an attitude that came easily to me, but I could say or do anything around Tommy and he wouldn’t judge me. How could he? He was the weirdest person I’d ever met—but lovably weird. Around Tommy I could be who I wanted to be—and to me that felt like freedom.
”
”
Greg Sestero (The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made)
“
He’s brought a sleeping bag, one of those big green bulky L.L. Bean ones. I look at it questioningly.
Following my gaze, he turns red. “I told my parents I was going to help you study, then we might watch a movie, and if it got late enough, I’d crash on your living room floor.”
“And they said?”
“Mom said, ‘Have a nice time, dear.’ Dad just looked at me.”
“Embarrassing much?”
“Worth it.”
He walks slowly over, his eyes locked on mine, then puts his hands around my waist.
“Um. So . . . are we going to study?” My tone’s deliberately casual.
Jase slides his thumbs behind my ears, rubbing the hollow at their base. He’s only inches from my face, still looking into my eyes. “You bet. I’m studying you.” He scans over me, slowly, then returns to my eyes. “You have little flecks of gold in the middle of the blue.” He bends forward and touches his lips to one eyelid, then the other, then moves back. “And your eyelashes aren’t blond at all, they’re brown. And . . .” He steps back a little, smiling slowly at me. “You’re already blushing—here”—his lips touch the pulse at the hollow of my throat—“and probably here . . .” The thumb that brushes against my breast feels warm even through my T-shirt.
In the movies, clothes just melt away when the couple is ready to make love. They’re all golden and backlit with the soundtrack soaring. In real life, it just isn’t like that. Jase has to take off his shirt and fumbles with his belt buckle and I hop around the room pulling off my socks, wondering just how unsexy that is. People in movies don’t even have socks. When Jase pulls off his jeans, change he has in his pocket slips out and clatters and rolls across the floor.
“Sorry!” he says, and we both freeze, even though no one’s home to hear the sound.
In movies, no one ever gets self-conscious at this point, thinking they should have brushed their teeth. In movies, it’s all beautifully choreographed, set to an increasingly dramatic soundtrack.
In movies, when the boy pulls the girl to him when they are both finally undressed, they never bump their teeth together and get embarrassed and have to laugh and try again.
But here’s the truth: In movies, it’s never half so lovely as it is here and now with Jase.
”
”
Huntley Fitzpatrick (My Life Next Door)
“
Hiro walks straight through the display, and it vanishes. Amusement parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic, offering a wide selection of interactive three-dimensional movies. But in the end, they’re still nothing more than video games. Hiro’s not so poor, yet, that he would go and write video games for this company. It’s owned by the Nipponese, which is no big deal. But it’s also managed by the Nipponese, which means that all the programmers have to wear white shirts and show up at eight in the morning and sit in cubicles and go to meetings. When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that’s no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
We can discuss this point from different angles. Experts call one manifestation of such denigration of history historical determinism. In a nutshell we think that we would know when history is made; we believe that people who, say, witnessed the stock market crash of 1929 knew then that they lived an acute historical event and that, should these events repeat themselves, they too would know about such facts. Life for us is made to resemble an adventure movie, as we know ahead of time that something big is about to happen. It is hard to imagine that people who witnessed history did not know at the time how important the moment was. Somehow all respect we may have for history does not translate well into our treatment of the present.
”
”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto Book 1))
“
The classroom gradually filled up with our other roommates, but one bed remained unclaimed, heightening the air of mystery surrounding its future occupant. Then, suddenly, the door crashed open and into the room strode a human hurricane—a sturdy, confident fellow who greeted everyone with great cheer and a ferocious hug. He was almost four years older than me. He introduced himself to me as Brian Blessed. He was not yet the globally renowned actor, mountaineer, adventurer, and star of TV shows, stage musicals, and movies as disparate as Blackadder, Cats, Flash Gordon, and I, Claudius. But I could tell instantly that he was a one-off; they broke the mold when they made Brian. Like Norman and me, he, too, was of humble origin, from the South Yorkshire mining town of Mexborough. I was beginning to feel more comfortable by the minute.
”
”
Patrick Stewart (Making It So: A Memoir)
“
Everyone laughed, including myself. I think I was starting to feel what they all must have already felt about my last meal – that it was a story playing out on a movie screen and not in real life. All their laughter and curiosity and encouragement wasn't completely evil. It was just the result of some teenage sense of immortality mixed with that thing that makes you slow down and watch a car crash, even when you don't really want to look.
”
”
Erin Jade Lange (Butter)
“
Sometimes difficulty clarifies things. And sometimes realizing that the road you’ve chosen is a demanding one gives you the courage to stay on that road. It reveals the nature of our relationship with God. It sounds cute and comforting to say “God is in control,” and people who say that may imagine sitting on their daddy’s lap behind the wheel of the family car, going “Vroom vroomy vroom!” while Daddy does the steering. In reality, when God is in control, it feels more like one of those movies where some amateur has to step up and land the airplane or steer the ship to safety through a crashing storm, with an expert giving them instructions remotely through a headset. In theory, following the expert’s instructions will help us get in safely; but our fear, panic, self-doubt, and lack of skill are not exactly comforting. Yes, God is in control, but we’re the ones who are in for a rough ride.
”
”
Simcha Fisher (The Sinner's Guide to Natural Family Planning)
“
I do this thing where I say
I love you, but it’s more like a latch,
a finger movement, something I’ve tricked
into happening. Or a hotel pool
I’ve been crashing for years. I slather myself in lotion
watch a movie where a woman with tiny birds
on her dress stops talking, walks across the room.
This is always happening, then happening again.
Like an eclipse, or dark spot in my vision.
She stops eating and shines so bright
it’s intoxicating, which is to say, it’s terrifying.
”
”
Kristy Bowen
“
Let me tell you what happened, the way it looked from inside my head. The world slowed down, like it does in the movies when someone is getting shot and the filmmaker wants you to feel every bullet enter your body. The words echoed in my ears over and over and over. Attached to that simple pronoun was the word failure, quickly followed by the word freak. All the joy sucked out of my life in that instant, and every moment I'd ever fucked up crashed down on my head. Here was someone who'd never known me as a man, referring to me as a man.
”
”
Kate Bornstein (Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us)
“
I found a photo of Mom standing between Mick and Dad, who were both wearing basketball uniforms. Mom was perfectly groomed, of course, and looking very ladylike. I said I must have been adopted. Ma-ma-oo laughed and said that when Mom was a little girl, she was always doing things like tying two cookie sheets to her shoes and attempting to ski because she'd seen one of her movie star idols in a magazine, elegantly poised on the slopes of Switzerland. Mom flew down the hill, hit a bump and crashed into a bush. She broke her leg and earned the nickname "Crash.
”
”
Eden Robinson (Monkey Beach)
“
All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?
Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash.
Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. Their daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.
”
”
Nathanael West
“
The more I looked around, the more I listened to the music, watched television and movies, and examined sexist advertising, the more convinced I became that, as a society, we were on the wrong path with our daughters. American culture was poisonous to teenage girls. The messages girls received about sex, beauty and their place in the world truncated their development and left many of them traumatized. With the onset of puberty, girls were crashing into a junk culture that was just too hard for them to understand and master. Many became overwhelmed, depressed and angry.
”
”
Mary Pipher (Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls)
“
Do kraja boravka u bolnici, nisam više video doktorku Helen Remington, ali sam, dok sam ležao na praznom odeljenju, neprekidno razmišljao o sudaru koji nas je spojio. Izmedu mene i te ožalošcene mlade žene javio se snažan osecaj erotske privlacnosti, gotovo kao da sam podsvesno želeo da nas dvoje u
njenoj materici ponovo zacnemo njenog mrtvog muža. Ako bih ušao u njenu vaginu, tu na odeljenju za rendgensko snimanje, medu metalnim ormaricima i belim kablovima, nekako bih prizvao njenog muža iz mrtvih, stvorio bih ga iz spoja njenog levog pazuha i hromiranog postolja za rendgenski aparat, iz
sjedinjenja naših genitalija s fino izradenim poklopcem za objektiv.
”
”
J.G. Ballard (Crash)
“
Why do you hate the idea of being with yourself so much that ‘the time you spend with yourself is now considered as loneliness
Why we fear loneliness. The fear of loneliness was injected into our minds since we were kids. We have learned that the kid who eats alone, sits alone, and has no friends is pathetic. In every book or movie, the kid who is eating alone, and has no friend is always featured as a weak character who needs to be saved.
It’s not pathetic to be alone. I realized that we don’t hate being alone. We hate to believe that we are left behind.
Being alone is a part of life. But being lonely means viewing yourself from the lens of sympathy and misery. When you look at yourself through the lens of loneliness, you feel insecure and left out.
Being alone doesn’t mean you are lonely. Being alone means YOU ARE WITH YOURSELF.
Stop romanticizing your life , one day someone will come to save you, rescue you, or rather fall in love with you. The problem with this is that you CHOOSE to believe that YOU ARE NOT ENOUGH to change your life all by yourself. You rely your hope on someone who doesn’t exist.
After college, you don’t make friends. You just network. You just try to be nice to people so you are not left behind (mostly).
We don’t want people to think that no one chose us so what do we do? We start becoming like an ideal version of whom everyone loves. We start saying YES to things that we hate. But step by step, as we become like everyone else, we go far away from who we truly are.
Loneliness is not when you don’t have people around. Loneliness occurs when you cannot find yourself inside you. The moment you feel the loss of your real self, that’s when loneliness makes a home inside you.
“There are some days when you miss yourself more than you have ever missed anyone else.
Solitude is my home , Loneliness was my cage.
Imagine Yourself as a computer and see how you have opened different tabs of your personality for each person you meet. New person, new tab. Perhaps, that's the reason your real personality has crashed.
”
”
Renuka Gavrani
“
Can we walk for a bit?” he says.
“Yes, that would be lovely.” But as I start getting up I lose my footing and slip and fall—right over the shingle. If I’d been doing a stunt in an action-adventure movie it would have probably looked spectacular but in the context of a romantic makeup it looks totally ridiculous.
“Are you OK?” Noah calls over to me.
I scramble up, my face red with embarrassment.
“That was an awesome body roll. I wanna try.” Noah takes a step back before hurling himself over the shingle. He crashes into me and we land on the beach in a tangled heap. And as we laugh our heads off, the very last traces of tension between us disappear.
“I’ve missed you so much, Inciting Incident,” he whispers.
— Zoe Sugg (Girl Online (Girl Online, #1))
”
”
Zoe Sugg
“
Riley: I have to ask you something.
Heroine: Shoot…
Riley: Bear with me. I can’t believe that we haven’t discussed this yet so I’m a little nervous.
Heroine: Now I’m nervous.
Riley: You have nothing to worry about. Your life will continue just fine. It’s mine that might come crashing down here.
Riley: How do you feel about comics and superheroes?
Heroine: DC or Marvel?
Heroine: Nevermind, that’s a terrible question. I’d never want to choose. I love the ensembles. The Avengers, the X-Men, the Justice League.
Heroine: But I haven’t read any in 20 years. I’ve caught up with the movies as they’ve been released, though. Most of them have been really good.
Heroine: Are you still with me?
Riley: Yes. Sorry. I just spontaneously orgasmed.
Heroine: What?
Riley: Nothing. But I’ll talk to you later. Something just popped up.
”
”
Kate Canterbary (Preservation (The Walshes, #7))
“
This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it—talking trade balances here—once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here—once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel—once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity—y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
THE SPEED OF TIME VARIED, fast or slow, depending on the depth of my sleep. I became very sensitive to the taste of the water from the tap. Sometimes it was cloudy and tasted of soft minerals. Other times it was gassy and tasted like somebody’s bad breath. My favorite days were the ones that barely registered. I’d catch myself not breathing, slumped on the sofa, staring at an eddy of dust tumbling across the hardwood floor in the draft, and I’d remember that I was alive for a second, then fade back out. Achieving that state took heavy dosages of Seroquel or lithium combined with Xanax, and Ambien or trazodone, and I didn’t want to overuse those prescriptions. There was a fine mathematics for how to mete out sedation. The goal for most days was to get to a point where I could drift off easily, and come to without being startled. My thoughts were banal. My pulse was casual. Only the coffee made my heart work a bit harder. Caffeine was my exercise. It catalyzed my anxiety so that I could crash and sleep again. The movies I cycled through the most were The Fugitive, Frantic, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and Burglar. I loved Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg.
”
”
Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation)
“
Pru curled up in the bay window and looked out at the city. People were going to the movies, parents were putting their children to bed. Suddenly, she feared for them all. She remembered, as she did from time to time, that everyone was going to die. Plane crashes, heart attacks, the slow erosion of bones. How did we manage to forget this, she wondered, and get through our daily lives? It was astonishing to her. Everybody was going to die, but still they did the laundry, watered the plants, dug out the scum around the taps in the bathroom,. They let themselves love others, who were also going to die. They created little beings, who they also loved, and who will, one day, cease to exist. What did it matter how love ended? So it ended for Patsy with Jacob returning to his wife, instead of with his death. Did it really matter so much? She thought of something her mother used to say, a warning she gave whenever they’d begun to fight over some precious object or another: “It’s going to end in tears girls! It always ends in tears.”
For a long time, she’d thought the whole problem was about finding love. She’d thought that, once she’d found it, she’d basically be done. Set. Good to go. Funny how until just now, she hadn’t put it all together: All love ended, somehow. One way, or another.
It was all going to end in tears, wasn’t it?
”
”
Rebecca Flowers (Nice to Come Home To)
“
Who’s the guy?”
“What guy?”
“The guy you’re dating.”
That’s when I see him. Peter Kavinsky, walking down the hallway. Like magic. Beautiful, dark-haired Peter. He deserves background music, he looks so good. “Peter. Kavinsky. Peter Kavinsky!” The bell rings, and I sail past Josh. “I’ve gotta go! Talk later, Josh!”
“Wait!” he calls out.
I run up to Peter and launch myself into his arms like a shot out of a cannon. I’ve got my arms around his neck and my legs hooked around his waist, and I don’t even know how my body knows how, because I’ve for sure never touched a boy like this in my life. It’s like we’re in a movie and the music is swelling and waves are crashing around us. Except for the fact that Peter’s expression is registering pure shock and disbelief and maybe a drop of amusement, because Peter likes to be amused. Raising his eyebrows, he says, “Lara Jean? What the--?”
I don’t answer. I just kiss him.
My first thought is: I have muscle memory of his lips.
My second thought is: I hope Josh is watching. He has to be watching or it’s all for nothing.
My heart is beating so fast I forget to be afraid of doing it wrong. Because for about three seconds, he’s kissing me back. Peter Kavinsky, the boy of every girl’s dreams, is kissing me back.
I haven’t kissed that many boys before. Peter Kavinsky, John Ambrose McClaren, Allie Feldman’s cousin with the weird eye, and now Peter again.
I open my eyes and Peter’s staring at me with that same expression on his face. Very sincerely I say, “Thank you.” He replies, “You’re welcome,” and I hop out of his arms and sprint off in the opposite direction.
”
”
Jenny Han (To All the Boys I've Loved Before (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #1))
“
The first time he saw her, he formed an impression that did not
change for many years: She was a dour, bookish, geeky type who dressed like she
was interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral parlor. At the same
time, she had a flamethrower tongue that she would turn on people at the oddest
times, usually in some grandiose, earth-scorching retaliation for a slight or
breach of etiquette that none of the other freshmen had even perceived. It
wasn't until a number of years later, when they both wound up working at Black
Sun Systems, Inc., that he put the other half of the equation together. At the
time, both of them were working on avatars. He was working on bodies, she was
working on faces. She was the face department, because nobody thought that
faces were all that important -- they were just flesh-toned busts on top of the
avatars. She was just in the process of proving them all desperately wrong.
But at this phase, the all-male society of bit-heads that made up the power
structure of Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial and
superficial. It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially
virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too
smart to be sexists.
That first impression, back at the age of seventeen, was nothing more than that
-- the gut reaction of a post-adolescent Army brat who had been on his own for
about three weeks. His mind was good, but he only understood one or two things
in the whole world --samurai movies and the Macintosh -- and he understood them
far, far too well. It was a worldview with no room for someone like Juanita.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Still others assert that they have grown enormously as a result of their traumatic experience, discovering a maturity and strength of character that they didn’t know they had—for example, reporting having found “a growth and a freedom to…give fuller expression to my feelings or to assert myself.” A new and more positive perspective is a common theme among those enduring traumas or loss, a renewed appreciation of the preciousness of life and a sense that one must live more fully in the present. For example, one bereaved person rediscovered that “having your health and living life to the fullest is a real blessing. I appreciate my family, friends, nature, life in general. I see a goodness in people.”12 A woman survivor of a traumatic plane crash described her experience afterward: “When I got home, the sky was brighter. I paid attention to the texture of sidewalks. It was like being in a movie.”13 Construing benefit in negative events can influence your physical health as well as your happiness, a remarkable demonstration of the power of mind over body. For example, in one study researchers interviewed men who had had heart attacks between the ages of thirty and sixty.14 Those who perceived benefits in the event seven weeks after it happened—for example, believing that they had grown and matured as a result, or revalued home life, or resolved to create less hectic schedules for themselves—were less likely to have recurrences and more likely to be healthy eight years later. In contrast, those who blamed their heart attacks on other people or on their own emotions (e.g., having been too stressed) were now in poorer health.
”
”
Sonja Lyubomirsky (The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want)
“
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
* music
* movies
* microcode (software)
* high-speed pizza delivery
The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."
So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Nope. Look. The Raft is a media event. But in a much more profound, general
sense than you can possibly imagine."
"Huh?"
"It's created by the media in that without the media, people wouldn't know it
was here, Refus wouldn't come out and glom onto it the way they do. And it
sustains the media. It creates a lot of information flow-movies, news reports -
- you know."
"So you're creating your own news event to make money off the information flow
that it creates?" says the journalist, desperately trying to follow. His tone
of voice says that this is all a waste of videotape. His weary attitude
suggests that this is not the first time Rife has flown off on a bizarre
tangent.
"Partly. But that's only a very crude explanation. It really goes a lot deeper
than that. You've probably heard the expression that the Industry feeds off of
biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean."
"I've heard the expression, yes."
"That's my expression. I made it up. An expression like that is just like a
virus, you know -- it's a piece of information -- data -- that spreads from one
person to the next. Well, the function of the Raft is to bring more biomass.
To renew America. Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having
babies. But America's like this big old clanking, smoking machine that just
lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. Leaves
behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always needs more fuel...
"Now I have a different perspective on it. America must look, to those poor
little buggers down there, about the same as Crete looked to those poor Greek
suckers. Except that there's no coercion involved. Those people down there
give up their children willingly. Send them into the labyrinth by the millions
to be eaten up. The Industry feeds on them and spits back images, sends out
movies and TV programs, over my networks, images of wealth and exotic things
beyond their wildest dreams, back to those people, and it gives them something
to dream about, something to aspire to. And that is the function of the Raft.
It's just a big old krill carrier."
Finally the journalist gives up on being a journalist, just starts to slag L.
Bob Rife openly. He's had it with this guy. "That's disgusting. I can't
believe you can think about people that way."
"Shit, boy, get down off your high horse. Nobody really gets eaten. It's just
a figure of speech. They come here, they get decent jobs, find Christ, buy a
Weber grill, and live happily ever after. What's wrong with that?
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
When I swung open the door, there he was: Marlboro Man, wearing Wranglers and a crisp white shirt and boots. And a sweet, heart-melting smile.
What are you doing here? I thought. You’re supposed to be in the shower. You’re supposed to be with the sex kitten.
“Hey,” he said, wasting no time in stepping through the door and winding his arms around my waist. My arms couldn’t help but drape over his strong shoulders; my lips couldn’t help but find his. He felt soft, warm, safe…and our first kiss turned into a third, and a sixth, and a seventh. It was the same kiss as the night before, when the phone call alerting him to the fire had come. My eyes remained tightly closed as I savored every second, trying to reconcile the present with the horror movie I’d imagined just moments earlier. I had no idea what was going on. At that point, I didn’t even care.
“Ummmmm!!! I’m t-t-t-ttellin’!” Mike teased from the top of the stairs, just before running down and embracing Marlboro Man in a bear hug.
“Hi, Mike,” Marlboro Man said, politely patting him on the back.
“Mike?” I said, smiling and blinking my eyes. “Will you excuse us for a couple of minutes?”
Mike obliged, giggling and oooo-ing as he walked toward the kitchen.
Marlboro Man picked me up and brought my eyes to the level of his. Smiling, he said, “I’ve been trying to call you this afternoon.”
“You have?” I said. I hadn’t even heard the phone ring. “I, um…I sort of took a nine-hour nap.”
Marlboro Man chuckled. Oh, that chuckle. I needed it badly that night.
He set my feet back down on the floor. “So…,” he teased. “You still cranky?”
“Nope,” I finally answered, smiling. So, who is that woman in your house? So…what did you do all day? “Did you ever get any sleep?” So, who is that woman in your house?
“Well,” he began. “I had to help Tim with something this morning, then I crashed on the couch for a few hours…it felt pretty good.”
Who was the woman? What’s her name? What’s her cup size?
He continued. “I would’ve slept all day, but Katie and her family showed up in the middle of my nap,” he said. “I forgot they were staying at my house tonight.”
Katie. His cousin Katie. The one with the two young kids, who had probably just gone to bed when I’d called earlier.
“Oh…really?” I said, my chest relaxing with a long, quiet exhale.
“Yeah…but it’s a little crowded over there,” he said. “I thought I’d come over here and take you to a movie.”
I smiled, stroking his back with my hand. “A movie sounds perfect.” The busty, bronze mystery girl slowly faded into oblivion.
Mike came barreling out of the kitchen, where he’d been listening to every word.
“Hey--if you guys are goin’ to the movie, c-c-c-can you drive me to the mall?” he yelled.
“Sure, Mike,” Marlboro Man said. “We’ll drive you to the mall. It’ll cost you ten bucks, though.”
And as the three of us made our way outside to Marlboro Man’s diesel pickup, I had to bite my lip to keep myself from articulating the only seven words in the English language that were in my vocabulary at that moment:
God help me--I love that man.
”
”
Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
“
Freshly sprung from my monogamous LTR, I had no idea how vulnerable I would be to the onslaught of chemicals your brain releases when you’re attracted to someone. These chemicals are responsible for every single people-in-love-are-crazy-fools song, movie plot, and Shakespearean drama ever written. They stimulate the same area of the brain that lights up when you snort a fat rail of cocaine. This state of mind, limerence, is a biological relative of obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you are an addict, or perhaps have the sort of low-dopamine, low-serotonin brain soup best served with a side of SSRIs, you are perhaps more sensitive to the mind-altering power of limerence. And if you are a romantic, you are perhaps more likely to label this heady, overwhelming sensation love. Being a low-serotonin addict with romantic tendencies, I had to experience many crashed-and-burned affairs to understand that for me, love really was a drug.
”
”
Michelle Tea (How to Grow Up)
“
I sat with my toes buried in the warm yellow sand staring out towards the back door of The East. Pacific Ocean Blue was playing in the background and it had left me in a state of Bohemia as the waves crashed ashore; roaring as loud as lions.
”
”
David Louden (White Mexicans (& Other Short Stories That All Definitely Happened*))
“
How hard can it be to follow five black SUVs?” Serge leaned over the steering wheel. “Except we’re in Miami.” “So?” “Miami drivers are a breed unto their own. Always distracted.” He uncapped a coffee thermos and chugged. “Quick on the gas and the horn. No separation between vehicles, every lane change a new adventure. The worst of both worlds: They race around as if they are really good, but they’re really bad, like if you taught a driver’s-ed class with NASCAR films.” He watched the first few droplets hit the windshield. “Oh, and worst of all, most of them have never seen snow.” “But it’s not snow,” said Felicia. “It’s rain. And just a tiny shower.” “That’s right.” Serge hit the wipers and took another slug from the thermos. “Rain is the last thing you want when you’re chasing someone in Miami. They drive shitty enough as it is, but on top of that, snow is a foreign concept, which means they never got the crash course in traction judgment for when pavement slickness turns less than ideal. And because of the land-sea temperature differential, Florida has regular afternoon rain showers. Nothing big, over in a jiff. But minutes later, all major intersections in Miami-Dade are clogged with debris from spectacular smash-ups. In Northern states, snow teaches drivers real fast about the Newtonian physics of large moving objects. I haven’t seen snow either, but I drink coffee, so the calculus of tire-grip ratio is intuitive to my body. It feels like mild electricity. Sometimes it’s pleasant, but mostly I’m ambivalent. Then you’re chasing someone in the rain through Miami, and your pursuit becomes this harrowing slalom through wrecked traffic like a disaster movie where everyone’s fleeing the city from an alien invasion, or a ridiculous change in weather that the scientist played by Dennis Quaid warned about but nobody paid attention.” Serge held the mouth of the thermos to his mouth. “Empty. Fuck it—
”
”
Tim Dorsey (Pineapple Grenade (Serge Storms #15))
“
When living in Denver, me and my friend Tony – who’s actually up here now and does amazing photography and helped us with the photoshoot for this collection – we did this funny thing on the anniversary of the stock market crash. It was a protest at a mall in Denver, and we called it “Black Friday is the new Black Monday”. We wanted to make the hipster thing into something else, we wanted to see what potential it had. Because we were fascinated by Paris 68, we made these pamphlets that said stuff like “Real hipsters riot”. We tried to encourage that mythology of the hipster from Sorbonne, Paris. This guy you see in Godard movie. We went into Urban Outfitters, threw a bunch of shit, flipped over things, went outside, shot a bunch of fireworks. That was pretty cool. The IEF was grounded in certain theoretical premises of insurrectionist theory, continental philosophy, and critical theory. It was definitely all over the damn place.
”
”
Anonymous
“
What happened in Prohibition? What happens to you when you put on a few pounds, and decide to get rid of them with a crash diet? What happened to the, ah, romantic content of movies after public criticism forced the adoption of a rating code? What happens to a daughter whose father forbids her to date? Unwanted efforts to apply a strict standard will almost always backfire, and bring about the very result which they seek to prevent.
”
”
Bill James (Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame? Baseball, Cooperstown, and the Politics of Glory)
“
What we went through on interminable conference calls in fancy office buildings obviously did not compare with the horrors of war, but ten minutes into the movie I knew I had finally found something that captured what the crisis felt like: the overwhelming burden of responsibility combined with the paralyzing risk of catastrophic failure; the frustration about the stuff out of your control; the uncertainty about what would help; the knowledge that even good decisions might turn out badly; the pain and guilt of neglecting your family; the loneliness and the numbness.”82
”
”
Adam Tooze (Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World)
“
tell some of her crew, “Officers, if the Bad Guys crash
”
”
Kate Howard (The Bad Guys Movie Novelization)
“
His mind was good, but he only understood one or two things in the whole world—samurai movies and the Macintosh—and he understood them far, far too well. It was a worldview with no room for someone like Juanita.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
The conceptual auto-disaster. The volunteer panels were shown fake safety propaganda movies in which implausible accidents were staged. Far from eliciting a humorous or sardonic response from the audience, marked feelings of hostility were shown towards the film and medical support staff. Subsequent films of genuine accidents exerted a notably calming effect. From this and similar work it is clear that Freud’s classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. A dominant element in this reality is technology and its instrument, the machine. In most roles the machine assumes a benign or passive posture - telephone exchanges, engineering hardware, etc. The twentieth century has also given birth to a vast range of machines - computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons - where the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous even to the skilled investigator. An understanding of this identity can be found in a study of the automobile, which dominates the vectors of speed, aggression, violence and desire. In particular the automobile crash contains a crucial image of the machine as conceptualized psychopathology. Tests on a wide range of subjects indicate that the automobile, and in particular the automobile crash, provides a focus for the conceptualizing of a wide range of impulses involving the elements of psychopathology, sexuality and self-sacrifice.
”
”
J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)
“
Tolerances of the Human Face in Crash Impacts. Travers took the glass of whisky from Karen Novotny. ‘Who is Koester? - the crash on the motorway was a decoy. Half the time we’re moving about in other people’s games.’ He followed her on to the balcony. The evening traffic turned along the outer circle of the park. The past few days had formed a pleasant no-man’s land, a dead zone on the clock. As she took his arm in a domestic gesture he looked at her for the first time in half an hour. This strange young woman, moving in a complex of undefined roles, the gun moll of intellectual hoodlums with her art critical jargon and bizarre magazine subscriptions. He had met her in the demonstration cinema during the interval, immediately aware that she would form the perfect subject for the re-enactment he had conceived. What were she and her fey crowd doing at a conference on facial surgery? No doubt the lectures were listed in the diary pages of Vogue , with the professors of tropical diseases as popular with their claques as fashionable hairdressers. ‘What about you, Karen? - wouldn’t you like to be in the movies?’ With a stiff forefinger she explored the knuckle of his wrist. ‘We’re all in the movies.
”
”
J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)
“
During the depression, W. C. Fields, the comedian, lost all his money, and found himself without income, without a job, and his means of earning a living (vaudeville) no longer existed. Moreover, he was past sixty, when many men consider themselves old. He was so eager to stage a comeback that he offered to work without pay, in a new field (movies). In addition to his other troubles, he fell and injured his neck. To many that would have been the place to give up and quit. But Fields was persistent. He knew that if he carried on he would get the breaks sooner or later, and he did get them, but not by chance. Marie Dressler found herself down and out, with her money gone, with no job, when she was about sixty. She, too, went after the “breaks,” and got them. Her persistence brought an astounding triumph late in life, long beyond the age when most men and women are done with ambition to achieve. Eddie Cantor lost his money in the 1929 stock crash, but he still had his persistence and his courage. With these, plus two prominent eyes, he exploited himself back into an income of $10,000 a week! Verily, if one has persistence, one can get along very well without many other qualities. The only break anyone can afford to rely upon is a self-made break. These come through the application of persistence. The starting point is definiteness of purpose. Examine the first hundred people you meet, ask them what they want most in life, and ninety-eight of them will not be able to tell you.
”
”
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich)
“
Do kraja boravka u bolnici, nisam više video doktorku Helen Remington, ali sam, dok sam ležao na praznom odeljenju, neprekidno razmišljao o sudaru koji nas je spojio. Izmedu mene i te ožalošcene mlade žene javio se snažan osecaj erotske privlacnosti, gotovo kao da sam podsvesno želeo da nas dvoje u
njenoj materici ponovo zacnemo njenog mrtvog muža. Ako bih ušao u njenu vaginu, tu na odeljenju za rendgensko snimanje, medu metalnim ormaricima i belim kablovima, nekako bih prizvao njenog muža iz mrtvih, stvorio bih ga iz spoja njenog levog pazuha i hromiranog postolja za rendgenski aparat, iz sjedinjenja naših genitalija s fino izradenim poklopcem za objektiv.
”
”
J.G. Ballard (Crash)
“
Naturally, we even made snow angels in the backyard as we stumbled around, and passed out. No one cared what we did really, thus far that was the fun of it all. Oh, and Kenneth was just the boy that only wanted one thing from Jenny.
He had no personality to speak of… he would hit on me all the time, and sometimes he would get it from me too, or I would be out of the group by her if he said I was the one that wanted it from him.
We could break widows out of old buildings and homes, and who would stop us. Sure, we got chased by the cops, yet that was the fun of it too. There is nothing else for us to do. I remember Maddie leaving her handprints in the wet mud, Jenny her butt, and some of her lady-ness, when the town thought it was time for new sidewalks. Yet we all did, something that would last forever, we thought. Maddie drew a few other things too. You can get the picture! All inappropriate… all there for life.
She was just crazy like that, like squatting down pissing, and doing number two in the old man Jackups yard. She has more balls than most guys… I knew. Old man Jackups called us, ‘Mindless slutty hooligans’ So that was payback. At the time- I thought like what is wrong with that, we're just having some fun here… your old windbag, like go and sit on your cane! You know what I mean… I think?
I remember being so smashed at my sweet sixteen too, that I don’t even remember it. Yet that is what having a good time was all about, so they say. Bumping and grinding on all the boys with loud music. And as the twinkling lights shine on your skin, that lights the way up to your bedroom.
You know that your puffy dress is going to be pushed up a couple of times on that night. I just don’t remember how many times it was, and I didn’t remember who it was with, I am not even sure if I know them at all… all of them or not. All I know is I did it all and was happy to do whatever they asked me to do. But- but I thought I was having the time of my life. I was the birthday girl that had the rosiest pink lipstick on most boys at the party. I thought it was such a horror. In my mind at the time, I thought that I high-jacked the rainbow, and crashed into a pot of gold! All the girls my age did it, yet I was the best at it!
I recall the time Liv and I went trick or treating. I was dressed as Hermione from the Harry Potter movies. Liv was a sexy witch! With the pointed hat. So, original…! That is what I told her. That was the night we scared the pants off of Ray in the not-so-scary haunted house. And before you ask, he was dressed as Harry. So, I wanted to play with his wand, that's why I dressed the way I did at the time. Liv was one of those good friends… I thought, which would tell everyone what you all did the day after, to all the girls at the lunch table.
She can text faster than anyone I know. Anyways… we jumped out at him, and he nearly craps his nicely pressed pants. I am sure there was a skid mark on his tighty- whities or something. Yet he did yack on Liv’s chest, and that was hilarious to me. She was dancing around, and flapping her hands doing the funky chicken while yelling, ‘Ou- ou- ou- wah!’ As I dibble over in lather, I guess it was funnier when it doesn’t happen to you too many times.
”
”
Marcel Ray Duriez (Nevaeh Falling too You)
“
This too has been made into a movie very effectively. [One in 1971 and one in 1992.] In Chapter 17, you will read about how there was unusual interest in this story by our biological warfare folks.
”
”
Robert M. Wood (Alien Viruses: Crashed UFOs, MJ-12, & Biowarfare)
“
Mr. Stallone and Ms. Stone… a meeting as disastrous as the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic
”
”
John Wilson (The Official Razzie Movie Guide: Enjoying the Best of Hollywood's Worst)
“
Sometimes people who have been in a car crash describe their memory of the event as being like a black-and-white silent movie. That’s the way I remember that moment now. A bone stuck out of the rock. I knew instantly what it was: the clavicle, or collarbone, of a hominin. I knew that fossil shape—I had done my Ph.D. research on this bone. Still, I doubted myself. But as I took the rock from Matt and stared at the little S-shaped piece of bone, I thought, “What else could it be?” I turned the rock over to get a better angle. There was a hominin canine tooth and part of the jaw, as well as other bones. This was not just any hominin. And, at the very least, there were several parts of the skeleton embedded in this chunk of rock. Matt says I cursed. I don’t remember. Whatever I said or did, I knew for sure that both his life and mine were about to change forever.
”
”
Lee Berger (Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story)
“
You know that friend who’s always planning something, and gets a little too enthusiastic? That would probably be me. I love birthday parties because there’s cake, any excuse to wear a costume, and movies that I can’t guess the end to. I’m looking for someone who lives to laugh, who wants the wild, chaotic mess that comes with falling in love, and someone who could sit on the cliffs at Hendry’s Beach and listen to the crashing surf until the sun has slipped into the ocean.
”
”
Christina Lauren (My Favorite Half-Night Stand)
“
they can’t think of a car crash in a movie as a violent act. It’s a celebration. A reaffirmation of traditional values and beliefs. I connect car crashes to holidays like Thanks-giving and the Fourth. We don’t mourn the dead or rejoice in miracles. These are days of secular optimism, of self-celebration. We will improve, prosper, perfect ourselves. Watch any car crash in any American movie. It is a high-spirited moment like old-fashioned stunt flying, walking on wings. The people who stage these crashes are able to capture a lightheartedness, a carefree enjoyment that car crashes in foreign movies can never approach.
”
”
Don DeLillo (White Noise)
“
I’d always assumed that the people who lived in those fancy houses in the suburbs were financially better off than I was, and only once I’d joined them did I come to understand that it’s all just a much more sophisticated and elaborate way of being broke. There’s the jumbo mortgage, the home equity loan to renovate the kitchen and bathrooms, the two or three monthly luxury car payments; before you know it, you’ve spent a hundred grand of post-tax income before you’ve put the first piece of bread on your table. Curse of the middle class, my ass. They do it to themselves, all because they’ve got this Hollywood Christmas movie notion of what their life is supposed to look like. It’s a tenuous existence built precariously on a foundation of colossal debt, and one miscalculation, one meager bonus or bad investment or unforeseen expense, can bring the whole thing crashing to the ground.
”
”
Jonathan Tropper (How to Talk to a Widower)
“
Nudity and explicit sex are far more easily available now than are clear images of death. The quasi-violence of movies and television dwells on the lively acts of killing – flying kicks, roaring weapons, crashing cars, flaming explosions. These are the moral equivalents of old-time cinematic sex. The fictional spurting of gun muzzles after flirtation and seduction but stop a titillating instant short of actual copulation. The results of such aggressive vivacity remain a mystery. The corpse itself, riddled and gaping, swelling or dismembered, the action of heat and bacteria, of mummification or decay are the most illicit pornography.
The images we seldom see are the aftermath of violent deaths. Your family newspaper will not print photos of the puddled suicide who jumped from the fourteenth floor. No car wrecks with the body parts unevenly distributed, no murder victim sprawled in his own juices. Despite the endless preaching against violent crime, despite the enormous and avid audience for mayhem, these images are taboo.
”
”
Sean Tejaratchi (Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective's Scrapbook)
“
Will" Rogers, known as "Oklahoma's Favorite Son,” was born on November 4, 1879, in what was then considered Indian Territory. His career included being a cowboy, writer, vaudeville performer, movie star and political wit. He poked fun at politicians, government programs, gangsters and current events, in a home spun and folksy way, making him one of the most idolized people in America. He became the highest paid Hollywood movie star at the time.
Will Rogers died on August 15, 1935 with his friend and pilot Wiley Post, when their small airplane crashed in Alaska. He once said that he wanted his tombstone to read "I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn’t like.
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
It will occur to him months from now that if this had been a movie, he wouldn’t have done it. Wouldn’t have sunk to the level of this monster. But the ugly truth is it never even crosses Ethan’s mind not to do it. And though he will continually dream about the crash, about all the things Aashif did to him, this moment will never haunt him. He will only wish it could have lasted longer.
”
”
Blake Crouch (Pines (Wayward Pines, #1))
“
This ritual was straight out of the 1965 movie Shenandoah: “We thank you, Lord, for this food. We cleared the land. We tended the herd and planted the corn, cared for it, and harvested it. Then my wife prepared the meal, and we thank you for the opportunity
”
”
David Soucie (Why Planes Crash: An Accident Investigator?s Fight for Safe Skies)
“
That said, I love to go to sleep at 2 a.m. Which is weird, because I’m an extremely jumpy and anxious person, especially in the dark. As soon as night falls, a family of raccoons will skitter across the deck eating compost or a deer will ram its head repeatedly into the garage door, causing my heart to skip several beats as I brace myself for a horror-movie villain to come crashing through the glass door while my wife sleeps peacefully upstairs, blissfully unaware of the corpse she’s unfortunately going to have to heave out of the way when she wakes up to get past the guy in the Scream mask hiding in the closet. But let me tell you what your partner won’t: it’s worth risking getting your head chopped off by Freddy Krueger to watch your makeup tutorials and/or read a couple chapters of your Book of the Month in blissful unadulterated silence.
”
”
Samantha Irby (Wow, No Thank You.)
“
...a few weeks before production wrapped on the movie 'Le Mans', racer David Piper lost control of his car and crashed as the cameras rolled. Years later, Piper recounted to a reporter, "I suddenly found myself sitting in only half a car, surrounded by smoke and dust, and I thought, Good Lord, that's my shoe over there--- and my foot is still in it!
”
”
Greg Laurie (Steve Mcqueen: The Salvation of an American Icon)
“
When it gets down to it—talking trade balances here—once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here—once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel—once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity—y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery The
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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The boat heaves and plunges, temporarily weightless awash. Juliet believes it is unsinkable. She also believes that taxis and buses never crash, that every movie that ever makes it to the theatre must be objectively good, and that her own hands clasped in a certain special formation across her waist will act as effectively as a seatbelt in a moment of emergency.
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Carrie Snyder (The Juliet Stories)
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Before we move on to discussing specific ways description can modulate the pace of a story, let’s clarify what we mean by action. Action in a story is not the same as activity. Action is motion that is going somewhere, that pushes the story along. It’s a forward movement, an outward sign of an inward motive. Motion serves, as the lyrics of a popular song suggests, to “second that emotion.” Activity, on the other hand, is mere random movement. Made-for-TV movies often include lots of activity— cars crashing, buildings exploding, bullets flying—with little or no motivated action. When a viewer or a reader turns off the TV or closes the book, complaining that “nothing’s happening,” he’s usually referring not to the lack of activity on the screen or page, but to the lack of forward movement. The difference between activity and action is the difference between running on a treadmill and running in a race. So
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Rebecca McClanahan (Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively)
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In the Jolan district, on the edge of the Euphrates River, in the northwestern corner of the city, Marines found something far more troubling. Inside a metal-sided warehouse, past the insurgent caches of rocket-propelled grenades and artillery rounds, the Marines discovered a crawl space barricaded with a safe. Pushing it aside, the troops saw an Iraqi man chained hand and foot, lying in his own waste. The virtual skeleton proved to be a still-living taxi driver who’d been abducted four months earlier along with a pair of French journalists—thankfully, he would survive. Down the hall, Marines crashed through another door and found themselves in what appeared to be a ramshackle movie studio. On the table was a glass with ice in it; whoever had left had just done so in a hurry. Nearby, Marines found two video cameras, klieg lights, and instructions on how to get footage to the Baghdad offices of some of the regional news networks. On the back wall of the room hung the black-and-green flag of Ansar al-Islam. The floor was caked in dried blood. The moment I read that last detail in the intelligence report I received, I knew it was the room where Nick Berg had been murdered.
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Nada Bakos (The Targeter: My Life in the CIA, Hunting Terrorists and Challenging the White House)
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music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery The Deliverator used to make
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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special ease, and so be disproportionately weighted in any judgment. Danny and Amos had noticed how oddly, and often unreliably, their own minds recalculated the odds, in light of some recent or memorable experience. For instance, after they drove past a gruesome car crash on the highway, they slowed down: Their sense of the odds of being in a crash had changed. After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people’s judgment of the odds—their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater—told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds.
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Michael Lewis (The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds)
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Somewhere along the way, I picked up the unspoken belief that I was made for white people. That might sound weird, but it's true. Much of my teaching (and learning) managed to revolve around whiteness - white privilege, white ignorance, white shame, the things white folks "needed" in order to believe racial justice is a worthy cause. Movie discussions on Do the Right Thing or Crash often focused on the white characters, and "privilege walks" focused on making white people recognize the unearned advantages they'd gotten at birth.
I worked as if white folks were at the center, the great hope, the linchpin, the key to racial justice and reconciliation - and so I contorted myself to be the voice white folks could hear. It's amazing how white supremacy even invades programs aimed at seeking racial reconciliation.
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Austin Channing Brown (I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness)
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If you consistently ask, “What if I lose my job? What if I crash my car? What if criminals attack me?” All these ‘what if’ phrases create ‘movies’ in your mind that constantly loop different scenarios, which creates a state of worry. Rather, say to yourself, “What would I do if I lost my job? What would I do if I crashed my car?” These movies that are created by these questions don’t loop you into worry. They give you action steps that direct your mind. Create a procedure for different scenarios and make peace with your thinking.
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Kevin Horsley (Unlimited Memory: How to Use Advanced Learning Strategies to Learn Faster, Remember More and be More Productive (Mental Mastery, #1))
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E – Energize: give your pictures action. Would you rather watch a movie of your holiday or a slide show? What creates more feeling in your imagination: a horse standing still or a horse that is running and moving? Make your information vivid, colorful, and not boring, flat and black and white. Use action; it brings life to your memories. Make your images act in illogical ways: you can weave, crash, stick, or wrap things together. We can make things talk, sing, and dance. Think about the great genius Walt Disney. The process of imagination is a fun creative process. The more enjoyment you can put into it the better.
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Kevin Horsley (Unlimited Memory: How to Use Advanced Learning Strategies to Learn Faster, Remember More and be More Productive (Mental Mastery, #1))
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There’s only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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If I were standing, I’m pretty sure I would’ve stumbled backward from the force of that tiny little six-letter word, crashing into my chest like an uppercut.
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Lynn Painter (Nothing Like the Movies (Better Than the Movies, #2))
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What if I lose my job? What if I crash my car? What if criminals attack me?” All these ‘what if’ phrases create ‘movies’ in your mind that constantly loop different scenarios, which creates a state of worry. Rather, say to yourself, “What would I do if I lost my job? What would I do if I crashed my car?” These movies that are created by these questions don’t loop you into worry. They give you action steps that direct your mind. Create a procedure for different
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Kevin Horsley (Unlimited Memory: How to Use Advanced Learning Strategies to Learn Faster, Remember More and be More Productive (Mental Mastery, #1))