Electricity Saving Quotes

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The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder... Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently, #1))
Directly above them, framed in the doorway from the Brain Room, stood Albus Dumbledore, his wand aloft, his face white and furious. Harry felt a kind of electric charge surge through every particle of his body - they were saved.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5))
Truth is not fully explosive, but purely electric. You don't blow the world up with the truth; you shock it into motion.
Criss Jami (Healology)
The only honorable, desirable kind of fear that shouldn't be feared is the fear of harm on a loved one. It's the kind of fear that leads to self-sacrifice and the kind of fear where you would truly jump in front of a bus to save another.
Criss Jami (Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality)
Looking back, I wonder if mom saw it in my eyes: the storm clouds gathering, the dry crackle of electricity in the air. But it was already too late. No warning sirens were going to save me. I guess you never really know the danger, not until you’re the one left, huddled on the ground, surrounded by the pieces of your broken heart.
Melody Grace (Unbroken (Beachwood Bay, #1))
So this Zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God. So I tell him I killed God. I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob, and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath. So he pulls an alternating-current taser on me and tells me that only the Official Serbian Church of Tesla can save my polyphase intrinsic electric field, known to non-engineers as "the soul." So I hit him. What would you do?
Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Vol. 3: Year of the Bastard)
Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.
Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless : Tales of Transgression)
How ironic it would be, to die at his hands while trying to save him, when he first came to me because he was trying to save me.
Beth Revis (The Body Electric)
You're cute when you're worried," she muttered. "Your eyebrows get all scrunched together." "You are not going to die while I owe you a favor," I said. "Why did you take that knife?" "You would've done the same for me." It was true. I guess we both knew it. Still, I felt like somebody was poking my heart with a cold metal rod. "How did you know?" "Know what?" I looked around to make sure we were alone. Then I leaned in close and whispered: "My Achilles spot. If you hadn't taken that knife, I would've died." She got a faraway look in her eyes. Her breath smelled like grapes, maybe from the nectar. "I don't know, Percy. I just had this feeling you were in danger. Where... where is the spot?" I wasn't supposed to tell anyone. But this was Annabeth. If I couldn't trust her, I couldn't trust anyone. "The small of my back." She lifted her hand. "Where? Here?" She put her hand on my spine, and my skin tingled. I moved her fingers to the one spot that grounded me to my mortal life. A thousand volts of electricity seemed to arc through my body. "You saved me." I said. "Thanks." She removed her hand, but I kept holding it. "So you owe me," she said weakly. "What else is new?
Rick Riordan (The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #5))
I saw thee once - only once - years ago: I must not say how many - but not many. It was a July midnight; and from out A full-orbed moon, that, like thine own soul, soaring, Sought a precipitate pathway up through heaven, There fell a silvery-silken veil of light, With quietude, and sultriness, and slumber, Upon the upturn'd faces of a thousand Roses that grew in an enchanted garden, Where no wind dared stir, unless on tiptoe - Fell on the upturn'd faces of these roses That gave out, in return for the love-light, Their odorous souls in an ecstatic death - Fell on the upturn'd faces of these roses That smiled and died in the parterre, enchanted By thee, and by the poetry of thy presence. Clad all in white, upon a violet bank I saw thee half reclining; while the moon Fell upon the upturn'd faces of the roses, And on thine own, upturn'd - alas, in sorrow! Was it not Fate, that, on this July midnight - Was it not Fate, (whose name is also Sorrow,) That bade me pause before that garden-gate, To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses? No footsteps stirred: the hated world all slept, Save only thee and me. (Oh, Heaven! - oh, G**! How my heart beats in coupling those two words!) Save only thee and me. I paused - I looked - And in an instant all things disappeared. (Ah, bear in mind the garden was enchanted!) The pearly lustre of the moon went out: The mossy banks and the meandering paths, The happy flowers and the repining trees, Were seen no more: the very roses' odors Died in the arms of the adoring airs. All - all expired save thee - save less than thou: Save only divine light in thine eyes - Save but the soul in thine uplifted eyes. I saw but them - they were the world to me. I saw but them - saw only them for hours - Saw only them until the moon went down. What wild heart-histories seemed to lie enwritten Upon those crystalline, celestial spheres! How dark a wo! yet how sublime a hope! How silently serene a sea of pride! How daring an ambition! yet how deep - How fathomless a capacity for love! But now, at length, dear Dian sank from sight, Into a western couch of thunder-cloud; And thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees Didst glide away. Only thine eyes remained. They would not go - they never yet have gone. Lighting my lonely pathway home that night, They have not left me (as my hopes have) since. They follow me - they lead me through the years. They are my ministers - yet I their slave. Their office is to illumine and enkindle - My duty, to be saved by their bright fire, And purified in their electric fire, And sanctified in their elysian fire. They fill my soul with Beauty (which is Hope,) And are far up in Heaven - the stars I kneel to In the sad, silent watches of my night; While even in the meridian glare of day I see them still - two sweetly scintillant Venuses, unextinguished by the sun!
Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven and Other Poems)
Electric monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe... The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors.
Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently, #1))
Love makes fools of us all. I never realized that would be so literal. We're both so intent on saving each other from pain and harm, we're throwing ourselves right into those very things.
Katee Robert (Electric Idol (Dark Olympus, #2))
This is not a psychotic episode. This is a cleansing moment of clarity. I'm imbued, Max. I'm imbued with some special spirit. It's not a religious feeling at all. It's a shocking eruption of great electrical energy. I feel vivid and flashing, as if suddenly I'd been plugged into some great electromagnetic field. I feel connected to all living things. To flowers, birds, all the animals of the world. And even to some great, unseen, living force. What I think the Hindus call prana. But it's not a breakdown. I've never felt more orderly in my life. It is a shattering and beautiful sensation. It is the exalted flow of the space-time continuum, save that it is spaceless and timeless and... of such loveliness. I feel on the verge of some great, ultimate truth.
Howard Beale
To Helen I saw thee once-once only-years ago; I must not say how many-but not many. It was a july midnight; and from out A full-orbed moon, that, like thine own soul, soaring, Sought a precipitate pathway up through heaven, There fell a silvery-silken veil of light, With quietude, and sultriness, and slumber Upon the upturn'd faces of a thousand Roses that grew in an enchanted garden, Where no wind dared to stir, unless on tiptoe- Fell on the upturn'd faces of these roses That gave out, in return for the love-light Thier odorous souls in an ecstatic death- Fell on the upturn'd faces of these roses That smiled and died in this parterre, enchanted by thee, by the poetry of thy prescence. Clad all in white, upon a violet bank I saw thee half reclining; while the moon Fell on the upturn'd faces of the roses And on thine own, upturn'd-alas, in sorrow! Was it not Fate that, on this july midnight- Was it not Fate (whose name is also sorrow) That bade me pause before that garden-gate, To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses? No footstep stirred; the hated world all slept, Save only thee and me. (Oh Heaven- oh, God! How my heart beats in coupling those two worlds!) Save only thee and me. I paused- I looked- And in an instant all things disappeared. (Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!) The pearly lustre of the moon went out; The mossy banks and the meandering paths, The happy flowers and the repining trees, Were seen no more: the very roses' odors Died in the arms of the adoring airs. All- all expired save thee- save less than thou: Save only the divine light in thine eyes- Save but the soul in thine uplifted eyes. I saw but them- they were the world to me. I saw but them- saw only them for hours- Saw only them until the moon went down. What wild heart-histories seemed to lie enwritten Upon those crystalline, celestial spheres! How dark a woe! yet how sublime a hope! How silently serene a sea of pride! How daring an ambition!yet how deep- How fathomless a capacity for love! But now, at length, dear Dian sank from sight, Into western couch of thunder-cloud; And thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees Didst glide away. Only thine eyes remained. They would not go- they never yet have gone. Lighting my lonely pathway home that night, They have not left me (as my hopes have) since. They follow me- they lead me through the years. They are my ministers- yet I thier slave Thier office is to illumine and enkindle- My duty, to be saved by thier bright light, And purified in thier electric fire, And sanctified in thier Elysian fire. They fill my soul with Beauty (which is Hope), And are far up in heaven- the stars I kneel to In the sad, silent watches of my night; While even in the meridian glare of day I see them still- two sweetly scintillant Venuses, unextinguished by the sun!
Edgar Allan Poe
My mom always said, there are two kinds of love in this world: the steady breeze, and the hurricane. The steady breeze is slow and patient. It fills the sails of the boats in the harbor, and lifts laundry on the line. It cools you on a hot summer’s day; brings the leaves of fall, like clockwork every year. You can count on a breeze, steady and sure and true. But there’s nothing steady about a hurricane. It rips through town, reckless, sending the ocean foaming up the shore, felling trees and power lines and anyone dumb or fucked-up enough to stand in its path. Sure, it’s a thrill like nothing you’ve ever known: your pulse kicks, your body calls to it, like a spirit possessed. It’s wild and breathless and all-consuming. But what comes next? “You see a hurricane coming, you run.” My mom told me, the summer I turned eighteen. “You shut the doors, and you bar the windows. Because come morning, there’ll be nothing but the wreckage left behind.” Emerson Ray was my hurricane. Looking back, I wonder if mom saw it in my eyes: the storm clouds gathering, the dry crackle of electricity in the air. But it was already too late. No warning sirens were going to save me. I guess you never really know the danger, not until you’re the one left, huddled on the ground, surrounded by the pieces of your broken heart. It’s been four years now since that summer. Since Emerson. It took everything I had to pull myself back together, to crawl out of the empty wreckage of my life and build something new in its place. This time, I made it storm-proof. Strong. I barred shutters over my heart, and found myself a steady breeze to love. I swore, nothing would ever destroy me like that summer again. I was wrong. That’s the thing about hurricanes. Once the storm touches down, all you can do is pray.
Melody Grace (Unbroken (Beachwood Bay, #1))
Even viewed conservatively, trees are worth far more than they cost to plant and maintain. The U.S. Forest Service's Center for Urban Forest Research found a ten-degree difference between the cool of a shaded park in Tucson and the open Sonoran desert. A tree planted in the right place, the center estimates, reduces the demand for air conditioning and can save 100 kilowatt hours in annual electrical use, about 2 to 8 percent of total use. Strategically planted trees can also shelter homes from wind, and in cold weather they can reduce heating fuel costs by 10 to 12 percent. A million strategically planted trees, the center figures, can save $10 million in energy costs. And trees increase property values, as much as 1 percent for each mature tree. These savings are offset somewhat by the cost of planting and maintaining trees, but on balance, if we had to pay for the services that trees provide, we couldn't afford them. Because trees offer their services in silence, and for free, we take them for granted.
Jim Robbins (The Man Who Planted Trees: Lost Groves, Champion Trees, and an Urgent Plan to Save the Planet)
Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massive insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt in your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kinds of women—those you write poems about and those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought you a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed. My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addiction lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M., whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked within the confines of my character, cast as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan of your dark side. We don’t have a past so much as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power never put to good use. What we had together makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught one another like colds, and desire was merely a symptom that could be treated with soup and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I’m still not immune to your waterfall scent, still haven’t developed antibodies for your smile. I don’t know how long regret existed before humans stuck a word on it. I don’t know how many paper towels it would take to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light of a candle being blown out travels faster than the luminescence of one that’s just been lit, but I do know that all our huffing and puffing into each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trick birthday candle—didn’t make the silence any easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses I scrawled on your neck were written in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you so hard one of your legs would pop out of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d press your face against the porthole of my submarine. I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen years to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding off the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyriding over flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolate to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy of each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraph from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.
Jeffrey McDaniel
The old Elsa would’ve watched me with a wild gaze. She would’ve had a battle in those electric blue eyes about whether to fight or to save her energy. Not this Elsa. She doesn’t flinch. She just remains as immovable as a statue. A cold, frigid statue. This isn’t my Elsa. And if I have to break the statue to bring her out, then so be it. She stares up at me with dim eyes. “We’re enemies, aren’t we?” “Maybe.” “Then we’re over,” she says with more strength than needed. I push a stray blonde strand behind her ear, taking my time to feel the warmth of her skin against mine. “That’s where you’re wrong, sweetheart,” I murmur near her mouth, “Being enemies doesn’t change the fact that you’re fucking mine.
Rina Kent (Steel Princess (Royal Elite, #2))
In grammar school he’d had an old priest as his religion teacher. “Truth is light,” the priest had said one day. Montalbano, never very studious, had been a mischievous pupil, always sitting in the last row. “So that must mean that if everyone in the family tells the truth, they save on the electric bill.
Andrea Camilleri (The Shape of Water (Inspector Montalbano, #1))
The best scenario of all when it comes to air pollution has nothing to do with tailpipe filters or hybrid, electric, or zero emissions car technology. The way to reduce pollution is to reduce driving, plain and simple.
Elly Blue (Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save The Economy (Bicycle))
So, to save time, Sredmash decided to skip the prototype stage entirely: the quickest way to find out how the new reactors would work in industrial electricity generation would be to put them directly into mass production.
Adam Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster)
The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently #1))
As we were about to cross the road, Davin suddenly grabbed my wrist and held me back a moment; a car peeled out of the driveway and roared past us. “Geez,” I gasped, and then, glancing at him curiously, I added, “Thanks.” He didn’t say anything, but slowly released my wrist. Before he completely withdrew, I took his hand and interlaced my fingers through his. He looked at me, his lips parted in surprise, but then he smiled shyly and gave my hand a squeeze as we kept walking. It gave me a feeling of nervous flutters in the best way. As we walked up to the doors, Jill and Laurel came bursting out the exit.
J.M. Richards (Tall, Dark Streak of Lightning (Dark Lightning Trilogy, #1))
Mercer,” Rick said. “I am your friend,” the old man said. “But you must go on as if I did not exist. Can you understand that?” He spread empty hands. “No,” Rick said. “I can’t understand that. I need help.” “How can I save you,” the old man said, “if I can’t save myself?” He smiled. “Don’t you see? There is no salvation.” “Then what’s this for?” Rick demanded. “What are you for?” “To show you,” Wilbur Mercer said, “that you aren’t alone. I am here with you and always will be. Go and do your task, even though you know it’s wrong.” “Why?” Rick said. “Why should I do it? I’ll quit my job and emigrate.” The old man said, “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.” “That’s all you can tell me?” Rick said.
Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
It’s like we've been flung back in time," he said. "Here we are in the Stone Age, knowing all these great things after centuries of progress but what can we do to make life easier for the Stone Agers? Can we make a refrigerator? Can we even explain how it works? What is electricity? What is light? We experience these things every day of our lives but what good does it do if we find ourselves hurled back in time and we can’t even tell people the basic principles much less actually make something that would improve conditions. Name one thing you could make. Could you make a simple wooden match that you could strike on a rock to make a flame? We think we’re so great and modern. Moon landings, artificial hearts. But what if you were hurled into a time warp and came face to face with the ancient Greeks. The Greeks invented trigonometry. They did autopsies and dissections. What could you tell an ancient Greek that he couldn’t say, ‘Big Deal.’ Could you tell him about the atom? Atom is a Greek word. The Greeks knew that the major events in the universe can’t be seen by the eye of man. It’s waves, it’s rays, it’s particles." “We’re doing all right.” “We’re sitting in this huge moldy room. It’s like we’re flung back.” “We have heat, we have light.” “These are Stone Age things. They had heat and light. They had fire. They rubbed flints together and made sparks. Could you rub flints together? Would you know a flint if you saw one? If a Stone Ager asked you what a nucleotide is, could you tell him? How do we make carbon paper? What is glass? If you came awake tomorrow in the Middle Ages and there was an epidemic raging, what could you do to stop it, knowing what you know about the progress of medicines and diseases? Here it is practically the twenty-first century and you’ve read hundreds of books and magazines and seen a hundred TV shows about science and medicine. Could you tell those people one little crucial thing that might save a million and a half lives?” “‘Boil your water,’ I’d tell them.” “Sure. What about ‘Wash behind your ears.’ That’s about as good.” “I still think we’re doing fairly well. There was no warning. We have food, we have radios.” “What is a radio? What is the principle of a radio? Go ahead, explain. You’re sitting in the middle of this circle of people. They use pebble tools. They eat grubs. Explain a radio.” “There’s no mystery. Powerful transmitters send signals. They travel through the air, to be picked up by receivers.” “They travel through the air. What, like birds? Why not tell them magic? They travel through the air in magic waves. What is a nucleotide? You don’t know, do you? Yet these are the building blocks of life. What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.
Don DeLillo (White Noise)
Our textbooks were ridiculous propaganda. The first English sentence we learned was "Long live Chairman Mao!" But no one dared to explain the sentence grammatically. In Chinese the term for the optative mood, expressing a wish or desire, means 'something unreal." In 1966 a lecturer at Sichuan University had been beaten up for 'having the audacity to suggest that "Long live Chairman Mao!" was unreal!" One chapter was about a model youth hero who had drowned after jumping into a flood to save an electricity pole because the pole would be used to carry the word of Mao. With great difficulty, I managed to borrow some English language textbooks published before the Cultural Revolution from lecturers in my department and from Jin-ming, who sent me books from his university by post. These contained extracts from writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde, and stories from European and American history. They were a joy to read, but much of my energy went toward finding them and then trying to keep them. Whenever someone approached, I would quickly cover the books with a newspaper. This was only partly because of their 'bourgeois' content. It was also important not to appear to be studying too conscientiously, and not to arouse my fellow students' jealousy by reading something far beyond them. Although we were studying English, and were paid par fly for our propaganda value by the government to do this, we must not be seen to be too devoted to our subject: that was considered being 'white and expert." In the mad logic of the day, being good at one's profession ('expert') was automatically equated with being politically unreliable ('white').
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
In the remote towns of the west there are few of the amenities of civilization; there is no sewerage, there are no hospitals, rarely a doctor; the food is dreary and flavourless from long carrying, the water is bad; electricity is for the few who can afford their own plant, roads are mostly non-existent; there are no theatres, no picture shows and few dance halls; and the people are saved from stark insanity by the one strong principle of progress that is ingrained for a thousand miles east, north, south and west of the Dead Heart - the beer is always cold.
Kenneth Cook (Wake in Fright (Text Classics))
They have not left me (as my hopes have) since; They follow me- they lead me through the years. They are my ministers- yet I their slave. Their office is to illumine and enkindle- My duty, to be saved by their bright light, And purified in their electric fire, And sanctified in their elysian fire.
Edgar Allan Poe
Her eyes had to adjust to the night sky. She walked away from the house, out of the spill of electric light, and the sky grew deeper. She watched for a long time and it began to spread and melt and go deeper still, developing strata and magnitudes and light-years in numbers so unapproachable that someone had to invent idiot names to represent the arrays of ones and zeros and powers and dominations because only the bedtime language of childhood can save us from awe and shame.
Don DeLillo (The Body Artist)
When a director at Pacific Gas & Electric, one of the nation’s largest utilities, testified that all of its control systems were getting hooked up to the Internet, to save money and speed up the transmission of energy, Lacombe asked what the company was doing about security. He didn’t know what Lacombe was talking about.
Fred Kaplan (Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War)
When I look back at my sexual history - those singular still shots and picture postcards - so little of it involves the actual physical act. Rather the before and after - the buildup to and takeaway from. It's me figuring out what I want and what I'm worth, a long line of cause and effect that started with spinning and ended in electricity.
Megan Stielstra (The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays)
Xie Lian had never experienced a feeling like this, as if all the blood in his veins had turned into an electrical current that charged through his body. The powers he’d borrowed before had to be economized and saved, only one bite taken at a time for fear of wasting them. Right now, he felt like he could eat a full bowl and dump out ten without a care.
Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù (Heaven Official's Blessing: Tian Guan Ci Fu (Novel) Vol. 4)
Envisioning fungi as nanoconductors in mycocomputers, Gorman (2003) and his fellow researchers at Northwestern University have manipulated mycelia of Aspergillus niger to organize gold into its DNA, in effect creating mycelial conductors of electrical potentials. NASA reports that microbiologists at the University of Tennessee, led by Gary Sayler, have developed a rugged biological computer chip housing bacteria that glow upon sensing pollutants, from heavy metals to PCBs (Miller 2004). Such innovations hint at new microbiotechnologies on the near horizon. Working together, fungal networks and environmentally responsive bacteria could provide us with data about pH, detect nutrients and toxic waste, and even measure biological populations.
Paul Stamets (Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World)
The night was fading. It was too early to be called dawn yet, but Taylor could just make out the outline of Will's weary, unshaven face. His deep blue eyes were the only color in the gray world of rain and shadows. Will leaned in, and his mouth covered Taylor's, rough but sweet, his tongue seeking Taylor's. Taylor opened willingly to that kiss, forgetting for a second his scratched, scraped hands and the rain running down the back of his neck. They kissed a lot these days, especially for men who had never been much for kissing. Taylor had become expert in all Will's kisses, from the hungry, lustful kisses that always made his own cock rise so fast it hurt, to the tender, almost cherishing kisses that Will generally saved for when he thought Taylor was sleeping. That dawn kiss beneath the pine trees rippled through him like an electric shock, a reminder that, tired, wet, and lost as they might be, so long as they were together, they were all right.
Josh Lanyon (Blood Heat (Dangerous Ground, #3))
I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort… I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they didn’t have running water or electricity. This is why he can build things and chop things… He did his high school courses by correspondence, sitting at the kitchen table and studying by the light by a kerosene lamp; he put himself through university by working in lumber camps and cleaning out rabbit hutches, and was so poor he lived in a tent in the summers to save money… All this is known, but unimaginable. Also I wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
Margaret Atwood (Cat’s Eye)
Liam... You’re the best. You’re handsome, funny, patient with my fits, a fantastic cook. You taught me how to swim.” Ryan bit his lip, eyes focused on the shadowed face in front of him. “Like, if there was a zombie apocalypse, you’d save me and feed me.” He smiled. “I wouldn’t need some loser with a guitar that wouldn’t even work without electricity. I’d need a real man. The kind that runs into a burning building to save me.
K.A. Merikan (Special Needs: The Complete Story)
Never miss an opportunity to learn another life skill. Just because you are an author or a doctor does not mean that you cannot learn carpentry, auto mechanics,electrical wiring, farming, or any other discipline. Each of these skills will give you the opportunity to help someone and to make a friend. Your new friend probably has a skill that you do not. If you will just ask every skilled person you see to show you how he does what he does, you will have the tools to succeed in life, to make new friends, and to save a boatload of money.
Charles C. Anderson
It was getting late, but sleep was the furthest thing from my racing mind. Apparently that was not the case for Mr. Sugar Buns. He lay back, closed his eyes, and threw an arm over his forehead, his favorite sleeping position. I could hardly have that. So, I crawled on top of him and started chest compressions. It seemed like the right thing to do. "What are you doing?" he asked without removing his arm. "Giving you CPR." I pressed into his chest, trying not to lose count. Wearing a red-and-black football jersey and boxers that read, DRIVERS WANTED. SEE INSIDE FOR DETAILS, I'd straddled him and now worked furiously to save his life, my focus like that of a seasoned trauma nurse. Or a seasoned pot roast. It was hard to say. "I'm not sure I'm in the market," he said, his voice smooth and filled with a humor I found appalling. He clearly didn't appreciate my dedication. "Damn it, man! I'm trying to save your life! Don't interrupt." A sensuous grin slid across his face. He tucked his arms behind his head while I worked. I finished my count, leaned down, put my lips on his, and blew. He laughed softly, the sound rumbling from his chest, deep and sexy, as he took my breath into his lungs. That part down, I went back to counting chest compressions. "Don't you die on me!" And praying. After another round, he asked, "Am I going to make it?" "It's touch-and-go. I'm going to have to bring out the defibrillator." "We have a defibrillator?" he asked, quirking a brow, clearly impressed. I reached for my phone. "I have an app. Hold on." As I punched buttons, I realized a major flaw in my plan. I needed a second phone. I could hardly shock him with only one paddle. I reached over and grabbed his phone as well. Started punching buttons. Rolled my eyes. "You don't have the app," I said from between clenched teeth. "I had no idea smartphones were so versatile." "I'll just have to download it. It'll just take a sec." "Do I have that long?" Humor sparkled in his eyes as he waited for me to find the app. I'd forgotten the name of it, so I had to go back to my phone, then back to his, then do a search, then download, then install it, all while my patient lay dying. Did no one understand that seconds counted? "Got it!" I said at last. I pressed one phone to his chest and one to the side of his rib cage like they did in the movies, and yelled, "Clear!" Granted, I didn't get off him or anything as the electrical charge riddled his body, slammed his heart into action, and probably scorched his skin. Or that was my hope, anyway. He handled it well. One corner of his mouth twitched, but that was about it. He was such a trouper. After two more jolts of electricity--it had to be done--I leaned forward and pressed my fingertips to his throat. "Well?" he asked after a tense moment. I released a ragged sigh of relief,and my shoulders fell forward in exhaustion. "You're going to be okay, Mr. Farrow." Without warning, my patient pulled me into his arms and rolled me over, pinning me to the bed with his considerable weight and burying his face in my hair. It was a miracle!
Darynda Jones (The Curse of Tenth Grave (Charley Davidson, #10))
With the money my mother earned from selling cakes, my father cut a deal with Mangochi and bought one pail of maize. My mother took it to the mill, saved half the flour for us, and used the rest for more cakes. We did this every day, taking enough to eat and selling the rest. It was enough to provide our one blob of nsima each night, along with some pumpkin leaves. It was practically nothing, yet knowing it would be there somehow made the hunger less painful. "As long as we can stay in business," my father said, "we'll make it through. Our profit is that we live.
William Kamkwamba (The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope)
Dr. Mary Atwater's story was so inspiring. Growing up, Dr. Atwater had a dream to one day be a teacher. But as a black person in the American South during the 1950s, she didn't have many great educational opportunities. It didn't help that she was also a girl, and a girl who loved science, since many believed that science was a subject only for men. Well, like me, she didn't listen to what others said. And also like me, Dr. Atwater had a father, Mr. John C. Monroe, who believed in her dreams and saved money to send her and her siblings to college. She eventually got a PhD in science education with a concentration in chemistry. She was an associate director at New Mexico State University and then taught physical science and chemistry at Fayetteville State University. She later joined the University of Georgia, where she still works as a science education researcher. Along the way, she began writing science books, never knowing that, many years down the road, one of those books would end up in Wimbe, Malawi, and change my life forever. I'd informed Dr. Atwater that the copy of Using Energy I'd borrowed so many times had been stolen (probably by another student hoping to get the same magic), so that day in Washington, she presented me with my own copy, along with the teacher's edition and a special notebook to record my experiments. "Your story confirms my belief in human beings and their abilities to make the world a better place by using science," she told me. "I'm happy that I lived long enough to see that something I wrote could change someone's life. I'm glad I found you." And for sure, I'm also happy to have found Dr. Atwater.
William Kamkwamba (The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope)
about jobs, bosses, or unpaid electric bills. Freedom is fantastic. Yet my lifestyle is not “normal.” Like wealth, society, through its “Get Rich Slow” mandates, has defined “normal” for you. Normal is waking at 6 a.m., working eight hours at a tolerated job Monday through Friday, save 10%, and repeat for 50 years. Normal is to buy everything on credit. Normal is to believe the illusion that trusting Wall Street and their cohorts will make you rich. Normal is to believe that a faster car and a bigger house will make you happy. You’re conditioned to accept normal based on society’s corrupted definition of wealth, and because of it, normal itself is corrupted. Normal is modern-day slavery.
M.J. DeMarco (The Millionaire Fastlane)
The ludicrous idea that believing is something you can decide to do is deliciously mocked by Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, where we meet the robotic Electric Monk, a labour-saving device that you buy ‘to do your believing for you’. The de luxe model is advertised as ‘Capable of believing things they wouldn’t believe in Salt Lake City’.
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
A father from New Zealand, Harry Parke of Cambridge, told a group of fathers, "My wife and I figured that by nursing our first son, Christopher, we saved considerably in the first year by not using formula, sterilizers, early solids, electricity, birth control means, etc. Raewyn immediately decided that the money saved was to be a deposit on a freezer, and now it stands in the hall.
La Leche League International (The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding)
She hadn’t visited this spot in a few years, but when she was younger it had been a frequent hideout. She called it the Barbie Graveyard because it was where, one night when she was nine years old, she’d ceremoniously buried every single doll she had. She’d marked the site with a melted Barbie toaster. “They all died in an electrical fire,” she told her mother somberly. “I couldn’t save them.
Pseudonymous Bosch (If You're Reading This, It's Too Late (Secret, #2))
Having Bob there gave me a chance to interact with people. They would ask about Bob and I would get a chance to explain my situation at the same time. They would ask where he came from and I’d then be able to explain how we got together and how we were making money to pay our rent, food, electricity and gas bills. People would give me more of a fair hearing. Psychologically, people also began to see me in a different light. Cats are notoriously picky about who they like. And if a cat doesn’t like its owner it will go and find another one. Cats do that all the time. They go and live with somebody else. Seeing me with my cat softened me in their eyes. It humanised me. Especially after I’d been so dehumanised. In some ways it was giving me back my identity. I had been a non-person; I was becoming a person again.
James Bowen (A Street Cat Named Bob: And How He Saved My Life)
During a long heart-to-heart talk, as they ramble through the country lanes near Bredon Hill, his father muses upon the old meaning of ‘pagan’ – ‘belonging to the village’. ‘The village is sneered at as something petty. Petty it can be. Yet it works – the scale is human. People can relate there. Man may yet, in the nick of time, revolt, and save himself. Revolt from the monolith; come back to the village.’ He
Rob Young (Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music)
No,” Rick said. “I can’t understand that. I need help.” “How can I save you,” the old man said, “if I can’t save myself?” He smiled. “Don’t you see? There is no salvation.” “Then what’s this for?” Rick demanded. “What are you for?” “To show you,” Wilbur Mercer said, “that you aren’t alone. I am here with you and always will be. Go and do your task, even though you know it’s wrong.” “Why?” Rick said. “Why should I do it? I’ll quit my job and emigrate.
Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. Unfortunately
Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently, #1))
When we talk about reducing transportation emissions, the conversation tends to solely be about cars and fuel. Efforts to invent and promote electric and hybrid cars have enjoyed some success, and have proven the latent market demand for lower-emissions personal transportation. These vehicles pollute less, but they still require roads and parking spaces, are susceptible to crashes, and contribute to a dispersed and unhealthy landscape. And they are far from energy-neutral.
Elly Blue (Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save The Economy (Bicycle))
In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagontires grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now. They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the wagons and the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their moustaches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)
A steampunk nation Baby pollution rises up then the loving comes arraigning 'cause Our art's official and only partially artificial And our heart's in the middle of sharp hardened shards of metal but There's not where it settles Because it's beating to the steaming of God's hottest pot or kettle And now we face it, this creation we made to To save our craving for a synthetic rebelnation it's Our safeway they make into a pathetic revelation In our steampunk nation Our steampunk nation
Criss Jami (Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality)
I love my kids, and I’m so proud of them for everything that they have accomplished. My oldest child, Elon, is making electric cars to save the environment and launching rockets. My middle child, Kimbal, opened farm-to-table restaurants and is teaching children across the country to build fruit and vegetable gardens in underserved schools. My youngest child, Tosca, runs her own entertainment company, producing and directing romance films from bestselling novels. They all have different interests.
Maye Musk (A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success)
I keep thinking about how we met. At that point in our lives, we could’ve crashed into anyone. But you showed up at that backyard party and saved me from that asshole. I know part of our story is the electricity of our connection, but the other part is equally miraculous. It’s the simple fact that you walked into my life at the exact moment you did. You instead of someone else. In some ways, isn’t that even more incredible than the connection itself? That we found each other at all?” “It’s remarkable.
Blake Crouch (Dark Matter)
At the Samarka Camp in 1946 a group of intellectuals had reached the very brink of death: They were worn down by hunger, cold, and work beyond their powers. And they were even deprived of sleep. They had nowhere to lie down. Dugout barracks had not yet been built. Did they go and steal? Or squeal? Or whimper about their ruined lives? No! Foreseeing the approach of death in days rather than weeks, here is how they spent their last sleepless leisure, sitting up against the wall: Timofeyev-Ressovsky gathered them into a “seminar,” and they hastened to share with one another what one of them knew and the others did not—they delivered their last lectures to each other. Father Savely—spoke of “unshameful death,” a priest academician—about patristics, one of the Uniate fathers—about something in the area of dogmatics and canonical writings, an electrical engineer—on the principles of the energetics of the future, and a Leningrad economist—on how the effort to create principles of Soviet economics had failed for lack of new ideas. Timofeyev-Ressovsky himself talked about the principles of microphysics. From one session to the next, participants were missing—they were already in the morgue.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago)
(On producer/consumer relationship in subsistence farming) This is the sort of interconnectedness that once defined every outpost across our emerging nation. But outposts grew into towns, towns grew into cities, and cities grew into metropolises, necessitating a push into resource bases far beyond these population centers. Even as this occurred, the conveniences of modern life--electricity, indoor plumbing, the automobile--took hold, further eroding any sense of shared responsibility for the community's survival. From the standpoint of our most basic needs, we became islands unto ourselves, despite the ever-increasing population density.
Ben Hewitt (The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food)
It wasn’t my idea. Gracie is all about saving the world. She’s been lecturing everyone about the importance of saving electricity, recycling, and countless other things that we need to do to be greener.” She shrugged as she turned off the stove and lifted the pot of noodles. “I’m just doing as I was told. First by Gracie and then enforced by Hawk.” I smirked. Of course it would be Gracie. The girl was sweet and full of all kinds of innocence. Hawk was in deep with her. Like the couldn’t eat, sleep…breathe without her kind of deep. I knew all about that. For six weeks Willa had been mine. For four years I’d been unable to draw a deep breath.
Terri Anne Browning (Entangled (Angel's Halo MC, #2))
the large building that is Sydney Aquarium. It was almost two o’clock in the morning, and Ben, the night-watchman, had let them in. A casual question from Harry—why all the lights were off—had led to a detailed explanation from the old watchman. “Of course it saves electricity, but that’s not the most important reason—the most important reason is that we’re telling the fish it’s night. I think so, anyhow. Before, we used to turn off the lights with a standard switch, and you could hear the shock when all of a sudden everything went pitch black. A whoosh went through the whole aquarium as hundreds of fish dashed to hide or swam off in blind panic.
Jo Nesbø (The Bat (Harry Hole, #1))
His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a moment, the turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of accident, had thrust into the blazing heat of him. His mind picked out in white living brightness these pinpoints of experience and the ghostliness of all things else became more awful because of them. So many of the sensations that returned to open haunting vistas of fantasy and imagining had been caught from a whirling landscape through the windows of the train. And it was this that awed him — the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time. There was one moment of timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move. It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute. Or like those motion-pictures that describe the movements of a swimmer making a dive, or a horse taking a hedge — movement is petrified suddenly in mid-air, the inexorable completion of an act is arrested. Then, completing its parabola, the suspended body plops down into the pool. Only, these images that burnt in him existed without beginning or ending, without the essential structure of time. Fixed in no-time, the slattern vanished, fixed, without a moment of transition. His sense of unreality came from time and movement, from imagining the woman, when the train had passed, as walking back into the house, lifting a kettle from the hearth embers. Thus life turned shadow, the living lights went ghost again. The boy among the calves. Where later? Where now? I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me, which, having for me no existence save that which I gave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a cumulation of what I have been becoming. Why here? Why there? Why now? Why then? The fusion of the two strong egotisms, Eliza’s inbrooding and Gant’s expanding outward, made of him a fanatical zealot in the religion of Chance. Beyond all misuse, waste, pain, tragedy, death, confusion, unswerving necessity was on the rails; not a sparrow fell through the air but that its repercussion acted on his life, and the lonely light that fell upon the viscous and interminable seas at dawn awoke sea-changes washing life to him. The fish swam upward from the depth.
Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel)
Dunkirk was to hold out until the day on which all the Allied troops in the pocket who could embark to Britain had done so. Ramsay and the British Government initially assumed that no more than 45,000 troops could be saved, but over the nine days between dawn on Sunday, 26 May and 03.30 on Tuesday, 4 June, no fewer than 338,226 Allied soldiers were rescued from death or capture, 118,000 of whom were French, Belgian and Dutch. Operation Dynamo – so named because Ramsay’s bunker at Dover had housed electrical equipment during the Great War – was the largest military evacuation in history so far, and a fine logistical achievement, especially as daylight sailings had to be suspended on 1 June due to heavy Luftwaffe attacks.
Andrew Roberts (The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War)
Outside The Museum (The Sonnet) Enough with, patria o muerte*! Enough with, god save the queen! Enough with, heil hitler! Enough with, o say can you see! Bronze age beings yell about national glory, Stone age beings yell about religious glory. Electric beings got no time for such make-believe, On their shoulders walks the present of humanity. There is no earth till all roots combine, Till we crave for each other all roots are chains. Museums add perspective on the direction of life, But to spend a life in museum is life lost in vain. Enough with vande mataram**, it's time for vasudhaiva kutumbakam***. To hell with nation, culture and tradition, civilization awaits outside the museum. (*homeland or death, *hail the motherland, ***world is family)
Abhijit Naskar (Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans)
Why trust this account when humanity has never been so rich, so healthy, so long-lived? When fewer die in wars and childbirth than ever before—and more knowledge, more truth by way of science, was never so available to us all? When tender sympathies—for children, animals, alien religions, unknown, distant foreigners—swell daily? When hundreds of millions have been raised from wretched subsistence? When, in the West, even the middling poor recline in armchairs, charmed by music as they steer themselves down smooth highways at four times the speed of a galloping horse? When smallpox, polio, cholera, measles, high infant mortality, illiteracy, public executions and routine state torture have been banished from so many countries? Not so long ago, all these curses were everywhere. When solar panels and wind farms and nuclear energy and inventions not yet known will deliver us from the sewage of carbon dioxide, and GM crops will save us from the ravages of chemical farming and the poorest from starvation? When the worldwide migration to the cities will return vast tracts of land to wilderness, will lower birth rates, and rescue women from ignorant village patriarchs? What of the commonplace miracles that would make a manual labourer the envy of Caesar Augustus: pain-free dentistry, electric light, instant contact with people we love, with the best music the world has known, with the cuisine of a dozen cultures? We’re bloated with privileges and delights, as well as complaints, and the rest who are not will be soon.
Ian McEwan (Nutshell)
Judging by its commercial, political, and media success, the evangelical movement seems to be booming. But is it still Christian? I am not asking that question glibly or simply to provoke a reaction. My concern is that we are getting dangerously close to the place in everyday American church life where the Bible is mined for “relevant” quotes but is largely irrelevant on its own terms; God is used as a personal resource rather than known, worshiped, and trusted; Jesus Christ is a coach with a good game plan for our victory rather than a Savior who has already achieved it for us; salvation is more a matter of having our best life now than being saved from God’s judgment by God himself; and the Holy Spirit is an electrical outlet we can plug into for the power we need to be all that we can be.
Michael Scott Horton (Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church)
Look here, this is a book he had when he was a boy. It just shows you.” He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see. On the last flyleaf was printed the word schedule, and the date September 12, 1906. And underneath: Rise from bed 6:00 a.m. Dumbell exercise and wall-scaling 6:15⁠–⁠6:30 “ Study electricity, etc. 7:15⁠–⁠8:15 “ Work 8:30⁠–⁠4:30 p.m. Baseball and sports 4:30⁠–⁠5:00 “ Practise elocution, poise and how to attain it 5:00⁠–⁠6:00 “ Study needed inventions 7:00⁠–⁠9:00 “ General Resolves No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable] No more smokeing or chewing. Bath every other day Read one improving book or magazine per week Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week Be better to parents “I came across this book by accident,” said the old man. “It just shows you, don’t it?
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
Our father Blue Bones was much the same and we brothers cowered before his fury when TRACKED-IN SAND was detected on the carpets of the VAUXHALL CRESTA and then there were such threats of whippings with razor strops, electric flex, greenhide belts, God save us, he had that mouth, cruel as a cut across his skin. As a boy I could never understand why nice clean sand would cause such terror in my dad’s bloodshot eyes, but I had never seen an hourglass and did not know that I would die. None shall be spared, and when my father’s hour was come then the eternal sand-filled wind blew inside his guts and ripped him raw, God forgive him for his sins. He could never know peace in life or even death, never understood what it might be to become a grain of sand, falling whispering with the grace of multitudes, through the fingers of the Lord.
Peter Carey
The history books, which had almost completely ignored the contribution of the Negro in American history, only served to intensify the Negroes’ sense of worthlessness and to augment the anachronistic doctrine of white supremacy. All too many Negroes and whites are unaware of the fact that the first American to shed blood in the revolution which freed this country from British oppression was a black seaman named Crispus Attucks. Negroes and whites are almost totally oblivious of the fact that it was a Negro physician, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, who performed the first successful operation on the heart in America. Another Negro physician, Dr. Charles Drew, was largely responsible for developing the method of separating blood plasma and storing it on a large scale, a process that saved thousands of lives in World War II and has made possible many of the important advances in postwar medicine. History books have virtually overlooked the many Negro scientists and inventors who have enriched American life. Although a few refer to George Washington Carver, whose research in agricultural products helped to revive the economy of the South when the throne of King Cotton began to totter, they ignore the contribution of Norbert Rillieux, whose invention of an evaporating pan revolutionized the process of sugar refining. How many people know that the multimillion-dollar United Shoe Machinery Company developed from the shoe-lasting machine invented in the last century by a Negro from Dutch Guiana, Jan Matzeliger; or that Granville T. Woods, an expert in electric motors, whose many patents speeded the growth and improvement of the railroads at the beginning of this century, was a Negro?
Martin Luther King Jr. (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Peter and I are standing in line for popcorn at the movies. Even just this mundane thing feels like the best mundane thing that’s ever happened to me. I check my pocket to make sure I’ve still got my ticket stub. This I’ll want to save. Gazing up at Peter, I whisper, “This is my first date.” I feel like the nerdy girl in the movie who lands the coolest guy in school, and I don’t mind one bit. Not one bit. “How can this be your first date when we’ve gone out plenty of times?” “It’s my first real date. Those other times were just pretend; this is the real thing.” He frowns. “Oh, wait, is this real? I didn’t realize that.” I move to slug him in the shoulder, and he laughs and grabs my hand and links my fingers with his. It feels like my heart is beating right through my hand. It’s the first time we’ve held hands for real, and it feels different from those fake times. Like electric currents, in a good way. The best way.
Jenny Han (P.S. I Still Love You (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #2))
York. No amount of emergency planning had prepared anyone for something of this scale. Raging fires and radioactive winds were killing everyone in their paths, yet fleeing for safety was difficult if not impossible. Shock paralyzed millions. The lack of electricity paralyzed millions more, as did the inability to communicate. What had just happened? What was coming next? Where could one go to be safe? And how in the world should one get there? And then the City of Angels became the City of Demons. Jackie Sanchez picked up the secure phone on the console in front of her and took the priority-one call from General Briggs at NORAD. She could barely believe what he was telling her, but she had no time to argue. They had a minute, if that, to get the president to safety. She slammed down the phone and quickly shouted a series of coded commands into her wrist-mounted microphone. Her team reacted instantly, just as they’d been trained. She wasn’t sure if it really mattered. Perhaps all their efforts would be in vain. Maybe they wouldn’t save any lives. But
Joel C. Rosenberg (Dead Heat: A Jon Bennett Series Political and Military Action Thriller (Book 5) (The Last Jihad series))
I lie flat, the damp air above me like a lid. Like earth. I wish it would rain. Better still, a thunderstorm, black clouds, lightning, ear-splitting sound. The electricity might go off. I could go down to the kitchen then, say I’m afraid, sit with Rita and Cora around the kitchen table, they would permit my fear because it’s one they share, they’d let me in. There would be candles burning, we would watch each other’s faces come and go in the flickering, in the white flashes of jagged light from outside the windows. Oh Lord, Cora would say. Oh Lord save us. The air would be clear after that, and lighter. I look up at the ceiling, the round circle of plaster flowers. Draw a circle, step into it, it will protect you. From the center was the chandelier, and from the chandelier a twisted strip of sheet was hanging down. That’s where she was swinging, just lightly, like a pendulum; the way you could swing as a child, hanging by your hands from a tree branch. She was safe then, protected altogether, by the time Cora opened the door. Sometimes I think she’s still in here, with me. I feel buried.
Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1))
I lie flat, the damp air above me like a lid. Like earth. I wish it would rain. Better still, a thunderstorm, black clouds, lightning, car-splitting sound. The electricity might go off. I could go down to the kitchen then, say I'm afraid, sit with Rita and Cora around the kitchen table, they would permit my fear because it's one they share, they'd let me in. There would be candles burning, we would watch each other's faces come and go in the flickering, in the white flashes of jagged light from outside the windows. Oh Lord, Cora would say. Oh Lord save us. The air would be clear after that, and lighter. I look up at the ceiling, the round circle of plaster flowers. Draw a circle, step into it, it will protect you. From the center was the chandelier, and from the chandelier a twisted strip of sheet was hanging down. That's where she was swinging, just lightly, like a pendulum; the way you could swing as a child, hanging by your hands from a tree branch. She was safe then, protected altogether, by the time Cora opened the door. Sometimes I think she's still in here, with me. I feel buried.
Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1))
Akimov, prevailed upon by Dyatlov that the reactor could be saved, tried to start the diesel generators before witnessing his superior send two young trainees - Viktor Proskuryakov and Aleksandr Kudyavtsev - to the reactor hall with instructions to lower the control rods by hand. He sent them to their deaths. Dyatlov spent the rest of his life regretting the moment. “When they ran out into the corridor, I realized it was a stupid thing to do. If the rods had not come down by electricity or gravity, there would be no way of getting them down manually. I rushed after them, but they had disappeared,” he said a few years before his death.130 The trainees made it to the massive reactor hall, having navigated their way past destroyed rooms and elevators, and only remained in the vicinity for a minute - stunned by what they saw - but that was enough. They died a few weeks later. Returning to the Unit 4 control room, tanned deep brown by the massive dose of radiation they had absorbed, the pair reported that the reactor was simply no longer there. Dyatlov refused to believe them, insisting they were mistaken: the reactor was intact, the explosion had come from an oxygen/hydrogen mix in an emergency tank. Water had to be supplied to the core!
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
Day slammed the door behind Johnson, leaving just him and his partner in the room alone. Day hit the lights. “Setting the mood, Leo?” God grinned at him. “I want to talk to you now.” “You can’t always get what you want, Leonidis,” God rebutted. “I want you,” Day said with no hesitation. The room was deathly silent. After a few long seconds God responded simply, “No you don’t.” “I do. Isn’t it obvious?” Day moved a little closer. “You don’t know what the fuck you want. I’ve watched you for four years, jumping from bed to bed and fucking your way through half of Atlanta. I have one emotional night and all of a sudden you want me…fuck you,” God said in his gruffest voice. Day’s body heated instantly at the sound. He moved even closer to where God was standing on the opposite side of the table. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I was supposed to be saving myself for marriage, and even more so, I didn’t realize you were a goddamn virgin. How many women have I seen you fuck in that pussy-getting truck of yours, huh?” Day lowered his voice as he stood directly in front of God. “Just tell me you didn’t feel what I did last night.” He closed the small gap, not minding God’s height at all, and looked up into electric-green eyes. “Tell me you don’t want me too, and I’ll back the fuck off.” God looked down at him and Day could see the uncertainty all over that ruggedly handsome face. “Shit’s complicated, Leo.” God’s breath ghosted across his forehead. “Make me understand, Cashel,” Day whispered and slowly brought his hands up to rest on God’s waist.
A.E. Via
You know,” I said, “you don’t owe New Fiddleham anything. You don’t need to help them.” “Look,” Charlie said as we clipped past Market Street. He was pointing at a man delicately painting enormous letters onto a broad window as we passed. NONNA SANTORO’S, it read, although the RO’S was still just an outline. “That Italian restaurant?” “Yes,” he smiled. “They will be opening their doors for the first time very soon. Sweet family. I bought my first meal in New Fiddleham from that man. A couple of meatballs from a street cart were about all I could afford at the time. He’s an immigrant, too. He’s going to do well. His red sauce is amazing.” “That’s grand for him, then,” I said. “I like it when doors open,” said Charlie. “Doors are opening in New Fiddleham every day. It is a remarkable time to be alive anywhere, really. Do you think our parents could ever have imagined having machines that could wash dishes, machines that could sew, machines that do laundry? Pretty soon we’ll be taking this trolley ride without any horses. I’ve heard that Glanville has electric streetcars already. Who knows what will be possible fifty years from now, or a hundred. Change isn’t always so bad.” “Your optimism is both baffling and inspiring,” I said. “The sun is rising,” he replied with a little chuckle. I glanced at the sky. It was well past noon. “It’s just something my sister and I used to say,” he clarified. “I think you would like Alina. You often remind me of her. She has a way of refusing to let the world keep her down.” He smiled and his gaze drifted away, following the memory. “Alina found a rolled-up canvas once,” he said, “a year or so after our mother passed away. It was an oil painting—a picture of the sun hanging low over a rippling ocean. She was a beautiful painter, our mother. I could tell that it was one of hers, but I had never seen it before. It felt like a message, like she had sent it, just for us to find. “I said that it was a beautiful sunset, and Alina said no, it was a sunrise. We argued about it, actually. I told her that the sun in the picture was setting because it was obviously a view from our camp near Gelendzhik, overlooking the Black Sea. That would mean the painting was looking to the west. “Alina said that it didn’t matter. Even if the sun is setting on Gelendzhik, that only means that it is rising in Bucharest. Or Vienna. Or Paris. The sun is always rising somewhere. From then on, whenever I felt low, whenever I lost hope and the world felt darkest, Alina would remind me: the sun is rising.” “I think I like Alina already. It’s a heartening philosophy. I only worry that it’s wasted on this city.” “A city is just people,” Charlie said. “A hundred years from now, even if the roads and buildings are still here, this will still be a whole new city. New Fiddleham is dying, every day, but it is also being constantly reborn. Every day, there is new hope. Every day, the sun rises. Every day, there are doors opening.” I leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “When we’re through saving the world,” I said, “you can take me out to Nonna Santoro’s. I have it on good authority that the red sauce is amazing.” He blushed pink and a bashful smile spread over his face. “When we’re through saving the world, Miss Rook, I will hold you to that.
William Ritter (The Dire King (Jackaby, #4))
Give us an idea of…” Noya Baram rubs her temples. “Oh, well.” Augie begins to stroll around again. “The examples are limitless. Small examples: elevators stop working. Grocery-store scanners. Train and bus passes. Televisions. Phones. Radios. Traffic lights. Credit-card scanners. Home alarm systems. Laptop computers will lose all their software, all files, everything erased. Your computer will be nothing but a keyboard and a blank screen. “Electricity would be severely compromised. Which means refrigerators. In some cases, heat. Water—well, we have already seen the effect on water-purification plants. Clean water in America will quickly become a scarcity. “That means health problems on a massive scale. Who will care for the sick? Hospitals? Will they have the necessary resources to treat you? Surgical operations these days are highly computerized. And they will not have access to any of your prior medical records online. “For that matter, will they treat you at all? Do you have health insurance? Says who? A card in your pocket? They won’t be able to look you up and confirm it. Nor will they be able to seek reimbursement from the insurer. And even if they could get in contact with the insurance company, the insurance company won’t know whether you’re its customer. Does it have handwritten lists of its policyholders? No. It’s all on computers. Computers that have been erased. Will the hospitals work for free? “No websites, of course. No e-commerce. Conveyor belts. Sophisticated machinery inside manufacturing plants. Payroll records. “Planes will be grounded. Even trains may not operate in most places. Cars, at least any built since, oh, 2010 or so, will be affected. “Legal records. Welfare records. Law enforcement databases. The ability of local police to identify criminals, to coordinate with other states and the federal government through databases—no more. “Bank records. You think you have ten thousand dollars in your savings account? Fifty thousand dollars in a retirement account? You think you have a pension that allows you to receive a fixed payment every month?” He shakes his head. “Not if computer files and their backups are erased. Do banks have a large wad of cash, wrapped in a rubber band with your name on it, sitting in a vault somewhere? Of course not. It’s all data.” “Mother of God,” says Chancellor Richter, wiping his face with a handkerchief.
Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing)
Energy efficiency is universally viewed as the best and cheapest means of reducing carbon emissions. But the power industry was designed to make and sell as much power as possible as cheaply as possible. Repurposing the industry to both sell and save electricity raises extremely difficult financial, regulatory, and managerial questions.
Peter Fox-Penner (Smart Power Anniversary Edition: Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities)
If you turn lights on and off often in an attempt to save electricity, it uses more electricity than leaving it on. The idea behind this misconception is that most of the electricity is used in turning on the light. But this is untrue. It’s like believing turning a car on and off over and over again will use up more fuel than travelling hundreds of miles.
James Egan (The Mega Misconception Book (Things People Believe That Aren't True 5))
We mean to say that Symbolism and Decadence — the negative attitude to which is indisputable to everyone except the "participants" — are genetically connected with everything brilliant and sublime created by the "unbound personality" during this period of time, from the Renaissance up to the development of electrical engineering; contrariwise, the border which they cannot cross is laid down where man understood that he was always "bound." The great continent of history, the continent of real deeds, practical needs, and more than all that, of received religion and the established Church - that is whose shore this stinking monster can never crawl into, that is where we are fleeing to from it, that is where man can always save himself. Where the monastery wall rises this surge of the faithless waves of history — no matter how strong it may become and how far it may spread around — will stop and fall back. ("On Symbolists & Decadence")
Vasily Rozanov (Silver Age of Russian Culture (An Anthology))
Some people save the boxes for electrical appliances because they think they can get more money for the appliances if they ever sell them. This, however, is a waste. If you consider the rent or mortgage you pay, turning your space into a storage shed for empty boxes costs you more than what you could earn selling an appliance in a box. You don’t need to keep them for moving either. You can worry about finding suitable boxes when the time comes. It’s a shame to let a boring box take up room in your house just because you might need it someday.
Marie Kondō (The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Magic Cleaning #1))
Electric vehicles won’t displace ICE vehicles because they save money (except in the commercial realm), or even because of their very real environmental benefits. They will win out in the end because they’re better. They’re more fun and more convenient to drive, they’re safer, they require less maintenance, they offer more interior space, and their technological superiority enables all kinds of high-tech features that will someday seem as necessary as the AC and the stereo do today.
Charles Morris (Tesla Motors: How Elon Musk and Company Made Electric Cars Cool, and Sparked the Next Tech Revolution)
People who have seen the latest Greek plan said Athens was proposing new savings in the pension system — the biggest sticking point — which will amount to about 0.4 per cent of gross domestic product this year and just over 1 per cent next year. But this is short of the 1 per cent savings this year and next that Greece’s creditors had demanded. It also relies on higher employer contributions which, alongside proposed tax changes targeting corporate profits, could crimp economic growth, some creditor officials fear. The two sides also remain at loggerheads over rates of valued added tax on electricity and processed food. According to officials who attended the eurogroup meeting, Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund chief, was particularly tough.
Anonymous
we are getting dangerously close to the place in everyday American church life where the Bible is mined for "relevant" quotes but is largely irrelevant on its own terms; God is used as a personal resource rather than known, worshiped, and trusted; Jesus Christ is a coach with a good game plan for our victory rather than a Savior who has already achieved it for us; salvation is more a matter of having our best life now than being saved from God's judgment by God himself; and the Holy Spirit is an electrical outlet we can plug into for the power we need to be all that we can be.
Anonymous
As on the first tour, we had almost no equipment, once again victims of empty promises from agents and record companies. It was Jimi Hendrix who saved us. Hearing of our problems (his managers also handled the Soft Machine) he sent us down to Electric Lady, his recording studio and storage facility on West 8th Street, and told us to help ourselves to what we needed. There are some real rock’n’roll heroes.
Nick Mason (Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd)
I had seen small-scale electric fishing near Beijing, where workers from local restaurants wandered the streams and pools in rubber waders with giant batteries strapped to their backs connected to a pole in each hand that they dipped into the water, electrocuting everything in between. This was by no means the worst form of indiscriminate fishing in China. I had read and heard numerous reports of fishing with explosives.
Jonathan Watts (When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind—Or Destroy It)
It is a dangerous thing to live your life without a spiritual “plumb line,” or standard, by which you determine right from wrong. God's Word is that plumb line. Spiritual laws, like physical laws, are meant to protect you, not restrict you. You may exercise your freedom to challenge the laws of electricity, but to do so can bring you death. Likewise, you will not break God's laws, they will break you. God established absolute moral and spiritual laws that we are free to ignore, but we do so at our own peril. These laws are timeless. Culture does not supersede them. Circumstances do not abrogate them. God's laws are eternal, and they will save you from death if you follow them.
Henry T. Blackaby (Experiencing God Day By Day)
licensing”: the tendency to indulge yourself for doing something virtuous. Although this example may seem harmless (except to the shoppers’ waistlines), the results can be perverse. A study from 2011 on water-conservation in Massachusetts shows how. In the experiment, some 150 apartments were divided into two groups. Half received water-saving tips and weekly estimates of their usage; the other half served as a control. The households that were urged to use less water did so: their consumption fell by an average of 6% compared with the control group. The hitch was that their electricity consumption rose by 5.6%. The moral licensing was so strong, in other words, that it more or less outweighed the original act of virtue. Moral licensing does not seem to occur when virtuous conduct is obligatory. In one study, participants imagined themselves doing
Anonymous
the Three Gorges Dam, the most ambitious and controversial hydroelectric development ever undertaken. It took fifty years to plan, fifteen years to build, $24 billion to pay for, and 16 million tons of reinforced concrete to fill. The giant barrier has created a reservoir that stretches back along the Yangtze almost the length of England.21 This mass of water drives twenty-six giant turbines to generate up to 18,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. There are few more fitting monuments to early twenty-first-century China.
Jonathan Watts (When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind—Or Destroy It)
I also came across the word neoteny, which means “remaining young.” It’s something which we as humans have developed into a survival trait. Other animals, when they are young, have a curiosity about the world, a flexibility of response, and an ability to play which they lose as they grow up. As a species we have retained it. As a species, we are forever sticking our fingers into the electric socket of the universe to see what will happen next. It is a trait that will either save us or kill us, but it is what makes us human beings. I would rather be in the company of people who look at Mars than people who contemplate humanity’s navel—other worlds are better than fluff.
Anonymous
So they went on walking around the streets and sitting on the cage terraces. On the whole, they were not cowardly, joking with each other more often than bewailing their fate, and pretending to accept with good humour discomforts that would clearly not last. Appearances were saved. Yet around the end of the month . . . more serious transformations altered the face of the town. First of all the Prefect took steps to deal with traffic and supplies. Supplies were limited and petrol rationed. Measures were even taken to save electricity. Only essential goods would be brought by road or air to Oran. As a result, traffic decreased progressively until it almost disappeared altogether, some shops selling luxury goods down overnight and others hung 'sold out' notices in their windows, while queues of customers formed in front of their doors. . . For the time being they were not yet unemployed, just on leave.
Albert Camus (The Plague)
Another famous and controversial tactic—often called “rank-and-yank”—forced managers to come up with an annual ranking of the performance of their workers. The bottom 10 percent would be put on notice, and if they didn’t improve, they were fired. The constant pressure from this kind of tactic only added to employee tension. Rank-and-yank worked well for GE’s acquisitions, providing a formula for trimming fat and squeezing profits out of the operations. But some managers didn’t see it as helpful, especially after it had been used for a few years and some competent employees were ending up in the bottom 10 percent. You can trim fat only for so long. Also, some thought that the policy made workers fight each other for survival and inhibited managers’ ability to bring their workers together to operate as a team for the good of the company. One manager tried to subvert the system by putting an employee who’d recently died in the bottom 10 percent of the ranking list in order to save another employee’s job.
Thomas Gryta (Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric)
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Max Weber, for example, made the mistake. He imagined that the Protestant ethic encouraged hard work and high saving, instancing Benjamin Franklin. Weber didn’t get the joke about Father Abraham and a penny saved (few have, actually). Franklin’s special gift was not working hard—which hard work, after all, the peasant planting rice does daily. His gift was innovation, at a frenetic rate, for which he was honored and required no patents for—his stove, bifocals, battery, street lighting, postal sorting shelves, the lightning rod, the flexible catheter, the glass harmonica, a map of the Gulf Stream, and the theory of electricity.
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All)
Since 2010, the price of electricity from utility-scale solar farms has fallen almost 90 percent. Onshore wind fell 60 percent in the same time. Advanced batteries, which power electric cars and are increasingly finding a role in balancing fluctuations on the electric grid, fell more than 80 percent. When highly efficient light bulbs made with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, first came out just over a decade ago, you could easily pay $50 for one; nowadays they sell at Home Depot for $1.24 apiece, a decline of 97 percent.
Hal Harvey (The Big Fix: Seven Practical Steps to Save Our Planet)
Tips from Psychology 1. Make sustainable behavior the social default When asked directly, people vehemently deny that their actions might be influenced by trendiness or popular opinion. However, we are biologically programmed to care what other people think of us and to try to make our behavior fit in. This is a product of our evolution: early humans who were ostracized from their group faced almost certain death out on their own. Because of this biological programming, all people internalize and act on messages from other people, both explicit and implicit messages, about the kinds of behaviors expected and accepted by society. At the same time, people significantly underestimate the extent to which these social messages influence them. A recent study of household energy use confirms this: when asked outright, participants told experimenters that “what neighbors are doing” was the least likely factor to influence their behavior. However, the results showed that out of four different types of informational messages (environmental impact, money savings, how-to instructions, and how much neighbors are cutting back), the message about neighbors’ behavior was the only message that resulted in participants measurably reducing their own electricity use (Schultz, et al, 2007).
Christie Manning (The Psychology of Sustainable Behavior)
By the end of the year, X-ray burns were front-page news in virtually every prominent electrical, medical, and scientific journal. No one, however, paid a greater price than the men and women on the front lines of this new technology: radiologists and radiology technicians, most of whom saw themselves as noble warriors, “martyrs to science,” in their quest to save lives with X-rays. In November 1896, Walter Dodd, a founding father of radiology in the United States, suffered severe skin burns on both hands. Within five months, the pain was “beyond description” and his face and hands were visibly scalded. When the pain kept him awake at night, Dodd paced the floor of Massachusetts General Hospital with his hands held above his head. In July 1897, he received the first of fifty skin grafts, all of which failed. Bit by bit, his fingers were amputated. Dodd waited as long as he could before amputating his little finger because, as he said, “I needed something to oppose my thumb.” On August 3, 1905, at the age of forty-six, Elizabeth Fleischmann, the most experienced woman radiographer in the world, died from X-ray-induced cancer after a series of amputations. Fleischmann had gained international renown for her X-rays of soldiers in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. Upon her death, almost every major newspaper published eulogies about “America’s Joan of Arc.
Paul A. Offit (You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation)
As I wrestled through these issues, I walked into the seminary bookstore one day to browse among the books. On this occasion, I noticed several volumes of sermons by Charles Spurgeon. Curious, I pulled one off the shelf and began reading. Quite frankly, I was not prepared for what I found. As I pored over the pages, I found message after message dripping with the biblical truths of sovereign grace. But at the same time, each message was on fire with evangelistic fervor, as Spurgeon pleaded with sinners to be saved. Never had I read anything like this. These sermons were like an electric current running through my soul. They shocked my senses and enlightened my mind.
Steven J. Lawson (The Gospel Focus of Charles Spurgeon (A Long Line of Godly Men Profile))
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from school. In Alek’s village, there was no running water or electricity. She had to walk to a well for drinking water, but she and her family lived a simple, happy life. Then a terrible war broke out, and Alek’s life changed forever. As the warning sirens wailed over their village, Alek and her family had to run away from the fighting. It was the rainy season. The river had flooded, the bridges across it were underwater, and Alek could not swim. She was terrified of drowning, but her mom helped her to cross safely to the other side. During their journey, Alek’s mom foraged for food and sold packets of salt until she saved enough to buy passports for her
Elena Favilli (Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women)
Rob Young, in his essential Electric Eden, describes as Barrett being “strangely pushed and pulled between nostalgia for the secret garden of a child’s imagination and the space-age futurism of interstellar overdrive.” Barrett was channeling a spirit that was trying to pierce the veil between these worlds, and while this nostalgia and futurism, as Young puts it, seem opposed, they are actually two ideas at the heart of magic. The practice of magic is one requiring a link to the past and a vision of the future. Barrett added this directly to the lyrics of his songs and his live performances, experimenting with light and sound in an attempt to work the audience into a trance. The method is new, but the intention is ancient.
Peter Bebergal (Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll)
Men and women who live all their lives in centrally heated homes and offices, and go in the car to post a letter and collect the children from school, and have labour-saving devices for every conceivable purpose (including electric tooth-brushes and carving-knives)—such people have become so sensually unaware and so unresponsive to physical challenges that they are only half-alive.
Dervla Murphy (Wheels Within Wheels)
The analysis of the /General Theory /shows that inflation is a real, not a monetary, phenomenon. It operates in two stages (once more giving a crudely simple account of an intricate process). An increase in effective demand meeting an inelastic supply of goods raises prices. When food is supplied by a peasant agriculture a rise of the prices of foodstuffs is a direct increase of money income to the sellers and increases their expenditure. The higher cost of living sets up a pressure to raise wage rates. So money incomes rise all round, prices are bid up all the higher and a vicious spiral sets in. The first stage — a rise of effective demand — can very easily be prevented by not having any development. But if there is to be development there must be a stage when investment increases relatively to consumption. There must be an increase in effective demand and a tendency towards inflation. The problem is how to keep it within bounds. Some schemes of investment that seem to be clearly indispensable to improvements in the long run, such as electrical installations, take a long time to yield any fruit and meanwhile the workers engaged on these have to be supplied. The secret of non-inflationary development is to allocate the right amount of quick-yielding, capital-saving investment to the consumption-good sector (especially agriculture) to generate a sufficient surplus to support the necessary large schemes. It is in this kind of analysis, rather than in the mystifications of “deficit finance,” that the clue to inflation is to be found. [pp. 110-11]
Joan Robinson (Economic Philosophy)
After Patrice had moved downstairs, Sherrena discovered that she had been pirating electricity. The meter-repair bill would cost $200, and Sherrena refused to pay it while Patrice was living with Doreen. “I ain’t incurring shit,” she said. “They black asses are gonna incur everything, or they gonna be cold this winter.” It took the Hinkstons a couple months to save $200; during that time the back of the house, including the kitchen, was without power. Everything in the refrigerator spoiled. The family ate dinners out of cans: ravioli, SpaghettiOs.
Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)