“
One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. ... I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me. They may make me feel, but I can't feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight.
”
”
Will Schwalbe (The End of Your Life Book Club)
“
I promise you that the same stuff galaxies are made of, you are. The same energy that swings planets around stars makes electrons dance in your heart. It is in you, outside you, you are it. It is beautiful. Trust in this. And you your life will be grand.
”
”
Kamal Ravikant (Live Your Truth)
“
Yes, Jenna, I love you with all my heart. And with my atoms and molecules and electrons and whatever further breakdown you require.
”
”
Sharon Shinn (Jenna Starborn)
“
If movements were a spark every dancer would desire to light up in flames.
”
”
Shah Asad Rizvi
“
Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on.
”
”
Joe Queenan (One for the Books)
“
Show me a person who found love in his life and did not celebrate it with a dance.
”
”
Shah Asad Rizvi
“
So odd a pair, she and he. A duet in code and electron. Age and youth and cynicism and hope.
He is quicker than her - more learned by far. But she. She is unafraid. Too young to know failure and the fear it brings. She takes him places he would not have explored by himself.
She is catalyst. She is chaos. I can see why he loves her.
”
”
Jay Kristoff (Illuminae (The Illuminae Files, #1))
“
People don't need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don't need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don't need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth. Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs-for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy-with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, world require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment.
”
”
Donella H. Meadows (Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update)
“
The Goddess falls in love with Herself, drawing forth her own emanation, which takes on a life of its own. Love of self for self is the creative force of the universe. Desire is the primal energy, and that energy is erotic: the attraction of lover to beloved, of planet to star, the lust of electron for proton. Love is the glue that holds the world together.
”
”
Starhawk (The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religions of the Great Goddess)
“
To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about.
”
”
Edward Abbey (Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast)
“
13
NOTES
She hesitated. For two years she had kept as far away from Mikael Blomkvist as she could. And yet he kept sticking to her life like gum on the sole of her shoe, either on the Net or in real life. On the Net it was O.K. There he was no more than electrons and words. In real life, standing on her doorstep, he was still fucking attractive. And he knew her secrets just as she knew all of his. She looked at him for a moment and realized that she now had no feelings for him. At least not those kinds of feelings. He had in fact been a good friend to her over the past year. She trusted him. Maybe. It was troubling that one of the few people she trusted was a man she spent so much time avoiding. Then she made up her mind. It was absurd to pretend that he did not exist. It no longer hurt her to see him. She opened the door wide and let him into her life again.
”
”
Stieg Larsson (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Millennium, #3))
“
Have it compose a poem- a poem about a haircut! But lofty, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter S!!” [sic]….
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide."
("The First Sally (A) or The Electronic Bard"
THE CYBERIAD)
”
”
Stanisław Lem
“
One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. Sure, sometimes they'll elude you by hiding in improbable places... But at other times they'll confront you, and you'll literally stumble over some tomes you hadn't thought about in weeks or years. I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me. They may make me feel, but I can't feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight. They can get in your head but can't whack you upside it.
”
”
Will Schwalbe (The End of Your Life Book Club)
“
One proton of faith, three electrons of humility, a neutron of compassion and a bond of honesty,” Robert said, winking at his daughter. “What’s that?” Cora frowned, confused. Maggie laughed. “That, according to your father, is the molecular structure of love.
”
”
Menna Van Praag (The Dress Shop of Dreams)
“
I turn and – it’s Jack. Of course it’s Jack. The electron to my nucleus, constantly spinning around me in the most annoying of orbits.
”
”
Ali Hazelwood (Love, Theoretically)
“
So if we're all quarks and electrons ..." he begins.
What?"
We could make love and it would be nothing more than quarks and electrons rubbing together."
Better than that," I say. "Nothing really 'rubs together' in the microscopic world. Matter never really touches other matter, so we could make love without any of our atoms touching at all. Remember that electrons sit on the outside of atoms, repelling other electrons. So we could make love and actually repel each other at the same time.
”
”
Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)
“
Last December I saw an advertisement outside an electronics store. There was a little boy, delirious with delight, surrounded by computers, stereos, and other gadgets. The text read: “We know what your child wants for Christmas.” I stared at the poster, then said to no one in particular, “What your child wants for Christmas is your love, but if he can’t get that, he’ll settle for a bunch of electronic crap.
”
”
Derrick Jensen (A Language Older Than Words)
“
You and I were never meant to be together, but we are. Our pairing is not unlike two electrons ignoring natural laws in order to orbit one another. Life now defies reason—quirky but beautiful.
”
”
Richelle E. Goodrich (Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, and Grumblings for Every Day of the Year)
“
And then I was offered the job of a particle in factory physics. I was offered the job of an electron in an office atom. I was offered the job of a frequency for a radio station. People told me I could easily make it as a ray in a ray gun. What's the matter with you, don't you want to do well? I wanted to be a beach bum and work on my wave function. I have always loved the sea.
”
”
Jeanette Winterson
“
If you were to look at human skin under an electron microscope, you would not be able to tell where the human being begins and ends.
There is no fine barrier between the person and the universe. There is just a flow from one thing to the next and the only reason we perceive separateness is because of the limitations of our senses.
Human beings can only see .0001 % of the spectrum of light and we can only hear .0001 % of the spectrum of sound. If we could see infrared, and if we could see ultraviolet and x-rays, and energy, and hear the whole spectrum of sounds, the universe would appear very differently, there would be no empty space. It would be so full we would just see this sea of energy and there would only be oneness.
There is no separate you. No separateness. There's a deep interconnectedness. There's only oneness.
”
”
Todd Perelmuter (Spiritual Words to Live by : 81 Daily Wisdoms and Meditations to Transform Your Life)
“
The life spills over, some days.
She cannot be at rest,
Wishes she could explode
Like that red tree—
The one that bursts into fire
All this week.
Senses her infinite smallness
But can’t seize it,
Recognizes the folly of desire,
The folly of withdrawal—
Kicks at the curb, the pavement,
If only she could, at this moment,
When what she’s doing is plodding
To the bus stop, to go to school,
Passing that fiery tree—if only she could
Be making love,
Be making a painting,
Be exploding, be speeding through the universe
Like a photon, like a shower
Of yellow flames—
She believes if she could only catch up
With the riding rhythm of things, of her own electrons,
Then she would be at rest—
If she could forget school,
Climb the tree,
Be the tree,
burn like that.
”
”
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
“
Today alpha equals 1/137.0359 or so. Regardless, its value makes the periodic table possible. It allows atoms to exist and also allows them to react with sufficient vigor to form compounds, since electrons neither roam too freely from their nuclei nor cling too closely. This just-right balance has led many scientists to conclude that the universe couldn’t have hit upon its fine structure constant by accident.
”
”
Sam Kean (The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements)
“
Also unlike a planet, an electron—if excited by heat or light—can leap from its low-energy shell to an empty, high-energy shell. The electron cannot stay in the high-energy state for long, so it soon crashes back down. But this isn’t a simple back-and-forth motion, because as it crashes, the electron jettisons energy by emitting light.
”
”
Sam Kean (The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements)
“
When I use a PC today I cannot understand why a machine with 1,000 times more processing power has a worse user response than the machine I was using in the late ’80s at Acorn,’ remarks Steve Furber. ‘Well, I do know why it is, but it still seems the wrong answer.
”
”
Tom Lean (Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer)
“
The bell on the door beeped it's annoying electronic beep as a customer walked in and I straightened up, ready to plaster a fake smile on my face. Keep on truckin'. My eyes collided with a set of chocolate brown and my heart stopped. It actually stopped beating and I wondered if this was what it felt like to die. "Hey," West said, shoving his hands into his pockets. "I was hoping I'd find you here." What lengths will West go to prove his love for Blair?
”
”
Amity Cross (Unexplainable (Unexpected, #2))
“
Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..."
Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra?" Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not--for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
”
”
Stanisław Lem (The Cyberiad)
“
So now, he hoped, here was a chance to bring mankind back into the book-loving fold. He gloated. There was still no electronics in the pioneer worlds, was there? Where was your internet? Hah! Where was Google? Where was your mother’s old Kindle? Your iPad 25? Where was Wickedpedia? (Very primly, he always called it that, just to show his disdain; very few people noticed.) All gone, unbelievers! All those fancy toy-gadgets stuffed in drawers, screens blank as the eyes of corpses, left behind. Books – oh yes, real books – were flying off his shelves. Out in the Long Earth humanity was starting again in the Stone Age.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (The Long Earth (The Long Earth, #1))
“
Some say we are not like humans but we are more like them than we are different. Man and animals are in the same species as mammals as they have mammary glands that produce the milk to nurse their young. Their lungs breathe air and their blood is warm. They are vertebrates in that their skeletal system and well-designed spines hold their bodies together. Each cell is made of molecules, each molecule is made of atoms, and each atom is made of protons, neutrons and mostly electrons, which are made of waves of fibered light.
”
”
Kate McGahan (Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge: A Dog's Afterlife Story of Loss, Love and Renewal (Jack McAfghan Pet Loss Series Book 3))
“
A cell has a nucleus and some other parts like membranes, plasmas and other stuff. Its energy is made up of protons, neurons and electrons. Genetic scientists, however, have discovered that the majority of a cell is made up of something unknown. Something akin to space filled with electromagnetic fibers of light. The human body is made up of some 37 trillion cells. What do you think you are made of? Who do you think you are?
”
”
Kate McGahan (Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge: A Dog's Afterlife Story of Loss, Love and Renewal (Jack McAfghan Pet Loss Series Book 3))
“
Addiction to an electronic world caused the downfall of the MoFos. They’d forgotten to connect with each other, to connect with the creatures who missed them and to Nature as She called for them to come home. The crow part of me knew not to dwell on what was, but the MoFo part of me would always carry my best friend in my heart. Because we never give up on anything, especially love, and that’s the very, very best thing about being a MoFo.
”
”
Kira Jane Buxton (Hollow Kingdom (Hollow Kingdom #1))
“
So where do I go from here? I’ve disposed of love, I’ve disposed of God, and all that is left is me and the universe, and I am no more a part of it than before. I feel as if I am an electron circling an atom. I must go from point A to point B but never actually cross the space between the two points. If only atoms could speak.
”
”
Francis Fesmire
“
One of the things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. Sure, sometimes they’ll elude you by hiding in improbable places: in a box full of old picture frames, say, or in the laundry basket, wrapped in a sweatshirt. But at other times they’ll confront you, and you’ll literally stumble over some tomes you hadn’t thought about in weeks or years. I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me. The may make me feel, but I can’t’ feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture and no weight. They can get in your head but can’t whack you upside it.
”
”
Will Schwalbe (The End of Your Life Book Club)
“
Toddlers walk through life like we all wish we could: confident, demanding, and 100 percent positive that they are the center of the universe. They can kick their father in the testicles and feel nothing. They love to laugh. They love to destroy expensive cosmetics and to fingerpaint with long-wearing lipstick. Toddlers love to render electronic devices useless. They enjoy making debit cards and keys vanish into thin air. They like to permanent marker on shit. Toddlers live that #thuglyfe better than any of us could even try to because toddlers. don’t. give. a. fuck. The quicker you understand that, the better. Repeat after me: Toddlers don’t care and they never did.
”
”
Bunmi Laditan (Toddlers Are A**holes: It's Not Your Fault)
“
America is a leap of the imagination. From its beginning, people had only a persistent idea of what a good country should be. The idea involved freedom, equality, justice, and the pursuit of happiness; nowadays most of us probably could not describe it a lot more clearly than that. The truth is, it always has been a bit of a guess. No one has ever known for sure whether a country based on such an idea is really possible, but again and again, we have leaped toward the idea and hoped. What SuAnne Big Crow demonstrated in the Lead high school gym is that making the leap is the whole point. The idea does not truly live unless it is expressed by an act; the country does not live unless we make the leap from our tribe or focus group or gated community or demographic, and land on the shaky platform of that idea of a good country which all kinds of different people share.
This leap is made in public, and it's made for free. It's not a product or a service that anyone will pay you for. You do it for reasons unexplainable by economics--for ambition, out of conviction, for the heck of it, in playfulness, for love. It's done in public spaces, face-to-face, where anyone is free to go. It's not done on television, on the Internet, or over the telephone; our electronic systems can only tell us if the leap made elsewhere has succeeded or failed. The places you'll see it are high school gyms, city sidewalks, the subway, bus stations, public parks, parking lots, and wherever people gather during natural disasters. In those places and others like them, the leaps that continue to invent and knit the country continue to be made. When the leap fails, it looks like the L.A. riots, or Sherman's March through Georgia. When it succeeds, it looks like the New York City Bicentennial Celebration in July 1976 or the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963. On that scale, whether it succeeds or fails, it's always something to see. The leap requires physical presence and physical risk. But the payoff--in terms of dreams realized, of understanding, of people getting along--can be so glorious as to make the risk seem minuscule.
”
”
Ian Frazier (On the Rez)
“
I would like you to respect me” isn’t as good as, “I would like you to turn off your electronic devices at dinner so we can just talk to each other.
”
”
John M. Gottman (Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love)
“
The electron to my nucleus, constantly spinning around me in the most annoying of orbits. He’s
”
”
Ali Hazelwood (Love, Theoretically)
“
Something worse than a boy who hates you: a boy who loves you.
”
”
Markus Zusak (Handbook of Industrial Electronic Circuits)
“
The electron to my nucleus, constantly spinning around me in the most annoying of orbits.
”
”
Ali Hazelwood (Love, Theoretically)
“
But Anh was going to have her beautiful love story, and Olive wouldn’t
have to wait for ages to use the electron microscope.
”
”
Ali Hazelwood (The Love Hypothesis)
“
Now peradventure, in that mighty book
Which men call heaven, it had come to pass,
In stars, when first a living breath he took,
That he for love should get his death, alas!
”
”
Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales [electronic Resource] of Chaucer. To Which are Added, an Essay Upon his Language and Versification; an Introductory Discourse; and Notes. In Four Volumes. Volume 3)
“
Books, be they physical objects or electronic pulses, are way cool. They are idea houses. So let those who want to read from machines. Those who love the feel, the smell, the gilt edging and the pretty covers and the soft paper, and the kinetic memories will enjoy the physical objects. Either form can be artifact. So long as we're all reading, and gaining joy from it, does it really matter so much?
”
”
Wendy Welch (The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book)
“
Furthermore, because silicon packs on more protons than carbon, it's bulkier, like carbon with fifty extra pounds. Sometimes that's not a big deal. Silicon might substitute adequately for carbon in the Martian equivalent of fats or proteins. But carbon also contorts itself into ringed molecules we call sugars. Rings are states of high-tension- which means they store lots of energy-and silicon just isn't supple enough to bend into the right position to form rings. In a related problem, silicon atoms cannot squeeze their electrons into tight spaces for double bonds, which appear in virtually every complicated biochemical.
”
”
Sam Kean (The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements)
“
the months leading up to the start of his visionary company, Steve Jobs was something of a conflicted young man, seeking spiritual enlightenment and dabbling in electronics only when it promised to earn him quick cash.
”
”
Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love)
“
As the warrant says, I’ll be taking all patient files and billing records.” She crossed her arms. “I’ll help you with the files, but billing records aren’t kept here. Doc had a local gal do all the billing electronically,
”
”
Lynette Eason (Harlequin Love Inspired Suspense December 2017 - Box Set 2 of 2: Christmas Ranch Rescue\Holiday Secrets\Yuletide Suspect)
“
What we learn is that the scientist is as important a part of this experiment as the electron, and that the scientist and the electron are in fact connected. This experiment is the cornerstone of the holistic universe theory.
”
”
Danny Scheinmann (Random Acts Of Heroic Love)
“
It’s a fortress of passion, a crash--a fatal collision of neurons and electrons and fibers, my circus of oddities coming together as one, imploding in a fiery blaze. It’s . . . I-don’t-know-what . . . my collection of shiny.
It’s love.
”
”
David Arnold (Mosquitoland)
“
Then there are those who think their bodies don't exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o'clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock. They make love between eight and ten at night. They work forty hours a week, read the Sunday paper on Sunday, play chess on Tuesday nights. When their stomach growls, they look at their watch to see if it is time to eat. When they begin to lose themselves in a concert, they look at the clock above the stage to see when it will be time to go home. They know that the body is not a thing of wild magic, but a collection of chemicals, tissues, and nerve impulses. Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings. Sadness no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock. As such, the body must be addressed in the language of physics. And if the body speaks, it is the speaking only of so many levers and forces. The body is a thing to be ordered, not obeyed.
”
”
Alan Lightman
“
—
If love wants you; if you’ve been melted
down to stars, you will love
with lungs and gills, with warm blood
and cold. With feathers and scales.
Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy
you’ll want to breathe with the spiral
calls of birds, while your lashing tail
still gropes for the waes. You’ll try
to haul your weight from simple sea
to gravity of land. Caught by the tide,
in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments
suffocating in both water and air.
If love wants you, suddently your past is
obsolete science. Old maps,
disproved theories, a diorama.
The moment our bodies are set to spring open.
The immanence that reassembles matter
passes through us then disperses
into time and place:
the spasm of fur stroked upright; shocked electrons.
The mother who hears her child crying upstairs
and suddenly feels her dress
wet with milk.
Among black branches, oyster-coloured fog
tongues every corner of loneliness we never knew
before we were loved there,
the places left fallow when we’re born,
waiting for experience to find its way
into us. The night crossing, on deck
in the dark car. On the beach wehre
night reshaped your face.
In the lava fields, carbon turned to carpet,
moss like velvet spread over splintered forms.
The instant spray freezes
in air above the falls, a gasp of ice.
We rise, hearing our names
called home through salmon-blue dusk, the royal moon
an escutcheon on the shield of sky.
The current that passes through us, radio waves,
electric lick. The billions of photons that pass
through film emulsion every second, the single
submicroscopic crystal struck
that becomes the phograph.
We look and suddenly the world
looks back.
A jagged tube of ions pins us to the sky.
—
But if, like starlings, we continue to navigate
by the rear-view mirror
of the moon; if we continue to reach
both for salt and for the sweet white
nibs of grass growing closest to earth;
if, in the autumn bog red with sedge we’re also
driving through the canyon at night,
all around us the hidden glow of limestone
erased by darkness; if still we sish
we’d waited for morning,
we will know ourselves
nowhere.
Not in the mirrors of waves
or in the corrading stream,
not in the wavering
glass of an apartment building,
not in the looming light of night lobbies
or on the rainy deck. Not in the autumn kitchen
or in the motel where we watched meteors
from our bed while your slow film, the shutter open,
turned stars to rain.
We will become
indigestible. Afraid
of choking on fur
and armour, animals
will refuse the divided longings
in our foreing blue flesh.
—
In your hands, all you’ve lost,
all you’ve touched.
In the angle of your head,
every vow and
broken vow. In your skin,
every time you were disregarded,
every time you were received.
Sundered, drowsed. A seeded field,
mossy cleft, tidal pool, milky stem.
The branch that’s released when the bird lifts
or lands. In a summer kitchen.
On a white winter morning, sunlight across the bed.
”
”
Anne Michaels
“
Love, that most banal of things, that most clichéd of religious motivations, had more power—Sol now knew—than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. Love was these other forces, Sol realized. The Void Which Binds, the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon, was nothing more or less than love. But could love—simple, banal love—explain the so-called anthropic principle which scientists had shaken their collective heads over for seven centuries and more—that almost infinite string of coincidences which had led to a universe that had just the proper number of dimensions, just the correct values on electron, just the precise rules for gravity, just the proper age to stars, just the right prebiologies to create just the perfect viruses to become just the proper DNAs—in short, a series of coincidences so absurd in their precision and correctness that they defied logic, defied understanding, and even defied religious interpretation. Love? For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God—primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian—even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth. No room for love there.
”
”
Dan Simmons (The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2))
“
This is me trying to bridge the gap and make a record that I’m truly proud of, I’ve got my 80s side and my indie side, my super pop slant and the electronic music that I love. I wanted to make happy, feel-good music. It all comes from an organic place
”
”
Blake Lewis
“
Einstein said that we only use at most 8% of our brain’s capacity. I know this because one of my favorite things to do each night was to get into bed with her and learn from the books she was reading. She would read out loud to me the facts and then look at me and ask me what I thought.
“What do you think is going on with the other 92%?”
A cell has a nucleus and some other parts like membranes, plasms and other stuff. Its energy is made up of protons, neurons and electrons. Genetic scientists, however, have discovered that the majority of a cell is made up of something unknown. Something akin to space filled with electromagnetic fibers of light. The human body is made up of some 37 trillion cells. What do you think you are made of? Who do you think you are?
”
”
Kate McGahan (Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge: A Dog's Afterlife Story of Loss, Love and Renewal (Jack McAfghan Pet Loss Series Book 3))
“
It came to me in whole form… that the energy of the Universe swirled and coalesced and formed into suns and cooling planets orbiting those suns. And on the planets (one specifically that I know of) the energy started swirling and coalescing into electrons and forming molecules and those merged and joined and formed microscopic life, that in turn gave rise to aquatic things, and plants and animals and beings that walked on two legs that loved and had children that in turn loved. So that all the planet is connected by the energy of the Universe, and I am part of it.
”
”
Robin Rumi (Naked Morsels: short stories of spiritual erotica)
“
New York loves expanse. It grows upward and spreads its tentacles outward, the island spilling into adjoining lands through its many bridges and tunnels. A person given to idleness, as Parvis has come to think of himself, must move about for the sake of moving, if only to fit into the general scheme of things - an electron obeying the current. Tantamount to movement, he has come to realize, is self-reliance, a fact reflected in the language: "Take care," a friend may say to another as the two part. In his old life the same two friends would have said to one another, khodahfez - "may God protect you.
”
”
Dalia Sofer (The Septembers of Shiraz)
“
A child says ‘Thank God for my good dinner’. What can I say at seventy-five? ‘Thank God for my good life, and for all the love that has been given to me.’ Wallingford. October IIth 1965 SEARCHABLE TERMS Note: The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created.
”
”
Agatha Christie (Agatha Christie: An Autobiography)
“
The color of the emitted light depends on the relative heights of the starting and ending energy levels. A crash between closely spaced levels (such as two and one) releases a pulse of low-energy reddish light, while a crash between more widely spaced levels (say, five and two) releases high-energy purple light.
”
”
Sam Kean (The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements)
“
In the intricate and mutable space-time geometry at the black hole, in-falling matter and energy interacted with the virtualities of the vacuum in ways unknown to the flatter cosmos beyond it. Quasi-stable quantum states appeared, linked according to Schrodinger's wave functions and their own entanglement, more and more of them, intricacy compounding until it amounted to a set of codes. The uncertainty principle wrought mutations; variants perished or flourished; forms competed, cooperated, merged, divided, interacted; the patterns multiplied and diversified; at last, along one fork on a branch of the life tree, thought budded.
That life was not organic, animal and vegetable and lesser kingdoms, growing, breathing, drinking, eating, breeding, hunting, hiding; it kindled no fires and wielded no tools; from the beginning, it was a kind of oneness. An original unity differentiated itself into countless avatars, like waves on a sea. They arose and lived individually, coalesced when they chose by twos or threes or multitudes, reemerged as other than they had been, gave themselves and their experiences back to the underlying whole. Evolution, history, lives eerily resembled memes in organic minds.
Yet quantum life was not a series of shifting abstractions. Like the organic, it was in and of its environment. It acted to alter its quantum states and those around it: action that manifested itself as electronic, photonic, and nuclear events. Its domain was no more shadowy to it than ours is to us. It strove, it failed, it achieved. They were never sure aboardEnvoy whether they could suppose it loved, hated, yearned, mourned, rejoiced. The gap between was too wide for any language to bridge. Nevertheless they were convinced that it knew something they might as well call emotion, and that that included wondering.
”
”
Poul Anderson (Starfarers)
“
I read an article in a women's magazine about "writing purple prose for love and money." They made it sound easy, so I started writing on an old electronic typewriter that alternated between stuck keys and high throttle. I had no clue my first letter to Harlequin came back marked "Return to Sender." Luckily, I made my first sale before I understood how long the odds were.
”
”
Carrie Alexander
“
The song transitions, and so does her sway. It’s an older tune. An electronic mix between rock and pop. Not approved listening aboveground. The band sings of immortality. Of the inability to live without another. It’s about tested faith. About past and future and living forever and losing time.
It’s a love song.
A fantasy.
What would that be like? To rely so much on someone else?
”
”
Sara Ella (The Wonderland Trials (The Curious Realities, #1))
“
By habit we perceive ourselves and the world around us as solid, real, and enduring. Yet without much effort, we can easily determine that not one aspect within the whole world’s system exists independent of change. I had just been in one physical location, and now I was in another; I had experienced different states of mind. We have all grown from babies to adults, lost loved ones, watched children grow, known changes in weather, in political regimes, in styles of music and fashion, in everything. Despite appearances, no aspect of life ever stays the same. The deconstruction of any one object—no matter how dense it appears, such as an ocean liner, our bodies, a skyscraper, or an oak tree—will reveal the appearance of solidity to be as illusory as permanence. Everything that looks substantial will break down into molecules, and into atoms, and into electrons, protons, and neutrons. And every phenomenon exists in interdependence with myriad other forms. Every identification of any one form has meaning only in relationship to another. Big only has meaning in relation to small. To mistake our habitual misperceptions for the whole of reality is what we mean by ignorance, and these delusions define the world of confusion, or samsara.
”
”
Yongey Mingyur (In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying)
“
The pace of this modern age is not conducive to maintaining one’s consciousness. Glued to our electronics, we are blind and deaf to the world around us. Run down by our long work days, we are too exhausted to think and too hurried to feel. The day ends in a haze of strained thoughts, numbness, and fatigue. And we rise the next morning only to start the cycle again.
In this age of distraction, if you desire to fritter away your life with empty diversions, there is an abundance of gadgets available to aid you. Quietness is a characteristic of ages gone by. Our generation is the one it died with. Connected to the virtual world, we ignore the presence of those in our home. One can only hope we will awaken to the need for balance before we look up from the screen to find our loved ones have gone, and our life has passed us by.
”
”
L.M. Browning
“
The Central Intelligence Agency, America’s best-known spy shop. In that fearful post-Joe McCarthy era, when assassinated JFK had publicly loved James Bond and secretly been entangled in covert intrigues like assassination plots against Cuba’s Fidel Castro outsourced to the Mafia by our spies, the CIA was a myth-shrouded invisible army. In those pre-Internet days before electronic books, Web sites with varied credibility, and search
”
”
James Grady (Six Days of the Condor)
“
Fake dating.’ Like it’s a thing.” “Because it is. Don’t you watch rom-coms?” He stared at her with a puzzled expression, until she cleared her throat and looked down at her knees. “Right.” God, they had nothing in common. They’d never find anything to talk about. Their ten-minute coffee breaks were going to be the most painful, awkward parts of her already painful, awkward weeks. But Anh was going to have her beautiful love story, and Olive wouldn’t have to wait for ages to use the electron microscope. That was all that mattered.
”
”
Ali Hazelwood (The Love Hypothesis)
“
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammels and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
”
”
Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America)
“
Now, according to Business Week, 94 percent of U.S. corporations ask for electronic resumes. They use software to sift through them, picking out a selection of "finalists" for human managers to consider. What does the software look for? That's what we have to figure out. Some pick out certain words-MBA, Harvard, Excel, fluent Mandarin. Others look for more sophisticated combinations. Plenty of consultants are on call to sell us inside tips. The point is that when we want to be found, whether we're looking for money or love, we must make ourselves intelligible to machines. We need good page rank. We must fit ourselves to algorithms.
”
”
Stephen Baker (The Numerati)
“
One of the many things i love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. Sure, sometimes they’ll elude you by hiding in improbable places: in a box full of old pictures frames,say, or in the laundry basket, wrapped in a sweatshirt. But at other times they’ll confront you, and you’ll literally stumble over some tomes you hadn’t thought about in weeks or years. I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me. They may make me feel, but i can’t feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight. They can get in your head but can’t whack you upside it.
”
”
Will Schwalbe (The End of Your Life Book Club)
“
One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. Sure, sometimes they’ll elude you by hiding in improbable places: in a box full of old picture frames, say, or in the laundry basket, wrapped in a sweatshirt. But at other times they’ll confront you, and you’ll literally stumble over some tomes you hadn’t thought about in weeks or years. I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me. They may make me feel, but I can’t feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight. They can get in your head but can’t whack you upside it.
”
”
Will Schwalbe (The End of Your Life Book Club)
“
The twenty-first century physicist Carlo Rovelli theorized that quantum mechanics was, fundamentally, about relationships. That no element of nature exists alone. Everything acts and is acted upon in turn. A minuscule electron jumping an orbit can change an entire element or cause a chain reaction that leads to devastation. But without such reactions, there would be no universe at all. There would be no stars, no sun, no planets, no living creatures, no way of even knowing about such things as quantum mechanics. Isn't it beautiful that the underlying theory of our entire universe is predicated on the ways the smallest particles relate to each other? We collided in a sea of endless shifting probabilities.
”
”
Wendy Xu
“
The voice of the crowd rises into one universal scream as we roll into the fading evening light, but neither one of us reacts. I simply fix my eyes on a point far in the distance and pretend there is no audience, no hysteria. I can’t help catching glimpses of us on the huge screens along the route, and we are not just beautiful, we are dark and powerful. No, more. We star-crossed lovers from District 12, who suffered so much and enjoyed so little the rewards of our victory, do not seek the fans’ favour, grace them with our smiles, or catch their kisses. We are unforgiving. And I love it. Getting to be myself at last. As we curve around into the loop of the City Circle, I can see that a couple of the other stylists have tried to steal Cinna and Portia’s idea of illuminating their tributes. The electric-light-studded outfits from District 3, where they make electronics, at least make sense. But what are the livestock keepers from District 10, who are dressed as cows, doing with flaming belts? Broiling themselves? Pathetic.
”
”
Suzanne Collins (Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2))
“
First, the “fingers” would face tiny attractive forces that would make them stick to other molecules. Atoms stick to each other, in part, because of tiny electrical forces, like the van der Waals force, that exist between their electrons. Think of trying to repair a watch when your tweezers are covered with honey. Assembling anything as delicate as watch components would be impossible. Now imagine assembling something even more complicated than a watch, like a molecule, that constantly sticks to your fingers. Second, these fingers might be too “fat” to manipulate atoms. Think of trying to repair that watch wearing thick cotton gloves. Since the “fingers” are made of individual atoms, as are the objects being manipulated, the fingers may simply be too thick to perform the delicate operations needed. Smalley concluded, “Much like you can’t make a boy and a girl fall in love with each other simply by pushing them together, you cannot make precise chemistry occur as desired between two molecular objects with simple mechanical motion …. Chemistry, like love, is more subtle than that.
”
”
Michio Kaku (Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100)
“
Sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets. Or she stays inside her house and cries. Or her children tell her a joke, and she doesn’t laugh because she doesn’t hear it. I talked to women who had spent years on the analyst’s couch, working out their “adjustment to the feminine role,” their blocks to “fulfillment as a wife and mother.” But the desperate tone in these women’s voices, and the look in their eyes, was the same as the tone and the look of other women, who were sure they had no problem, even though they did have a strange feeling of desperation.
A mother of four who left college at nineteen to get married told me:
I’ve tried everything women are supposed to do—hobbies, gardening, pick-ling, canning, being very social with my neighbors, joining committees, run-ning PTA teas. I can do it all, and I like it, but it doesn’t leave you anything to think about—any feeling of who you are. I never had any career ambitions. All I wanted was to get married and have four children. I love the kids and Bob and my home. There’s no problem you can even put a name to. But I’m desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?
A twenty-three-year-old mother in blue jeans said:
I ask myself why I’m so dissatisfied. I’ve got my health, fine children, a lovely new home, enough money. My husband has a real future as an electron-ics engineer. He doesn’t have any of these feelings. He says maybe I need a vacation, let’s go to New York for a weekend. But that isn’t it. I always had this idea we should do everything together. I can’t sit down and read a book alone. If the children are napping and I have one hour to myself I just walk through the house waiting for them to wake up. I don’t make a move until I know where the rest of the crowd is going. It’s as if ever since you were a little girl, there’s always been somebody or something that will take care of your life: your parents, or college, or falling in love, or having a child, or moving to a new house. Then you wake up one morning and there’s nothing to look forward to.
”
”
Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique)
“
Oh, were we talking about dinner? Well, let me say this: I don’t take it lightly if when I write the word beef someone chooses to read lamb. People talking about a book as if it were just another thing, like a dish, or a product like an electronic device or a pair of shoes, to be rated for consumer satisfaction—that was just the goddamn trouble, you said. Even those aspiring writers your students seemed never to judge a book on how well it fulfilled the author’s intentions but solely on whether it was the kind of book that they liked. And so you got papers stating things like “I hate Joyce, he’s so full of himself,” or “I don’t see why I should have to read about white people problems.” You got customer reviews full of umbrage, suggesting that if a book didn’t affirm what the reader already felt—what they could identify with, what they could relate to—the author had no business writing the book at all. Those hilarious stories that people loved, and loved to share—the book clubber who said, When I read a novel I want someone to die in it; the complaint against Anne Frank’s diary, in which nothing much happens and then the story just breaks off—did not make you laugh.
”
”
Sigrid Nunez (The Friend)
“
An electronic machine can carry out mathematical calculations, remember historical facts, play chess and translate books from one language to another. It is able to solve mathematical problems more quickly than man and its memory is faultless. Is there any limit to progress, to its ability to create machines in the image and likeness of man? It seems the answer is no.
It is not impossible to imagine the machine of future ages and millennia. It will be able to listen to music and appreciate art; it will even be able to compose melodies, paint pictures and write poems. Is there a limit to its perfection? Can it be compared to man? Will it surpass him?
Childhood memories… tears of happiness … the bitterness of parting… love of freedom … feelings of pity for a sick puppy … nervousness … a mother’s tenderness … thoughts of death … sadness … friendship … love of the weak … sudden hope … a fortunate guess … melancholy … unreasoning joy … sudden embarrassment…
The machine will be able to recreate all of this! But the surface of the whole earth will be too small to accommodate this machine – this machine whose dimensions and weight will continually increase as it attempts to reproduce the peculiarities of mind and soul of an average, inconspicuous human being.
Fascism annihilated tens of millions of people.
”
”
Vasily Grossman (Life and Fate)
“
Space Rockets as Power Symbols
The moon rocket is the climactic expression of the power system: the maximum utilization of the resources of science and technics for the achievement of a relatively miniscule result: the hasty exploration of a barren satellite. Space exploration by manned rockets enlarges and intensifies all the main components of the power system: increased energy, accelerated motion, automation, cyber-nation, instant communication, remote control. Though it has been promoted mainly under military pressure, the most vital result of moon visitation so far turns out to be an unsought and unplanned one-a full view of the beautiful planet we live on, an inviting home for man and for all forms of life. This distant view on television evoked for the first time an active, loving response from many people who had hitherto supposed that modern technics would soon replace Mother Earth with a more perfect, scientifically organized, electronically controlled habitat, and who took for granted that this would be an improvement. Note that the moon rocket is itself necessarily a megastructure: so it naturally calls forth such vulgar imitations as the accompanying bureaucratic obelisk (office building) of similar dimensions, shown here (left). Both forms exhibit the essentially archaic and regressive nature of the science-fiction mind.
”
”
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
“
Tegmark: That’s right, and there’s a more elemental example. In a certain sense, your genes have invented you. They built your brain so that you could make copies of your genes. That’s why you like to eat—so you won’t starve to death. And that’s why we fall in love—to make copies of our genes, right? But even though we know this, we still choose to use birth control, which is the opposite of what our genes want.
Some people dismiss the idea that there will ever be anything smarter than humans for mystical reasons—because they think there’s something more than quarks and electrons and information processing going on in us. But if you take the scientific approach, that you really are your quarks, then there’s clearly no physical law of physics that precludes anything more intelligent than a human. We were constrained by how many quarks you could fit into a skull, and things like that—constraints that computers don’t have. It becomes instead more a question of time. And, as you said, there’s a relentless pressure to make smarter things, because it’s profitable and interesting and useful. The question isn’t if this will happen, but when. And finally, to come back to those ants. Suppose you’re in charge of a huge green-energy project, and just as you’re about to let the water flood the hydroelectric dam you’ve built, someone points out that there’s an anthill right in the middle of the flood zone. Now, you know the ants don’t want to be drowned, right? So you have to make a decision. What are you going to do?
Harris: Well, in that case, too bad for the ants.
Tegmark: Exactly. So we ought to plan ahead. We don’t want to end up like the ants.
”
”
Sam Harris (Making Sense)
“
SCULLEY. Pepsi executive recruited by Jobs in 1983 to be Apple’s CEO, clashed with and ousted Jobs in 1985. JOANNE SCHIEBLE JANDALI SIMPSON. Wisconsin-born biological mother of Steve Jobs, whom she put up for adoption, and Mona Simpson, whom she raised. MONA SIMPSON. Biological full sister of Jobs; they discovered their relationship in 1986 and became close. She wrote novels loosely based on her mother Joanne (Anywhere but Here), Jobs and his daughter Lisa (A Regular Guy), and her father Abdulfattah Jandali (The Lost Father). ALVY RAY SMITH. A cofounder of Pixar who clashed with Jobs. BURRELL SMITH. Brilliant, troubled hardware designer on the original Mac team, afflicted with schizophrenia in the 1990s. AVADIS “AVIE” TEVANIAN. Worked with Jobs and Rubinstein at NeXT, became chief software engineer at Apple in 1997. JAMES VINCENT. A music-loving Brit, the younger partner with Lee Clow and Duncan Milner at the ad agency Apple hired. RON WAYNE. Met Jobs at Atari, became first partner with Jobs and Wozniak at fledgling Apple, but unwisely decided to forgo his equity stake. STEPHEN WOZNIAK. The star electronics geek at Homestead High; Jobs figured out how to package and market his amazing circuit boards and became his partner in founding Apple. DEL YOCAM. Early Apple employee who became the General Manager of the Apple II Group and later Apple’s Chief Operating Officer. INTRODUCTION How This Book Came to Be In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I’d worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado. He’d be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted instead to take a walk so that we could talk. That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
I, Prayer (A Poem of Magnitudes and Vectors)
I, Prayer, know no hour. No season, no day, no month nor year.
No boundary, no barrier or limitation–no blockade hinders Me.
There is no border or wall I cannot breach.
I move inexorably forward; distance holds Me not.
I span the cosmos in the twinkling of an eye.
I knowest it all.
I am the most powerful force in the Universe.
Who then is My equal?
Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?
None is so fierce that dare stir him up.
Surely, I may’st with but a Word.
Who then is able to stand before Me?
I am the wind, the earth, the metal.
I am the very empyrean vault of Heaven Herself.
I span the known and the unknown beyond
Eternity’s farthest of edges.
And whatsoever under Her wings is Mine.
I am a gentle stream, a fiery wrath
penetrating; wearing down mountains
–the hardest and softest of substances.
I am a trickling brook to fools of want
lost in the deserts of their own desires.
I am a Niagara to those who drink in well.
I seep through cracks. I inundate.
I level forests kindleth unto a single burning bush.
My hand moves the Universe by the mind of a child.
I withhold treasures solid from the secret stores
to they who would wrench at nothing.
I do not sleep or eat, feel not fatigue, nor hunger.
I do not feel the cold, nor rain or wind.
I transcend the heat of the summer’s day.
I commune. I petition. I intercede.
My time is impeccable, by it worlds and destinies turn.
I direct the fates of nations and humankind.
My Words are Iron eternaled—rust not they away.
No castle keep, nor towers of beaten brass,
Nor the dankest of dungeon helks,
Nor adamantine links of hand-wrought steel
Can contain My Spirit–I shan’t turn back.
The race is ne’er to the swift, nor battle to the strong, nor wisdom to the wise or wealth to the rich.
For skills and wisdom, I give to the sons of man.
I take wisdom and skills from the sons of man
for they are ever Mine.
Blessed is the one who finds it so, for in
humility comes honor,
For those who have fallen on the battlefield
for My Name’s sake, I reach down to lift them up
from On High.
I am a rose with the thorn.
I am the clawing Lion that pads her children.
My kisses wound those whom I Love. My kisses are faithful.
No occasion, moment in time, instances, epochs, ages or eras hold Me back.
Time–past, present and future is to Me irrelevant.
I span the millennia. I am the ever-present Now.
My foolishness is wiser than man’s
My weakness stronger than man’s.
I am subtle to the point of formlessness yet formed.
I have no discernible shape, no place into which the
enemy may sink their claws.
I AM wisdom and in length of days knowledge.
Strength is Mine and counsel, and understanding.
I break. I build. By Me, kings rise and fall.
The weak are given strength; wisdom to those who seek and foolishness to both fooler and fool alike.
I lead the crafty through their deceit.
I set straight paths for those who will walk them.
I am He who gives speech and sight - and confounds and removes them.
When I cut, straight and true is my cut.
I strike without fault. I am the razored edge of
high destiny.
I have no enemy, nor friend.
My Zeal and Love and Mercy will not relent
to track you down until you are spent–
even unto the uttermost parts of the earth.
I cull the proud and the weak out of the common herd.
I hunt them in battles royale until their cries unto Heaven are heard.
I break hearts–those whose are harder than granite.
Beyond their atomic cores, I strike their atomic clock.
Elect motions; not one more or less electron beyond electron’s orbit that has been ordained
for you do I give–for His grace is sufficient for thee until He desires enough.
Then I, Prayer, move on as a comet,
Striking out of the black.
I, His sword, kills to give Life.
I am Living and Active, the Divider asunder
of thoughts and intents.
I Am the Light of Eternal Mind.
And I, Prayer,
AM Prayer Almighty.
”
”
Douglas M. Laurent
“
The molecular structure of love: one proton of faith, three electrons of humility, a neutron of compassion, and a bond of honesty.
”
”
Menna Van Praag (The Dress Shop of Dreams)
“
Whatcha listenin' to?"
"Oh, you probably wouldn't like it."
"Try me."
He shrugs as he passes the headphones across the slim space between our beds. This is gonna be good. I've got him pegged for a Yanni diehard, and I smirk a little as the music starts. One of my cellies had a thing for electronic rock, so I recognize the song right away. With the heavy breathing at the start, it's unforgettable and creepy as hell. Seriously. Like stalker-level shit.
I want you now, tomorrow won't do. There's a yearning inside and it's showing through.
"Depeche Mode, huh? Cool, man. Wouldn't have figured it."
Reach out your hands and accept my love. We've waited for too long. Enough is enough. Like I said, stalker-level.
His laugh is jittery, quick as the cockroaches in Folsom. "It's my favorite song. Reminds me of being seventeen again. You know, when sex was all you could think about."
I pretend I'm not totally skeeved out when I return his headphones and shut the lights.
”
”
Ellery A. Kane (The Hanging Tree (Doctors of Darkness, #2))
“
Now there is an attempt to reverse the history, to go back to the happy days when the principles of economic rationalism briefly reigned, gravely demonstrating that people have no rights beyond what they can gain in the labor market. And since now the injunction to "go somewhere else" won't work, the choices are narrowed to the workhouse prison or starvation, as a matter of natural law, which reveals that any attempt to help the poor only harms them—the poor, that is; the rich are miraculously helped thereby, as when state power intervenes to bail our investors after the collapse of the highly-toured Mexican "economic miracle," or to save failing banks and industries, or to bar Japan from American markets to allow domestic corporations to reconstruct the steel, automotive, and electronics industry in the 1980s (amidst impressive rhetoric about free markets by the most protectionist administration in the postwar era and its acolytes). And far more; this is the merest icing on the cake. But the rest are subject to the iron principles of economic rationalism, now sometimes called "tough love" by those who allocate the benefits.
”
”
Noam Chomsky (Chomsky On Anarchism)
“
Thanks to bad graphic design, some readers love only the electronic version of some books.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
The electron that scientists see in the laboratory-the electron that physicists, chemists, and engineers have known and loved for decades-is an impostor. It is not the true electron. The true electron is hidden in a shroud of particles, made up of the zero-point fluctuations, those particles that constantly pop in and out of existence. As an electron sits in the vacuum, it occasionally absorbs or spits out one of these particles, such as a photon. The swarm of particles makes it difficult to get a measurement of the electron's mass and charge, because the particles interfere with the measurement, madking the electron's true properties. The "true" electron is a bit heavier and carries a greater charge than the electron that physicists observe.
”
”
Charles Seife (Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea)
“
FATHER OF THE COMPUTER Alan Turing was sneered at for not being a tough guy, a he-man with hair on his chest. He whined, croaked, stuttered. He used an old necktie for a belt. He rarely slept and went without shaving for days. And he raced from one end of the city to the other all the while concocting complicated mathematical formulas in his mind. Working for British intelligence, he helped shorten the Second World War by inventing a machine that cracked the impenetrable military codes used by Germany’s high command. At that point he had already dreamed up a prototype for an electronic computer and had laid out the theoretical foundations of today’s information systems. Later on, he led the team that built the first computer to operate with integrated programs. He played interminable chess games with it and asked it questions that drove it nuts. He insisted that it write him love letters. The machine responded by emitting messages that were rather incoherent. But it was flesh-and-blood Manchester police who arrested him in 1952 for gross indecency. At the trial, Turing pled guilty to being a homosexual. To stay out of jail, he agreed to undergo medical treatment to cure him of the affliction. The bombardment of drugs left him impotent. He grew breasts. He stayed indoors, no longer went to the university. He heard whispers, felt stares drilling into his back. He had the habit of eating an apple before going to bed. One night, he injected the apple with cyanide.
”
”
Eduardo Galeano (Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone)
“
It’s deep and real and fucking old-school. It’s a fortress of passion, a crash—a fatal collision of neurons and electrons and fibers, my circus of oddities coming together as one, imploding in a fiery blaze. It’s . . . I-don’t-know-what . . . my collection of shiny. It’s love.
”
”
David Arnold (Mosquitoland)
“
The Janus particle has made reading e-books much more like the experience of reading a physical book, at least in terms of the appearance of the words on the page. It could yet be the future of the written word. However, it is unlikely that electronic paper will completely supplant books while it lacks paper's distinctive smell, feel, and sound, since it is this multisensual physicality of reading that is one of its great attractions. People love books, more perhaps than they love the written word. They use them as a way to define who they are and to provide physical evidence of their values. Books on shelves and on tables are a kind of internal marketing exercise, reminding us who we are and who we want to be. We are physical beings so it perhaps makes sense for us to identify and express our values using physical objects, which we like to touch and smell as well as read.
”
”
Mark Miodownik (Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World)
“
But, there should be nothing ‘Right’ unless something is ‘Wrong;’ like an electron-proton pair. Were we told that ‘Wrong’ is what you are not supposed to do but they have the values in defining ‘Right?’ After all, the negatively charged electron is responsible for all the reactions in creations and destructions while the positively charged proton quietly remains in the nucleus, to influence the electron. Life is a mixture of appreciations and dislikes; love and hate. Nobody can deny it. Everything seems ‘Right’ until it goes ‘Wrong.
”
”
Vhuppi (A Smoker's Life)
“
-give it a break, it says-
It's an art to realize our worst fears
Glee is the body turned out of shape, where
meaningless expectations drool
a string stiffened at both ends
in fists of life and failures
belief pirouette, bows and falls
Those milky decision exiled in
dust of time
She says, "this year is raving,
its skeleton has crippled the soil"
Code blue has alarmed
electronic crickets chime on monitor
rhythms of farewell
dance of death
lodestar grins at distance.
(Give it a break)
The stars are gleaming outside the window
birds chirruping intermittently
valid sound of crickets
dust settling on painted cities
A cyclic equilibrium, I tell you,
to bring the body in shape.
”
”
Satbir Singh Noor
“
Before the 1940’s, if one woman in an audience stood up and shrieked at the top of her lungs throughout an entire show she’d have been carted off to an asylum. By the mid-forties, however, entire audiences behaved like that, screaming, tearing at their clothes and hair, leaving their seats to board the stage. On December 30th, 1942, while Frank Sinatra sang at the Paramount Theater in New York, the behavior of the audience changed, and a part of our relationship to well-known people changed forever. Psychiatrists and psychologists of the day struggled to explain the phenomenon. They recalled medieval dance crazes, spoke of “mass frustrated love” and “mass hypnosis.” The media age did bring a type of mass hypnosis into American life. It affects all of us to some degree, and some of us to a great degree. Before the advent of mass-media, a young girl might have admired a performer from afar, and it would have been acceptable to have a passing crush. It would not have been acceptable if she pursued the performer to his home, or if she had to be restrained by police. It would not have been acceptable to skip school in order to wait for hours outside a hotel and then try to tear pieces of clothing from the passing star. Yet that unhealthy behavior became “normal” in the Sinatra days. In fact, audience behavior that surprised everyone in 1942 was expected two years later when Sinatra appeared again at the Paramount Theater. This time, the 30,000 screaming, bobby-soxed fans were joined by a troop of reporters. The media were learning to manipulate this new behavior to their advantage. Having predicted a commotion, 450 police officers were assigned to that one theater, and it appeared that society had learned to deal with this phenomenon. It had not. During the engagement, an 18-year old named Alexander Ivanovich Dorogokupetz stood up in the theater and threw an egg that hit Sinatra in the face. The show stopped, and for a moment, a brief moment, Sinatra was not the star. Now it was Dorogokupetz mobbed by audience members and Dorogokupetz who had to be escorted out by police. Society had not learned to deal with this, and still hasn’t. Dorogokupetz told police: “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning. It felt good.” Saddled with the least American of names, he had tried to make one for himself in the most American way, and but for his choice of a weapon, he would probably be as famous today as Frank Sinatra. Elements in society were pioneering the skills of manipulating emotion and behavior in ways that had never been possible before: electronic ways. The media were institutionalizing idolatry. Around
”
”
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
“
Before the 1940’s, if one woman in an audience stood up and shrieked at the top of her lungs throughout an entire show she’d have been carted off to an asylum. By the mid-forties, however, entire audiences behaved like that, screaming, tearing at their clothes and hair, leaving their seats to board the stage. On December 30th, 1942, while Frank Sinatra sang at the Paramount Theater in New York, the behavior of the audience changed, and a part of our relationship to well-known people changed forever. Psychiatrists and psychologists of the day struggled to explain the phenomenon. They recalled medieval dance crazes, spoke of “mass frustrated love” and “mass hypnosis.” The media age did bring a type of mass hypnosis into American life. It affects all of us to some degree, and some of us to a great degree. Before the advent of mass-media, a young girl might have admired a performer from afar, and it would have been acceptable to have a passing crush. It would not have been acceptable if she pursued the performer to his home, or if she had to be restrained by police. It would not have been acceptable to skip school in order to wait for hours outside a hotel and then try to tear pieces of clothing from the passing star. Yet that unhealthy behavior became “normal” in the Sinatra days. In fact, audience behavior that surprised everyone in 1942 was expected two years later when Sinatra appeared again at the Paramount Theater. This time, the 30,000 screaming, bobby-soxed fans were joined by a troop of reporters. The media were learning to manipulate this new behavior to their advantage. Having predicted a commotion, 450 police officers were assigned to that one theater, and it appeared that society had learned to deal with this phenomenon. It had not. During the engagement, an 18-year old named Alexander Ivanovich Dorogokupetz stood up in the theater and threw an egg that hit Sinatra in the face. The show stopped, and for a moment, a brief moment, Sinatra was not the star. Now it was Dorogokupetz mobbed by audience members and Dorogokupetz who had to be escorted out by police. Society had not learned to deal with this, and still hasn’t. Dorogokupetz told police: “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning. It felt good.” Saddled with the least American of names, he had tried to make one for himself in the most American way, and but for his choice of a weapon, he would probably be as famous today as Frank Sinatra. Elements in society were pioneering the skills of manipulating emotion and behavior in ways that had never been possible before: electronic ways. The media were institutionalizing idolatry.
”
”
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
“
her rest. If she had lived in the Middle Ages, she would surely have been a witch and flown a broomstick Saturday night to keep a date with the devil. But the Bronx is one place where the devil would have died of boredom. Her mother is also a witch in her own way, but a good witch: half rebbetzin, half fortuneteller. Every female sits in her own net weaving like a spider. When a fly happens to come along, it’s caught. If you don’t run away, they’ll suck the last drop of life out of you.” “I’ll manage to run away. Goodbye.” “We can be friends. The rabbi is a savage, but he loves people. He has unlimited connections and he can be of use to you. He’s angry at me because I won’t read electronics and television into the first chapter of Genesis. But he’ll find someone who will. Basically he’s a Yankee, although I think he was born in Poland. His real name isn’t Milton but Melech. He writes a check for everything. When he arrives in the next world and has to give an accounting, he’ll take out his checkbook. But, as my grandmother Reitze used to say, ‘Shrouds don’t have pockets.’ ” 3 The telephone rang, but Herman didn’t answer it. He counted the rings and went back to the Gemara. He sat at the table, which was covered with a holiday cloth, studying and intoning as he used to do in the study house in Tzivkev. Mishnah: “And these are the duties the wife performs for the husband. She grinds, bakes, washes, cooks, nurses her child, makes the bed, and spins wool. If she has brought one servant with her, she doesn’t grind, bake, or wash. If
”
”
Isaac Bashevis Singer (Enemies, A Love Story (Isaac Bashevis Singer: Classic Editions))
“
Missing’s success came about in part because it brought a moment of melancholy and heartbreak back to the dancefloor, a combination many people had always loved but perhaps forgotten. (…) electronic music with beats. It could be melodic and heartfelt, as well as experimental. Slow and moody. Atmospheric.
”
”
Tracey Thorn (Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star)
“
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace":
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
”
”
Richard Brautigan
“
Staring into the naked orange flames of the firepit, naked flesh, naked Carrie Donaldson on the bare rug in exhausted, sated semi-sleep beside him, Jack Barron felt a carapace of image-history-skin encysting him like steel walls of a TV set, a creature imprisoned in the electronic circuitry of his own head perceiving through promptboard vidphone fleshless electronic speed of light ersatz senses, separated from the girl beside him by the phosphor-dot impenetrable glass TV screen Great Wall of China of his own image.
First time I remember being blown feeling like wet put-down ugliness, he brooded. Ugly, he told himself, is a thing you feel — truth is ugly when it's a weapon, lie is beautiful when an act of love ugly when it's one-sided fuck is beautiful when it's simple, mutual, nobullshit balling, ugly when chick gets her kicks off you that really isn't there, is why you feel like a rotten lump of shit, man. Getting blown Sara go down being dug by woman's a pure gas; being sucked off, image-statue living lie, someone else's lie being eaten (Let me eat you, let me eat you, baby!) is a dirty act of plastic cannibalism, her dirtiness, not mine.
Whole world's full of plastic cannibals feeding their own little bags off meals of my goddamned image-flesh, eating Jack Barron ghost that isn't there. And now Morris and my so-called friend Luke are hot to package my living-color bod into TV dinners, sell to hundred million viewer-voter cannibals for thirty pieces of power silver.
”
”
Norman Spinrad (Bug Jack Barron)
“
Take an extreme case, where E-Prime seems overly pedantic: instead of “This is a chair,” I write “I call this a chair, and use it as a chair.” The is-ness statement tends, to a greater or lesser degree, to make you forget what the E-Prime statement helps you to remember: the non-verbal space-time event called a “chair” can have many other names, and many other uses — e.g., an aggressive weapon in a dysfunctional family, a defensive weapon if a burglar breaks in, kindling wood in some Ice Age situation, a scratching post for Kitty, etc. Similarly, “This is a rose” encourages you to forget that the non-verbal Gizmo “is” also a botanical specimen, a structure created by DNA out of other molecules, a source of pleasant aroma, a gift for a loved one, a subject for a painter, a mass of electrons, etc. etc. etc.
”
”
Robert Anton Wilson (Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death)
“
Club kids were generally urban and gay, ravers were generally suburban and straight, and goths lived in basements and spiderwebs. The ravers and club kids shared a love for techno and ecstasy, while the goths loved electronic music and old churches. So the Limelight became home for all three tribes.
”
”
Moby (Porcelain)
“
I mean, what is electronic music? Hip hop is electronic music, but people don’t think of it in that way necessarily. Some people when they talk about electronic music mean techno, which I love, but it’s not the only electronic music. Everything these days is electronic music.
”
”
Dylan Jones (Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics)
“
Do not try to give a serious apology via electronic media. Taking the time to speak directly with someone better conveys your sincerity.
”
”
Gary Chapman (When Sorry Isn't Enough: Making Things Right with Those You Love)
“
We didn't dance together. We danced our own dance, our own space. But we felt the connection. We were three people in communion with the music. The music sang and we sang back, loudly, with our bodies.
For a moment, all the superficiality of the world; all its banal cruelty, wokeness, and mundane distractions—everything faded. Our souls reverberated with the purity of music, the release of dance, and the separate yet united communion of disparate people in that single experience.
”
”
John Pucay (Karinderya Love Songs)
“
Electricity can be seen as made of free flowing feminine electrons that have been set free from the oppressive male grip of protons in the dense nucleii of metal atoms... even at the subatomic level you can find the male and female concept ....
”
”
Rami Elias Kremesti (For love of the sacred awe)
“
Supposedly, he didn’t used to be a douchebag, of which you are the proof. At one time, long, long ago, he was someone your mother could love. We don’t quite believe this, even though he will occasionally roll his eyes at one of your colorful outfits or pseudo-revolutionary statements and say something cryptic like If you only knew me when I first met your mom, like you’re too late, you missed your chance to have a parent who actually understands you, and now you’re stuck with this prematurely balding man who works seventy hours a week at a bank and drives a gas-guzzling four-wheel-drive Suburban, even though he never hauls anything around except his new brat kid and way-too-young and obnoxiously boring trophy wife and the occasional large electronics purchase.
”
”
Amy Reed (Over You)
“
Stephen Hawking said in his book A Brief History of Time that “The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron…the remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”23
”
”
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam)