Get Off The Grid Quotes

I think the best life would be one that's lived off the grid. No bills, your name in no government databases. No real proof you're even who you say you are, aside from, you know, being who you say you are. I don't mean living in a mountain hut with solar power and drinking well water. I think nature's beautiful and all, but I don't have any desire to live in it. I need to live in a city. I need pay as you go cell phones in fake names, wireless access stolen or borrowed from coffee shops and people using old or no encryption on their home networks. Taking knife fighting classes on the weekend! Learning Cantonese and Hindi and how to pick locks. Getting all sorts of skills so that when your mind starts going, and you're a crazy raving bum, at least you're picking their pockets while raving in a foreign language at smug college kids on the street. At least you're always gonna be able to eat.

The surrogate program is at the center of what we’re trying to do here. These people can’t use the Vitasync for various reasons and choose to stay off the grid. The cost is high, when you consider they can’t get a regular job, or insurance, or medical benefits. All of these things are tied into lifelogging so intimately that they’re basically ostracized from normal society.

As hot as the blood is the missing of her. God, how I want her little hand in mine. Only another parent can fully get this. It’s completely different from separation from a parent or lover. The clay in me wants to touch that part of myself — my blood flowing through another heart — touch the memories of her birth. The first time I held her, she was the length of my forearm.

The physical distance between us is meagre, but somehow still a forest grows between. Pine trees of mistakes so tall we can’t see over them and rivers of things we didn’t say so wide we can’t get around. We’re nowhere near where we thought we’d be, we’re completely off grid,

Here is something for you to write down and remember: facing reality is never pessimistic. Believing the truth, no matter how difficult that may be, is the ultimate act of optimism because it opens up the panorama of options that will free us from further deception. Taking off a blindfold is never an act of pessimism. Getting angry at the truth (or at the messenger who delivers the truth) is a self-deceptive act of narcissistic theater, and it is a colossal waste of time.

If you want to be a real person living in the real world, the first thing you must do is get off the grid. Take the first brave step and delete your Facebook profile. After all, you surely wouldn’t want the words carved on your headstone to be: “I was registered with Facebook. I had 101 online friends (and I even knew a few of them). My current mood is: Sad.

Mother didn’t want to be a midwife. Midwifery had been Dad’s idea, one of his schemes for self-reliance. There was nothing he hated more than our being dependent on the Government. Dad said one day we would be completely off the grid. As soon as he could get the money together, he planned to build a pipeline to bring water down from the mountain, and after that he’d install solar panels all over the farm. That way we’d have water and electricity in the End of Days, when everyone else was drinking from puddles and living in darkness. Mother was an herbalist so she could tend our health, and if she learned to midwife she would be able to deliver the grandchildren when they came along.

We honestly thought we’d get caught almost instantly. But…somehow, the stars aligned. A little cough syrup and a short ride in the trunk and we made it back to the States with you without any issues at all. Then you were ours. A child completely off the grid. Nobody knew you existed.

I have a friend that seems to never get anything accomplished because he’s so wishy-washy in his decisions. He has to analyze everything. He has to think about it. He has to ask a lot of people their opinions. By the time he’s done getting opinions, sometimes he never does anything at all. It’s possible to live a life without a go-for-it attitude.

Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern. He learns how to make contact with other kinds of electric appliances, in homes, in factories and out in the streets. Each has something to tell him. The pattern gathers in his soul (Seele, as the core of the earlier carbon filament was known in Germany), and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before. His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in the world seem impossible now—the Grid is wide open, all messages can be overheard, and there are more than enough traitors out on the line. Prophets traditionally don't last long—they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop and think, and most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it.

What’s really important is that you get a feeling for the immensity of the city, with its wonderful order of the grid system of streets (which plays off the chaos on the streets themselves), and the dizzying variety of building types (many of which can’t be adequately seen from the sidewalk). Try and get somewhere high early in your trip as there’s no better way to orient yourself.

The real force that pushed history to breakneck velocity […] was not the share market. Share markets were simply not liquid enough to bankroll Edison-sized ambitions. At the turn of the 20th century […] neither the banks nor the share markets could raise the kind of money needed to build all those power stations, grids, factories and distribution networks. To get those vast projects off the ground, what was required was an equivalently-sized network of credit. Hand-in-hand, shareholding and technology led to the creation of shareholder-owned mega banks, willing to lend to the new mega firms by generating a new kind of mega debt. This took the form of vast overdraft facilities for the Thomas Edisons and the Henry Fords of the world. Of course, the money they were lent did not actually exist… yet. Rather, it was as if they were borrowing the future profits of their mega firms in order to fund those mega firms’ construction.

However, DROs as a whole really need to keep track of people who have opted out of the entire DRO system, since those people have clearly signaled their intention to go rogue and live “off the grid.” Thus if you cancel your DRO insurance, your name goes into a database available to all DROs. If you sign up with another DRO, no problem, your name is taken out. However, if you do not sign up with any other DRO, red flags pop up all over the system. What happens then? Remember – there is no public property in a stateless society. If you’ve gone rogue, where are you going to go? You can’t take a bus – bus companies will not take rogues, because their DRO will require that they take only DRO-covered passengers, in case of injury or altercation. Want to fill up on gas? No luck, for the same reason. You can try hitchhiking, of course, which might work, but what happens when you get to your destination and try to rent a motel room? No DRO card, no luck. Want to sleep in the park? Parks are privately owned, so keep moving. Getting hungry? No groceries, no restaurants – no food! What are you going to do?

To get the man off her back, she finally looked out of her window. She thought she would find patchwork farmlands, but they were already above the suburban sprawl that surrounded the city. It was twilight—the sky was full of color, but she didn't look up. She could only look to the ground, where streetlights were already beginning to come on. To Lindsay, it looked like a grid of computer chips, stretching out for miles and miles. So many people, she thought. Lindsay could count on a single hand the people who really cared about her. And now, outside her 747 window, was a brutal reminder of how many people didn't.

I had grown weary of so many rules. That's the thing about every discipline. There's often a format, a belief that if you don't follow the structure to the tiniest detail, you won't get the maximum value: mantras are private. Om is the most perfect sound in the universe. Never lay a sacred text to chant on the floor. If you are in a seminar, always wear a name tag. Put your name in the upper right hand corner of every essay. Just breathe. No, scream. No, cry or hit something. But don't lose yourself. Never do yoga on the full moon. Walk clockwise around a temple. Don't eat protein and starch in the same meal. Always begin the day with fruit. Don't eat any fruit. Never utter the word of G_d. There is no God. There are multiple gods. To be a good acupuncturist, "check your stuff" at the door. Bring all of you. Never do work on the Sabbath. Don't cary anything in your pockets. Consciousness is constant work. Accept Jesus. Read the Bible. There is no suffering. Acknowledge suffering as a noble truth. Tread lightly on the Earth. Leave no trace. Make your mark. Get noticed. Travel silently through life. Attend to the needs of others. Follow your bliss. Suppress. Express. Withhold. Let go. Let it in. Get off the grid. Join the marketplace. Go toward the light. Hadn't I heard enough?

. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must’ve passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . . But anyway so Bickle said, “Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?” I passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich. He said, “You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there’s some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there’d have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That’s a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn’t bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn’t pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you’d start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you’d notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you’d start to wonder if somehow it didn’t get restocked while you slept. But you’d realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you’d keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you’d begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn’t explain it, you’d still need it. And you’d assume that you simply didn’t understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn’t place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You’d place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you’d come to realize you’d exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You’d worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You’d make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you’d start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you’d grow so frustrated you’d push it off this cliff.” “Is Mr. Kirkpatrick real?” I asked. After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, “That’s the neocortex talking again.

Any country that enjoys fighting and bitching as a recreation as much as America does will always be, in some way or another, walking along a knife’s edge. We’re a nation that spends its afternoons watching white trash throw chairs at each other on Jerry Springer, its drive time listening to the partisan rantings of this or that hysterical political demagogue, and its late-night hours composing feverish blog entries full of anonymous screeds and denunciations. All of this shit is harmless enough so long as the power comes on every morning, fresh milk makes it to the shelves, there’s a dial tone, and your front yard isn’t underwater. But it becomes a problem when the magic grid goes down and suddenly there’s no more machinery between you and whomever you happen to get off on hating.

On the Craft of Writing:  The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White 2K to 10K: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron  On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing by Libbie Hawker  You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) by Jeff Goins Prosperity for Writers: A Writer's Guide to Creating Abundance by Honorée Corder  The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield Business for Authors: How To Be An Author Entrepreneur by Joanna Penn  On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark On Mindset:  The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan The Art of Exceptional Living by Jim Rohn Vision to Reality: How Short Term Massive Action Equals Long Term Maximum Results by Honorée Corder The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg Mckeown Mastery by Robert Greene The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer The Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy Taking Life Head On: How to Love the Life You Have While You Create the Life of Your Dreams by Hal Elrod Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill In

blast could see the lethal, glowing plume from miles away. It was certainly seen on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, just ten miles away, and as the killer winds began to blow, death and destruction soon followed. It was only a matter of time. There would be no escape, and no place to hide. Surely first responders would emerge from surrounding states and communities, eager to help in any way they possibly could. But how would they get into the hot zones? How would they communicate? Where would they take the dead? Where would they take the dying? The power grid went down instantly. All communications went dark. The electromagnetic pulse set off by the warhead’s detonation had fried all electronic circuitry for miles. The electrical systems of most motor vehicles in Seattle—from fire trucks and ambulances to police cars and military Humvees, not to mention most helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft—were immobilized completely or, at the very least, severely damaged. Most cell phones, pagers, PDAs, TVs, and radios were rendered useless as well, as were even the backup power systems in hospitals and other emergency facilities throughout the blast radius. The same was true in Washington, D.C., and New

This doesn’t mean that the kids can skip going to school,

One of the key aspects to homesteading is to get away from consumerism by adopting an economic approach that is based in trade, exchange and barter. The idea is to create as little waste as you can by being able to exchange your excess (harvest, product and so on) for something that you need. Cash money should be reserved for things that you absolutely have to have, but can’t trade an item you have grown or created.

People like you are the reason this album needed to be written in the first place. When you’ve got your salary, and your cosy little ivory tower, you’re dead happy to spout off about artistic integrity and us getting there together. But the minute you’re asked to back your promises up with some strength of character, you come apart. You say you love good music, but you can’t listen to it that carefully if you treat people like this.

Get out. Get out NOW!

The reasons why industrial-scale CHP has not been used more widely in the United States are all related to regulatory and institutional hurdles. It can be difficult to make the necessary coordination arrangements with a large building that will accept and use a generator’s waste heat. It also requires navigating many siting, land use, and other rules to put generators into or near heat users. Arrangements with utilities are also a frequent issue. Because cogenerators displace utility sales, utilities don’t have an economic incentive to help them get established—yet utilities have to connect up and monitor the cogenerator and provide backup service when the cogenerator trips off (some cogenerators are “off the grid,” in which case there is no backup, but most are not).

Sullivan had been gone for six months, and the ticking clock in D’s head was getting louder and louder the longer Sully stayed off the grid.

New options for getting off the grid

Go and get a deep cycle marine type battery!

This is a journey that, for me, began many years ago and continues still. It involves faith, love, hope. It includes travel, food, naked people, courage, real life, holidays, new friends, and new traditions. It’s about work and play, community, daily rhythms; it’s about the moments that make up a life. It’s a journey to presence. To going off the grid and living life with intentionality. To choosing peace over chaos, little by little turning down the noise, one discovery at a time. It’s a journey to quickening the desperation for contentment and inviting the good, true, and beautiful. Let’s walk in this together. Lay down the chaos and be prepared to get your breath back.

TV is a problem only if you’ve forgotten how to look and listen…My students and I discuss this all the time. They’re beginning to feel they ought to turn against the medium, exactly as an earlier generation turned against their parents and their country. I tell them they have to learn to look as children again. Root out content. Find the codes and messages... … [They say] television is just another name for junk mail. But tell them I can't accept that. I tell them I’ve been sitting this room for more than two months, watching TV into the early hours, listening carefully, taking notes. A great and humbling experience, let me tell you. Close to the mystical. … I’ve come to understand that the medium is a primal force in the American home. Sealed-off, timeless, self-contained, self-referring. It’s like a myth being born right there in our living room, like something we know in a dream-like and preconscious way. I’m very enthused. … You have to learn how to look. You have to open yourself to the data. TV offers incredible amounts of psychic data. It opens ancient memories of world birth, it welcomes us into the grid, the network of little buzzing dots that make up the picture pattern. There is light, there is sound. I ask my students 'What more do you want?' Look at the wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras. 'Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.’ The medium practically overflows with sacred formulas if we can remember how to respond innocently and get past our irritation, weariness and disgust. (50-51)

I’ve been a passionate adventurer in the solar industry and the sustainability movement my whole life. I try hard to walk my talk. My wife, Nantzy, and I live in an off-the-grid home (see page 70) built of recycled and green materials, powered by solar (passive and active) and hydroelectric energy, with gorgeous biodynamic gardens and fruit orchards that provide most of our food, a 15-acre biodynamic olive orchard, an 8-acre biodynamic vineyard, and a dozen beehives. I’m fortunate to benefit from the fruits of all our collective labors. As the solar industry continues to grow and mature, and as our cultural consciousness evolves, I remain hopeful that, once and for all, we will get things right in

completely off the grid,” she said. “I get into town from time

Sure, sure, I’m just telling about how Puerto Rico has a lot of lessons for us here in Ouray. Maria and Irma, oof. Those storms hit us, left us reeling, Benjamin. Reeling. Demolished our power grid, our agriculture, our economy. We had to learn how to rely on ourselves, on what we could build with our own hands—a zipline and bridge across a river, griddles and grills to cook meat for our people, our own antennas and signal boosters for phones and internet, even plans for low-carbon micro-grids to get us off the big one that failed us. There’s lessons there in that. People think an apocalypse is for the whole world. But for us, those storms? They were apocalypses.

Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern. He learns how to make contact with other kinds of electric appliances, in homes, in factories and out in the streets. Each has something to tell him. The pattern gathers in his soul (Seek, as the core of the earlier carbon filament was known in Germany), and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before. His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in the world seem impossible now—the Grid is wide open, all messages can be overheard, and there are more than enough traitors out on the line. Prophets traditionally don’t last long—they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop and think, and most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it. . . .

De Beers set up a purchasing office in Monrovia in 1954 where they bought diamonds, with the intent of keeping as much of the diamond trade under its control as possible. However by 1956, while I was still in Monrovia, there were approximately 75,000 illegal miners, who were smuggling these valuable stones on a vast scale. At that time I was offered the opportunity to get involved in this bonanza, which I fortunately did not do since some of my friends who did, went missing never to be seen again. At that time I was the Captain of a Farrell Line’s coastal ship and made additional pocket money running booze into the Liberian interior. In those days when someone disappeared or fell off of the grid, as we would say, the chance that they would be found again was exceedingly slim. In 1984 the De Beers Group (SLST) from South Africa, sold its remaining shares, under duress, to the Precious Metals Mining Company controlled by Lebanese National, Jamil Sahid Mohamed Khalil, was a questionable local businessman, as well as a diamonds and commodities trader. He became known throughout the world’s diamond industry as a wheeler-dealer and a politician, influential in Sierra Leone, where the majority of the blood diamonds came from. In 1999, when South African mercenaries invaded Sierra Leone’s capital city Freetown, Jamil attempted to flee from this West African country but was stopped prior to leaving his home. During this altercation, one of Jamil’s sons was shot to death right in front of him. The following year, Jamil died of a stroke after having successfully made his way to Lebanon.

the only way to teach the traumatized dogs to get off the electric grids when the doors were open was to repeatedly drag them out of their cages so they could physically experience how they could get away.

Every year that I live here it is as though another of my personalities is left behind, like a variation in a Passacaglia, leaving me nearer the first and last plain theme. It is not only that as one grows older the passions and vanities fade, nor that the pressure of the present day obliges one to live an ever simpler life, to make and to do with one's own hands whatever is necessary, to be forever saying goodbye to civilization. It is rather that civilization has turned to shoddy, plastic and sham, has become a cage with bars of cliché, so that one must get out. Here on my island the years have opened like a rose in the sun, the fury of standardization has missed one little byway, and events have remained in their real dimension as reactions of the human heart, limitless, yet dependent on its fleeting pulse.

Finally, I broke through and hit the steep track on the far side of the forest, and spotted the lone DS tent, silhouetted against the skyline. The routine when arriving at a checkpoint was rigorously enforced. You approached the checkpoint, crouched down on one knee, map folded tightly in one hand, compass in the other, and weapon cradled in your arms. Then you announced yourself. Name. Number. The DS would then give you your next six-figure grid reference, which you had to locate rapidly on the map, and then point out to him with the corner of the compass or a blade of grass. (If we were caught pointing at a map with a finger, instead of a blade of grass or something sharp, we had been threatened, by the unforgettable Sgt. Taff, that he would “Rip that finger off and beat you to death with the soggy end!” It’s a threat that I enjoy passing on to my boys when we are reading a map together nowadays.) As soon as the grid reference was confirmed, it was time to “pack up and f*** off,” as we were so often told. That was your cue to get moving.

The ship’s electricity was produced by three turbo-drive 300 kW DC generators when at sea, but when ashore, for the most part, electricity came from either the Central Maine power grid or a generator in the Engineering Laboratory. The State of Maine was considered cold iron until her boilers were lit off, breathing life into her soul. This would be the first time the engineers fired up the boilers and cautiously brought up a head of steam close to her rated 450 psi at 759 degrees. At this temperature, a failure was not an option. The steam was so hot as to be invisible and could instantly cut a two by four in half. There have been recorded boiler and steam pipe failures resulting in the deaths of people in the engine room, so we were taking no chances! Out on the open deck the sky was sunny however the air was frigid. It was the kind of day you could expect in Maine this time of year and we were just happy that the sun was shining. Now it was up to deck force to let go of all but the forward spring lines. Slowly the ship pulled ahead and as the spring line tightened, our stern swung out into the channel. At the right moment the order was given and we backed away from the dock. It was the first time for our new TS State of Maine to get underway, and so far, everything functioned satisfactorily.

Once you’ve secured provisions, one of the first orders of survival after a catastrophe is getting diseases and infections under control,

You can't stop the thunder. You just have to let it roll over you. And then when it's done, you get up and keep going.

When the Blazer problem had started to get out of control in Alestria a couple of months ago, the FIB had put up magical checkpoints throughout the city and at its boundaries. Every vehicle had to pass through them daily and their contents were assessed by the spells so they could try and find the dealers moving the Killblaze. A couple of shipments had been found that way at first, but not a single shipment was discovered after that. They went completely off the grid. And this was how they were doing it. King must have been using some dark magic to hide the vehicles, let them slip through magical barriers like they were nothing but smoke.