Going Off The Grid Quotes

When I go off the grid, my main source of light will be fireflies. Oh, and the glow that will come from the epic love poem I am writing for you.

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.

which everyone was a criminal. I tried to talk to Lindsay about all this. But though she was generally sympathetic to my concerns, she wasn’t so sympathetic that she was ready to go off the grid, or even off Facebook or Instagram. “If I did that,” she said, “I’d be giving up my art and abandoning my friends. You used to like being in touch with other people.

I hold in my hands the ability to bring about a darkness unheard of since before the dawn of the industrial revolution. Imagine a time after the total collapse of society, a time when there are no longer arguments about the benefits of going off the grid, a time when all men become equal in the struggle to survive a world without order, without law, without hope. Then, and only then, would you and the rest of mankind truly understand the power I wield. —Fortis Lombardi to Prof. Richard Halberstram (from the third installment of the Dark Angel Trilogy)

He doubted that the drivers hurtling down the interstate even noticed the herd, the coyote, or the dogfight in the clouds. Like so many vistas in the state, Joe thought, it looked like a whole lot of nothing at first. But if one stopped and observed, really sat still for a few minutes and observed, there was a lot going on. The high-steppe desert was alive and complex. •

It also means that cosmology doesn’t really have a well-defined concept of “now.” Or rather, the “now” you experience is highly specific to you, to where you are and to what you are doing. What does it mean to say “that supernova is going off now” if we see the light of it now, and we can watch the star explode now, but that light has been traveling for millions of years? The thing we’re watching is essentially fully in the past, but the “now” for that exploded star is unobservable to us, and we won’t receive any knowledge of it for millions of years, which makes it, to us, not “now,” but the future. When we think of the universe as existing in spacetime—a kind of all-encompassing universal grid in which space is three axes and time is a fourth—we can just think of the past and the future as distant points on the same fabric, stretching across the cosmos from its infancy to its end. To someone sitting at a different point on this fabric, an event that is part of the future to us might be the distant past to them. And the light (or any information) from an event that we won’t see for millennia is already streaming across spacetime toward us “now.” Is that event in the future, or the past, or, perhaps, both? It all depends on perspective.

Andras went through the Sortie doors and walked out into a city that no longer contained his brother. He walked on benumbed feet in the new black Oxfords his brother had brought him from Hungary. He didn’t care who passed him on the street or where he was going. If he had stepped off the curb into the air instead of down into the gutter, if he had climbed the void above the cars and between the buildings until he was looking down at the rooftops with their red-clay chimney pots, their irregular curving grid, and if he had then kept climbing until he was wading through the slough of low-lying clouds in the winter sky, he would have felt no shock or joy, no wonder or surprise, just the same leaden dampness in his limbs.

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.

We said our goodbyes to Eurytion, Tyson pulled the cattle grid off the hole and we dropped back into the maze. I wish I could’ve put the mechanical spider on a leash. It scuttled along the tunnels so fast that most of time I couldn’t even see it. If it hadn’t been for Tyson’s and Grover’s excellent hearing, we never would’ve known which way it was going. We ran down a marble tunnel, then dashed to the left and almost fell into an abyss. Tyson grabbed me and hauled me back before I could fall. The tunnel continued in front of us, but there was no floor for about thirty metres, just gaping darkness and a series of iron rungs in the ceiling. The mechanical spider was about halfway across, swinging from bar to bar by shooting out metal web fibre. ‘Monkey bars,’ Annabeth said. ‘I’m great at these.’ She leaped onto the first rung and started swinging her way across. She was scared of tiny spiders, but not of plummeting to her death from a set of monkey bars. Go figure. Annabeth got to the opposite side and ran after the spider. I followed. When I got across, I looked back and saw Tyson giving Grover a piggyback ride (or was it a goatyback ride?).

Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems. And who can you blame? You were the one who chose to live here, in this hard town with its hard people, the financial capital of the world, land of opportunity for the white man and a tundra of spent dreams and empty promises for anyone else stupid enough to believe the hype. Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before: they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise, occasionally appearing on Broadway stages or on baseball teams with slogans like “You gotta believe,” when in fact there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder. She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, she realized. She read it in their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die.

Our current relationship with technology is fraught. We feel overwhelmed and out of control. We dream of declaring “e-mail bankruptcy” or maybe “going off the grid.” But we are also addicted and entranced—constantly logging on to share our every thought, image, and idea. It’s easy to blame the tools, but the real problem is us. Rather than demonizing new technologies unnecessarily or championing them blindly, we must begin to develop a subtler sensibility. We must ask hard questions like: Why are we driven to use our tools so compulsively? What would it mean to approach e-mail and social media mindfully? How does being tethered to our devices impact our physical bodies—and even our imaginations? In this new era of technological invention, questioning how we work—which behaviors are productive and which are destructive—is an essential part of the creative process.

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?

You've heard the call: We have to do something. We need to fight. We need to identify the enemy and go after them. Some respond, march and chant. Some look away, deny what's happening and search out escape routes into imaginary tomorrows: a life off the grid, space colonies, immortality in paradise, explicit denial, or consumer satiety in wireless, robot staffed, 3-D printed techno-utopia. Meanwhile, the rich take shelter in their fortresses, trusting to their air conditioning, private schools, and well-paid guards. Fight. Flight. Flight. Flight. The threat of death activates our deepest animal drives.

After simmering years of censorship and repression, the masses finally throng the streets. The chants echoing off the walls to build to a roar from all directions, stoking the courage of the crowds as they march on the center of the capital. Activists inside each column maintain contact with each other via text messages; communications centers receive reports and broadcast them around the city; affinity groups plot the movements of the police via digital mapping. A rebel army of bloggers uploads video footage for all the world to see as the two hosts close for battle. Suddenly, at the moment of truth, the lines go dead. The insurgents look up from the blank screens of their cell phones to see the sun reflecting off the shields of the advancing riot police, who are still guided by close circuits of fully networked technology. The rebels will have to navigate by dead reckoning against a hyper-informed adversary. All this already happened, years ago, when President Mubarak shut down the communications grid during the Egyptian uprising of 2011. A generation hence, when the same scene recurs, we can imagine the middle-class protesters - the cybourgeoisie - will simply slump forward, blind and deaf and wracked by seizures as the microchips in their cerebra run haywire, and it will be up to the homeless and destitute to guide them to safety.

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?

A number of Burning Women I know choose to ‘go dark’ regularly. Stepping away from technology and distractions, they immerse themselves in nature and their own creative impulses undistracted. Be it by living off-grid for a day each week, or even months or years. By returning to writing by hand, and living by firelight and candlelight for the winter season or just winter solstice. By retreating every time their menstrual blood emerges, or on their personal Sabbath, or simply when they choose to create.

I’m just glad you planned to have your honeymoon away from the castle,” he replied as he smirked knowingly. “Gods know when you two go at it, the entire power grid and magical field around the castle is high voltage.” “You can feel it?” I gasped. “What did you expect, Flower? You’re a Goddess of Faery; your mother is a fertility Goddess. When you two fuck, even the flowers feel it. Last night, they bloomed. You know, the ones that only open once a year were awakened by the power you two gave off.

That’s all right, pay no attention to me, just make yourself at home,” I tell the self-propelled whoopee cushion, then audit the itemized receipt with a sinking heart. Judging from the bottom line, cats fall somewhere between a new Porsche and a used Lamborghini in running costs, and I’ve got a nasty suspicion that I’m not going to be able to expense this claim. I mean, I might be able to concoct an experimental protocol that involves hosting one all-black specimen of Felis catus in the lap of luxury before sacrificing it on a summoning grid—but I suspect that would annoy Trish, and one should always avoid pissing off the departmental secretary.

I want you to answer twenty questions. Hell, thousands of questions until we run out of answers to give. I want to know if you sleep talk or if you cuddle a pillow and make me jealous of the damn thing. I want to shred those rules you got against me being in your heart, even if I got to do it one stubborn rule at a time. I want to wake up with you. I want to go to sleep with you. I want to piss you off and have you want to beat my ass every day, if that’s what it takes, Beth Daniels.

Miles stood next to me to make sense of his notes for me. He pointed to the board. “It is separated into chapters, as you can see. The first grid under each chapter states the object, conflict, and emotion. After that are the characters and their connections. Then there are plot points, locations, phrases and conversation prompts. Or at least there should be.” He sounded discouraged. Just seeing all the remnants of the words he had erased had me feelings sucker punched for him. “How long does it usually take you to outline?” “Normally a few weeks, but this took months, and it was all for naught,” he sighed. “What happened?” He longingly looked over the mostly empty board while he ran his hand over his head. “I’ve felt a bit paralyzed. The raging success of silent stones caught me off guard, as did Isabella. I think I’ve been so afraid to finish the next book for fear it won’t live up to the first one, or to Isabella’s expectations, that I’ve been playing it safe.” “Aren’t you in charge of Isabella?” “No, darling.” He let the darling stand instead of correcting himself and changing it to Aspen. “She is very much in charge of her story. I am only her medium. And she let me know that she wasn’t exactly happy with eh direction I was going.

We can be intentional in our decisions about vacations and leisure time. Before we make our decisions, we can explore questions like, How far from home will we travel? Shall we go by bike, car, train, or airplane? Do we have closer alternatives nearby? What kind of tourism and recreation do we want to support with our choices? Travel has always been a big source of pleasure for Jim and me and we have struggled to find the right balance between saving and savoring. Some of our happiest times have been traveling to festivals and parks. We still travel but we are experimenting with the staycation. One day a month, we go off the grid. We wake up and make one decision at a time about what we feel like doing. We don’t take phone calls or look at our computers. We don’t pay bills or do housework. We just enjoy whatever we feel like doing in our area.

Look, Brad, we all foolishly believe our opinions, our ideas, our low-rent sophistry is going to influence the course of human events.” “I kind of hoped mine would,” Brad said. Actually, he didn’t care at first, but now that things were about to go sour in the world, he did. Jaffe puffed off his stogie and sipped at his brandy. His brand of sophistry had paid for a lot of refinement. He was a successful fraud. “No one can control what happens in the world,” he said. “History marches forward no matter where we stand on the chess grid. There are systems in place that we, as individuals, can’t even begin to influence. All we can do is be as intelligent and discerning as we can and try to land on the right side of history. And you’re the best at that I’ve ever seen.

Building an off the grid home is one of the hardest, but also one of the most rewarding things you will ever do.

Jesus H. Christ!” Harrison raged. “You’d be less obvious as a Wiccan hooker in Salt Lake City. You can’t go around killing people when you’re off-grid, especially average citizens.

Our current relationship with technology is fraught. We feel overwhelmed and out of control. We dream of declaring “e-mail bankruptcy” or maybe “going off the grid.” But we are also addicted and entranced—constantly logging on to share our every thought, image, and idea. It’s easy to blame the tools, but the real problem is us. Rather than demonizing new technologies unnecessarily or championing them blindly, we must begin to develop a subtler sensibility. We

I considered going off grid, but where was “off grid” anymore that didn’t require me to know how to kill an elephant seal and live off its blubber?

This is the paradox of weekends: “You have to set an appointment to go off the grid as surely as to go on it.

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

You’ll apologize tomorrow—apologize for shutting her out, apologize for going off the grid.

Reconnect to the source of all energy by going off a grid

If an animal has previously suffered escapable shock, and then she suffers inescapable shock, she will be happier than if she has previously not suffered escapable shock — for if she hasn’t, she will only know about being shocked inescapably. But if she has been inescapably shocked before, and she is put in the conditions where she was inescapably shocked before, she will behave as if being shocked, mostly. Her misery doesn’t require acts. Her misery requires conditions. If an animal is inescapably shocked once, and then the second time she is dragged across the electrified grid to some non-shocking space, she will be happier than if she isn’t dragged across the electrified grid. The next time she is shocked, she will be happier because she will know there is a place that isn’t an electrified grid. She will be happier because rather than just being dragged onto an electrified grid by a human who then hurts her, the human can then drag her off of it. If an animal is shocked, escapably or inescapably, she will manifest deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her. If she has manifested deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her, she will manifest deeper reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her and then dragged her off the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for electrified grids. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for what is not the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for dragging. She may also develop deep feelings of attachment for science, laboratories, experimentation, electricity, and informative forms of torture. If an animal is shocked, she will manufacture an analgesic response. These will be incredible levels of endogenous opioids. This will be better than anything. Then later, there will be no opioids, and she will go back to the human who has shocked her looking for more opioids. She will go to the shocking condition — called “science” — and there in the condition she will flood with endogenous opioids, along with cortisol and other things which feel arousing. Eventually all arousal will feel like shock. She will not be steady, though, in her self-supply of analgesic. She will not always be able to dwell in science, as much as she now believes she loves it. That humans are animals means it is possible that the animal model of inescapable shock explains why humans go to movies, lovers stay with those who don’t love them, the poor serve the rich, the soldiers continue to fight, and other confused, arousing things. Also, how is capitalism not an infinite laboratory called “conditions”? And where is the edge of the electrified grid?

Reconnect to the source of all energy by going off the grid

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.

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. . . .

Go and get a deep cycle marine type battery!

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.

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.

You’ve heard the call: We have to do something. We need to fight. We need to identify the enemy and go after them. Some respond, march, and chant. Some look away, deny what’s happening, and search out escape routes into imaginary tomorrows: a life off the grid, space colonies, immortality in paradise, explicit denial, or consumer satiety in a wireless, robot-staffed, 3D-printed techno-utopia. Meanwhile, the rich take shelter in their fortresses, trusting to their air conditioning, private schools, and well-paid guards. Fight. Flight. Flight. Fight. The threat of death activates our deepest animal drives.