Grinder Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Grinder. Here they are! All 100 of them:

It reminded me of a meat grinder. From when I was a kid. Going to school it felt like you were in a meat grinder. It chews you up and pours out this mess that can't function
Gerard Way
Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.
Winston S. Churchill
A tornado is the ultimate coffee grinder. Just add water, and you’ll wake the whole trailer park.
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
The universe is a meat grinder and we're just pork in designer shoes, keeping busy so we can pretend we're not all headed for the sausage factory. Maybe I've been hallucinating this whole time and there is no Heaven and Hell. Instead of having to choose between God and the devil, maybe our only real choice comes down to link or patty?
Richard Kadrey (Kill the Dead (Sandman Slim, #2))
You know him? (Papa Bear) I used to. But if you guys want to chop him up and make hamburgers out of him, I wouldn’t mind in the least. Hell, I’ll even go get the grinder. (Fury)
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Dead After Dark)
… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.
Yiannis Ritsos (The Fourth Dimension)
You hurt any of us or those we love again and so help me, I won’t stop until I’ve pulled you into so many pieces, you’ll think you’ve been through a grinder. (Fang)
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Bad Moon Rising (Dark-Hunter, #18; Were-Hunter, #4; Hellchaser, #2))
Going home was equivalent to sticking my head in a meat grinder and then asking why it hurt.
J. Lynn (Wait for You (Wait for You, #1))
No, it was the brutal loss of his family that haunted him and for that Nykyrian couldn’t fault him at all. Syn had been put through a meat grinder by life. The fact that man could still get up and make it through a day without blowing his brains out amazed him.’ (Nykyrian)
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Born of the Night (The League, #1))
To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.
Eugene B. Sledge (With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa)
One day,” Dane snarled, “I’m going to put your nuts in a grinder and make a testicle salad sandwich.
Gena Showalter
Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.
Walter Bagehot
I am always jumping into the sausage grinder and deciding, even before I’m half ground, that I don’t want to be a sausage after all.
Jessamyn West (Double Discovery)
Well, the Dutch invented the microscope,” she said. “They were jewelers, grinders of lenses. They want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something.
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
The Russian’s had almost killed Grinder, Rider hadn’t forgotten.
V. Theia (Mistletoe and Outlaws (Renegade Souls MC #5.5))
Early Morning in Your Room It's morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasp-like Coffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep. The gray light as you pour gleaming water-- It seems you've traveled years to get here. Finally you deserve a house. If not deserve It, have it; no one can get you out. Misery Had its way, poverty, no money at least. Or maybe it was confusion. But that's over. Now you have a room. Those lighthearted books: The Anatomy of Melancholy, Kafka's Letter to his Father, are all here. You can dance With only one leg, and see the snowflake falling With only one eye. Even the blind man Can see. That's what they say. If you had A sad childhood, so what? When Robert Burton Said he was melancholy, he meant he was home.
Robert Bly (Stealing Sugar from the Castle: Selected Poems, 1950–2011)
She believed that unadulterated devotion had its share of protective power, as if love were a steel grinder that Fates could not snip through. She also believed that the moment you relaxed your guard, the moment you were anything less than ferocious in your keeping, that was the moment it could all be snatched away.
Jodi Picoult (Second Glance)
ALTERNATE UNIVERSE IN WHICH I AM UNFAZED BY THE MEN WHO DO NOT LOVE ME when the businessman shoulder checks me in the airport, i do not apologize. instead, i write him an elegy on the back of a receipt and tuck it in his hand as i pass through the first class cabin. like a bee, he will die after stinging me. i am twenty-four and have never cried. once, a boy told me he doesn’t “believe in labels” so i embroidered the word chauvinist on the back of his favorite coat. a boy said he liked my hair the other way so i shaved my head instead of my pussy. while the boy isn’t calling back, i learn carpentry, build a desk, write a book at the desk. i taught myself to cum from counting ceiling tiles. the boy says he prefers blondes and i steam clean his clothes with bleach. the boy says i am not marriage material and i put gravel in his pepper grinder. the boy says period sex is disgusting and i slaughter a goat in his living room. the boy does not ask if he can choke me, so i pretend to die while he’s doing it. my mother says this is not the meaning of unfazed. when the boy says i curse too much to be pretty and i tattoo “cunt” on my inner lip, my mother calls this “being very fazed.” but left over from the other universe are hours and hours of waiting for him to kiss me and here, they are just hours. here, they are a bike ride across long island in june. here, they are a novel read in one sitting. here, they are arguments about god or a full night’s sleep. here, i hand an hour to the woman crying outside of the bar. i leave one on my best friend’s front porch, send my mother two in the mail. i do not slice his tires. i do not burn the photos. i do not write the letter. i do not beg. i do not ask for forgiveness. i do not hold my breath while he finishes. the man tells me he does not love me, and he does not love me. the man tells me who he is, and i listen. i have so much beautiful time.
Olivia Gatwood (New American Best Friend)
There was an avocado green slow cooker, a venerable coffeemaker, two coffee grinders, and a blender. These were the tools of the modern witch, though Sarah kept a big black cauldron by the fireplace for old times’ sake.
Deborah Harkness (The Book of Life (All Souls Trilogy, #3))
The world may perish, but the meat grinder is indestructible.
Tatyana Tolstaya (The Slynx)
Humans, no matter their Color, are fragile as doves in the meat grinder of war.
Pierce Brown (Golden Son (Red Rising Saga, #2))
But when the Count opened the small wooden drawer of the grinder, the world and all it contained were transformed by that envy of the alchemists—the aroma of freshly ground coffee.
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
Baby, you could climb on me twenty-four fucking hours a day, wherever I am and I wouldn’t hate it. Understand? Far as you’re concerned you can call my face your throne. Sit the fuck down, my queen.
V. Theia (Tracking Luxe (Renegade Souls MC Romance Saga #3))
In another telling anomaly of the meat-grinding business, many of the larger slaughterhouses will sell their product only to grinders who agree to not test their product for E. coli contamination--until after it's run through a grinder with a whole bunch of other meat from other sources...It's like demanding of a date that she have unprotected sex with four or five other guys immediately before sleeping with you--just so she can't point the finger directly at you should she later test positive for clap.
Anthony Bourdain (Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook)
Not seeing me again was never an option. Nothing can keep me from you now.
V. Theia (Tracking Luxe (Renegade Souls MC Romance Saga #3))
Put me inside you,” his voice rasped. “Put me inside my woman who loves me.
V. Theia (Tracking Luxe (Renegade Souls MC Romance Saga #3))
The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In a word, what is unique is not America but what is called Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not trying to Anglicise thousand of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders. France is not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or German prisoners of war. America is the only place in the world where this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on. And the process, as I have pointed out, is not internationalization. It would be truer to say it is the nationalization of the internationalized. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles.
G.K. Chesterton (What I Saw in America (Anthem Travel Classics))
I want to taste you. Fuck, I need to taste you, it’s gnawing at my gut. I want your mouth open and sucking on my tongue, Luxe.
V. Theia (Tracking Luxe (Renegade Souls MC Romance Saga #3))
It is completely bonkers that after we’ve had our heart put through a meat grinder, we just gather up the chunks and say, “Well, let’s try again!
Nora McInerny (No Happy Endings: A Memoir)
We are flooded with books; books come pouring out of the publishing meat grinder. And, the quality has dropped severely. We may be able to print a book better, but intrinsically the book, perhaps, is not better than it was. We have a backlist of books, superb books, by Margaret Wise Brown, by Ruth Krauss, by lots of people. I’d much rather we just took a year off, a moratorium: no more books. For a year, maybe two—just stop publishing. And get those old books back, let the children see them! Books don’t go out of fashion with children; they only go out of fashion with adults. So that kids are deprived of the works of art which are no longer around simply because new ones keep coming out. from The Openhearted Audience (1980)
Maurice Sendak
Exit God, exit religion, exit divine purpose; enter cosmic insignificance, enter universal purposelessness, enter ever-fleeting pleasures and ever-present suffering—life does indeed seem very bleak. No myths, no prophecies, nothing to console the thinking individual. What's left is a heartless, cosmic meat-grinder that is perfectly indifferent to its inhabitants. Without the 'vital lies' we tell ourselves, our lives are utterly useless.
Selim Güre (The Occult of the Unborn)
In the country, spring is a time of small happenings happening quietly, hyacinth shoots thrusting in a garden, willows burning with a sudden frosty fire of green, lengthening afternoons of long flowing dusk, and midnight rain opening lilac; but in the city there is the fanfare of organ-grinders, and odors, undiluted by winter wind, clog the air; windows long closed go up, and conversation, drifting beyond a room, collides with the jangle of a peddler's bell.
Truman Capote (The Complete Stories of Truman Capote)
Do you feel like you've been through a meat grinder or just tumbled around in a cement mixer?
Dana Marton (Deathmarch (Broslin Creek, #7))
It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ — and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing — oh, that eternal hand!— a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
You should read Spanish,' he said. 'It is a noble tongue. It has not the mellifluousness of Italian--Italian is the language of tenors and organ-grinders--but it has grandeur: it does not ripple like a brook in a garden, but it surges tumultuous like a mighty river in a flood.
W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)
Well the Dutch invented the microscope," she said. "They were jewellers, grinders of lenses. The want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something. Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life- a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple- the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last- it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer- there it is.
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
When I was young, because I was young once like you, I heard many organ grinders play, and I can assure you no two tunes ever sounded the same, even on the same instrument. That's how it is, isn't it? The less love you put into things the more they resemble one another. The same goes for stories, everyone knows them by heart, but when someone tells them with love, I don't know, they seem new.
Andrés Neuman (Traveler of the Century)
For true art there is no such thing as preparatory schooling, but there are certainly preparations; the best, however, is when the least pupil takes a share in master's work. Colour-grinders have turned into very good artists.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings)
When a worker is injured at an IBP plant in Texas, he or she is immediately presented with a waiver. Signing the waiver means forever surrendering the right to sue IBP on any grounds. Workers who sign the waiver may receive medical care under IBP's Workplace Injury Settlement Program. Or they may not. Once workers sign, IBP and its company-approved doctors have control over the job-related medical treatment - for life. Under the program's terms, seeking treatment from an independent physician can be grounds for losing all medical benefits. Workers who refuse to sign the IBP waiver not only risk getting no medical care from the company, but also risk being fired on the spot...Injured workers almost always sign the waiver. The pressure to do so is immense. An IBP medical case manager will literally bring the waiver to a hospital emergency room in order to obtain an injured worker's signature. When Lonita Leal's right hand was mangled by a hamburger grinder at the IBP plant in Amarillo, a case manager talked her into signing the waiver with her left hand as she waited in the hospital for surgery. When Duane Mullin had both hands crushed in a hammer mill at the same plant, an IBP representative persuaded him to sign the waiver with a pen held in his mouth.
Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal)
You see, if you’re too plumply entertained in hyperrealistic distraction, you’re no threat—no threat to the paradigms and certainly no threat to the meat grinder awaiting. Just sit back, relax, and focus on your movie because this train is leaving.
M.J. DeMarco (UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship)
I remember distinctly the retarded, inexorable grind of the gravel under the iron tires, a sound that seemed to declare some irreversible process in which we were trapped, as though we were coffee beans dropped in a coffee grinder as big as the world.
Robert Penn Warren (A Place to Come To)
Tell me you ache for me to bend you over the couch, to feel me drip sweat down your back while I work you into a frenzy like an over starved animal. Tell me you want me to give it hard and nasty, make you pop, because you’ve fucking missed me, Luxe, even if it’s just this neat little body that’s missed having me inside it.
V. Theia (Tracking Luxe (Renegade Souls MC Romance Saga #3))
Children came running with their mothers' scissors, or the carving knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an edge (except, indeed, poor Clifford's wits) that the grinder might apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov stirred at half past eight to the sound of rain on the eaves. With a half-opened eye, he pulled back his covers and climbed from bed. He donned his robe and slipped on his slippers. He took up the tin from the bureau, spooned a spoonful of beans into the Apparatus, and began to crank the crank. Even as he turned the little handle round and round, the room remained under the tenuous authority of sleep. As yet unchallenged, somnolence continued to cast its shadow over sights and sensations, over forms and formulations, over what has been said and what must be done, lending each the insubstantiality of its domain. But when the Count opened the small wooden drawer of the grinder, the world and all it contained were transformed by that envy of the alchemists—the aroma of freshly ground coffee. In that instant, darkness was separated from light, the waters from the lands, and the heavens from the earth. The trees bore fruit and the woods rustled with the movement of birds and beasts and all manner of creeping things. While closer at hand, a patient pigeon scuffed its feet on the flashing. Easing
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
Life can put you through the grinder sometimes," I answer. "Sometimes it can seem like there isn't any point in trying to keep going because it's only going to get worse. Killing yourself doesn't feel like violence or an act of cruelty. It's mercy. Instead of trudging along through the rest of life with the days shackled to your neck, dragging along behind you, you cut the chains. You're relieved of the burden. Depression and hopelessness can be a bitch.
A.J. Rivers (The Girl in the Manor (Emma Griffin FBI Mystery, #3))
Many systems require slack in order to work well. Old reel-to-reel tape recorders needed an extra bit of tape fed into the mechanism to ensure that the tape wouldn't rip. Your coffee grinder won't grind if you overstuff it. Roadways operate best below 70 percent capacity; traffic jams are caused by lack of slack.
Eldar Shafir (Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much)
You were so quick to judge, weren’t you? Ah, you revealed so much with that contemptuous utterance. And I admit to being amused at my own instinctive response to your words. Naive. Errant take me, I wanted to rip your head from your body, like decapitating a swamp-fly. I wanted to show you true contempt. Mine. For you and your kind. I wanted to take that dismissive expression on your face and push it through an offal grinder. You think you have all the answers? You must, given the ease of your voiced judgement. Well, you pathetic little creature, one day uncertainty will come to your door, will clamber down your throat, and it will be a race to see which arrives first, humility or death. Either way, I will spare you a moment’s compassion, which is what sets you and me apart, isn’t it?
Steven Erikson (Reaper's Gale (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #7))
Even as he turned the little handle round and round, the room remained under the tenuous authority of sleep. As yet unchallenged, somnolence continued to cast its shadow over sights and sensations, over forms and formulations, over what has been said and what must be done, lending each the insubstantiality of its domain. But when the Count opened the small wooden drawer of the grinder, the world and all it contained were transformed by that envy of the alchemists—the aroma of freshly ground coffee.
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
I’m sorry, I thought you were together.’ ‘Why, do I look like an organ grinder?’ said Cobb.
Tony Rattigan (The Speed of Dark)
A few Sharps carbines were designed to hold a coffee mill in the butt stock of the gun, so that the soldier could always carry his grinder with him.
Mark Pendergrast (Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World)
Astrid looked for the pepper grinder, her fingers waggling over the table like a star-nosed mole sniffing out a meal.
Emma Straub (All Adults Here)
To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us. The
Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
I didn't have a choice." "Are you saying...What are you saying?" Is he...could he be talking about me? He runs a hand through his hair. I've never seen him this emotional before. He's always so controlled, so sure of himself. "I'm saying you're what I want, Emma. I'm saying I'm in love with you." He steps forward and lifts his hand to my cheek, blazing a line of fire with his fingertips as they trace down to my mouth. "How do you think it would make me feel to see you with Grom?" he whispers. "Like someone ripped my heart out and put it through Rachel's meat grinder, that's how. Probably worse. It would probably kill me. Emma, please don't cry." I throw my hands in the air. "Don't cry? Are you serious? Why did you come here, Galen? Did you think it would make me feel better to know that you do love me, but that it still won't work out? That I still have to mate with Grom for the greater good? Don't you tell me not to cry, Galen! I...c...c...can't h...h...help-" The waterworks soak me. Galen looks at me, hands by his side, helpless as a trapped crab. I'm bordering on hyperventilation, and pretty soon I'll start hiccupping. This is too much. His expression is so severe, it looks like he's in physical pain. "Emma," he breathes. "Emma, does this mean you feel the same way? Do you care for me at all?" I laugh, but it sounds sharper than I intended, because of a hiccup. "What does it matter how I feel, Galen? I think we pretty much covered why. No need to rehash things, right?" "It matters, Emma." He grabs my hand and pulls me to him again. "Tell me right now. Do you care for me?" "If you can't tell that I'm stupid in love with you, Galen, then you aren't a very good ambassador for the hum-" His mouth covers mine, cutting me off. This kiss isn't gentle like the first one. It's definitely not sweet. It's rough, demanding, searching. And disorienting. There's not a part of me that isn't melting against Galen, not a part that isn't combusting with his fevered touch. I accidentally moan into his lips. He takes it for his cue to lift me off my feet, to pull me up to his height for more leverage. I take his groan for my cue to kiss him harder. He ignores his cell phone ringing in his pocket. I ignore the rest of the universe. Even when headlights approach, I'm willing to overlook their intrusion and keep kissing. But, prince that he is, Galen is a little more refined than me at this moment. He gently pries his lips from mine and sets me down. His smile is both intoxicated and intoxicating. "We still need to talk." "Right," I say, but I'm shaking my head. He laughs. "I didn't come all the way to Atlantic City to make you cry." "I'm not crying." I lean into him again. He doesn't refuse my lips, but he doesn't do them justice either, planting a measly little kiss on them before stepping back.
Anna Banks (Of Poseidon (The Syrena Legacy, #1))
You wanna come into town, give me lip for a bitch being friendly with me when I’m a single man and free to talk and fuck who I want.” Even hearing it curdled bile in his lower stomach. “Then climb all over my cock and disappear as quick as you came and came and came. Though, this is my own goddamn fault, isn’t it, baby? I asked for this, for you to use me and my dick as your own fuck toy. So, you’re gonna come home with me and you can get what you came looking for by fucking the shit out of me.
V. Theia (Tracking Luxe (Renegade Souls MC Romance Saga #3))
Edmond Locard ordered all the local organ grinders and their simian employees brought to his laboratory. A number of the monkeys, perhaps concerned about an infringement of their civil rights, resisted fingerprinting and had to be restrained. The organ grinders were more cooperative. When the burglarizing beast had been identified, his companion’s rooms were searched and there the missing items were found.
E.J. Wagner (The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective's Greatest Cases)
A slick of vagabonds, petty thieves and their bosses, discharged foreign soldiers, discharged jailbirds, dissolute rich and tinkers, beggars, pimps and their charges, chancers, knife-grinders, poets and police agents.
China Miéville (Iron Council (New Crobuzon, #3))
I’m pretty sure I could tumble down all the stairs in the Empire State Building, naked, with a greased-up pepper grinder in each hand, and a box of candles around my neck, and still end up in the lobby with an empty rectum.
David Sedaris (Themes and Variations)
Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, “I find no pleasure in them”— before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars grow dark, and the clouds return after the rain; when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men stoop, when the grinders cease because they are few, and those looking through the windows grow dim; when the doors to the street are closed and the sound of grinding fades; when people rise up at the sound of birds, but all their songs grow faint; when people are afraid of heights and of dangers in the streets; when the almond tree blossoms and the grasshopper drags itself along and desire no longer is stirred. Then people go to their eternal home and mourners go about the streets. Remember him—before the silver cord is severed, and the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, and the wheel broken at the well, and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Everything is meaningless!
Anonymous
Who are they for? Friends. Not necessarily neighbor friends: indeed, the larger share is intended for persons we've met maybe once, perhaps not at all. People who've struck our fancy. Like President Roosevelt. Like the Reverend and Mrs. J. C. Lucey, Baptist missionaries to Borneo who lectured here last winter. Or the little knife grinder who comes through town twice a year. Or Abner Packer, the driver of the six o'clock bus from Mobile, who exchanges waves with us every day as he passes in a dust-cloud whoosh. Or the young Wistons, a California couple whose car one afternoon broke down outside the house and who spent a pleasant hour chatting with us on the porch (young Mr. Wiston snapped our picture, the only one we've ever had taken). Is it because my friend is shy with everyone except strangers that these strangers, and merest acquaintances, seem to us our truest friends? I think yes. Also, the scrapbooks we keep of thank-you's on White House stationery, time-to-time communications from California and Borneo, the knife grinder's penny post cards, make us feel connected to eventful worlds beyond the kitchen with its view of a sky that stops.
Truman Capote (A Christmas Memory)
Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, USMC, pours some beans into the grinder and starts to belabor the crank. A black flurry begins to accumulate in the coffeepot below. He has learned to make this stuff the Swedish way, using an egg to settle the grounds.
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
Now the evening's at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there's a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane - before the reverse tide starts to set in. The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Danny's and Lindy's - yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go - and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from - and that's home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: 'New York, New York, it's a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery's down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground. Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it's a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart; and as Johnny Carson's face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. There's a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again. Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. It's an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch; from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it's ever going to get. This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. The blue hours; when guys' nerves get tauter and women's fears get greater. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. And as the windows on the 'Late Show' title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, There's a life that's happening here. ("New York Blues")
Cornell Woolrich (Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich (Otto Penzler Book))
Where is Grandpa?" I asked Grandma, who was gazing into the distance with the expression of a well-fed cobra on her face. "Now that I have chopped him up and passed him through the electric meat-grinder at maximum, he is no longer oppressed by the burden of being.
Noémi Szécsi (The Finno-Ugrian Vampire)
It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to who as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth every grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romance laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing - oh, that eternal hand! - a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
The way certain classes arrogate to themselves the title of the people has never pleased me. Why are some human beings the people, and the people only, and others not? I am of the people myself, I have worked all my days like a knife-grinder, and I have really never changed.
Henry James (Henry James: The Complete Novels (The Greatest Writers of All Time Book 35))
Katie warned her never to follow the big organ. Katie said that those organ grinders who dressed up so were Sicilians. And all the world knew that the Sicilians belonged to the Black Hand and that the Black Hand Society always kidnapped little children and held them for ransom.
Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)
The Strip was still lit by a million neon lights, though the crowds on the sidewalk had greatly decreased by this hour. Still, Bosch was awed by the spectacle of light. In every imaginable color and configuration, it was a megawatt funnel of enticement to greed that burned twenty-four hours a day. Bosch felt the same attraction that all the other grinders felt tug at them. Las Vegas was like one of the hookers on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Even happily married men at least glanced their way, if only for a second, just to get an idea what was out there, maybe give them something to think about. Las Vegas was like that. There was a visceral attraction here. The bold promise of money and sex. But the first was a broken promise, a mirage, and the second was fraught with danger, expense, physical and mental risk. It was where the real gambling took place in this town.
Michael Connelly (Trunk Music (Harry Bosch, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #6))
I will here give a brief sketch of the progress of opinion on the Origin of Species. Until recently the great majority of naturalists believed that species were immutable productions, and had been separately created. This view has been ably maintained by many authors. Some few naturalists, on the other hand, have believed that species undergo modification, and that the existing forms of life are the descendants by true generation of pre existing forms. Passing over allusions to the subject in the classical writers (Aristotle, in his "Physicae Auscultationes" (lib.2, cap.8, s.2), after remarking that rain does not fall in order to make the corn grow, any more than it falls to spoil the farmer's corn when threshed out of doors, applies the same argument to organisation; and adds (as translated by Mr. Clair Grece, who first pointed out the passage to me), "So what hinders the different parts (of the body) from having this merely accidental relation in nature? as the teeth, for example, grow by necessity, the front ones sharp, adapted for dividing, and the grinders flat, and serviceable for masticating the food; since they were not made for the sake of this, but it was the result of accident. And in like manner as to other parts in which there appears to exist an adaptation to an end. Wheresoever, therefore, all things together (that is all the parts of one whole) happened like as if they were made for the sake of something, these were preserved, having been appropriately constituted by an internal spontaneity; and whatsoever things were not thus constituted, perished and still perish." We here see the principle of natural selection shadowed forth, but how little Aristotle fully comprehended the principle, is shown by his remarks on the formation of the teeth.), the first author who in modern times has treated it in a scientific spirit was Buffon. But as his opinions fluctuated greatly at different periods, and as he does not enter on the causes or means of the transformation of species, I need not here enter on details.
Charles Darwin (The Origin of Species)
The phone was laid on a desk thousands of miles away. Once more, with that clear familiarity, the footsteps, the pause, and, at last, the raising of the window. "Listen," whispered the old man to himself. And he heard a thousand people in another sunlight, and the faint, tinkling music of an organ grinder playing "La Marimba"— oh, a lovely, dancing tune. With eyes tight, the old man put up his hand as if to click pictures of an old cathedral, and his body was heavier with flesh, younger, and he felt the hot pavement underfoot. He wanted to say, "You're still there, aren't you? All of: you people in that city in the time of the early siesta, the shops closing, the little boys crying loteria nacional para hoy! to sell lottery tickets. You are all there, the people in the city. I can't believe I was ever among you. When you are away I: from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a ' quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And it is so good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living . . .
Ray Bradbury (Dandelion Wine)
In summer months, the concrete gets so blisteringly hot, instructors have to hose it down so the recruits won’t singe their hands doing push-ups. The Grinder is where SEAL graduations are held and where, like a constant taunt, the SEAL exit bell hangs. A famous sign is also there: THE ONLY EASY DAY WAS YESTERDAY.
Rorke Denver (Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior)
the boy says he prefers blondes and i steam clean his clothes with bleach. the boy says i am not marriage material and i put gravel in his pepper grinder. the boy says period sex is disgusting and i slaughter a goat in his living room. the boy does not ask if he can choke me, so i pretend to die while he’s doing it.
Olivia Gatwood (New American Best Friend)
Isn't that the tie Lily bought for your birthday?" Evan looked down to examine it. It was paisley, a kaleidoscope of color. "Yes it is, as a matter of fact. Good memory. What do you think? Too much?" "It doesn't matter what I think." "But you don't like it." "I think that if you want to wear it, you should wear it." Evan seemed momentarily undecided. "Why do you do that?" "Do what?" "Refuse to answer a simple question." "Because my opinion is irrelevant. You should wear what you want." "Just tell me, okay?" "I don't like your tie." "Really? Why not?" "Because it's ugly." "It's not ugly." Colin nodded. "Okay." "You don't know what you're talking about." "Probably." "You don't even wear ties." "You're right." "So why do I care what you think?" "I don't know." Evan scowled. "Talking to you can be infuriating, you know." "I know. You've said that before." "Of course I've said it before! Because it's true! Didn't we just talk about this the other night? You don't have to say whatever pops into your head." "But you asked." "Just ... Oh, forget it." He turned and started back toward the house. "I'll talk to you later, okay?" "Where are you going?" Evan walked a couple of steps before answering without turning around. "To change my damn tie. And by the way Margolis was right. Your face still looks like it was run through a meat grinder." Colin smiled. "Hey, Evan!" Evan stopped and turned. "What?" "Thanks." "For what?" "For everything." "Yeah, yeah. You're just lucky I won't tell Lily what you said." "You can if you'd like. I already told her." Evan starred. "Of course you did.
Nicholas Sparks (See Me)
which was increased by the two guardsmen, who took sides with one of the loungers, and by the scissors-grinder, who was equally hot upon the other side. A blow was struck, and in an instant the lady, who had stepped from her carriage, was the centre of a little knot of flushed and struggling men, who struck savagely at each other with their fists and sticks. Holmes dashed into the crowd to protect the lady; but, just as he reached her, he gave a cry and dropped to the ground, with the blood running freely down his face. At his fall the guardsmen took to their heels in one direction and the loungers in the other, while a number of better dressed
Arthur Conan Doyle (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes)
Posy grabs the handle of one of those espresso thingies and holds the basket part under the chute. She uses her thumb to swish a lever back and forth three times, as a tidy pile of coffee grounds fills the little cup, making a rounded shape. Like a breast. Three seconds on the grinder. Three swishes of the lever. Make a coffee titty. Got it.
Sarina Bowen (Loverboy (The Company, #2))
Buy whole organic flaxseeds at a natural foods store. Keep them in the refrigerator, and grind a half-cup or so at a time, using a blender or coffee grinder. Ground flax has a nutty taste that is quite good added to cereals, salads, potatoes, rice, or cooked vegetables. A tablespoon of the meal once a day will give you a good ration of omega-3s.
Andrew Weil (8 Weeks to Optimum Health: A Proven Program for Taking Full Advantage of Your Body's Natural Healing Power)
In order to assimilate the culture of the oppressor and venture into his fold, the colonized subject has to pawn some of his own intellectual possessions. For instance, one of the things he has had to assimilate is the way the colonialist bourgeoisie thinks. This is apparent in the colonized intellectual's inaptitude to engage in dialogue. For he is unable to make himself inessential when confronted with a purpose or idea. On the other hand, when he operates among the people he is constantly awestruck. He is literally disarmed by their good faith and integrity. He is then constantly at risk of becoming a demagogue. He turns into a kind of mimic man who nods his assent to every word by the people, transformed by him into an arbiter of truth. But the fellah, the unemployed and the starving do not lay claim to truth. They do not say they represent the truth because they are the truth in their very being. During this period the intellectual behaves objectively like a vulgar opportunist. His maneuvering, in fact, is still at work. The people would never think of rejecting him or cutting the ground from under his feet. What the people want is for everything to be pooled together. The colonized intellectual's insertion into this human tide will find itself on hold because of his curious obsession with detail. It is not that the people are opposed to analysis. They appreciate clarification, understand the reasoning behind an argument, and like to see where they are going. But at the start of his cohabitation with the people the colonized intellectual gives priority to detail and tends to forget the very purpose of the struggle - the defeat of colonialism. Swept along by the many facets of the struggle, he tends to concentrate on local tasks, undertaken zealously but almost always too pedantically. He does not always see the overall picture. He introduces the notion of disciplines, specialized areas and fields into that awesome mixer and grinder called a people's revolution. Committed to certain frontline issues he tends to lose sight of the unity of the movement and in the event of failure at the local level he succumbs to doubt, even despair. The people, on the other hand, take a global stance from the very start. "Bread and land: how do we go about getting bread and land?" And this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people is finally the most rewarding and effective model.
Frantz Fanon
Remember: the journey is the destination.
John Grinder (The Origins Of Neuro Linguistic Programming)
Creative geniuses are: 1.  Comfortable with uncertainty 2.  Able to hold seeming opposites or paradoxes 3.  Persistent
John Grinder (The Origins Of Neuro Linguistic Programming)
Adrienne snatched an hors d'oeuvre from a passing tray. She had eaten a sausage grinder for family meal but this food was too gorgeous to pass up. She stopped at the buffet table and dipped a crab claw in a lemony mayonnaise. Her champagne was icee cold; it was crisp, like an apple. Across the tent, she saw Darla Parrish and her sister Eleanor standing in front of a table where a man was slicing gravlax.
Elin Hilderbrand (The Blue Bistro)
It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ – and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing – oh, that eternal hand! – a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
Is it because my friend is shy with everyone except strangers that these strangers, and merest acquaintances, seem to us our truest friends? I think yes. Also, the scrapbooks we keep of thank-you's on White House stationery, time-to-time communications from California and Borneo, the knife grinder's penny post cards, make us feel connected to eventful worlds beyond the kitchen with its view of a sky that stops.
Truman Capote
Many systems require slack in order to work well. Old reel-to-reel tape recorders needed an extra bit of tape fed into the mechanism to ensure that the tape wouldn’t rip. Your coffee grinder won’t grind if you overstuff it. Roadways operate best below 70 percent capacity; traffic jams are caused by lack of slack. In principle, if a road is 85 percent full and everybody goes at the same speed, all cars can easily fit with some room between them. But if one driver speeds up just a bit and then needs to brake, those behind her must brake as well. Now they’ve slowed down too much, and, as it turns out, it’s easier to reduce a car’s speed than to increase it again. This small shock—someone lightly deviating from the right speed and then touching her brakes—has caused the traffic to slow substantially. A few more shocks, and traffic grinds to a halt. At 85 percent there is enough road but not enough slack to absorb the small shocks.
Sendhil Mullainathan (Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much)
At first glance, it looks like some kind of ice cream... ...! It isn't sweet. I see. It's salmon ice cream, but made without sweetener." "He made salmon into ice cream?! But how?!" "The Cryogenic Grinder." "Ah! That's Alice Nakiri for you. Got it in one guess. I pureed some salmon with a blender and then froze the resulting paste, putting it through the Cryogenic Grinder. The high-powered blades of the grinder minced the paste into a fluffy and silky soft ice cream.
Yūto Tsukuda (食戟のソーマ 19 [Shokugeki no Souma 19] (Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma, #19))
These suckling-pigs were really delicious, and Pencroft was devouring his share with great gusto, when all at once a cry and an oath escaped him. "What's the matter?" asked Cyrus Harding. "The matter? the matter is that I have just broken a tooth!" replied the sailor. "What, are there pebbles in your peccaries?" said Gideon Spilett. "I suppose so," replied Pencroft, drawing from his lips the object which had cost him a grinder!-- It was not a pebble--it was a leaden bullet.
Jules Verne (The Mysterious Island)
He remembered Amy reading a review of The Organ-Grinder’s Boy which had first acknowledged the book’s pace and readability, and then suggested a certain derivativeness in its plotting. She’d said, “So what? Don’t these people know there are only about five really good stories, and writers just tell them over and over, with different characters?” Mort himself believed there were at least six stories: success; failure; love and loss; revenge; mistaken identity; the search for a higher power, be it God or the devil. He had told the first four over and over, obsessively,
Stephen King (Four Past Midnight)
In our hands we hold the shadow of our hands. The night is kind―the others do not see us holding our shadow. We reinforce the night. We watch ourselves. So we think better of others. The sea still seeks our eyes and we are not there. A young girl buttons up her love in her breast and we look away smiling at the great distance. Perhaps high up, in the starlight, a skylight opens up that looks out on the sea, the olive trees and the burnt houses― We listen to the butterfly gyrating in the glass of All Soul’s Day, and the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee- grinder.
Yiannis Ritsos
Anything the Tarahumara eat, you can get very easily,” Tony told me. “It’s mostly pinto beans, squash, chili peppers, wild greens, pinole, and lots of chia. And pinole isn’t as hard to get as you think.” Nativeseeds.org sells it online, along with heritage seeds in case you want to grow your own corn and whiz up some homemade pinole in a coffee grinder. Protein is no problem; according to a 1979 study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the traditional Tarahumara diet exceeds the United Nations’ recommended daily intake by more than 50 percent. As for bone-strengthening calcium, that gets worked into tortillas and pinole with the limestone the Tarahumara women use to soften the corn.
Christopher McDougall (Born to Run)
I put a handful of Criollo beans into the grinder. Their scent is very far from sweet. I can smell oud, and sandalwood, and the dark scents of cumin and ambergris. Seductive, yet faintly unsavory, like a beautiful woman with unwashed hair. A moment in the grinder, and the beans are ready to use. Their volatile essence fills the air, freed from one form into another. The Maya tattooed their bodies, you know, in order to placate the wind. No, not the wind. The gods. The gods. I add hot water to the beans and allow them time to percolate. Unlike coffee beans, they release an oily kind of residue. Then I add nutmeg, cardamom and chili to make the drink that the Aztecs called xocoatl- bitter water. That bitterness is what I need.
Joanne Harris (The Strawberry Thief (Chocolat, #4))
Such things are joys. These passages of happy couples are a profound appeal to life and nature, and make a caress and light spring forth from everything. There was once a fairy who created the fields and forests expressly for those in love,—in that eternal hedge-school of lovers, which is forever beginning anew, and which will last as long as there are hedges and scholars. Hence the popularity of spring among thinkers. The patrician and the knife-grinder, the duke and the peer, the limb of the law, the courtiers and townspeople, as they used to say in olden times, all are subjects of this fairy. They laugh and hunt, and there is in the air the brilliance of an apotheosis—what a transfiguration effected by love! Notaries' clerks are gods. And the little cries, the pursuits through the grass, the waists embraced on the fly, those jargons which are melodies, those adorations which burst forth in the manner of pronouncing a syllable, those cherries torn from one mouth by another,—all this blazes forth and takes its place among the celestial glories. Beautiful women waste themselves sweetly. They think that this will never come to an end. Philosophers, poets, painters, observe these ecstasies and know not what to make of it, so greatly are they dazzled by it. The departure for Cythera! exclaims Watteau; Lancret, the painter of plebeians, contemplates his bourgeois, who have flitted away into the azure sky; Diderot stretches out his arms to all these love idyls, and d'Urfe mingles druids with them.
Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
It had only been moments ago—just a moment ago—that she’d spent the night waiting in line to get her hands on a volume of Akhmatova. Now she was head over heels for a coffee grinder. Some piece of junk…People threw away their Party membership cards like they were just trash. It was hard to believe…The whole world had transformed in a matter of days. Tsarist Russia, as you can read in the memoirs, slipped away in three days, and the same went for communism. A matter of days. It boggles the mind…There were also the kind of people who hid their membership cards, stashing them away just in case. I was recently at a house where they took down a bust of Lenin from the storage cabinet to show me. They’re holding on to it for a rainy day…The communists will come back, and they’ll be the first ones to pin the red bow on once more. [She is silent for a long time.] I had
Svetlana Alexievich (Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets)
The most fulfilled people are those who completely express themselves via their work. You know when this happens because even though you are working very hard – much harder than ordinary people – everything is in a sense effortless. Once you exist in such a way, you cannot imagine doing anything else. You do what you do because it is the actualization of who you are. It doesn’t matter if it leads to external success or not. You have internally achieved everything you hoped for and you wouldn’t swap it for anything. So, what about you? Are you all over the place? Have you not yet clicked with the activity that seems effortless to you and fully satisfying, or, if you have, do you doubt that you could make a living from it, hence are plagued by doubts and the need to compromise? Life is a great struggle. It crushes almost everyone. Only the world-historic figures survive the Meat Grinder.
Thomas Stark (Holenmerism and Nullibism: The Two Faces of the Holographic Universe (The Truth Series Book 9))
But sympathy we cannot have. Wisest Fate says no. If her children, weighted as they already are with sorrow, were to take on them that burden too, adding in imagination other pains to their own, buildings would cease to rise; roads would peter out into grassy tracks; there would be an end of music and of paintings; one great sigh alone would rise to Heaven, and the only attitudes for men and women would be those of horror and despair. As it is, there is always some little distraction—an organ grinder at the corner of the hospital, a shop with book or trinket to decoy one past the prison or the workhouse, some absurdity of cat or dog to prevent one from turning the old beggar's hieroglyphic of misery into volumes of sordid suffering, and the vast effort of sympathy which those barracks of pain and discipline, those dried symbols of sorrow, ask us to exert on their behalf, is uneasily shuffled off for another time.
Virginia Woolf (On Being Ill)
You may well ask: when the bubble finally burst, why did we not let the bankers crash and burn? Why weren't they held accountable for their absurd debts? For two reasons. First because the payment system - the simple means of transferring money from one account to another and on which every transaction relies - is monopolised by the very same bankers who were making the bets. Imagine having gifted your arteries and veins to a gambler. The moment he loses big at the casino, he can blackmail you for anything you have simply by threatening to cut off your circulation. Second, because the financiers' gambles contained deep inside the title deeds to the houses of the majority. A full-scale financial market collapse could therefore lead to mass homelessness and a complete breakdown in the social contract. Don't be surprised that the high and mighty financiers of Wall Street would bother financialising the modest homes of poor people. Having borrowed as much as they could off banks and rich clients in order to place their crazy bets, they craved more since the more they bet, the more they made. So they created more debt from scratch to use as raw materials for more bets. How? By lending to impecunious blue collar worker who dreamed of the security of one day owning their own home. What if these little people could not actually afford their mortgage in the medium term? In contrast to bankers of old, the Jills and the Jacks who actually leant them the money did not care if the repayments were made because they never intended to collect. Instead, having granted the mortgage, they put it into their computerised grinder, chopped it up literally into tiny pieces of debt and repackaged them into one of their labyrinthine derivatives which they would then sell at a profit. By the time the poor homeowner had defaulted and their home was repossessed, the financier who granted the loan in the first place had long since moved on.
Yanis Varoufakis (Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism)
If you take a close look at an object, with your eyes closed to avoid being deceived by the appearances that things exude around themselves, if you allow yourself to be mistrustful, you can see their true faces, at least for a moment. Things are beings steeped in another reality, where there is no time or motion. Only their surface can be seen. The rest, hidden elsewhere, defines the significance and meaning of each material object. A coffee grinder, for example. The grinder is just such a piece of material infused with the concept of grinding. Grinders grind, and that is why they exist. But no one knows what the grinder means in general. Perhaps the grinder is a splinter off some total, fundamental law of transformation, a law without which this world could not go round or would be completely different. Perhaps coffee grinders are the axis of reality, around which everything turns and unwinds, perhaps they are more important for the world than people. And perhaps Misia’s one single grinder is the pillar of what is called Primeval.
Olga Tokarczuk (Primeval and Other Times)
The rain began the next morning and showed no signs of letting up. Mud sucked at Arin’s boots as he helped Kestrel ready her horse. The rain intensified, dropping down like little stones. Arin squinted up at it. “Terrible day to ride.” He hated to see her go. She wiped water from her face, glancing over at Risha, whose head was tipped back under the rain, eyes closed. “Not for everyone,” Kestrel said, “and the rain will make it less likely a Valorian scout will notice that a small band is riding from camp.” True. The middle distance was a gray fog. Arin raked dripping hair off his brow. He tried to be all right. His nerves sparked the way a blade does against the grinder. Kestrel touched his cheek. “The rain is good for us.” “Come here.” She tasted like the rain: cool and fresh and sweet. Her mouth warmed as he kissed her. He felt the way her clothes stuck to her skin. He forgot himself. She murmured, “I have something for you.” “You needn’t give me anything.” “It’s not a gift. It’s for you to keep safe until I return.” She placed a speckled yellow feather on his palm. The rain fell in a veil behind her.
Marie Rutkoski (The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3))
That any society ought to have philosophers in its midst seems to us an axiom of any possible social philosophy. Probably any society will have some reflective people in it, some Socrates or Mandeville or Wollstonecraft to ask awkward questions, but even if this is to be welcomed, it does not follow that any society should have professional philosophers in its midst, nor, if it does have them, that their activities should the take the form ours assume. The very professionalization of philosophy makes the likelihood more remote that those awkward questions, necessary for a healthy social consciousness, should come from philosophers. It may make for better philosophy and a better society if they come from a social misfit like Diogenes, or from an anathemetized lense-grinder like Spinoza, or from a man of affairs, an unsuccessful aspirant to two chairs of philosophy, like Hume. (Even more conventionally acceptable moral philosophers like Aquinas and Butler earned their living as clerics, not as philosophers.) The questions we need to ask occasionally are, first, why anyone should be a philosopher (in our sense); second, why anyone else should pay one to be a philosopher; third, how many should be paid philosophers; and fourth, what exact form the activity of paid philosophers should take.
Annette Baier (Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals)
The spicy tingle that prickles at the nose is from the alkaloid piperine that's present in abundance in black pepper! Together with the pyrazine that develops when paprika powder is heated, the two aromas meld together and form the strong base of the dish's overall scent! The primary herbs used to ameliorate the gamy smell of the bear meat is thyme! The strong, herby scent of thymol- the active component of thyme- beautifully erases any stink the meat had! Then, uh... there's the cayenne and the oregano... and... uh... The oregano, and... "Aaaah! I can't! I just can't! Anytime I try to think, my mind just screams that it wants more!" Exquisite! Every last wisp of the bear meat's scent has been transformed into a powerfully savory flavor! The delicate complexity of the fragrance and the deep layers of the umami flavor... there is no denying it. "This dish... surpasses Soma Yukihira's." "I rubbed the bear meat with salt, my Cajun spice blend and other spices. I made sure to wrap it in a nice, thick coat of batter when I fried it up too. Plus, when I marinated it before battering it, I used plenty of juniper berries in the marinade. I ground them in a spice grinder first to really bring out their scent. Waves of juicy flavor so rich and refined that they even have a hint of sweetness to them should gush out of the bear meat with every bite.
Yūto Tsukuda (食戟のソーマ 22 [Shokugeki no Souma 22] (Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma, #22))
In other words, you need to be a bureaucracy in order to survive one. This is the overwhelming narrative of modern American economics, that the individual, particularly the individual without a lot of money, is inherently overmatched. He’s a loser. And if he falls into any part of the machine, he goes straight to the bottom. And then there’s the most disturbing truth of all. People assume that a system that favors the rich likes rich people. This isn’t true. Our bureaucracies respond to the money rich people have, and they bend to the legal might the rich can hire, but they don’t give a damn about rich people. You can be rich and still fall into any one of a dozen financial/legal meat grinders, from an erroneously collapsed credit score to a robo-signed foreclosure to a stolen identity to a retirement account vaporized by institutional theft and fraud. The system eats up rich people, too, because it’s not concerned with protecting any individuals, even the rich ones. These bureaucracies accomplish just two things: they make small piles of money smaller and big piles of money bigger. It’s a system that doesn’t care whose hands end up holding the bag, or how long those hands get to hold the bag. It just relentlessly creates and punishes losers, who get to sit beneath an ever-narrowing group of winners, who may or may not stay on top for long. What does get preserved, in all cases, is a small constellation of sprawling, interconnected financial companies, whose names and managements may change (Bear becomes Chase, Wachovia becomes Wells Fargo, etc.), but whose entrenched influence remains the same. In other words, this is a machine that loves and protects money but somehow hates all people.
Matt Taibbi (The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap)
For four hours, Andrew and I were presented with course after course of delightful creations, imaginative pairings, and, always, dramatic presentations. Little fillets of sturgeon arrived under a glass dome, after which it was lifted, applewood smoke billowed out across the table. Pretzel bread, cheese, and ale, meant to evoke a picnic in Central Park, was delivered in a picnic basket. But my favorite dish was the carrot tartare. The idea came, along with many of the menu's other courses, while researching reflecting upon New York's classic restaurants. From 21 Club to Four Seasons, once upon a time, every establishment offered a signature steak tartare. "What's our tartare?" Will and Daniel wondered. They kept playing with formulas and recipes and coming close to something special, but it never quite had the wow factor they were looking for. One day after Daniel returned from Paffenroth Gardens, a farm in the Hudson Valley with the rich muck soil that yields incredibly flavorful root vegetables, they had a moment. In his perfect Swiss accent, he said, "What if we used carrots?" Will remembers. And so carrot tartare, a sublime ode to the humble vegetable, was added to the Eleven Madison Park tasting course. "I love that moment when you clamp a meat grinder onto the table and people expect it to be meat, and it's not," Will gushes of the theatrical table side presentation. After the vibrant carrots are ground by the server, they're turned over to you along with a palette of ingredients with which to mix and play: pickled mustard seeds, quail egg yolk, pea mustard, smoked bluefish, spicy vinaigrette. It was one of the most enlightening yet simple dishes I've ever had. I didn't know exactly which combination of ingredients I mixed, adding a little of this and a little of that, but every bite I created was fresh, bright, and ringing with flavor. Carrots- who knew?
Amy Thomas (Brooklyn in Love: A Delicious Memoir of Food, Family, and Finding Yourself)
Well then, first would be the abalone and sea urchin- the bounty of the sea! Ah, I see! This foam on top is kombu seaweed broth that's been whipped into a mousse!" "Mm! I can taste the delicate umami flavors seeping into my tongue!" "The fish meat was aged for a day wrapped in kombu. The seaweed pulls just enough of the moisture out of the meat, allowing it to keep longer, a perfect technique for a bento that needs to last. Hm! Next looks to be bonito. ...!" What rich, powerful umami!" Aha! This is the result of several umami components melding together. The glutamic acid in the kombu from the previous piece is mixing together in my mouth with the inosinic acid in the bonito! "And, like, I cold aged this bonito across two days. Aging fish and meats boosts their umami components, y'know. In other words, the true effect of this bento comes together in your mouth... as you eat it in order from one end to the other." "Next is a row... that looks to be made entirely from vegetables. But none of them use a single scrap of seaweed. The wrappers around each one are different vegetables sliced paper-thin!" "Right! This bento totally doesn't go for any heavy foods." "Next comes the sushi row that practically cries out that it's a main dish... raw cold-aged beef sushi!" Th-there it is again! The powerful punch of umami flavor as two components mix together in my mouth! "Hm? Wait a minute. I understand the inosinic acid comes from the beef... but where is the glutamic acid?" "From the tomatoes." "Tomatoes? But I don't see any..." "They're in there. See, I first put them in a centrifuge. That broke them down into their component parts- the coloring, the fiber, and the jus. I then filtered the jus to purify it even further. Then I put just a few drops on each piece of veggie sushi." "WHAT THE HECK?!" "She took an ingredient and broke it down so far it wasn't even recognizable anymore? Can she even do that?" Appliances like the centrifuge and cryogenic grinder are tools that were first developed to be used in medicine, not cooking. Even among pro chefs, only a handful are skilled enough to make regular use of such complex machines! Who would have thought a high school student was capable of mastering them to this degree! "And last but not least we have this one. It's sea bream with some sort of pink jelly... ... resting on top of a Chinese spoon." That pink jelly was a pearl of condensed soup stock! Once it popped inside my mouth... ... it mixed together with the sea bream sushi until it tasted like- "Sea bream chazuke!
Yūto Tsukuda (食戟のソーマ 8 [Shokugeki no Souma 8] (Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma, #8))