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)
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))
… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.
Yiannis Ritsos (The Fourth Dimension)
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))
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)
Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.
Walter Bagehot
One day,” Dane snarled, “I’m going to put your nuts in a grinder and make a testicle salad sandwich.
Gena Showalter
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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, #3))
Humans, no matter their Color, are fragile as doves in the meat grinder of war.
Pierce Brown (Golden Son (Red Rising Saga, #2))
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)
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
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))
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))
The world may perish, but the meat grinder is indestructible.
Tatyana Tolstaya (The Slynx)
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)
Offering your heart to another person on a platter is a good way to get it thrown in the trash. Or a meat grinder.
Katee Robert (Stone Heart (Dark Olympus, #0.5))
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)
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)
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)
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))
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 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)
Yeah, I do. And right now, all signs point to me taking you down to my room and fucking your brains out.” Dead. RIP Jake Compton, the best grinder the NHL ever had. He died doing what he loved most.
Emily Rath (That One Night (Jacksonville Rays, #0.5))
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)
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)
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))
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)
I’m sorry, I thought you were together.’ ‘Why, do I look like an organ grinder?’ said Cobb.
Tony Rattigan (The Speed of Dark)
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)
If parents cared as much about raising kids as the chef cared about making this cake, the world would be a completely different meat grinder. Bruce can’t take a bite of his cake without
A.S. King (Still Life with Tornado)
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))
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
Kim breathed out, long and slow. “I have wondered where you were hiding the damage. First things first: forget what I said. I shouldn’t have asked and I’m sorry. You came through a meat grinder alive and won medals on the way. You ‘just got on’ in order to survive hell. If that’s what you have to keep doing, then in God’s name keep doing it, at least until you don’t need to any more.
K.J. Charles (Subtle Blood (The Will Darling Adventures, #3))
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)
You know now, don’t you, that even a poor monotonous chorister and grinder of music—in his niche—may be troubled with some stray sort of ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction, what shall we call it?
Charles Dickens (The Mystery of Edwin Drood)
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)
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)
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))
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)
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)
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))
Although he always talked about technology and Oracle with passion and intensity, he didn’t have the methodical relentlessness that made Bill Gates so formidable and feared. By his own admission, Ellison was not an obsessive grinder like Gates: “I am a sprinter. I rest, I sprint, I rest, I sprint again.
Matthew Symonds (Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle)
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)
Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless. If we storytellers are Death’s Secretaries, we are so because, in our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses.
John Berger (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos)
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)
New characters always cause a reshuffle.
The Grinder
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)
In the same way that a word repeated over and over begins to sound bizarre, so an object scrutinized with such attention will start to shed its everyday invisibility. So pepper grinders become armless women who scream when their heads are twisted and rain bitterness, a cheese-grater becomes a steel wall of tears, or a light bulb the lost eye of a Cyclops. The
Julia Bell (The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty Authors Share Advice and Exercises for Fiction and Poetry)
Mitch shook his head. "Amazing. You'd literally do anything wouldn't you?" Turning a pointed look on her hand, he lifted it from his arm and dropped it. "Frankly, Ms. Price, I'd sooner stick my dick in a meat grinder. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a stolen child to find. Impossible as it may for you to comprehend, he's a hell of a lot more important than you.
Tami Hoag (Night Sins (Deer Lake, #1))
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
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)
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)
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)
Long ago the old man had been helping to dig a grave in a family plot on Grinders Creek and they were inadvertently digging the woman’s grave too near her husband’s casket and Bloodworth’s shovel had disappeared into the rotten wood and the smell that had risen out of this ancient and sacred earth had been the same odor that saturated the trailer and Bloodworth had stood with the shovelhandle in his hands breathing death in a kind of appalled outrage, thinking, so this is what it amounts to, this is what it all comes down to.
William Gay (Provinces of Night)
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: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen)
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)
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)
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)
What does one wear to a ranch early in the morning? I wondered. I was stumped. I had enough good sense, thank God, to know my spiked black boots--the same boots I’d worn on basically every date with Marlboro Man thus far--were out of the question. I wouldn’t want them to get dirty, and besides that, people might look at me funny. I had a good selection of jeans, yes, but would I go for the dark, straight-leg Anne Kleins? Or the faded, boot-cut Gaps with contrast stitching? And what on earth would I wear on top? This could get dicey. I had a couple of nice, wholesome sweater sets, but the weather was turning warmer and the style didn’t exactly scream “ranch” to me. Then there was the long, flax-colored linen tunic from Banana Republic--one I loved to pair with a chunky turquoise necklace and sandals. But that was more Texas Evening Barbecue than Oklahoma Early-Morning Cattle Gathering. Then there were the myriad wild prints with sparkles and stones and other obnoxious adornments. But the last thing I wanted to do was spook the cattle and cause a stampede. I’d seen it happen in City Slickers when Billy Crystal fired up his cordless coffee grinder, and the results weren’t the least bit pretty. I considered cancelling. I had absolutely nothing to wear. Every pair of shoes I owned was black, except for a bright yellow pair of pumps I’d bought on a whim in Westwood one California day. Those wouldn’t exactly work, either. And I didn’t own a single shirt that wouldn’t loudly broadcast *CLUELESS CITY GIRL!* *CLUELESS CITY GIRL!* *CLUELESS CITY GIRL!* I wanted to crawl under my covers and hide.
Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
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)
From the story he told me, I pictured him among those bands of vagrants that in the years that followed I saw more and more often roaming about Europe: false monks, charlatans, swindlers, cheats, tramps and tatterdemalions, lepers and cripples, jugglers, invalid mercenaries, wandering Jews escaped from the infidels with their spirit broken, lunatics, fugitives under banishment, malefactors with an ear cut off, sodomites, and along with them ambulant artisans, weavers, tinkers, chair-menders, knife-grinders, basket-weavers, masons, and also rogues of every stripe, forgers, scoundrels, cardsharps, rascals, bullies, reprobates, recreants, frauds, hooligans, simoniacal and embezzling canons and priests, people who lived on the credulity of others, counterfeiters of bulls and papal seals, peddlers of indulgences, false paralytics who lay at church doors, vagrants fleeing from convents, relic-sellers, pardoners, soothsayers and fortunetellers, necromancers, healers, bogus alms-seekers, fornicators of every sort, corruptors of nuns and maidens by deception and violence, simulators of dropsy, epilepsy, hemorrhoids, gout, and sores, as well as melancholy madness. There were those who put plasters on their bodies to imitate incurable ulcerations, others who filled their mouths with a blood-colored substance to feign accesses of consumption, rascals who pretended to be weak in one of their limbs, carrying unnecessary crutches and imitating the falling sickness, scabies, buboes, swellings, while applying bandages, tincture of saffron, carrying irons on their hands, their heads swathed, slipping into the churches stinking, and suddenly fainting in the squares, spitting saliva and popping their eyes, making the nostrils spurt blood concocted of blackberry juice and vermilion, to wrest food or money from the frightened people who recalled the church fathers’ exhortations to give alms: Share your bread with the hungry, take the homeless to your hearth, we visit Christ, we house Christ, we clothe Christ, because as water purges fire so charity purges our sins.
Umberto Eco (The Name Of The Rose)
By the authority of God Almighty, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and of the holy canons, and of the undefiled Virgin Mary, mother and patroness of our Saviour, and of all the celestial virtues, angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, powers, cherubins and seraphins, and of all the holy patriarchs, prophets, and of all the apostles and evangelists, and of the holy innocents, who in the sight of the Holy Lamb, are found worthy to sing the new song of the holy martyrs and holy confessors, and of the holy virgins, and of all the saints together, with the holy and elect of God, may he be damn'd. We excommunicate, and anathematize him, and from the thresholds of the holy church of God Almighty we sequester him, that he may be tormented, disposed, and delivered over with Dathan and Abiram, and with those who say unto the Lord God, Depart from us, we desire none of thy ways. And as fire is quenched with water, so let the light of him be put out for evermore, unless it shall repent him' and make satisfaction. Amen. May the Father who created man, curse him. May the Son who suffered for us curse him. May the Holy Ghost, who was given to us in baptism, curse him May the holy cross which Christ, for our salvation triumphing over his enemies, ascended, curse him. May the holy and eternal Virgin Mary, mother of God, curse him. May St. Michael, the advocate of holy souls, curse him. May all the angels and archangels, principalities and powers, and all the heavenly armies, curse him. [Our armies swore terribly in Flanders, cried my uncle Toby,---but nothing to this.---For my own part I could not have a heart to curse my dog so.] May St. John the Pre-cursor, and St. John the Baptist, and St. Peter and St. Paul, and St. Andrew, and all other Christ's apostles, together curse him. And may the rest of his disciples and four evangelists, who by their preaching converted the universal world, and may the holy and wonderful company of martyrs and confessors who by their holy works are found pleasing to God Almighty, curse him. May the holy choir of the holy virgins, who for the honor of Christ have despised the things of the world, damn him May all the saints, who from the beginning of the world to everlasting ages are found to be beloved of God, damn him May the heavens and earth, and all the holy things remaining therein, damn him. May he be damn'd wherever he be---whether in the house or the stables, the garden or the field, or the highway, or in the path, or in the wood, or in the water, or in the church. May he be cursed in living, in dying. May he be cursed in eating and drinking, in being hungry, in being thirsty, in fasting, in sleeping, in slumbering, in walking, in standing, in sitting, in lying, in working, in resting, in pissing, in shitting, and in blood-letting! May he be cursed in all the faculties of his body! May he be cursed inwardly and outwardly! May he be cursed in the hair of his head! May he be cursed in his brains, and in his vertex, in his temples, in his forehead, in his ears, in his eye-brows, in his cheeks, in his jaw-bones, in his nostrils, in his fore-teeth and grinders, in his lips, in his throat, in his shoulders, in his wrists, in his arms, in his hands, in his fingers! May he be damn'd in his mouth, in his breast, in his heart and purtenance, down to the very stomach! May he be cursed in his reins, and in his groin, in his thighs, in his genitals, and in his hips, and in his knees, his legs, and feet, and toe-nails! May he be cursed in all the joints and articulations of the members, from the top of his head to the sole of his foot! May there be no soundness in him! May the son of the living God, with all the glory of his Majesty and may heaven, with all the powers which move therein, rise up against him, curse and damn him, unless he repent and make satisfaction! Amen. I declare, quoth my uncle Toby, my heart would not let me curse the devil himself with so much bitterness!
Laurence Sterne