Infiniti Car Quotes

How can this be your car? (Nick) Well, I wrote a really big check that didn’t bounce to the dealer and then the most amazing thing happened…the salesman gave me the keys and let me take it home. It was like magic. (Acheron)

The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like. It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity—distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.

The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like.

But Nick still had one person left to speak to. Mark. “How did you survive?” he asked as Mark left Simi, who was licking her fingers and joined them by the truck. Mark flashed him a grin. “What? Did you forget the first rule I taught you, boy?” Nick scowled as he tried to remember Mark’s various rules for survival. “Duck urine chases away every living and unliving thing?” “Nah, that’s number six. Rule number one: I don’t have to outrun the zombie. I just have to outrun you. How you think Eric and Tabitha got captured?” Tabitha laughed. “Oh please. Inspector Gadget over there made a blowtorch out of Eric’s art sealant and a lighter. I’m not sure the house is stil standing, but he got us out of there and Simi covered the rest of our retreat. We’d have gotten away completely had Eric not tripped and I made the mistake of going back for him while Mark was hot-wiring a neighbour’s car.” Nick laughed at more proof Mark wasn’t completely insane. Never go back for the fallen unless you want to be captured or killed. Unless the fallen was Bubba, who usually had a larger calibre of weapons. Mark sighed. “By the time I realized they weren’t behind me, they were gone and I was sick over it. I really thought they’d gotten eaten. But luckily I saw your girlfriend under attack and, with Simi’s help, was able to get her to safety.

1 The summer our marriage failed we picked sage to sweeten our hot dark car. We sat in the yard with heavy glasses of iced tea, talking about which seeds to sow when the soil was cool. Praising our large, smooth spinach leaves, free this year of Fusarium wilt, downy mildew, blue mold. And then we spoke of flowers, and there was a joke, you said, about old florists who were forced to make other arrangements. Delphiniums flared along the back fence. All summer it hurt to look at you. 2 I heard a woman on the bus say, “He and I were going in different directions.” As if it had something to do with a latitude or a pole. Trying to write down how love empties itself from a house, how a view changes, how the sign for infinity turns into a noose for a couple. Trying to say that weather weighed down all the streets we traveled on, that if gravel sinks, it keeps sinking. How can I blame you who kneeled day after day in wet soil, pulling slugs from the seedlings? You who built a ten-foot arch for the beans, who hated a bird feeder left unfilled. You who gave carrots to a gang of girls on bicycles. 3 On our last trip we drove through rain to a town lit with vacancies. We’d come to watch whales. At the dock we met five other couples—all of us fluorescent, waterproof, ready for the pitch and frequency of the motor that would lure these great mammals near. The boat chugged forward—trailing a long, creamy wake. The captain spoke from a loudspeaker: In winter gray whales love Laguna Guerrero; it’s warm and calm, no killer whales gulp down their calves. Today we’ll see them on their way to Alaska. If we get close enough, observe their eyes—they’re bigger than baseballs, but can only look down. Whales can communicate at a distance of 300 miles—but it’s my guess they’re all saying, Can you hear me? His laughter crackled. When he told us Pink Floyd is slang for a whale’s two-foot penis, I stopped listening. The boat rocked, and for two hours our eyes were lost in the waves—but no whales surfaced, blowing or breaching or expelling water through baleen plates. Again and again you patiently wiped the spray from your glasses. We smiled to each other, good troopers used to disappointment. On the way back you pointed at cormorants riding the waves— you knew them by name: the Brants, the Pelagic, the double-breasted. I only said, I’m sure whales were swimming under us by the dozens. 4 Trying to write that I loved the work of an argument, the exhaustion of forgiving, the next morning, washing our handprints off the wineglasses. How I loved sitting with our friends under the plum trees, in the white wire chairs, at the glass table. How you stood by the grill, delicately broiling the fish. How the dill grew tall by the window. Trying to explain how camellias spoil and bloom at the same time, how their perfume makes lovers ache. Trying to describe the ways sex darkens and dies, how two bodies can lie together, entwined, out of habit. Finding themselves later, tired, by a fire, on an old couch that no longer reassures. The night we eloped we drove to the rainforest and found ourselves in fog so thick our lights were useless. There’s no choice, you said, we must have faith in our blindness. How I believed you. Trying to imagine the road beneath us, we inched forward, honking, gently, again and again.

One group hug and we're out the door and back in the car that brought me here. We're on the road, and I can't believe I've gotten myself into this. Maybe this is how every hero feels before they go into battle.

Even as I regarded those two men, I became aware of the flying beams of the spotlights, to the north-east, painting ephemeral infinity symbols across the pregnant clouds that increasingly commanded the sky, of the distant roller-coaster chain clacking through the ratchet angles of the guideway as cars full of riders climbed an incline toward the next long drop, of the dusty smell of the campground, and of the scent of rain pending.

When I got to the waterfront, I parked the car beside a deserted warehouse, smoked a cigarette and put Bob Dylan on auto-repeat. I reclined the seat, kicked both legs up on the steering wheel, breathing calmly. I felt like having a beer, but the beer was gone. The sun sliced through the windshield, sealing me in light. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth on my eyelids. Sunlight traveled a long distance to reach this planet; an infinitesimal portion of that energy was enough to warm my eyelids. I was moved. That something as insignificant as an eyelid had its place in the workings of the universe, that the cosmic order did not overlook this momentary fact. Was I any closer to appreciating Alyosha's insights? Some limited happiness had been granted this limited life.

Justice and honesty and loyalty are not properties of this world, she thought; and then, by God, she rammed her old enemy, her ancient foe, the Coca-Cola truck, which went right on going without noticing. The impact spun her small car around; her headlights dimmed out, horrible noises of fender against tire shrieked, and then she was off the freeway onto the emergency strip, facing the other direction, water pouring from her radiator, with motorists slowing down to gape. Come back, you motherfucker, she said to herself, but the Coca-Cola truck was long gone, probably undented. Maybe a scratch. Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, her war, her taking on a symbol and a reality that outweighed her. Now my insurance rates will go up, she realized as she climbed from her car. In this world you pay for tilting with evil in cold, hard cash. A late-model Mustang slowed and the driver, a man, called to her, “You want a ride, miss?” She did not answer. She just kept on going. A small figure on foot facing an infinity of oncoming lights.

Wren’s voice dropped. “She feels terrible about it, Cath.” “Good!” Cath shouted. “So do I!” She took a step closer to her sister. “I’m probably going to be crazy for the rest of my life, thanks to her. I’m going to keep making fucked-up decisions and doing weird things that I don’t even realize are weird. People are going to feel sorry for me, and I won’t ever have any normal relationships—and it’s always going to be because I didn’t have a mother. Always. That’s the ultimate kind of broken. The kind of damage you never recover from. I hope she feels terrible. I hope she never forgives herself.” “Don’t say that.” Wren’s face was red, and there were tears in her eyes. “I’m not broken.” There weren’t any tears in Cath’s eyes. “Cracks in your foundation.” She shrugged. “Fuck that.” “Do you think I absorbed all the impact? That when Mom left, it hit my side of the car? Fuck that, Wren. She left you, too.” “But it didn’t break me. Nothing can break me unless I let it.” “Do you think Dad let it? Do you think he chose to fall apart when she left?” “Yes!” Wren was shouting now. “And I think he keeps choosing. I think you both do. You’d rather be broken than move on.” “Dad’s sick, Wren,” she said as calmly as she could manage. “And your omelette’s burnt. And I’d rather be broken than wasted.” She set the plate on the counter. “You can tell Laura to go fuck herself. Like, to infinity and beyond. She doesn’t get to move on with me. Ever.

By then we lived in a small town an hour outside of Minneapolis in a series of apartment complexes with deceptively upscale names: Mill Pond and Barbary Knoll, Tree Loft and Lake Grace Manor. She had one job, then another. She waited tables at a place called the Norseman and then a place called Infinity, where her uniform was a black T-shirt that said GO FOR IT in rainbow glitter across her chest. She worked the day shift at a factory that manufactured plastic containers capable of holding highly corrosive chemicals and brought the rejects home. Trays and boxes that had been cracked or clipped or misaligned in the machine. We made them into toys—beds for our dolls, ramps for our cars. She worked and worked and worked, and still we were poor. We received government cheese and powdered milk, food stamps and medical assistance cards, and free presents from do-gooders at Christmastime. We played tag and red light green light and charades by the apartment mailboxes that you could open only with a key, waiting for checks to arrive. “We aren’t poor,” my mother said, again and again. “Because we’re rich in love.

Initially the driver asked the passengers to stay seated and remain on the bus, but after a half hour of conferring with his supervisors, he informed the passengers that another bus was being sent to their location to take them to Los Angeles. The driver gave them an hour and reiterated that the journey would resume on the new bus at ten thirty, and to please be prompt so they wouldn’t be left behind. He gave them a quick tour-guide style run-down of the available restaurants and sites to see in Primm, including a huge Buffalo shaped pool at Buffalo Bills Hotel, and the roller coaster that Finn was suddenly determined to ride. But when the bus driver mentioned that the bullet riddled car of the infamous outlaws, Bonnie and Clyde, was on display at Whiskey Pete’s Hotel and Casino, he and Bonnie looked at each other in wide-eyed wonder. Finn had started to laugh, almost choking on his disbelief. “Now that, Infinity, is a sign,” Bonnie drawled, and immediately scowled. “William’s sign is still in Bear’s car. I’ve got to get it back. If I only come out of this trip with one souvenir, that’s the one I want. A cardboard sign and a big, blond husband. That’s all I ask.

The P.I. states that if something x has happened in certain particular circumstances n times in the past, we are justified in believing that the same circumstances will produce x on the (n + 1)th occasion. The P.I. is wholly respectable and authoritative, and it seems like a well-lit exit out of the whole problem. Until, that is, it happens to strike you (as can occur only in very abstract moods or when there’s an unusual amount of time before the alarm goes off) that the P.I. is itself merely an abstraction from experience … and so now what exactly is it that justifies our confidence in the P.I.? This latest thought may or may not be accompanied by a concrete memory of several weeks spent on a relative’s farm in childhood (long story). There were four chickens in a wire coop off the garage, the brightest of whom was called Mr. Chicken. Every morning, the farm’s hired man’s appearance in the coop area with a certain burlap sack caused Mr. Chicken to get excited and start doing warmup-pecks at the ground, because he knew it was feeding time. It was always around the same time t every morning, and Mr. Chicken had figured out that t(man + sack) = food, and thus was confidently doing his warmup-pecks on that last Sunday morning when the hired man suddenly reached out and grabbed Mr. Chicken and in one smooth motion wrung his neck and put him in the burlap sack and bore him off to the kitchen. Memories like this tend to remain quite vivid, if you have any. But with the thrust, lying here, being that Mr. Chicken appears now actually to have been correct—according to the Principle of Induction—in expecting nothing but breakfast from that (n + 1)th appearance of man + sack at t. Something about the fact that Mr. Chicken not only didn’t suspect a thing but appears to have been wholly justified in not suspecting a thing—this seems concretely creepy and upsetting. Finding some higher-level justification for your confidence in the P.I. seems much more urgent when you realize that, without this justification, our own situation is basically indistinguishable from that of Mr. Chicken. But the conclusion, abstract as it is, seems inescapable: what justifies our confidence in the Principle of Induction is that it has always worked so well in the past, at least up to now. Meaning that our only real justification for the Principle of Induction is the Principle of Induction, which seems shaky and question-begging in the extreme. The only way out of the potentially bedridden-for-life paralysis of this last conclusion is to pursue further abstract side-inquiries into what exactly ‘justification’ means and whether it’s true that the only valid justifications for certain beliefs and principles are rational and noncircular. For instance, we know that in a certain number of cases every year cars suddenly veer across the centerline into oncoming traffic and crash head-on into people who were driving along not expecting to get killed; and thus we also know, on some level, that whatever confidence lets us drive on two-way roads is not 100% rationally justified by the laws of statistical probability. And yet ‘rational justification’ might not apply here. It might be more the fact that, if you cannot believe your car won’t suddenly get crashed into out of nowhere, you just can’t drive, and thus that your need/desire to be able to drive functions as a kind of ‘justification’ of your confidence.* It would be better not to then start analyzing the various putative ‘justifications’ for your need/desire to be able to drive a car—at some point you realize that the process of abstract justification can, at least in principle, go on forever. The ability to halt a line of abstract thinking once you see it has no end is part of what usually distinguishes sane, functional people—people who when the alarm finally goes off can hit the floor without trepidation and plunge into the concrete business of the real workaday world—from the unhinged.

was terrible to think that way. She knew it. The guilt swamped her as she packed her kit alongside the guys. They gathered in the launch pad to load the Clipper, the Light Blade’s shuttle. It would have them on the planet’s surface in a matter of minutes. “The Cloud Cat is away,” Colin reported, entering the chamber. “They’ve sent Gabriel, Carly, and Chris, surprisingly. It’s actually good, because—” “Wait a minute,” Anna said sharply. “Let’s not discuss them right now.” Colin smiled icily. He did not like being told what to do. That should never be forgotten. But he stood quietly as the surface crew packed into the shuttle. Siena, Ravi, and

I’d better make a list of all the things that make me feel good. Lists save lives. They keep our memories alive, as Umberto Eco says in The Infinity of Lists. Here goes: Laura’s voice message letting me know she’s at an LGBT+ rights demo like she’d tell me she was popping down to the shops, and warning me not to pick up if her boyfriend calls; he’s looking for her, and fretting because he can’t find her, and anyway he ‘doesn’t even know the difference between gay and straight’ Raffaella’s voice messages and her joy when she receives our books Maicol tearing through the cobbled streets of Lucignana, drunk on life My great-niece Rebecca joining the bookshop family and the certainty her cynicism will blossom into something completely unexpected My father’s existence The coffee I’m about to have with Tessa, who’s on her way to us on her motorbike with a box full of bookmarks, our official bookmarks she’s been gifting us since that day after the fire, with a quote from her mother Lynn Emanuele Trevi and Giovanni Giovannetti absconding from the literary conference in Lucca, later found smoking weed in a car in Piazza San Michele by a security guard, who happened to be the writer Vincenzo Pardini, so he let them go Ernesto and Mum cuddling on the sofa Daniele’s Barbara and Maurizio’s Barbara Ricchi e Poveri Donatella being sure Romano fancies her My mother trying to escape her hospital bed as soon as I look the other way Tina’s mother Mike quickly wrapping a towel around his waist as I walk into his garden and Mike leaving Brighton with two large boxes of tea stashed in his boot, concocting a story for the customs officers The anglers reading Louise Glück and Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the Segone The words I only ever hear in Lucignana: lollers and slackies and ‘bumming down’ to pee My own continued, miraculous existence.

William climbed into the car, and just before he shut the door, Bonnie asked him if she could borrow his cardboard sign, just for a second. He acquiesced, obviously, because Bonnie Rae grabbed it as William pulled the door closed, and then she held it over the roof of the car, showing Finn, who still stood next to the driver’s side door. Bonnie’s eyes were almost as wide and crazy as George Orrin Dillinger’s. She pointed at the words on the sign fiercely, not speaking. I Believe in Bonnie and Clyde the sign read. Finn read it again, and then again, not sure what to make of it. Then he looked at Bonnie and shrugged. “So?” “So?” she hissed. “It’s a sign!” “Yeah. It is. A cardboard sign.” “Finn! It has our names on it!” “Names which happen to be the same names as a very well-known pair. He could have written ‘I believe in Sonny and Cher’ or ‘Beavis and Butthead’ or ‘peanut butter and jelly.’” Bonnie looked a little crestfallen. He’d taken the magic out of the moment. He was good at that. “And now we have a smelly guy named William with the initials, G.O.D. in our backseat. And I’m not happy about it, Bonnie Rae.” “His initials are G.O.D!” Bonnie’s eyes were seriously going to pop out of her skull. The magic was back. Finn moaned and then started laughing, once again not even sure how any of this could possibly be real. He even pinched himself, just to make sure he’d actually woken up this morning to a pop star in his arms, a Bear on his front steps, and now, God in his backseat

Whistling past the graveyard,” Julie intones. “Rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.” I laugh. “Yes, but it’s not just death that has everyone flustered. Anyone can create a scenario to deal with death. But what’s beyond that scenario? Another scenario? And another? Eventually you run out of turtles.” “Huh? Turtles?” “A student goes to his teacher and asks ‘What does the world rest upon, master?’ To which the teacher replies ‘On the back of a giant turtle.’ The student, not to be so easily put off, asks ‘And what does the turtle rest upon, oh wise one?’ To which the teacher replies, ‘Upon another turtle.’ The student is not ready to give up. ‘And what does that turtle rest on?’ he asks, to which the master angrily replies, ‘Don’t you get it? It’s turtles all the way down!’” Julie laughs and nods her head. “The truth of the situation is that eventually, there’s nothing. Infinity. Eternity. The void. The abyss. Eventually, every water-treader has to deal with the fact that it’s just him, the infinite ocean and nothing in-between.” “And that everything else is a lie.” “Basically, yes. The body is just a rental car and this planet is just a motel. This is nobody’s home, though some treat it like a permanent residence; as if the worst thing that can possibly happen is that you pick up and move on. How absurd, and yet, how absolutely vital to the experience. Look at things in this light and you’ll see the countless ways in which society encourages the externalized self and mocks, discourages and combats the very notion of turning inward. Alan Watts called it the taboo against knowing who you are. In order to break with one’s false self, one would have to break with…” “…everything.” Julie says. “Family, friends…” Her voice falters as she considers the ramifications. “Everything. Everything you are… everything you know… everything… Really everything.” I

The casting away of things is symbolic, you know. Talismanic. When you cast away things, you're also casting away the self-related others that are symbolically related to those things. You start a cleaning-out process. You begin to empty the vessel." Larry shook his head slowly. "I don't follow that." "Well, take an intelligent pre-plague man. Break his TV, and what does he do at night?" "Reads a book," Ralph said. "Goes to see his friends," Stu said. "Plays the stereo," Larry said, grinning. "Sure, all those things," Glen said. "But he's also missing that TV. There's a hole in his life where that TV used to be. In the back of his mind he's still thinking, At nine o'clock I'm going to pull a few beers and watch the Sox on the tube. And when he goes in there and sees that empty cabinet, he feels as disappointed as hell. A part of his accustomed life has been poured out, is it not so?" "Yeah," Ralph said. "Our TV went on the fritz once for two weeks and I didn't feel right until it was back." "It makes a bigger hole in his life if he watched a lot of TV, a smaller hole if he only used it a little bit. But something is gone. Now take away all his books, all his friends, and his stereo. Also remove all sustenance except what he can glean along the way. It's an emptying-out process and also a diminishing of the ego. Your selves, gentlemen--they are turning into a window-glass. Or better yet, empty tumblers." "But what's the point?" Ralph asked. "Why go through all the rigmarole?" Glen said, "If you read your Bible, you'll see that it was pretty traditional for these prophets to go out into the wilderness from time to time--Old Testament Magical Mystery Tours. The timespan given for these jaunts was usually forty days and forty nights, a Hebraic idiom that really means 'no one knows exactly how long he was gone, but it was quite a while.' Does that remind you of anyone?" "Sure. Mother," Ralph said. "Now think of yourself as a battery. You really are, you know. Your brain runs on chemically converted electrical current. For that matter, your muscles run on tiny charges, too--a chemical called acetylcholine allows the charge to pass when you need to move, and when you want to stop, another chemical, cholinesterase, is manufactured. Cholinesterase destroys acetylcholine, so your nerves become poor conductors again. Good thing, too. Otherwise, once you started scratching your nose, you'd never be able to stop. Okay, the point is this: Everything you think, everything you do, it all has to run off the battery. Like the accessories in a car." They were all listening closely. "Watching TV, reading books, talking with friends, eating a big dinner ... all of it runs off the battery. A normal life--at least in what used to be Western civilization--was like running a car with power windows, power brakes, power seats, all the goodies. But the more goodies you have, the less the battery can charge. True?" "Yeah," Ralph said. "Even a big Delco won't ever overcharge when it's sitting in a Cadillac." "Well, what we've done is to strip off the accessories. We're on charge." Ralph said uneasily: "If you put a car battery on charge for too long, she'll explode." "Yes," Glen agreed. "Same with people. The Bible tells us about Isaiah and Job and the others, but it doesn't say how many prophets came back from the wilderness with visions that had crisped their brains. I imagine there were some. But I have a healthy respect for human intelligence and the human psyche, in spite of an occasional throwback like East Texas here--" "Off my case, baldy," Stu growled. "Anyhow, the capacity of the human mind is a lot bigger than the biggest Delco battery. I think it can take a charge almost to infinity. In certain cases, perhaps beyond infinity." They walked in silence for a while, thinking this over. "Are we changing?" Stu asked quietly. "Yes," Glen answered. "Yes, I think we are.

EXCERPT: In an interview Zuckerberg admitted he was frustrated by people who “fear-monger” about artificial intelligence. Stephen Hawking has raised concerns over AI, saying it has the potential to wipe out the human race. “Once machines reach a critical stage of being able to evolve themselves we cannot predict whether their goals will be the same as ours. AI has the potential to evolve faster than the human race.” Despite using AI in Tesla cars, Elon Musk also has similar fears, but their concerns fall on deaf ears with Zuckerberg.