Piston Quotes

She led him past the engine room, which looked like a very dangerous, mechanized jungle gym, with pipes and pistons and tubes jutting from a central bronze sphere. Cables resembling giant metal noodles snaked across the floor and ran up the walls. “How does that thing even work?” Percy asked. “No idea,” Annabeth said. “And I’m the only one besides Leo who can operate it.” “That’s reassuring.” “It should be fine. It’s only threatened to blow up once.” “You’re kidding, I hope.” She smiled. “Come on.

Sex Piston, if you don’t quit bugging your sister, the police are going to be charging me with another crime,” Knox threatened.

It's an illusion I've noticed before-- words on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts. It only lasts while the words are in your head. After you put down the paper or pen, the pistons fall lifeless again.

And so taking the long way home through the market I slow my pace down. It doesn't come naturally. My legs are programmed to trot briskly and my arms to pump up and down like pistons, but I force myself to stroll past the stalls and pavement cafes. To enjoy just being somewhere, rather than rushing from somewhere, to somewhere. Inhaling deep lungfuls of air, instead of my usual shallow breaths. I take a moment to just stop and look around me. And smile to myself. For the first time in a long time, I can, quite literally, smell the coffee.

It is through the collaboration of all these factors, of course, that patriarchy is enforced: an elegant machinery whose pistons fire silently inside their own minds, and whose gleaming gears we mistake for our own jewelry.

Coming to the ball, Mr. Plumleigh-Teignmott?” “Ball? If you insist.” Pillover slid off his trunk, and Roger jumped down to help him load it into the cart. “Ball?” said one of the Pistons with interest. “We like balls.” Dimity gave them her best, most haughty look. “Yes, but are you certain they like you?

Stay hungry. It worked for Michelangelo, it worked for Picasso, and it works for a hundred thousand artists who do it not for love (although that might play a part) but in order to put food on the table. If you want to translate the world, you need to use your appetites. Does this surprise you? It shouldn’t. There’s no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art.

you been shopping? no i been shopping. well what'd you buy? i bought a piston engine. well how you going to cook it? you don't cook it it's a piston engine! well your not going to eat it raw are you? oh, i never thought of that...

The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph.

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe. I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

I will love to be called a foolish man of peace, than to be named a wise man of war. Show me your weapons of war and I will show you my Bible of peace!

Most likely Pistons," said Pillover in a resigned tone of voice. "You told them about the ball. They like to go to events uninvited, put gin in the punch, and steal all the spoons. Stylish shenanigans like that." "Charming," said Sophronia.

I can't speak. I feel the pistons of my heart moving, feel my lungs filling, emptying, my pores clogging. I feel the movement of the stars and I can hear the echo of all the black holes consuming everything.

What exists beneath the sea? I’d always pictured it in colors of emerald and aquamarine, where black velvet fish with sequined eyes swim among plankton. But, when my eyes adjust, I see gray stones, lost anchors, wet wood, buttons, hooks, and eyes, the salem witches who wouldn’t float, stars and stripes, missing vessels, windup toys, the souls of Romeo and Juliet, peaches, cream, pistons, screams, cages of ribs and birds, tunnels, nutcracker soldiers, satin bows, drugstore signs, Pandora box ripped open at its hinges.

Ball?” said one of the Pistons with interest. “We like balls.” Dimity gave them her best, most haughty look. “Yes, but are you certain they like you?

The ass of a man is the piston that drives the world.

Without a guiding organization, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam.

The Pistons were partly distracted by this short but excitingly fiery chase, and partly distracted by a new threat in the form of a small but enraged Dimity. Dimity, bless her heart, was reciting one of Mademoiselle Geraldine’s longest lectures on proper behavior at a dance, finger shaking in autocratic fury, Lord Dingleproops notwithstanding.

In a State, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerful—another piston in the great machine?

I happen to love the way your crankshaft works. Your piston sliding through my cylinder.

The ass of a man is the piston that drives the world, and you have a good one.

Hunger is the piston of art.

...the/ supreme end-result of/ early Gothic phallic forms/ is the skyscraper & the/ oil drill & powered/ compressor & pistons of/ great engines...

The ass of a man is the piston that drives the world, and you have a good one. In my prime, I would have corked it with my thumb and then eaten you alive. Preferably by the pool of Le Meridien in Monte Carlo, with an admiring audience to applaud my frontside and backside efforts.

Every thrust was harder and deeper, but he couldn’t fuck Tristan hard enough as he drank in the sight of him: his beautiful back and ass, and his own cock pistoning in and out of Tristan’s hole.

The boys were only fourteen and twelve years old at the time, happy go-lucky, fun-loving boys, like your sons, nephews, or grandsons. Their whole lives were in front of them. Their worries and concerns were the simple ones of any twelve or fourteen-year-olds. Who are my teachers this year? Will I have friends in my class? Will Mom buy me an iPhone? Will the Lions, Tigers, Pistons, or Red Wings have good seasons? Will I do well in school? Will my parents be proud of me? Will I be invited to cool parties? Will I meet a girl? These should be the problems of Kenny and Jake Tracey. Instead, they worry about whether they can ever get the filthy and disgusting acts of this degenerate out of their minds.

You’re cheery, which is important, you’re cheeky, which is more important, and you’ve got a lovely bottom, which is all-important. The ass of a man is the piston that drives the world, and you have a good one.

Pen: Today, the most reusable pen is a fountain model fitted with a piston or converter and refilled with bottled ink. The most sustainable pen is the one that already exists. Search eBay for secondhand pieces.

Black soil flew up in divots; the horses’ heads pounded up and down like pistons, and he felt a sensation of rushing speed no machine could quite match as the great muscles flexed and bunched between his legs. Havel

The sea contains many surprises for him who has his floor on a level with the surface and drifts along slowly and noiselessly. A sportsman who breaks his way through the woods may come back and say that no wild life is to be seen. Another may sit down on a stump and wait, and often rustlings and cracklings will begin and curious eyes peer out. So it is on the sea, too. We usually plow across it with roaring engines and piston strokes, with the water foaming round our bow. Then we come back and say that there is nothing to see far out on the ocean.

When they got to the front row, Artemis muttered, ‘There you are. We were beginning to wonder.’ That took the pressure out of Leo’s pistons. He’d been ready to introduce himself, explain how they’d come in peace, maybe tell a few jokes and offer breath mints. ‘So you were expecting us, then,’ Leo said. ‘I can tell, because you’re both so excited.

a new wave of immigrants would replace the Irish, fleeing a different but no less abject country, the process starting anew. The engine huffed and groaned and kept running. They had merely switched the fuel that moved the pistons. The

The boys were only fourteen and twelve years old at the time, happy go-lucky, fun-loving boys, like your sons, nephews, or grandsons. Their whole lives were in front of them. Their worries and concerns were the simple ones of any twelve or fourteen-year-olds. Who are my teachers this year? Will I have friends in my class? Will Mom buy me an iPhone? Will the Lions, Tigers, Pistons, or Red Wings have good seasons? Will I do well in school? Will my parents be proud of me? Will I be invited to cool parties? Will I meet a girl? These should be the problems of Kenny and Jake Tracey. Instead, they worry about whether they can ever get the filthy and disgusting acts of this degenerate out of their minds.

Decision's made?" Sicarius called over the pumping pistons of the engine. "They're closing on us quickly." "My grandmother on a bicycle could close on us quickly," Maldynado said. "This slag heap was probably the first model ever made.

Tallow turned the corner into Bat and Scarly's office to be greeted by a large plastic robot on the bench waving its arms and shouting, "Say hello to my l'il frien'" in an electronically processed voiced as a small plastic penis repeatedly jabbed out from its groin on a short metal piston. Bat emerged from behind the thing. "Don't judge me," he said. "I got bored.

If I understand anything about that afternoon, about the whole of my life, it's that sometimes the worst moments in our lives, the moments that set us spinning with ugly desires, that threaten to unglue us with the sheer impossibility of the pain we must endure, are in face the moments that bring us to understand our worth. It's as if we become aware of ourselves as a bridge between all that's been and all that will be. We become aware of all we've received and what we can choose-or choose not-to perpetuate. It's like vertigo, thrilling and terrifying, the past and the future surrounding us like a vast but traversable canyon. Small as we are in the big scheme of universe and time, each of us is a little mechanism that keeps the whole wheel spinning. And what will we power with the wheel of our own life? Will we keep pushing the same piston of loss or regret? Will we reengage and reenact all the hurts of our own abandonment? Will we make our children pick up the tab for our losses? Or will we take the best of what we know and let a new crop flourish from the field of our life?

Oh it was my pleasure, dears,” said Mrs. Weasley. “I’d invite you for Christmas, but … well, I expect you’re all going to want to stay at Hogwarts, what with … one thing and another.” “Mum!” said Ron irritably. “What d’you three know that we don’t?” “You’ll find out this evening, I expect,” said Mrs. Weasley, smiling. “It’s going to be very exciting — mind you, I’m very glad they’ve changed the rules —” “What rules?” said Harry, Ron, Fred, and George together. “I’m sure Professor Dumbledore will tell you. … Now, behave, won’t you? Won’t you, Fred? And you, George?” The pistons hissed loudly and the train began to move. “Tell us what’s happening at Hogwarts!” Fred bellowed out of the window as Mrs. Weasley, Bill, and Charlie sped away from them. “What rules are they changing?” But Mrs. Weasley only smiled and waved.

If we were magically shrunk and put into someone’s brain while she was thinking, we would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away, and we would be able to describe their workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would nowhere contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers! —G. W. LEIBNIZ (1646–1716)

It begins to rain. The first harsh, sparse, swift drops rush through the leaves and across the ground in a long sigh, as though of relief from intolerable suspense. They are big as buckshot, warm as though fired from a gun; they sweep across the lantern in a vicious hissing. Pa lifts his face, slackmouthed, the wet black rim of snuff plastered close along the base of his gums; from behind his slack-faced astonishment he 'muses as though from beyond time, upon the ultimate outrage. Cash looks once at the sky, then at the lantern. The saw has not faltered, the running gleam of its pistoning edge unbroken. "Get something to cover the lantern," he says.

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

There’s nothing as human as hunger. There’s no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art.

tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction. Three times a day for many months

On the other hand, if you drive to Minnesota you could have car trouble right away and be towed to a gas station: —“I don’t like the sound of that thing. At first I thought maybe just moisture in the distributor cap, but now, I don’t know, I think we’re talking valves here, or a broken piston.” —“I appreciate your concern.” —“You bet. Goin’ far?” —“I guess not.

The engine roared into life, accompanied by that clacking sound. It was much louder now. “What’s that?” Lois asked. “I don’t know,” Ralph said, but he thought he did—either a tie-rod or a piston.

Frau Elena paces the parlor, her slippers whispering left, whispering right. Coal cars grind past in the wet dark. Machinery hums in the distance: pistons throbbing, belts turning. Smoothly. Madly.

Ball?" said one of the Pistons with interest. "We like balls." Dimity gave them her best, most haughty look. "Yes, but are you certain they like you?" "What's that supposed to mean?" Sophronia whispered to her. Pillover joined them, as confident in his new situation as if he had always expected to set off with his sister and two other girls in a farm cart. "I don't know," replied Dimity as they drove away. "It sounded good at the time.

As he entered her, as the piston of lovemaking grew slick with her clear oils, she thought about being crushed to death in his arms, and she - thought how odd it was for her to consider such a thing, and how much stranger still to consider it without fear and with something very like desire, a melancholy longing, a curiously pleasant anticipation, not a death wish but a sweet resignation, and she knew that Dr. Cauvel would say this was a sign of her sickness, that now she was prepared to surrender even her ultimate responsibility (the fundamental responsibility for her own life, for deciding whether or not she was worthy of life), and he would say that she needed to rely more on herself and less on Max, but she didn't care, didn't care at all; she just felt the power, Max's power, and began to call his name, dug her fingers into his unyielding muscle and surrendered willingly.

His wife was a tiny woman who I can best describe as being very present. She was not a woman hiding, nor a woman afraid. She was a woman at rest, at home with herself and with all pistons firing. She was alive and beautiful.

Small as we are in the big scheme of universe and time, each of us is a little mechanism that keeps the whole wheel spinning. And what will we power with the wheel of our own life? Will we keep pushing the same piston of loss or regret? Will we reengage and reenact all the hurts of our own abandonment? Will we make our children pick up the tab for our losses? Or will we take the best of what we know and let a new crop flourish from the field of our life?

The sound of diesel fuel rushing through grimy pistons and cylinders below a morning-fogged window bored through his ears like a deep-water drill bit, and the thump of his own heartbeat cursed him for breaking one of his many rules.

Happy birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you. Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair. There are now more of the hard curled hairs around your privates than you can count without losing track. Other things. Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning. Your face has begun to get shiny when you don’t wash it. And two weeks of a deep and frightening ache this past spring left you with something dropped down from inside: your sack is now full and vulnerable, a commodity to be protected. Hefted and strapped in tight supporters that stripe your buttocks red. You have grown into a new fragility. And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of unyielding curves, frantic pistons, warmth and a great falling; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights through your window blinds crackling into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling, and on you a dense white jam that lisps between legs, trickles and sticks, cools on you, hardens and clears until there is nothing but gnarled knots of pale solid animal hair in the morning shower, and in the wet tangle a clean sweet smell you can’t believe comes from anything you made inside you.

But I was still anxious. Trevor Trevor Trevor. I might have felt better if he were dead, I thought, since behind every memory of him was the possibility of reconciling, and thus more heartbreak and indignity. I felt weak. My nerves were frayed and fragile, like tattered silk. Sleep had not yet solved my crankiness, my impatience, my memory. It seemed like everything was now somehow linked to getting back what I'd lost. I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash. Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere, but Trevor was stuck in the tailgate, blocking the flow of garbage. I was afraid things would be like that forever.

In the morning I want to see if my car will start.” He shook his head. “It won’t. All the oil ran out through a tiny hole in the oil pan. The engine overheated and the pistons froze up. Your car’s fucked.” “Shit. None of my dashboard lights came on.” “No? Oh, that’s probably because I disabled them.” “What?” “Yeah, I removed a few fuses, right after I drilled that tiny little hole in the pan.” She stared at him for a long moment as her thoughts spun in utter turmoil. “You vandalized my car?

Eyes blurred, she drove away. Alone, buzzing down the asphalt trail to Kayenta, heart beating, her pistons leaping madly up and down, Bonnie Abbzug relapsed into the sweet luxury of tears. Hard to see the road. She turned on the windshield wipers but that didn't help much.

Sherlock Holmes prese il suo flacone dall'angolo della mensola del caminetto e la sua siringa ipodermica da un elegante astuccio di marocchino. Con le sue dita lunghe e nervose infilò l'ago sottile e arrotolò la manica sinistra della camicia. Per un po', osservò pensoso l'avambraccio muscoloso e il polso, costellati di innumerevoli segni di punture. Alla fine, infilò con gesto deciso la siringa, premette il pistone e si abbandonò nella poltrona di velluto con un lungo sospiro di soddisfazione. [...] «Cos'è oggi», gli chiesi, «morfina o cocaina?» [...] «Cocaina», rispose, «soluzione al sette per cento. Vuole provarla?»

To honour its first creation, no sound was permitted within the home of Muse for a full year, no sound save that of its Art: the slow, crisp, click of polished brass gears, the sensual hiss of pneumatic release, the insidious sibilance and decisive thud of a withdrawing and thrusting piston, and the soft groan of the boy held within the cube as each rod ran him through, over and over and over. Powered by this action, the music box played. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down... And another piston rammed home. A mechanism of intricate complexity exchanging great pain for a little beauty. This, here, then, was Life. Muse was fulfilled.

Then he started fucking, his hips pistoning in a relentless tempo, his long thick cock plunging and withdrawing from root to tip in rapid-fire thrusts. Supporting his weight entirely with his arms and the tips of his toes, he powered into me, his rigid penis nailing me straight into the mattress. I came so hard my vision went black, my body seized with pleasure so intense I was locked in it, suspended in the powerful waves of erotic sensation. I was inundated by the ferocious surge of my climax. My skin tingled from head to toe. Gideon paused on a downstroke, grinding into me, giving my body the steely length of his penis to grasp. My sex spasmed ecstatically around that delicious hardness, gripping him hungrily. “Fuck,” Gideon bit out, “you’re milking my dick so hard.” I shook violently, fighting to breathe. The moment I sagged into the mattress, replete, Gideon pulled his cock out of my trembling slit and left the bed. Bereft, I lifted a hand to him. “Where are you going?” “Hang on.” He shoved his boxer briefs all the way off. He was still hard, his cock rising high and proud, slick from my orgasm—but I wasn’t wet with his. “You didn’t come.” I was too languid to help when he stripped me of my underwear. Sliding a hand beneath my back, he lifted me and whipped my shirt over my head. His

Don't stop until you get the pump, just do the fake.

That was enough dialogue for a few pages - he had to get into some fast, red-hot action. There weren't any more hitches now. The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato, the roller turned with almost piston-like continuity, the pages sprang up almost like blobs of batter from a pancake skillet. The beer kept rising in the glass and, contradictorily, steadily falling lower. The cigarettes gave up their ghosts, long thin gray ghosts, in a good cause; the mortality rate was terrible. His train of thought, the story's lifeline, beer-lubricated but no whit impeded, flashed and sputtered and coursed ahead like lightning in a topaz mist, and the loose fingers and hiccuping keys followed as fast as they could. ("The Penny-A-Worder")

The run can be a meditation-in-motion, a cleansing of all the sensory realities we encounter. The run is white noise, a way to simply experience time as a body, a piston, that exists away from the mind and only in the body as a live reactive presence. Running is escapism, but it is also the opposite. It can be the ultimate expression of being awake and alive only as a body that occupies space and time.

She moved back to accommodate him as he rolled on a condom. Then she stroked and squeezed until rational thought was a distant memory and all that was left were need and want, lust and desire. He dragged her up, claiming her mouth as he thrust inside her. Pleasure so exquisite, he closed his eyes and tried to take a mental snapshot of the moment. Bracing herself on his shoulders she rode him, levering her hips as she brought him closer and closer to his peak. Control. He needed it. In one swift motion he shifted, carrying her down so she lay beneath him, clothes half off, hair tangled, lips swollen from his kisses, wanton and free. Lifting her legs to his hips, he thrust into her. Slick walls tightened, made his eyes water. His hips pistoned, driving deep until pleasure peaked and they both found release.

She tightened her inner muscles around him, feeling his swift inhalation of breath at the movement. Then his magical fingers joined the action at her clit. “Oh, my God.” Jada could no longer concentrate. Could no longer maintain that careful, measured rhythm. She could only feel as the storm raged through her as she raced toward the end. She yelped in surprise when Donovan flipped them. Never stopping the glorious motion of his hips, he guided her leg over his hip and amazingly reached deeper inside her with an expert thrust. She held on for the ride, the sparks flying high and bright throughout her entire body, as his pace quickened. He rolled his hips, pressing against her clit, and his mouth swallowed her cry as she fell headlong over the edge. At her encouragement, he pistoned a few more times, shocking another climax out of her before finally throwing his head back in a hoarse shout as an orgasm claimed him.

Small as we are in the big scheme of universe and time, each of us is a little mechanism that keeps the whole wheel spinning. And what will we power with the wheel of our own life? Will we keep pushing the same piston of loss or regret? Will we reengage and reenact all the hurts from the past? Will we abandon the people we love as a consequence of our own abandonment? Will we make our children pick up the tab for our losses? Or will we take the best of what we know and let a new crop flourish from the field of our life?

Nobody acted as if this was an unusual occurrence, and when I finished changing I lay in bed thinking about my first day at magic school. I'd seen teachers turn into animals, passed through ghosts, and almost been killed by flying magic rodents. I lay there thinking about how the animated paintings weren't TVs mounted behind fancy frames. The moving stairs weren't powered by pistons. The teachers weren't wearing costumes or performing tricks. The magic was real, all real. Only now did I begin to accept, to really believe it. My head swam. I didn’t think I'd be able to sleep, but soon I was out.

In the nineteenth century, scientists described brains and minds as if they were steam engines. Why steam engines? Because that was the leading technology of the day, which powered trains, ships and factories, so when humans tried to explain life, they assumed it must work according to analogous principles. Mind and body are made of pipes, cylinders, valves and pistons that build and release pressure, thereby producing movements and actions. Such thinking had a deep influence even on Freudian psychology, which is why much of our psychological jargon is still replete with concepts borrowed from mechanical engineering.

For as long as the state of insufficient sleep lasts, and for some time thereafter, the body remains stuck in some degree of a fight-or-flight state. It can last for years in those with an untreated sleep disorder, excessive work hours that limit sleep or its quality, or the simple neglect of sleep by an individual. Like a car engine that is revved to a shrieking extreme for sustained periods of time, your sympathetic nervous system is floored into perpetual overdrive by a lack of sleep. The consequential strain that is placed on your body by the persistent force of sympathetic activation will leak out in all manner of health issues, just like the failed pistons, gaskets, seals, and gnashing gears of an abused car engine.

Then for a brief moment he saw everything completely differently. Open space, empty and endless, stretched away in all “directions. Everything within this dead expanse, every living thing was helpless and alone. Things were happening by accident, and when the accident failed, automatic law appeared – the rhythmical machinery of nature, the cogs and pistons of history, conformity with the rules that was rotting from the inside and crumbling to dust. Cold and sorrow reigned everywhere. Every creature was trying to huddle up to something, to cling to something, to things, to each other, but all that resulted was suffering and despair. The quality of what Izydor saw was temporality. Under a colourful outer coating everything was merging in collapse, decay, and destruction.

Does it stand, but not straight enough? Is there a bend in the tool? Leaning left like the Marxist-Leninist Party? To the right, like the Jan Sangh fascists? Or wobbling mindlessly in the middle, like the Congress Party? Fear not, for it can be straightened! Does it refuse to harden even with rubbing and massage? Then try my ointment, and it will become hard as the government's heart! All your troubles will vanish with this amazing ointment made from the organs of these wild animals! Capable of turning all men into engine-drivers! Punctual as the trains in the Emergency! Back and forth you will shunt with piston power every night! The railways will want to harness your energy! Apply this ointment once a day, and your wife will be proud of you! Apply it twice a day, and she will have to share you with the whole block!

I’m Danny Wexler and this is Channel Five sports! The [Undisclosed] football team has been raped in the ass by fate once again, booted from the first round of the playoffs as they failed to carry their inflatable turd past a chalk line in the grass as often as their opponents did. Here’s Hornets quarterback Mikey Wolford, flopping that right arm around like a retard while he tries to pass to a teammate that apparently only he can see. Aaaaand, it’s intercepted. Nice pass, ’tard! Now here’s Spartans fullback Derrick Simpson, pumping those nigger thighs down the field like pistons on a machine designed for cotton picking. Ooh, nice tackle attempt there, Freddy Mason! I bet you could tackle that fullback if he was made of dick, couldn’t you, Freddy? But, he’s not, so final score, forty-one to seventeen. May every Spartan die with a turd on his lips. All hail Korrok.

Steele yanked on the pistol, but the front sight got snagged on the Frenchman’s belt. Jean-Luc’s right arm hit him in the wrist, a painful bone-on-bone collision that wrenched the Five-seven out of his grip. Steele could make out Burrows’s bodyguard posted up ahead, faithfully guarding his boss’s booth. Jean-Luc shouted a warning while trying to dodge the server who seemed to appear out of nowhere. The bodyguard turned to his left, reached into his jacket, and squared up to the threat. Steele’s instincts told him that he was too far behind the eight-ball to get the MP9 into action fast, so he improvised. He launched a kick at Jean-Luc’s ankle that would have made an NFL punter proud. His leg muscles pistoned his foot toward its target like a hot rod on a quarter-mile track. The impact snapped the fleeing Frenchman’s puny ankle, causing him to tumble into the server. Now.

And consider flesh too, if it comes to that. Who could have dreamed up such stuff? It's flabby and it stinks as often as not or it bulges and develops knobs and is covered with horrible hair and blotches. The internal combustion engine is at least more efficient, or take the piston rods on a loco-motive, and it's quite easy to oil them too. While keeping flesh in decent condition is almost impossible even leaving aside the obscene process of ageing and the fact that half the world starves. What a planet. And take eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching they must be dying of laughter. And the shape of the human body. Who but a thoroughly imcompetent craftsman or else some sort of practical joker could have invented this sort of moon on two sticks? Legs are a bad joke. Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle.

Coal smuts fly past and the train ploughs forwards, fire-bellied and smoke-spitting, a mystery of steam pressure and pistons, a miracle of gauges. The engine is a painted comet, its tail rattling behind with every class of passenger hanging on. Many undertake this mode of transportation with nervous trepidation, as well they might; it is well known that regular rail travel contributes to the premature ageing of passengers. Unnatural speed and the rapid travelling of distances have a baleful effect on the organs. Hurrying can prove fatal, notably when combined with suet-based meals, improving spirits and fine tobaccos. The worst offender: the new-built, gas-lit, steam-hauled carriages of Hades which will convey a passenger between Paddington and Farringdon under the very ground of the metropolis. According to reports miscellaneous, the passenger (smoke-blinded, nerve-rattled, near-suffocated) will emerge from the experience variously six months to five years older.

In the nineteenth century, scientists described brains and minds as if they were steam engines. Why steam engines? Because that was the leading technology of the day, which powered trains, ships and factories, so when humans tried to explain life, they assumed it must work according to analogous principles. Mind and body are made of pipes, cylinders, valves and pistons that build and release pressure, thereby producing movements and actions. Such thinking had a deep influence even on Freudian psychology, which is why much of our psychological jargon is still replete with concepts borrowed from mechanical engineering. Consider, for example, the following Freudian argument: ‘Armies harness the sex drive to fuel military aggression. The army recruits young men just when their sexual drive is at its peak. The army limits the soldiers’ opportunities of actually having sex and releasing all that pressure, which consequently accumulates inside them. The army then redirects this pent-up pressure and allows it to be released in the form of military aggression.’ This is exactly how a steam engine works.

Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration.

I just checked that crosshead, Alexander Vassilievich,” I told him once when he started to examine the block between a piston rod and a connecting rod just after I had done the same thing. “And I want to do it myself,” Maltsev answered, smiling, and there was a kind of sadness in his smile which startled me. I later understood the meaning of this sadness and the reason for his always holding himself aloof from us. He felt a superiority over us because he understood the locomotive better than we did and because he didn’t believe that I or anybody else could learn the secret of his skill, the secret of seeing at the same time the swallow flying by and the signal ahead, being aware at the same moment in time of the track, the whole train, and the power of the locomotive. Maltsev realized of course that we could outdo even him in our zeal, but he couldn’t imagine that we could love the engine more than he did or drive the train better - anything better, he thought, would be impossible. And this was why Maltsev was sad with us; he was lonesome with his talent, as if he lived all by himself, not knowing how to express it to us so we could understand.

Daca am inteles ceva din acea dupa-amiaza, despre intreaga mea viata, a fost ca uneori cele mai rele momente ale existentei noastre, momentele care ne fac sa rumegam in minte cele mai urate dorinte, care ameninta sa ne desprinda de imposibilitatea reala a durerii pe care trebuie s-o induram, sunt de fapt momentele care ne conduc spre intelegerea propriei valori. Este ca si cand am deveni constienti de noi insine ca de o punte intre tot ce a fost si tot ce va fi. Devenim constienti de tot ce am primit si ce putem alege - sau nu- ori de ceea ce perpetuam. Este ca un vertij, incitant si terifiant, trecutul si viitorul inconjurandu-ne ca un canion vast, dar peste care putem trece. Asa mici cum suntem in marea schema a universului si a timpului, fiecare reprezinta un mecanism micut care face ca toata aceasa roata sa se invarteasca. Si ce vom alimenta cu roata propriei noastre vieti? Vom impinge acelasi piston al pierderii sau regretului? Vom reangaja si vom reactiva toate suferintele din trecut? Ii vom abandona pe cei pe care-i iubim ca o consecinta a abandonului de sine? Ii vom face pe copiii nostri sa plateasca pentru pierderile noastre? Sau vom lua ce-i mai bun din ce stim si vom lasa o noua recolta sa creasca pe campia vietii noastre?

Develop a rapid cadence. Ideal running requires a cadence that may be much quicker than you’re used to. Shoot for 180 footfalls per minute. Developing the proper cadence will help you achieve more speed because it increases the number of push-offs per minute. It will also help prevent injury, as you avoid overstriding and placing impact force on your heel. To practice, get an electronic metronome (or download an app for this), set it for 90+ beats per minute, and time the pull of your left foot to the chirp of the metronome. Develop a proper forward lean. With core muscles slightly engaged to generate a bracing effect, the runner leans forward—from the ankles, not from the waist. Land underneath your center of gravity. MacKenzie drills his athletes to make contact with the ground as their midfoot or forefoot passes directly under their center of gravity, rather than having their heels strike out in front of the body. When runners become proficient at this, the pounding stops, and the movement of their legs begins to more closely resemble that of a spinning wheel. Keep contact time brief. “The runner skims over the ground with a slithering motion that does not make the pounding noise heard by the plodder who runs at one speed,” the legendary coach Percy Cerutty once said.7 MacKenzie drills runners to practice a foot pull that spends as little time as possible on the ground. His runners aim to touch down with a light sort of tap that creates little or no sound. The theory is that with less time spent on the ground, the foot has less time to get into the kind of trouble caused by the sheering forces of excessive inward foot rolling, known as “overpronation.” Pull with the hamstring. To create a rapid, piston-like running form, the CFE runner, after the light, quick impact of the foot, pulls the ankle and foot up with the hamstring. Imagine that you had to confine your running stride to the space of a phone booth—you would naturally develop an extremely quick, compact form to gain optimal efficiency. Practice this skill by standing barefoot and raising one leg by sliding your ankle up along the opposite leg. Perform up to 20 repetitions on each leg. Maintain proper posture and position. Proper posture, MacKenzie says, shifts the impact stress of running from the knees to larger muscles in the trunk, namely, the hips and hamstrings. The runner’s head remains up and the eyes focused down the road. With the core muscles engaged, power flows from the larger muscles through to the extremities. Practice proper position by standing with your body weight balanced on the ball of one foot. Keep the knee of your planted leg slightly bent and your lifted foot relaxed as you hold your ankle directly below your hip. In this position, your body is in proper alignment. Practice holding this position for up to 1 minute on each leg. Be patient. Choose one day a week for practicing form drills and technique. MacKenzie recommends wearing minimalist shoes to encourage proper form, but not without taking care of the other necessary work. A quick changeover from motion-control shoes to minimalist shoes is a recipe for tendon problems. Instead of making a rapid transition, ease into minimalist shoes by wearing them just one day per week, during skill work. Then slowly integrate them into your training runs as your feet and legs adapt. Your patience will pay off.

Yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah, carburetor, gear ratio, compression, yah-da-yah, piston, plugs, intake, yah-da-yah, on and on and on. That is the romantic face of the classic mode.

Yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah, carburetor, gear ratio, compression, yah-da-yah, piston, plugs, intake, yah-da-yah, on and on and on. That is the romantic face of the classic mode. Dull, awkward and ugly. Few romantics get beyond that point.

Saylor and Beau worked together not like a piston head turned by a camshaft, but like the torque created from such synchronicity.

August 2014 that Cody Littley, a Ph. D candidate in computer science and Minecraft fan, had constructed a working hard drive within the world of Minecraft. What that means is that Littley had painstakingly and ingeniously assembled redstone-powered pistons into a basic device to store about one kilobyte of data. What data Littley’s device stores, of course, can be from any world. Littley could use it as a very small address book for his real or imaginary friends, or to keep a small inventory list of items either from his real-world pantry or his Minecraft-world crafting exploits. In principle, Littley could build a piston device so massively complicated that his Steve could play Minecraft on it, or perhaps even OurworldMinecraft, a game in which Steve plays around in a virtual reality version of our world. As a matter of fact, Littley can’t do this, since the programming in Minecraft does not sustain a big enough world at any given time to support the existence of such a huge contraption.

I feel charged, coiled, and ready to spring. Anger and fear is displaced by focus. My mind yields command to my body. Luke leans in for another kiss. Target acquired. Before I can think, my left arm shoots out like a piston, and the heel of my hand connects with his nose. He yelps like a puppy and staggers backwards. Blood gushes. And he looks extremely pissed off.

Look in my eyes. Can anyone else fuck you like this?” I stared at him, marveling at the intensity of his gaze as he pistoned into me harder than I thought possible. Every impact jarred me and gave me so much pleasure I was panting. His thumb on my clit was working me into a frenzy. “No,” I breathed. “Can any other man give you what you need?” “No. Only you.” “Damn right. I’m going to come so deep inside you, wildcat. Mark my goddamn territory.” He nipped at my jaw before kissing to my neck and sucking my skin between his teeth.

The P-39 "Aircobra" had its big, heavy, Allison piston engine mounted behind its single-seat cockpit. The spinning propeller shaft ran between the pilot's legs up to the nose. It was one of the least successful fighter aircraft of WWII.

The discovery of the power of injected water was luck; understanding and exploiting it was anything but. Newcomen and Calley replaced18 the accidental hole in the cylinder with an injection valve, and, ingeniously, attached it to the piston itself.

The pressure due to these collisions is certainly not a strictly constant time-independent quantity. On the contrary the instantaneous force acting on the piston is a rapidly fluctuating quantity.

On average the piston is at rest but it will perform small irregular vibrations about its equilibrium position as a consequence of the individual molecular collisions. These small irregular movements are known as Brownian motion

Your normal," he said weakly. Tumble pistoned his hand up and down. "I prefer," she said, "to think of myself as potentially extraordinary.

Underground, you see the dangling roots of condominiums, legs of lynched men dripping silver back into the earth. Ore crushers pound incessantly, great piston strokes and impacts. This town is a drum beaten by demons.

The PSS used a special subsonic cartridge with an internal piston that blocked the escape of the explosive gasses that made noise; it was as close to a silent killing firearm ever developed.

The Hope factory was menacing in the distance, for it was one of the few buildings that somehow managed to present itself through the smog. Its hulking form consumed almost all of the horizon, and its many pistons, pillars, chimneys and flumes ate into the heavens. For the parts of the sky it could not reach, those towers sent up endless streams of smoke, and this smoke devoured the natural clouds and left an unnatural haze in the heavens. The factory was a greedy mass of brick, a ravenous form of iron. As much as it gobbled up all the landscape, it threatened that it might eat the onlookers too.

Newcomen’s engine borrowed the best features of its predecessors and incorporated new features of its own. It borrowed Huygens’s cylinder and piston but followed Papin in substituting steam for gunpowder. It borrowed from Savery the idea of condensing steam to make a vacuum. The Newcomen engine, however, unlike Papin’s or Savery’s, heated water to steam in a large, separate boiler, then piped the steam through a flap valve up to an open-ended cylinder mounted overhead. Instead of using steam pressure to push up the piston, as Papin had, Newcomen hung the piston from a massive wooden rocking beam so that the weight of the beam as it rocked pulled up the piston to open the cylinder between cycles.

Leibniz responded immediately to Papin’s letter, asking if his system for raising water was based on rarefaction, meaning condensing steam to make a vacuum. Papin replied that it was, but it also used steam pressure directly. “These [direct] effects are not bounded,” he told Leibniz, “as is the case with suction.”30 Papin meant that his engine had two modes of action: (1) the pressure of expanding steam; and (2), rarefaction or suction—harnessing the power of atmospheric pressure to fill a partial vacuum. In the engine’s direct-action phase, a small quantity of water was poured into a cylinder, a piston was inserted and pushed down until it contacted the water, a ported lid was screwed onto the cylinder, and a fire built under it. When the water turned to steam, it pushed up the piston, which a spring-loaded rod then pinned into place. Removing the fire and allowing the cylinder to cool caused the cooling steam inside to condense back into water, creating a vacuum where steam had been before. Removing the rod holding up the piston allowed the piston, in Papin’s words, to be “pressed down by the whole weight of the atmosphere,” forcing it down to fill the cylinder again.31 With the piston connected to a crank, both the upward push of the steam and the downward push of the atmosphere could be applied to do useful work such as pumping water or turning a boat paddlewheel.

Il morso tagliente dell’ago che buca la mia pelle è una scarica di per sé. Il mio corpo vibra di desiderio per le endorfine che sto per ricevere. Aspiro, il cuore che martella quando uno spruzzo di sangue appare nella siringa. Poi spingo giù il pistone fino alla fine, la mia testa che ciondola all’indietro mentre l’euforia mi colpisce con la forza di mille orgasmi. Vivo per questo momento. L’unico secondo di meraviglia in cui il mio cervello si inebria delle belle sensazioni che mi danno le sostanze chimiche. Tutto il resto della mia vita sparisce, anche se solo per poco. Mi distendo sul materasso logoro e lascio che la sensazione di galleggiamento mi trasporti via. Ondate pacifiche di estasi mi portano in un mondo diverso. Un mondo in cui non ho mai usato il mio corpo per poter pagare una dipendenza. Un mondo in cui non ho mai dovuto vivere in auto e supplicare per un po’ di cibo. Un mondo in cui sono qualcuno e non qualcosa. È incredibile come le droghe ti facciano avere certe idee assurde

The internal combustion engine evolved from the steam engine. Both use hot gases expanding within an enclosed cylinder to supply power. The gas in a steam engine is steam, generated externally by heating water in a boiler and introduced through a valve into the cylinder, where it expands and pushes on a piston connected to a rod that transfers the motion outside the engine to turn a pair of wheels.

Electricity was a harder problem than steam had been. Though it was conceived first as a fluid, it wasn’t something that could be boiled up by heating a mass of liquid and released in controlled volumes to push a heavy piston to turn wheels. It was not a prime mover—a machine such as a windmill or a steam engine, which converts a natural source of energy into mechanical energy—it was a transfer agent. A Leyden jar discharged intermittently, in multiple bursts, each successive burst weaker than the last. A conductor—a wire, a river—could carry the charge, but when it reached the end of the wire or the other side of the river, it discharged all at once. Franklin’s electrostatic motor was powerful, yet it lacked a source of energy beyond a workman rubbing a sulfur ball to charge a Leyden jar. Assigning a workman to turn the spit by hand continued to be both simpler and less expensive. Again, unlike steam, electricity lacked obvious applications, however mysterious and fascinating it might be. With enough equipment—cat skin and amber, Leyden jar mounted with a spark gap—you could use it to light a candle. A few did, another parlor trick, but most continued to borrow a flame from the fireplace or strike a light with flint and steel.

The internal combustion engine, in comparison, could be started by turning a crank to work its pistons and generate a spark. (Cranking was hard work, particularly in cold weather, one reason many women preferred electric cars.) As the engine turned over, fuel—gasoline or alcohol, or a mixture of the two—in a timed sequence sprayed into its cylinders, where it was compressed and then spark-ignited, causing it to burn, heating and expanding so that it pushed on a piston connected to a rod that, again, transferred the motion outside the engine to turn a pair of wheels.

The trumpet, an incredible brass invention, is the king of instruments. This wild machine, its curved pipes, valves, and flowering bell. A puzzle of cold metal and grease, but when placed against the lips of a human being, and love is blown into it, it becomes warm and alive, a conduit for god, a spokesman for the divine. The more love in, the more warmth out, its finger-propelled pistons changing the shape and speed of the rainbows of curved air blown through its passageways. The expansion and contraction of lip muscles a feat of strength. From the first second I put that cold mouthpiece against my chops and started blowing warm, I yearned to create a beautiful sound, to feel my whole being vibrating one with a tone. I wanted that same oneness I felt when I hit a sweet jumper, or when I euphorically rolled on the floor as Walter and his friends jammed the hard bebop back in New York. When I played it right, I was living in the infinite present.

Three hours later we broke through the clouds. Chicago sprawled below us, a bristling parasite of steel and stone clinging to the curve of Lake Michigan. Skyscrapers rose up from the urban expanse like the pistons of a mighty engine, standing tall and sharp in the rainy gloom. Home was sin and sleaze and glitz in the desert sun. Vegas would steal every penny in your pocket, but it’d make sure you had a great time on your way to the gutter. Chicago didn’t have time to play games. It was a machine for printing money, moving at the speed of industry, and it only offered two choices: keep up or be left behind. Las Vegas was born from a gangster’s dream of fleecing tourists in paradise. Chicago was born from a trading post, built on the bones of an Indian massacre. Neither city has ever forgotten this.

Jacob stood up slowly and turned towards the window. He felt his heart pumping like a piston, his lungs like little ballast tanks of their own. Every tiny movement was magnified, every sound amplified. The sweat dripped from his hands, forming another sea upon the floor.