Short Ambient Quotes

The stables of Versailles in December were not renowned for illumination, but Eliza could hear the gentleman’s satins hissing and his linens creaking as he bowed. She made curtseying noises in return. This was answered by a short burst of scratching and rasping as the gentleman adjusted his wig. She cleared her throat. He called for a candle and got a whole silver candelabra, a chevron of flames bobbing and banking like a formation of fireflies through the ambient miasma of horse breath, manure gas and wig powder.

Eno again: “I know he liked Another Green World a lot, and he must have realised that there were these two parallel streams of working going on in what I was doing, and when you find someone with the same problems you tend to become friendly with them.” Another Green World (1975) has a different feel to Low, but it deploys some of the same strategies. It mixes songs that have recognisable pop structures with other, short, abstract pieces that Eno called “ambient”—with the emphasis not on melody or beat, but on atmosphere and texture. These intensely beautiful fragments fade in then out, as if they were merely the visible part of a vast submarine creation; they are like tiny glimpses into another world. On the more conventional tracks, different genres juxtapose, sometimes smoothly, sometimes not—jazzy sounds cohering with pop hooks but struggling against intrusive synthetic sound effects. The end result is a moodily enigmatic album of real power and ingenuity. One structural difference between the two albums, though, is that while Eno interspersed the “textural” pieces across Another Green World, Bowie separated them out and put them on another side, which provides Low with a sort of metanarrative.

Kayla froze and looked at her neighbor’s fence. A low masculine chuckle floated on the night, doing funny things to her insides. Grass crunched as footsteps approached the five-foot fence. When a handsome face appeared above it, butterflies filled her belly. Nick Belanger smiled at her, his brown eyes glinting with amusement in the ambient illumination cast by the floodlights. “Everything okay?” Straightening, she returned his smile and held up the snail. “Yes. Just stopping this little bugger. He and his buddies keep devouring my pepper plants.” He grinned. Damn, he was handsome. Not in a pretty-boy way, but in a ruggedly masculine way. His short black hair was slicked back from his face, still wet from a recent shower. His strong jaw bore a five-o’clock shadow. His straight white teeth provided sharp contrast to the dark stubble that coated his cheeks. She’d been attracted to him ever since she had moved next door to him six years ago.

So small changes in the ambient temperature over relatively short periods of time that are not sufficiently long for adaptive processes to develop can lead to huge ecological and climatological effects. Some of these may be positive, but many will be catastrophic. Regardless, however, of the sign of the effect, significant changes are upon us, and we desperately need to understand their origins and consequences and forge strategies for adaptation and mitigation. The crucial question is not whether these effects are anthropogenic in origin because they almost certainly are, but rather to what extent they can be minimized without leading to rapid discontinuous changes in our physical and economic environment and ultimately to the potential collapse of the global socioeconomic fabric. Hence my bewilderment at those in the general public including political and corporate leaders who reject the cautionary exhortations of scientists, environmentalists, and others, and why I am continually baffled by their lack of action. Yes, we should all delight in and promote the huge successes and fruits of the free market system and of the role of human ingenuity and innovation, but we should also recognize the critical roles of energy and entropy and together act strategically to find