Skeleton Crew Quotes

A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.

There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.

You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think--I did--that God put you on earth to blow your father away.

That rational voice was right to be frightened. There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt a faint, morbid urge to jump.

Grab onto my arm now. Hold tight. We are going into a number of dark places, but I think I know the way. Just don't let go of my arm. And if I should kiss you in the dark, it's no big deal; it's only because you are my love.

Even a zombie lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assault of a million fluorocarbon spray cans of deodorant.

even the most well-adjusted person is holding on to his or her sanity by a greased rope.

I have a real problem with bloat -- I write like fat ladies diet.

You may wonder about long-term solutions. I assure you, there are none. All wounds are mortal. Take what's given. You sometimes get a little slack in the rope but the rope always has an end. So what? Bless the slack and don't waste your breath cursing the drop. A grateful heart knows that in the end we all swing.

And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it.

I could tell you that dying's an art / and I am learning fast.

All the same, you don’t do it for money, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of the bottom line, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of it in terms of hourly wage, yearly wage, even lifetime wage, or you’re a monkey. In the end you don’t even do it for love, although it would be nice to think so. You do it because to not do it is suicide.

We all make a lot of choices in life. Most of the time we can't see with perfect clarity where those choices will lead. It's only with hindsight that we can look back and judge the wisdom-or lack thereof-of the decisions we made. We choose that path less taken and when we find ourselves all alone in the middle of the woods at night, only then do we ask, "What the fuck was I thinking?

There’s something powerful about knowing the shortest way, even if you take the longer way because you know your mother-in-law is sitting home.

‪'Do you love?' This question had begun to plague her, and she did not even know what it meant.

... the subconscious leaves its fingerprints, but there's a stranger down there, too. A hell of a weird guy who knows a hell of a lot. (Ballad of the Flexible Bullet)

As Lily Cavenaugh says in The Talisman (and it was Peter Straub's line, not mine), "You can never be too thin or too rich." And if you don't believe it, you were never really fat or really poor.

Leaving for the night, it came to me. What I should have told her. Life goes on - that's what I should have said. That's what you say to people when a loved one dies. But, thinking it over, I was glad I didn't. Because maybe that's what she was afraid of.

I do have a head, as I am at present manifest in the physical world, and indeed you demonstrate that my head possesses within it far more productive material than does yours. That was a hell of a sentence, Mr. Clean. You might need to diagram that motherfucker for me.

‪Yes, I love; I have loved, anyway, or at least tried to love, but memory is so wide and so deep, and I cannot cross.

I kept telling myself: Cold roast beef. Cold roast beef. Cold roast beef.

Garish could see Rollins lying dead in a ditch with maggots in his eyes. Rollins wouldn't care. Neither would the maggots. You either ate the world or the world ate you and it was okay either way.

The big weekend rush is on. The big city emptying itself out at once. Just a skeleton crew left to keep it going until Monday morning. Everybody getting out - everybody but me, everybody but those who are coming here for me tonight. We're going to have the whole damned town to ourselves. ("New York Blues")

One man may shoot himself in the forehead with a .38 and wake up in the hospital. Another may shoot himself in the forehead with a .22 and wake up in hell...if there is such a place. I tend to believe it's here on earth, possibly in New Jersey.

The desertion of Rwanda by the UN force was Hutu Power’s greatest diplomatic victory to date, and it can be credited almost single-handedly to the United States. With the memory of the Somalia debacle still very fresh, the White House had just finished drafting a document called Presidential Decision Directive 25, which amounted to a checklist of reasons to avoid American involvement in UN peacekeeping missions. It hardly mattered that Dallaire’s call for an expanded force and mandate would not have required American troops, or that the mission was not properly peacekeeping, but genocide prevention. PDD 25 also contained what Washington policymakers call “language” urging that the United States should persuade others not to undertake the missions that it wished to avoid. In fact, the Clinton administration’s ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, opposed leaving even the skeleton crew of two hundred seventy in Rwanda. Albright went on to become Secretary of State, largely because of her reputation as a “daughter of Munich,” a Czech refugee from Nazism with no tolerance for appeasement and with a taste for projecting U.S. force abroad to bring rogue dictators and criminal states to heel. Her name is rarely associated with Rwanda, but ducking and pressuring others to duck, as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, was the absolute low point in her career as a stateswoman.

Do you love?

The horrors of the Inquisition are nothing compared to the fates your mind can imagine for your loved ones. I grabbed them both hard and jerked them away.

Sofort überkam mich der allmächtige, rechtschaffene Zorn, den nur ein betrunkener Student empfinden kann.

…Sam [Raimi] wanted the climactic sword fight to play out as elegantly as a Fred Astaire movie and he wanted it all in one crane shot. I must have rehearsed the routine for three weeks, but when it came time to shoot, the rigors of running up and down steps, fighting with both hands, and flipping skeletons over my head was too much to pull off without cuts. After ten takes, I knew Sam was pissed off, because he yanked the bullhorn from John Cameron. ‘Okay, obviously, this is NOT WORKING, and it’s NOT GOING TO WORK, so we’re going to break it up into A THOUSAND LITTLE PIECES.’ When Sam gets upset, he lets you know it, and he’ll torture you for days afterward because he’s one of those guys who never forgets. The first ‘little piece’ of the sequence was a shot of me ducking as a sword glances off the stone wall behind me. ‘So, you think you can do this, Bruce?’ he’d say, loud enough for the entire crew to hear. ‘Or should I break this ONE shot into THREE MORE SHOTS?’ Sam also threatened to put Ash in a chorus line with skeletons.

I sit on the bench in front of Bell's Market and think about Homer Buckland and about the beautiful girl who leaned over to open his door when he come down that path with the full red gasoline can in his right hand - she looked like a girl of no more than sixteen, a girl on her learner's permit, and her beauty was terrible, but I believe it would no longer kill the man it turned itself on; for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not killed, although a part of me died at her feet." (from the short story Mrs. Todd's Shortcut)

I didn't see anybody I knew and I began to feel lonely, but pleasantly so. I was at that stage of the evening where you fantasize that everyone is looking at you, the romantic stranger, out of the corners of their eyes.

The Duchessa d’Aosta had been placed under the command of Geoffrey Appleyard and a skeleton crew, who were so delighted with their prize ship – and their Italian prisoners now locked below decks – that they hoisted a skull and crossbones from the mainmast. March-Phillipps exploded when he saw it fluttering in the dawn breeze. ‘We all got a rocket and we were told we weren’t to fly the Jolly Roger,’ recalled Leonard Guise. ‘He was a great stickler for etiquette, old Gus.

This young woman,” said Diana, “was responsible for the destruction of the Triumvirate’s fleet.” “Well, I had a lot of help,” Lavinia said. “I don’t understand,” I said, turning to Lavinia. “You made all those mortars malfunction?” Lavinia looked offended. “Well, yeah. Somebody had to stop the fleet. I did pay attention during siege-weapon class and ship-boarding class. It wasn’t that hard. All it took was a little fancy footwork.” Hazel finally managed to pick her jaw off the pavement. “Wasn’t that hard?” “We were motivated! The fauns and dryads did great.” She paused, her expression momentarily clouding, as if she remembered something unpleasant. “Um…besides, the Nereids helped a lot. There was only a skeleton crew aboard each yacht. Not, like, actual skeletons, but—you know what I mean. Also, look!” She pointed proudly at her feet, which were now adorned with the shoes of Terpsichore from Caligula’s private collection. “You mounted an amphibious assault on an enemy fleet,” I said, “for a pair of shoes.” Lavinia huffed. “Not just for the shoes, obviously.” She tap-danced a routine that would’ve made Savion Glover proud. “Also to save the camp, and the nature spirits, and Michael Kahale’s commandos.” Hazel held up her hands to stop the overflow of information. “Wait. Not to be a killjoy—I mean, you did an amazing thing!—but you still deserted your post, Lavinia. I certainly didn’t give you permission —” “I was acting on praetor’s orders,” Lavinia said haughtily. “In fact, Reyna helped. She was knocked out for a while, healing, but she woke up in time to instill us with the power of Bellona, right before we boarded those ships. Made us all strong and stealthy and stuff.” Hazel asked, “Is it true about Lavinia acting on your orders?” Reyna glanced at our pink-haired friend. The praetor’s pained expression said something like, I respect you a lot, but I also hate you for being right. “Yes,” Reyna managed to say. “Plan L was my idea. Lavinia and her friends acted on my orders. They performed heroically.” Lavinia beamed. “See? I told you.” The assembled crowd murmured in amazement, as if, after a day full of wonders, they had finally witnessed something that could not be explained.

He proved, back in 1923, that a man couldn't run a mile in under four minutes. He proved that. But people do it all the time, and do you know what that means? It means that no blue ribbon is forever. Someday—if the world doesn't explode itself in the meantime—someone will run a two-minute mile in the Olympics. It may take a hundred years or a thousand, but it will happen. Because there is no ultimate blue ribbon. There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.

Candles are funny things, you know. You lay them by every spring, knowing that a summer storm may knock out the power. And when the time comes, they hide.

It’s not good for a man to be alone, you know. I think that, even for the most self-sufficient of men, being isolated from the flow of humanity must be the worst form of torture!

Terror is the widening of perspective and perception.

And if people are frightened badly enough for long enough, they'll turn to anyone that promises a solution.

I would do anything - take any chances - just to see the sun again.

Randy screamed. He screamed. And then, for variety, he screamed some more.

Jim and Myron LaFleur, with the entire beer cooler and wine rack at their disposal, were abysmally shitfaced.

The coins had weighed out at an average of 4.5 ounces each on his postal scale.

Ich war mein eigener Anwalt und hatte wahrhaftig einen Narren als Klienten.

Es verschafft einem ein Machtgefühl, den kürzesten Weg zu kennen, selbst wenn man dann den weitesten fährt, weil man weiß, dass daheim die Schwiegermutter sitzt.

Er legte mir den Arm um den Hals, was für Männer die einzige Möglichkeit ist, Zuneigung zu zeigen – weil die Welt sie ja nur Frauen küssen lässt –, und lachte und stand auf.

Randy war ein guter Schüler und Deke ein guter Footballspieler, aber keiner war einen Furz bei Sturm wert, wenn es um Haushalt ging

Rachels Augen strahlten immer, aber man konnte schwer sagen, ob Fröhlichkeit ihnen diesen glänzenden Blick verlieh, oder nur Nervosität.

Er hat sie geschlagen, dachte Randy. Das wollte ich machen, richtig?

Sein Leben lang hatte er Funktionsweisen besser begriffen als Prinzipien. Gab es hier einen Unterschied, außer in der Größenordnung?

Der ganze Unterschied liegt zwischen Wollen und Haben, und das glaube ich aus tiefster Seele. Ich glaube, es ist besser tief zu pflügen als breit.

Es gibt nämlich keine endgültige Goldmedaille. Es gibt den Nullpunkt und die Ewigkeit, und es gibt die Sterblichkeit, aber es gibt nichts Endgültiges.

Ich konnte nicht damit umgehen, deshalb ließ ich es in Ruhe, wie man das als Mann so macht, wenn man weiß, dass die Sonne sowieso aufgehen wird.

Sie hatte Haare, bei denen ein Mann unwillkürlich denkt, wie sie auf einem Kopfkissen aussehen würden.

Johnson Spangler hatte schon vor langer Zeit gelernt, dass man mit einem Dummkopf am besten zurechtkam, wenn man ihn einfach nicht beachtete.

Meine Lebensgeschichte in fünf Sätzen. Ich glaube, ich war deprimiert.

Eine Zeit lang war es Liebe, dann war es so etwas wie Liebe, dann war es aus.

Gutes Aussehen ist in einem reichen Land billig.

Ich könnte dir sagen, dass Sterben eine Kunst ist Und ich schnell lerne.

Meine Mutter sagte, dass ich ihr damit das Herz gebrochen hätte. Was für ein Herz?

Jedes Arschloch kann sterben. Als Wichtigstes muss man lernen, wie man überlebt, wenn Sie wissen, was ich meine.

Beide waren im Innersten Halunken und kamen gut miteinander aus.

Inzwischen war er von »verdammt verschroben« auf »so verrückt wie eine Scheißhausratte« vorgerückt.

Manchmal muss ein Mann einfach aushalten, bis es ihn holt.

Die Insassen waren auf dem Rücksitz gefunden worden. Und auf den Vordersitzen, im Kofferraum und im Handschuhfach.

Bald wirst du eine Frau haben. Und dann Ableger. Alimente. Du weißt schon. Frauen führen immer zu Alimenten. Autos sind besser. Halt dich an Autos.

Man lacht, und dann ist man versucht, über die Schulter zu sehen, was einen gehört haben könnte.

Ja, ich liebe; jedenfalls habe ich geliebt oder zumindest versucht zu lieben, aber die Erinnerungen sind so weit und so tief, und ich kann nicht auf die andere Seite gelangen.

of it in terms of hourly wage, yearly wage, even lifetime wage, or you’re

The man was a fool. Johnson Spangler had learned a long time ago that the only way to talk to a fool was to ignore him.

These are things made for thinking on slowly, ... Things to be thought on at length, while the hands do their work and the coffee sits in a solid china mug nearby. Do the Dead Sing

He told me that Li-Tsu had played one of his jokes four months ago and that his wife had been blown up when she turned on the ignition of her Opel. Since then there had been no more jokes.

Wenn man sie ein bisschen zusammengedrückt hätte, hätte man die ganze Bande mit einer Schrotpatrone erledigen können, und ich kam bald zur Überzeugung, dass das nicht die schlechteste Idee war.

Liebst du? Ich höre ihre Stimme, die das sagt – manchmal höre ich sie noch. In meinen Träumen. Liebst du? Ja, antworte ich. Ja – und wahre Liebe wird niemals enden. Dann wache ich schreiend auf.

Aber im Gegensatz zum Familienzimmer war dies ein Ort, den er als sein eigen betrachtete – ein Ort, wo er die Fremde, die er geheiratet und den Fremden, den sie zur Welt gebracht hatte, aussperren konnte

»Es war ein Blackout«, sagte der Redakteur. »Das erste richtig erstklassige Blackout meines Lebens – aber die signalisieren immer das Ende, und man hat nie sehr viele. So oder so, man hat nie sehr viele.

Selbst der vernünftigste Mensch ist nur durch ein öliges Seil mit seinem Verstand verbunden. Das ist meine feste Überzeugung. Die Stromleitungen der Vernunft sind schlampig ins menschliche Tier eingebaut.

Ein merkwürdiger Ausdruck des Unbehagens huschte über das Gesicht des Schriftstellers. Es war der Ausdruck eines Mannes, der sich in einer Löwengrube befindet, wo schon Dutzende besserer Leute in Stücke gerissen worden sind.

She gazed around at all of us. “Prepare to meet your God!” “Prepare to meet shit,” Myron LaFleur said in a drunken snarl from the beer cooler. “Old woman, I believe your tongue must be hung in the middle so it can run on both ends.

You, my dear ... have been wondering why she stuck with him. Although you haven't said as much, it's been on your mind. Am I right?' She nodded. 'Yes. And I'm not going to offer a long motivational thesis - the convenient thing about stories that are true is that you need only say this is what happened and let people worry for themselves about why. Generally, nobody ever knows why things happen anyway ... particularly the ones who say they do. (Ballad of the Flexible Bullet)

The couple had been parking out here and were found in the boyfriend’s 1959 Mercury.The Merc had real leather seats and a large chrome hood ornament.The occupants had been found in the back seat.Also in the front seat, the trunk, and the glove compartment.

Auf seiner chaotischen Werkbank lag das Chromornament eines alten Wagens. Er begann damit herumzuspielen, und bald weinte er bittere Tränen um die alten Zeiten. Später, kurz nach drei Uhr morgens, erwürgte er seine Frau und brannte das Haus nieder, damit es wie ein Unfall aussah.

Das sind Dinge, über die man langsam nachdenken muss«, hätte er den Kindern gesagt, wenn er dafür die richtigen Worte gefunden hätte. »Dinge, über die man lange nachdenken muss, während die Hände ihre Arbeit verrichten und der Kaffee in einer stabilen Porzellankanne neben einem steht.

Diese rationale Stimme hatte recht, Angst zu haben. Etwas in uns fühlt sich sehr zum Wahnsinn hingezogen. Jeder, der von einem hohen Gebäude in die Tiefe blickt, verspürt einen leichten morbiden Drang zu springen. Und jeder, der sich einmal eine geladene Pistole an die Schläfe gesetzt hat …

Then she laughed, kind of soft, and she gave me a kiss. That was the best kiss I ever had in my whole life. It was just on the cheek, and it was the chaste kiss of a married woman, but it was as ripe as a peach, or like those flowers that open in the dark, and when her lips touched my skin I felt like...I don't know exactly what I felt like, because a man can't easily hold on to those things that happened to him with a girl who was ripe when the world was young or how those things felt...Those things all get a red cast to them in your memory and you cannot see through it at all.

Ich bekam ein wenig Angst vor Mädchen. Nicht einmal so sehr vor jenen, bei denen ich impotent war, sondern vor jenen, mit denen ich es machen konnte. Die stimmten mich unbehaglich. Ich fragte mich ständig, wo sie wohl die scharfe Axt versteckt haben mochten und wann sie auf mich herabsausen würde.

Each of us hides our own private Delaware lost in the gray jungle-tangle of our brains. No one else can know its depths and byways. No one else can know the height of its towers, the secrets of its tides and pools. There will always be lost lagoons to find there, and ruins almost hidden by the sand. There will always be monsters of great beauty and good men with ugly frowns. The forests are dark but lights bob among the branches. You are at home there, more at home than anyplace else, and yet you will never go there in your life. Their legends are yours. The pirates sale around the cape, a crew of skeletons in the rigging. Milkmaids run down mountain passes, dragging kites behind them. Wizards crack their backs after long days of chalk and incantation while above the crowded bazaars, over the golden temples, against the setting sun, around the ruddy minarets, the pterodactyls call out a long farewell.

Writing short stories hasn’t gotten easier for me over the years; it’s gotten harder. The time to do them has shrunk, for one thing. They keep wanting to bloat, for another (I have a real problem with bloat—I write like fat ladies diet). And it seems harder to find the voice for these tales—all too often the I-Guy just floats away.

Sapete cos'è il talento? La dannazione dell'aspettativa. Da ragazzo vi occorre affrontarla questa cosa, batterla in qualche modo. Se sapete scrivere, pensate che Dio vi abbia messo sulla terra per spazzar via Shakespeare. Se sapete disegnare, forse pensate - io lo pensavo - che Dio vi abbia messo sulla terra per spazzar via vostro padre.

You don’t do it for money; you do it because it saves you from feeling bad. A man or woman able to turn his or her back on something like that is just a monkey, that’s all. The story paid me by letting me get back to sleep when I felt as if I couldn’t. I paid the story back by getting it concrete, which it wanted to be. The rest is just side effects.

DU zerbrichst Dir vielleicht den Kopf über langfristige Lösungen; ich versichere Dir, die gibt es nicht. Alle Wunden sind tödlich. Nimm, was Dir gegeben wird. Manchmal wird der Strick etwas gelockert, aber er hat immer ein Ende. Na und. Freu Dich, wenn er gelockert wird, und verschwende keine Zeit darauf, den Sturz zu verfluchen. Ein dankbares Herz weiß, dass wir letztlich alle baumeln.

On the nights after Lona and Hal had gone back with their parents to the mainland in Al Curry’s boat, the children standing astern and waving good-bye, Alden considered that question, and others, and the matter of his father’s cap. Do the dead sing? Do they love? On those long nights alone, with his mother Stella Flanders at long last in her grave, it often seemed to Alden that they did both.

Der Verstand kann einem der beste Freund sein; er kann einen unterhalten, wenn es nichts zu lesen und nichts zu tun gibt. Aber er kann sich gegen einen wenden, wenn er zu lange ohne Sinneswahrnehmung bleibt. Er kann sich gegen einen wenden, was bedeutet, er wendet sich gegen sich selbst, verwüstet sich selbst, verzehrt sich vielleicht sogar selbst in einem unvorstellbaren Akt von Selbstkannibalismus.

Once, some friends and I were driving back from partying up there, in the middle of winter, on one of those perfectly clear and freezing nights. It was four in the morning and I was nodding in and out of hammered sleep, my vision mashed potatoes, we stopped so I could throw up at least twice. But as we drove with my face smushed on the window I noticed the field of snow along that stretch of the highway, all still and unmucked with. It looked brushed, almost. Or whipped. Designed. The patterns were the kind you'd see up close in a big rock. Sometimes you see that for far distances out here on the prairie, like a long white-blue sea. It's so gorgeous. And even with my brain's skeleton-crew state, I just thought, man. Everyone calls our part of the world bleak. But it's not bleak. I don't think it's bleak.

On September 6, 1522, a battered ship appeared on the horizon … A small pilot boat was dispatched to lead the strange ship over the reefs … The vessel they were guiding into the harbor was manned by a skeleton crew of just eighteen sailors and three captives, all of them severely malnourished. … Their captain was dead, as were the officers, the boatswains, and the pilots; in fact, nearly the entire crew had perished … the ship, Victoria, … had departed three years earlier. No one knew what had become of her … Despite the journey’s hardships, Victoria and her diminished crew accomplished what no other ship had ever done before. By sailing west until they reached the East, and then sailing on in the same direction, they had fulfilled an ambition as old as the human imagination, the first circumnavigation of the globe

And that night he dreamed of the monkey again, one of its cymbals striking the Philco radio as it babbled out Dean Martin singing Whenna da moon hitta you eye like a big pizza pie ats-a moray, the radio tumbling into the bathtub as the monkey grinned and beat its cymbals together with a JANG and a JANG and a JANG; only it wasn’t the Italian rag-man who was in the tub when the water turned electric. It was him. •

They stood in a circle in the storm, the dead of Goat Island, and the wind screamed around them, driving its packet of snow, and some kind of song burst from her. It went up into the wind and the wind carried it away. They all sang them, as children will sing in their high, sweet voices as a summer evening draws down to a summer night. They sang, and Stella felt herself going to them and with them, finally across the Reach.

The Witnesses In Ocean's wide domains, Half buried in the sands, Lie skeletons in chains, With shackled feet and hands. Beyond the fall of dews, Deeper than plummet lies, Float ships, with all their crews, No more to sink nor rise. There the black Slave-ship swims, Freighted with human forms, Whose fettered, fleshless limbs Are not the sport of storms. These are the bones of Slaves; They gleam from the abyss; They cry, from yawning waves, We are the Witnesses! Within Earth's wide domains Are markets for men's lives; Their necks are galled with chains, Their wrists are cramped with gyves. Dead bodies, that the kite In deserts makes its prey; Murders, that with affright Scare school-boys from their play! All evil thoughts and deeds; Anger, and lust, and pride; The foulest, rankest weeds, That choke Life's groaning tide! These are the woes of Slaves; They glare from the abyss; They cry, from unknown graves, We are the Witnesses!

Craig Newmark simply started e-mailing his friends about local events in 1995; almost twenty-two years later, network effects have kept Craigslist a dominant player in online classifieds despite operating with a skeleton crew and making seemingly no changes to the website design during that entire period! This is where an emphasis on speed also plays an important role. Because Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs focus on designing business models that can get big fast, they are more likely to incorporate network effects. And because the fierce local competition forces start-ups to grow so aggressively (i.e., blitzscale), Silicon Valley start-ups are more likely to reach the tipping point of network effects before start-ups from less aggressive geographies. One of the motivations for this book is to help entrepreneurs from around the world emulate these successes by teaching them how to systematically design their businesses for blitzscaling. When you design your business model to leverage network effects, you can succeed anywhere.

While she was snooping around, she had run across an old article on the grocery store, how it had originally been used as a casket making factory and the skeleton crew who worked the graveyard shift regularly complained there were odd noises, foggy silhouettes and cold spots inside the building, especially in the back.

Fat is able to exit your cells primarily through the actions of three enzymes called hormone sensitive lipase (HSL), monoglyceride lipase (MGL), and adipose triglyceride lipase (ATGL). Each of these enzymes are like little ushers that help move fat out of your cellular theater after the show is over. Again, without them, the fat would just stay seated in the cell taking up space. Now, the head usher responsible for the mobilization of free fatty acids from adipose tissue (i.e., lipolysis) is considered to be HSL. It’s more easily acted upon by hormones we can influence (thus the name hormone-sensitive), so, for our enzymatic fat loss communication, that’s where we’re going to put our focus. HSL is an intracellular lipase that has broad substrate specificity (meaning it can break down all kinds of fat). If you watched the cartoon Scooby-Doo when you were younger, you probably remember a time or twenty that someone in the crew had a “skeleton key” that was able to unlock any random door they wanted to get into. While other enzymes are like specialized keys that can break down one type of fat, HSL is like a skeleton key that can open the door to break down many types of fat.