Some Gasoline Quotes

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The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and they're pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody's be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. You'd have an overcoat this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you'd have a new partner. Or you'd have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you'd heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way—I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.
J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)
I love money. I love everything about it. I bought some pretty good stuff. Got me a $300 pair of socks. Got a fur sink. An electric dog polisher. A gasoline powered turtleneck sweater. And, of course, I bought some dumb stuff, too.
Steve Martin
Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way—I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.
J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)
I told the waitress I wanted some coffee. She asked if I wanted leaded of unleaded, so I had to leave the restaurant, because I quit drinking gasoline years ago.
Jarod Kintz (There are Two Typos of People in This World: Those Who Can Edit and Those Who Can't)
Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives.
Carl Sagan (Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium)
I was just contemplating how some gasoline and a match would improve this painting.
Penelope Douglas (Misconduct)
Flammable. An oddity, chiefly useful in saving lives. The common word meaning "combustible" is inflammable. But some people are thrown off by the in- and think inflammable means "not combustible." For this reason, trucks carrying gasoline or explosives are now marked FLAMMABLE. Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use inflammable.
E.B. White (The Elements of Style)
God's love descends on some like dew on a flower, blessed be He, but sometimes we trudge along our comfortable lives and bam, He descends on us like a splash of gasoline... and then He strikes a match.
Francisco X. Stork
I hate her with the fury of gasoline set on fire. I burn for Jenessa, who deserves better than this, better than some screwed-up, drug-addicted mother, better than this chaos that always seems to find us, rubbin' off on us like some horrible rash.
Emily Murdoch (If You Find Me)
...he stank more than any human joe had ever smelled, as if he had been dipped in some ungodly confection of camembert and rancid gasoline brewed up in a spit-filled cuspidor.
Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay)
RHAPAW ran not on gasoline, but on the inexhaustible fuel of human hope. You would sit on the blisteringly hot vinyl seat and hope she would start, and then Ben would turn the key and the engine would turn over a couple times, like a fish on land making its last, meager, dying flops. And then you would hope harder, and the engine would turn over a couple more times. You hoped some more, and it would finally catch.
John Green (Paper Towns)
As a nation we have lost our sense of tragedy, a recognition that bad things happen to good people. A nation that expects the government to prevent churches from burning, to control the price of bread or gasoline, to secure every job, and to find some villain for every dramatic accident, risks an even larger loss of life and liberty.
William A. Niskanen Jr.
A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras … A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about … Scattered rags, burnt-out bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp … and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow …” “I get it,” said Noonan. “A roadside picnic.
Arkady Strugatsky (Roadside Picnic)
Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. You'd have an overcoat on this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you'd have a new partner. Or you'd have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you'd heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way--I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.
J.D. Salinger
It so happens I am sick of being a man. And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes. The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs. The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool. The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens, no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators. It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails and my hair and my shadow. It so happens I am sick of being a man. Still it would be marvelous to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily, or kill a nun with a blow on the ear. It would be great to go through the streets with a green knife letting out yells until I died of the cold. I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep, going on down, into the moist guts of the earth, taking in and thinking, eating every day. I don't want so much misery. I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb, alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses, half frozen, dying of grief. That's why Monday, when it sees me coming with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline, and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel, and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night. And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses, into hospitals where the bones fly out the window, into shoeshops that smell like vinegar, and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin. There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines hanging over the doors of houses that I hate, and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot, there are mirrors that ought to have wept from shame and terror, there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords. I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes, my rage, forgetting everything, I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops, and courtyards with washing hanging from the line: underwear, towels and shirts from which slow dirty tears are falling
Pablo Neruda
What are you?' Trout asked the boy scornfully. 'Some kind of gutless wonder?' This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings. It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground. Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five)
Questions of Travel There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams hurry too rapidly down to the sea, and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion, turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. —For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains, aren't waterfalls yet, in a quick age or so, as ages go here, they probably will be. But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling, the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, slime-hung and barnacled. Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres? What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around? The tiniest green hummingbird in the world? To stare at some inexplicable old stonework, inexplicable and impenetrable, at any view, instantly seen and always, always delightful? Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too? And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm? But surely it would have been a pity not to have seen the trees along this road, really exaggerated in their beauty, not to have seen them gesturing like noble pantomimists, robed in pink. —Not to have had to stop for gas and heard the sad, two-noted, wooden tune of disparate wooden clogs carelessly clacking over a grease-stained filling-station floor. (In another country the clogs would all be tested. Each pair there would have identical pitch.) —A pity not to have heard the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird who sings above the broken gasoline pump in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque: three towers, five silver crosses. —Yes, a pity not to have pondered, blurredly and inconclusively, on what connection can exist for centuries between the crudest wooden footwear and, careful and finicky, the whittled fantasies of wooden cages. —Never to have studied history in the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages. —And never to have had to listen to rain so much like politicians' speeches: two hour of unrelenting oratory and then a sudden golden silence in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes: "Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home? Or could Pascal have been entirely right about just sitting quietly in one's room? Continent, city, country, society: the choice is never wide and never free. And here, or there...No. Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?
Elizabeth Bishop (Questions of Travel)
I love money. I love everything about it. I bought some pretty good stuff. Got me a $300 pair of socks. Got a fur sink. An electric dog polisher. A gasoline powered turtleneck sweater. And, of course, I bought some dumb stuff, too. —STEVE MARTIN
Michael Mechanic (Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All)
--Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms, rather, in the middle of the road. It approaches; it sniffs at the bus's hot hood. Towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house (or, safe as houses). A man's voice assures us 'Perfectly harmless. . . .' Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly, 'Sure are big creatures.' 'It's awful plain.' 'Look! It's a she!' Taking her time, she looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why, why do we feel (we all feel) this sweet sensation of joy? 'Curious creatures,' says our quiet driver, rolling his r's. 'Look at that, would you.' Then he shifts gears. For a moment longer, by craning backward, the moose can be seen on the moonlit macadam; then there's a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline.
Elizabeth Bishop (Geography III)
For many months there day and night, at the morning and the evening checks, innumerable execution orders were read out. In a temperature of fifty below zero [Fahrenheit] the musicians from among the non-political offenders played a flourish before and after each order was read. The smoking gasoline torches ripped apart the darkness…. The thin sheet on which the order was written was covered with hoarfrost, and some chief or other who was reading the order would brush the snowflakes from it with his sleeve so as to decipher and shout out the name of the next man on the list of those shot.
Varlam Shalamov (The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV)
Peruvian Amazon Company had committed virtual genocide in attempting to pacify and enslave the native population: it castrated and beheaded Indians, poured gasoline on them and lit them afire, crucified them upside down, beat them, mutilated them, starved them, drowned them, and fed them to dogs. The company’s henchmen also raped women and girls and smashed children’s heads open. “In some sections such an odour of putrefying flesh arises from the numerous bodies of the victims that the places must be temporarily abandoned,” said an engineer who visited the area, which was dubbed the “devil’s paradise.
David Grann (The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon)
I found out the differences between “the truth” and “all the truth.” You can know some pretty terrible things about a person, and you can know they’re true. But sometimes it makes a huge difference if you know what else is true too. I read something in a book once about an old lady who was walking along the street minding her own business when a young guy came charging along, knocked her down, rolled her in a mud puddle, slapped her head and smeared handsful of wet mud all over her hair. Now what should you do with a guy like that? But then if you find out that someone had got careless with a drum of gasoline and it ignited and the old lady was splashed with it, and the guy had presence of mind enough to do what he did as fast as he did, and severely burned his hands in the doing of it, then what should you do with him? Yet everything reported about him is true. The only difference is the amount of truth you tell.
Theodore Sturgeon (The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume X: The Man Who Lost the Sea)
FOR MILES Your sound is faultless pure & round holy almost profound Your sound is your sound true & from within a confession soulful & lovely Poet whose sound is played lost or recorded but heard can you recall that 54 night at the Open Door when you & bird wailed five in the morning some wondrous yet unimaginable score?
Gregory Corso (Gasoline)
And here’s the kicker: food manufacturers are using a gasoline additive known as hexane to process soy products (and some vegetable oils). Soybeans are soaked in large vats of hexane to assist in the extraction of substances such as protein and oils from them. An independent lab has found hexane residue in soy-based foods, but the FDA does not require any testing for hexane, even in baby foods. It is used by the food industry because it is cheap to do so and because the FDA lets them get away with it. The soy industry is incredibly powerful and influential. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lists hexane, incidentally, as a hazardous chemical.
Nora T. Gedgaudas (Primal Body, Primal Mind: Beyond Paleo for Total Health and a Longer Life)
Is this, Miriam wonders, what they call the march of history? And even if she doesn't fully understand, it doesn't mean she can't appreciate the need, the periodic need for some people to resort to gasoline, rags, and matches. Doesn't it always come to this? Isn't history as much about tearing things down as it is about building things up?
Peter Orner (Love and Shame and Love)
You heard me. Let someone else send you to your blaze of glory. You're a speck, man. You're nothing. You're not worth the bullet or the mark on my soul for taking you out." You trying to piss me off again, Patrick?" He removed Campbell Rawson from his shoulder and held him aloft. I tilted my wrist so the cylinder fell into my palm, shrugged. "You're a joke, Gerry. I'm just calling it like I see it." That so?" Absolutely." I met his hard eyes with my own. "And you'll be replaced, just like everything else, in maybe a week, tops. Some other dumb, sick shit will come along and kill some people and he'll be all over the papers, and all over Hard Copy and you'll be yesterday's news. Your fifteen minutes are up, Gerry. And they've passed without impact." They'll remember this," Gerry said. "Believe me." Gerry clamped back on the trigger. When he met my finger, he looked at me and then clamped down so hard that my finger broke. I depressed the trigger on the one-shot and nothing happened. Gerry shrieked louder, and the razor came out of my flesh, then swung back immediately, and I clenched my eyes shut and depressed the trigger frantically three times. And Gerry's hand exploded. And so did mine. The razor hit the ice by my knee as I dropped the one shot and fire roared up the electrical tape and gasoline on Gerry's arm and caught the wisps of Danielle's hair. Gerry threw his head back and opened his mouth wide and bellowed in ecstasy. I grabbed the razor, could barely feel it because the nerves in my hand seemed to have stopped working. I slashed into the electric tape at the end of the shotgun barrel, and Danielle dropped away toward the ice and rolled her head into the frozen sand. My broken finger came back out of the shotgun and Gerry swung the barrels toward my head. The twin shotgun bores arced through the darkness like eyes without mercy or soul, and I raised my head to meet them, and Gerry's wail filled my ears as the fire licked at his neck. Good-bye, I thought. Everyone. It's been nice. Oscar's first two shots entered the back of Gerry's head and exited through the center of his forehead and a third punched into his back. The shotgun jerked upward in Gerry's flaming arm and then the shots came from the front, several at once, and Gerry spun like a marionette and pitched toward the ground. The shotgun boomed twice and punched holes through the ice in front of him as he fell. He landed on his knees and, for a moment, I wasn't sure if he was dead or not. His rusty hair was afire and his head lolled to the left as one eye disappeared in flames but the other shimmered at me through waves of heat, and an amused derision shone in the pupil. Patrick, the eye said through the gathering smoke, you still know nothing. Oscar rose up on the other side of Gerry's corpse, Campbell Rawson clutched tight to his massive chest as it rose and fell with great heaving breaths. The sight of it-something so soft and gentle in the arms of something so thick and mountaineous-made me laugh. Oscar came out of the darkness toward me, stepped around Gerry's burning body, and I felt the waves of heat rise toward me as the circle of gasoline around Gerry caught fire. Burn, I thought. Burn. God help me, but burn. Just after Oscar stepped over the outer edge of the circle, it erupted in yellow flame, and I found myself laughing harder as he looked at it, not remotely impressed. I felt cool lips smack against my ear, and by the time I looked her way, Danielle was already past me, rushing to take her child from Oscar. His huge shadow loomed over me as he approached, and I looked up at him and he held the look for a long moment. How you doing, Patrick?" he said and smiled broadly. And, behind him, Gerry burned on the ice. And everything was so goddamned funny for some reason, even though I knew it wasn't. I knew it wasn't. I did. But I was still laughing when they put me in the ambulance.
Dennis Lehane
When Cliff has gotten sick in the past, I have not been the best of nursemaids. Especially if there's a lot going on.I want him to be like the paraplegic and just get up and walk. But I am not Jesus and Cliff is only human. And right now he's sick. If I am learning anything from the Proverbs 31 wife, I'm going to guess that being kind and loving to my husband when he's not feeling well is a lesson I need to learn. So I resist the urge the freak out and moan and complain about all we have to do and that he just needs to suck it up and be a man and push past the fever and phlegm and pack some boxes. Instead, I push him gently into bed, pull the comforter up to his chin, and bring him cold medicine...and tell him I hope he feels better better before I quietly shut the door behind me. And resist running around the house waving my arms in despair. Six hours later, as I'm packing up the kitchen, I see Cliff walk out of the bedroom with boxes in his hands, heading toward the office. And I breathe a silent prayer of thanks that I have indeed married a man's man. And that Tylenol works really, really well. And that honey gets a lot better results than gasoline.
Sara Horn (My So-Called Life as a Proverbs 31 Wife: A One-Year Experiment...and Its Surprising Results)
With German tanks climbing behind the lone platoon and without any means of antitank defense, Solis seized some of the gasoline from the Francorchamps dump, had his men pour it out in a deep road cut, where there was no turn-out, and set it ablaze. The result was a perfect antitank barrier. The German tanks turned back to Stavelot-this was the closest that Kampfgruppe Peiper ever came to the great stores of gasoline which might have taken the 1st SS Panzer Division to the Meuse River. Solis had burned 124,000 gallons for his improvised roadblock, but this was the only part of the First Army's POL reserve lost during the entire Ardennes operation.
Hugh M. Cole (The Ardennes - Battle of the Bulge (World War II from Original Sources))
You must have some new inventions that we did not have in my time. Tell me about your most modern things." "I think the best things are the bicycle trails. Since 1997 they've allowed no new roads to be built—only bike trails—and now there are as many miles of bike trails as there are of roads for cars." "So you can really bike all over the country?" you ask. "Sure—and not alongside buses and trucks and crazy drivers, but through forests and across plains and deserts and along rivers and streams. I sometimes feel like biking forever that way, and there are hostels for bikers where you can sleep in comfort for almost nothing. Most of the cost is paid for by taxes on gasoline.
Edward Packard
Some of the ideas were silly, thanks to Molly, who, despite being upset with Jones, was still trying to keep the mood upbeat. They had boxes and boxes of copy paper. They could make thousands of paper airplanes with the message, “Help!” written on them and fly them out the windows. Could they try to blast their way out of the tunnel? Maybe dig an alternative route to the surface? It seemed like a long shot, worth going back in there and taking a look at the construction—which Jones had done only to come back out, thumbs down. Two of them could create a diversion, while the other to took the Impala and crashed their way out of the garage. At which point the Impala—and everyone in it—would be hit by hundreds of bullets. That one—along with taking their chances with the far fewer number of soldiers lying in wait at the end of the escape tunnel—went into the bad idea file. Molly had thought that they could sing karaoke. Emilio had a Best of Whitney Houston karaoke CD. Their renditions of I Will Always Love you, she insisted, would cause the troops to break rank and run away screaming. Except the karaoke machine was powered by electricity, which they were trying to use only for the computer and the security monitors, considering—at the time—that the generator was almost out of gasoline. Yeah, that was why it was a silly idea. It did, however, generate a lot of desperately needed laughter.
Suzanne Brockmann (Breaking Point (Troubleshooters, #9))
You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you’d be so much older or anything. It wouldn’t be that, exactly. You’d just be different, that’s all. You’d have an overcoat on this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you’d have a new partner. Or you’d have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you’d heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you’d just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you’d be different in some way—I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.
J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)
The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. You'd have an overcoat this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you'd have a new partner. Or you'd have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you'd heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way — I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.
J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)
The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you’d be so much older or anything. It wouldn’t be that, exactly. You’d just be different, that’s all. You’d have an overcoat this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you’d have a new partner. Or you’d have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you’d heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you’d just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you’d be different in some way — I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.
J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)
For electric vehicles, the power plant generators alimenting the electrical grind will then produce the GHGs, not the car engine itself. Concerns for GHG emissions would then shift to the source of electric power generation and away from car manufacturers. Currently, there is a wide difference in GHGs emissions in various electrical grids, depending on the source of energy fueling the generators. The low emissions from Swedish and French grids are explained by a combination of nuclear and hydroelectric generation, while the high emissions of the Polish and US grids stem from the use of coal as a fuel in some generators. However, the emissions from the Californian grid are nearly half those of the IS average! The regional differences in emissions in the US grid are also explained by the differences in fuels used for electricity generation: California has a high proportion of hydroelectricity and nuclear plants, while in Michigan generation plants the dominant production fuels are coal and crude oil. Anybody concerned with GHG emissions should certainly switch to electric cars in Sweden, France, and California, but should use gasoline when driving in Michigan or Poland!
Alain Bertaud (Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities (Mit Press))
Hear that? Living skulls! What are we doing here? What war at Troy? Does anyone care? Gods of love and hate! Aren't they the same god? All of us, all our lives, searching for the one perfect enemy- you, me, Helen, Paris, Menelaos, all those crazy Greeks! all those hapless Trojans! my dear beloved Jack! Jack and I fought all the time. I remember almost nothing but the fights - every fight a war to end all wars, you know how it goes, a righteous war, a final war, the worst fight you've ever had, you can't do this again, this time you'll get things straight one way or the other or it's over, he'll see what you mean, see you're right, fights aren't about anything except being right, are they? once and for all. You feel old. Wrong. Clumsy. You sit in two chairs on the porch. Or the kitchen. Or the front hall. Hell arrives. It's as if the war was already there, waiting, the two of you poured into it like wet concrete. The chairs you sit in are the wrong chairs, they're the chairs you never sit in because they're so uncomfortable, you keep thinking you should move but you don't, your neck hurts, you hate your neck, evening closes in. Birds move about the yard. Hell yawns. War pours out of both of you, steaming and stinking. You rush backward from it and become children, every still sentence slamming you back into the child you still are, every sentence not what you meant to say at all but the meaning keeps flaring and contracting, as sparks drop on gasoline, Fuckshit this! Fuckshit that! no reason to live. You're getting vertigo. He's being despicable. Your mother was like this. Stop whimpering. No use asking, What is this about? Don't leave the room. I have to leave the room. Breathless, blaming, I'm not blaming! How is this not blaming! Hours pass or do they. You say the same things or are they different things? Hell smells stale. Fights aren't about anything, fights are about themselves. You're stiff. You hate these chairs. Nothing is resolved. It is too dark to see. You both go to bed and doze slightly, touching slightly. In the night a nightmare. Some giant bird, or insect, some flapping thing, trying to settle on the back of your neck, you can't see what it is or get it off. Pure fear. Scream unearthly. He jerks you awake. Oh sweetie, he says. He is using his inside voice, his most inside voice. The distance between that voice and the fight voice measures your whole world. How can a voice change so. You are saved. He has saved you. He sees you saved. An easement occurs, as night dew on leaves. And yet (you think suddenly) you yourself do not possess sort of inside voice - no wonder he's lonely. You this cannot offer this refuge, cannot save him, not ever, and, although physiological in origin, or genetic, or who knows, you understand the lack is felt by him as a turning away. No one can heal this. You both decide without words to just - skip it. You grip one another. In the night, in the silence, the grip slowly loosens and silence washes you out somewhere onto a shore of sleep. Morning arrives. Troy is still there. You hear from below the clatter of everyone putting on their armour. You go to the window.
Anne Carson (Norma Jeane Baker of Troy)
It should be clear by now that whatever Americans say about diversity, it is not a strength. If it were a strength, Americans would practice it spontaneously. It would not require “diversity management” or anti-discrimination laws. Nor would it require constant reminders of how wonderful it is. It takes no exhortations for us to appreciate things that are truly desirable: indoor plumbing, vacations, modern medicine, friendship, or cheaper gasoline. [W]hen they are free to do so, most people avoid diversity. The scientific evidence suggests why: Human beings appear to have deeply-rooted tribal instincts. They seem to prefer to live in homogeneous communities rather than endure the tension and conflict that arise from differences. If the goal of building a diverse society conflicts with some aspect of our nature, it will be very difficult to achieve. As Horace wrote in the Epistles, “Though you drive Nature out with a pitchfork, she will ever find her way back.” Some intellectuals and bohemians profess to enjoy diversity, but they appear to be a minority. Why do we insist that diversity is a strength when it is not? In the 1950s and 1960s, when segregation was being dismantled, many people believed full integration would be achieved within a generation. At that time, there were few Hispanics or Asians but with a population of blacks and whites, the United States could be described as “diverse.” It seemed vastly more forward-looking to think of this as an advantage to be cultivated rather than a weakness to be endured. Our country also seemed to be embarking on a morally superior course. Human history is the history of warfare—between nations, tribes, and religions —and many Americans believed that reconciliation between blacks and whites would lead to a new era of inclusiveness for all peoples of the world. After the immigration reforms of 1965 opened the United States to large numbers of non- Europeans, our country became more diverse than anyone in the 1950s would have imagined. Diversity often led to conflict, but it would have been a repudiation of the civil rights movement to conclude that diversity was a weakness. Americans are proud of their country and do not like to think it may have made a serious mistake. As examples of ethnic and racial tension continued to accumulate, and as the civil rights vision of effortless integration faded, there were strong ideological and even patriotic reasons to downplay or deny what was happening, or at least to hope that exhortations to “celebrate diversity” would turn what was proving to be a problem into an advantage. To criticize diversity raises the intolerable possibility that the United States has been acting on mistaken assumptions for half a century. To talk glowingly about diversity therefore became a form of cheerleading for America. It even became common to say that diversity was our greatest strength—something that would have astonished any American from the colonial era through the 1950s. There is so much emotional capital invested in the civil-rights-era goals of racial equality and harmony that virtually any critique of its assumptions is intolerable. To point out the obvious— that diversity brings conflict—is to question sacred assumptions about the ultimate insignificance of race. Nations are at their most sensitive and irrational where they are weakest. It is precisely because it is so easy to point out the weaknesses of diversity that any attempt to do so must be countered, not by specifying diversity’s strengths—which no one can do—but with accusations of racism.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
ethanol may actually make some kinds of air pollution worse. It evaporates faster than pure gasoline, contributing to ozone problems in hot temperatures. A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ethanol does reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent relative to gasoline, but it calculated that devoting the entire U.S. corn crop to make ethanol would replace only a small fraction of American gasoline consumption. Corn farming also contributes to environmental degradation due to runoff from fertilizer and pesticides. But to dwell on the science is to miss the point. As the New York Times noted in the throes of the 2000 presidential race, ―Regardless of whether ethanol is a great fuel for cars, it certainly works wonders in Iowa campaigns. The ethanol tax subsidy increases the demand for corn, which puts money in farmers‘ pockets. Just before the Iowa caucuses, corn farmer Marvin Flier told the Times, ―Sometimes I think [the candidates] just come out and pander to us, he said. Then he added, ―Of course, that may not be the worst thing. The National Corn Growers Association figures that the ethanol program increases the demand for corn, which adds 30 cents to the price of every bushel sold. Bill Bradley opposed the ethanol subsidy during his three terms as a senator from New Jersey (not a big corn-growing state). Indeed, some of his most important accomplishments as a senator involved purging the tax code of subsidies and loopholes that collectively do more harm than good. But when Bill Bradley arrived in Iowa as a Democratic presidential candidate back in 1992, he ―spoke to some farmers‖ and suddenly found it in his heart to support tax breaks for ethanol. In short, he realized that ethanol is crucial to Iowa voters, and Iowa is crucial to the presidential race.
Charles Wheelan (Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated))
Mike continued to walk unhurriedly toward the crowd until he loomed up in the stereo tank in life size, as if he were in the room with his water brothers. He stopped on the grass verge in front of the hotel, a few feet from the crowd. "You called me?" He was answered with a growl. The sky held scattered clouds; at that instant the sun came out from behind one and a shaft of golden light hit him. His clothes vanished. He stood before them, a golden youth, clothed only in his own beauty, beauty that made Jubal's heart ache, thinking that Michelangelo in his ancient years would have climbed down from his high scaffolding to record it for generations unborn. Mike said gently, "Look at me. I am a son of man." . . . . "God damn you!" A half brick caught Mike in the ribs. He turned his face slightly toward his assailant. "But you yourself are God. You can damn only yourself and you can never escape yourself." "Blasphemer!" A rock caught him just over his left eye and blood welled forth. Mike said calmly, "In fighting me, you fight yourself... for Thou art God and I am God * . . and all that groks is God-there is no other." More rocks hit him, from various directions; he began to bleed in several places. "Hear the Truth. You need not hate, you need not fight, you need not fear. I offer you the water of life-" Suddenly his hand held a tumbler of water, sparkling in the sunlight. "-and you may share it whenever you so will . . . and walk in peace and love and happiness together." A rock caught the glass and shattered it. Another struck him in the mouth. Through bruised and bleeding lips he smiled at them, looking straight into the camera with an expression of yearning tenderness on his face. Some trick of sunlight and stereo formed a golden halo back of his head. "Oh my brothers, I love you so! Drink deep. Share and grow closer without end. Thou art God." Jubal whispered it back to him. . . . "Lynch him! Give the bastard a nigger necktie!" A heavy-gauge shotgun blasted at close range and Mike's right arm was struck off at the elbow and fell. It floated gently down, then came to rest on the cool grasses, its hand curved open in invitation. "Give him the other barrel, Shortie-and aim closer!" The crowd laughed and applauded. A brick smashed Mike's nose and more rocks gave him a crown of blood. "The Truth is simple but the Way of Man is hard. First you must learn to control yourself. The rest follows. Blessed is he who knows himself and commands himself, for the world is his and love and happiness and peace walk with him wherever he goes." Another shotgun blast was followed by two more shots. One shot, a forty-five slug, hit Mike over the heart, shattering the sixth rib near the sternum and making a large wound; the buckshot and the other slug sheered through his left tibia five inches below the patella and left the fibula sticking out at an angle, broken and white against the yellow and red of the wound. Mike staggered slightly and laughed, went on talking, his words clear and unhurried. "Thou art God. Know that and the Way is opened." "God damn it-let's stop this taking the Name of the Lord in vain!"- "Come on, men! Let's finish him!" The mob surged forward, led by one bold with a club; they were on him with rocks and fists, and then with feet as he went down. He went on talking while they kicked his ribs in and smashed his golden body, broke his bones and tore an ear loose. At last someone called out, "Back away a little so we can get the gasoline on him!" The mob opened up a little at that waning and the camera zoomed to pick up his face and shoulders. The Man from Mars smiled at his brothers, said once more, softly and clearly, "I love you." An incautious grasshopper came whirring to a landing on the grass a few inches from his face; Mike turned his head, looked at it as it stared back at him. "Thou art God," he said happily and discorporated.
Robert A. Heinlein
Good luck. For most of my generation, it would just go to student debt and cocktails. If anything came to me (an impossibility), I would dump it into a poorly managed career in edgy luxury items. You can’t make opera money on perfume that smells like cunts and gasoline. At any rate, I didn’t usually make an appearance beyond the gala. Or, I hadn’t until recently. But Joseph Eisner had promised me a fortune, and now he wouldn’t take my calls. He did, however, like his chamber music. It had been an acquired taste for me. In my distant undergraduate past, when circumstance sat me in front of an ensemble, I spent the first five minutes of each concert deciding which musician I would fuck if I had the chance, and the rest shifting minutely in my seat. I still couldn’t stand Chanel. And while I had learned to appreciate—indeed, enjoy—chamber ensembles, orchestras, and on occasion even the opera, I retained my former habit as a dirty amusement to add some private savor to the proceedings. Tonight, it was the violist, weaving and bobbing his way through Dvořák’s Terzetto in C Major like a sinuous dancer. I prefer the romantics—fewer hair-raising harmonies than modern fare, and certainly more engaging than funereal baroque. The intriguing arrangement of the terzetto kept me engaged, in that slightly detached and floating manner engendered by instrumental performance. Moreover, the woman to my left, one row ahead, was wearing Salome by Papillon. The simple fact of anyone wearing such a scent in public pleased me. So few people dared wear anything at all these days, and when they did, it was inevitably staid: an inoffensive classic or antiseptic citrus-and-powder. But this perfume was one I might have worn myself. Jasmine, yes, but more indolic than your average floral. People sometimes say it smells like dirty panties. As the trio wrapped up for intermission, I took a steadying breath of musk and straightened my lapels. The music was only a means to an end, after all.
Lara Elena Donnelly (Base Notes)
The term stray refers to dogs and cats, animals traditionally viewed as pet animals, that are homeless and thus devoid of human companionship and protection. Stray animals are often perceived by individual residents as “pests” and by societal officials (specifically with respect to municipal and county animal control policies) as “nuisance animals/throwaways,” especially in the context of disease control (rabies, etc.). They are particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of existence on the street and are viewed by many people as being throwaway animals; millions of them are destroyed at animal shelters and animal control facilities in the United States each year. Four of the five violent subjects who reported acts of cruelty against stray animals reported frequent acts. Stray animals, genetically coded to bond and coexist with humans, may by necessity revert to feral (or wild) behavior, but they are not wild animals. As a result, they often seek the company of humans for food and shelter. The trust that they frequently display toward humans can be dangerous. Some of the most horrific reports of animal cruelty either committed or observed by the subjects in this study involved stray animals. These reports included exploding animals by inserting fireworks into the animal’s mouth or anus, using “Crazy Glue” to glue the paws of kittens and puppies to the middle of streets and then watching the animals be killed by passing cars, throwing stray animals to their death from rooftops, and setting animals on fire after drenching them in gasoline. Stray animals who are victims of cruelty can be analogized to the victims of serial killers, such as prostitutes and runaway juveniles; their deaths are often unseen and unknown by the average citizen until the remains are found.
Linda Merz-Perez (Animal Cruelty: Pathway to Violence Against People)
Learn About The High Rise Apartment Benefits Deciding places to reside typically be a concern and it is truly advisable to search into high rise apartment benefits prior to making a decision. Although surviving in a normal condominium in the city most likely be lurking in small space, it ought sure the benefits of some people. Keep in mind that bigger houses can be found in contain higher overhead expenses. Short-time period stay should involve minimal bills to purchase furniture and decorations for your home. If you happen to lived in a bigger home in the outskirts of city, you will have to buy a lot of thing to refill your place. After you have to move, dropping all of your possessions often are tedious and tiresome. Staying in 1 rental will require you in order to get fundamental furnishings only. Another benefit of staying in a city constructing is the convenience of commuting to work. Sometimes, your office could be downtown where additionally, you will discover many tall residential condominiums. You can walk to operate or take a short bus ride within your office. Going to see the suburbs would require that enable you to personal method to commute specifically for your office every day. The city lifestyle additionally has given to you more luxury and comfort. Good eating locations and pubs must be close by. You'll search for a good shops and goods within the city. It will be convenient to are now living in a high-rise apartment intrinsic of town that provides you easy access to good shops to operate your errands. In the suburbs, you'll likely have to have a automobile as a way to easy chores. If you could have to go to operate with at hours away, you would spend a lot for gasoline. Your car may also wear down quickly the santorini condo price since you'll be driving it usually permanently distances. Making a home in a high-rise residence can remove these extra burdens such as gas costs and time travel. You can spend extra quality time with your partner or youngsters by dwelling near your place of work. Suburban households are inclined to hire babysitters to observe their youngsters though they work miles away. Vacationing as a condominium ear your office will let you being more involved with of affairs since you is certainly not spending couple of days commuting each day. It is right to are now living in urban cities if you're single or live as a general couple. You'll be able to take advantage of high rise apartment benefits if you find yourself in a functional location close to your workplace. Staying in a very very condominium can supply you with higher security.
Mike Kelly
Total retail sales rose 0.7 percent in November, as holiday shopping began, and that came despite a sharp tumble in gasoline prices that reduced the dollar value of sales at gas stations by 0.8 percent. Analysts had expected a rise of only 0.4 percent. Read narrowly, the results show that some survey data suggesting weak post-Thanksgiving Black Friday sales was misleading at best; retail trade groups said at the time that they believed consumers spread their spending more evenly through November than they have in the past, and that appears to hold up.
Anonymous
M113 Family of Vehicles Mission Provide a highly mobile, survivable, and reliable tracked-vehicle platform that is able to keep pace with Abrams- and Bradley-equipped units and that is adaptable to a wide range of current and future battlefield tasks through the integration of specialised mission modules at minimum operational and support cost. Entered Army Service 1960 Description and Specifications After more than four decades, the M113 family of vehicles (FOV) is still in service in the U.S. Army (and in many foreign armies). The original M113 Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC) helped to revolutionise mobile military operations. These vehicles carried 11 soldiers plus a driver and track commander under armour protection across hostile battlefield environments. More importantly, these vehicles were air transportable, air-droppable, and swimmable, allowing planners to incorporate APCs in a much wider range of combat situations, including many "rapid deployment" scenarios. The M113s were so successful that they were quickly identified as the foundation for a family of vehicles. Early derivatives included both command post (M577) and mortar carrier (M106) configurations. Over the years, the M113 FOV has undergone numerous upgrades. In 1964, the M113A1 package replaced the original gasoline engine with a 212 horsepower diesel package, significantly improving survivability by eliminating the possibility of catastrophic loss from fuel tank explosions. Several new derivatives were produced, some based on the armoured M113 chassis (e.g., the M125A1 mortar carrier and M741 "Vulcan" air defence vehicle) and some based on the unarmoured version of the chassis (e.g., the M548 cargo carrier, M667 "Lance" missile carrier, and M730 "Chaparral" missile carrier). In 1979, the A2 package of suspension and cooling enhancements was introduced. Today's M113 fleet includes a mix of these A2 variants, together with other derivatives equipped with the most recent A3 RISE (Reliability Improvements for Selected Equipment) package. The standard RISE package includes an upgraded propulsion system (turbocharged engine and new transmission), greatly improved driver controls (new power brakes and conventional steering controls), external fuel tanks, and 200-amp alternator with four batteries. Additional A3 improvements include incorporation of spall liners and provisions for mounting external armour. The future M113A3 fleet will include a number of vehicles that will have high speed digital networks and data transfer systems. The M113A3 digitisation program includes applying hardware, software, and installation kits and hosting them in the M113 FOV. Current variants: Mechanised Smoke Obscurant System M548A1/A3 Cargo Carrier M577A2/A3 Command Post Carrier M901A1 Improved TOW Vehicle M981 Fire Support Team Vehicle M1059/A3 Smoke Generator Carrier M1064/A3 Mortar Carrier M1068/A3 Standard Integrated Command Post System Carrier OPFOR Surrogate Vehicle (OSV) Manufacturer Anniston Army Depot (Anniston, AL) United Defense, L.P. (Anniston, AL)
Russell Phillips (This We'll Defend: The Weapons & Equipment of the US Army)
I’m sure there are some readers who will choke on the word subsidy. The gasoline subsidy in the U.S. is not a visible thing that shows up in the budget documents, but it’s there. Keeping a standing Army and Navy at the ready to defend oil fields on the other side of the world is an extraordinary subsidy for gas-powered vehicles. Cheap leases on federal land for drilling and mining are subsidies. Tax breaks for the fossil-fuel industry are subsidies. If we enhanced the grid, subsidized electric vehicles, and let gasoline cost what people are really willing to pay (and what we really pay to get and protect it), we could bring a lot of our military home. And change the world.
Bill Nye (Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World)
It needs work. Or a match and some gasoline." "How much work is the question.
Kit Rocha (Beyond Innocence (Beyond, #6))
ANXIOUS CONTRACTIONS Life is movement. It’s dynamic and pulsating like a swift moving river. To be in a contented and happy state is to be in a state of flow where your thoughts and feelings follow a natural current and there is no inner friction or need to check in on your anxiety every five minutes. When you feel in flow, your body feels light and your mind becomes spontaneous and joyful. Anxiety and fear are the total opposite. They’re the contractions of life. When we get scared, we contract in fear. Our bodies become stiff and our minds become fearful and rigid. If we hold that contracted state, we eventually cut ourselves off from life. We lose flexibility. We lose our flow. We can think of this a bit like pulling a muscle. When a muscle is overused and tired, its cells run out of energy and fluid. This can lead to a sudden and forceful contraction, such as a cramp. This contraction is painful and scary as it comes without warning. In the same way, we can be living our lives with a lot of stress and exhaustion, similar to holding a muscle in an unusual position for too long. If we fail to notice and take care of this situation, we can experience an intense and sudden moment of anxiety or even panic. I call this an “anxious contraction,” and it can feel quite painful. Learning how to respond correctly to this anxious contraction is crucial and determines how quickly we release it. Anxious contractions happen to almost everyone at some point in their lives. We suddenly feel overwhelmed with anxiety as our body experiences all manner of intense sensations, such as a pounding heart or a tight chest or a dizzy sensation. Our anxiety level then is maybe an 8 or 9 out of 10. We recoil in fear and spiral into a downward loop of more fear and anxiety. Some might say they had a spontaneous panic attack while others might describe the feeling as being very “on edge.”   THE ANXIETY LOOP It’s at this point in time where people get split into those that develop an anxiety disorder and those that don’t. The real deciding factor is whether a person gets caught in the “anxiety loop” or not. The anxiety loop is a mental trap, a vicious cycle of fearing fear. Instead of ignoring anxious thoughts or bodily sensations, the person becomes acutely aware and paranoid of them. “What if I lose control and do something crazy?” “What if those sensations come back again while I’m in a meeting?” “What if it’s a sign of a serious health problem?” This trap is akin to quicksand. Our immediate response is to struggle hard to free ourselves, but it’s the wrong response. The more we struggle, the deeper we sink. Anxiety is such a simple but costly trap to fall into. All your additional worry and stress make the problem worse, fueling more anxiety and creating a vicious cycle or loop. It’s like spilling gasoline onto a bonfire: the more you fear the bodily sensations, the more intense they feel. I’ve seen so many carefree people go from feeling fine one day to becoming fearful of everyday situations simply because they had one bad panic attack and then got stuck in this anxious loop of fearing fear. But there is great hope. As strange as it sounds, the greatest obstacle to healing your anxiety is you. You’re the cure. Your body wants to heal your anxiety as much as you do.
Barry McDonagh (Dare: The New Way to End Anxiety and Stop Panic Attacks Fast)
Some firebreathers have to use props, gasoline, all that extra stuff," explains the Ringmaster. "But not this one. He's real. That's why I gave him the stage name Dragon. "And the clowns? Why do they look so sad?" "Ah, yes. Their girlfriend ran off with the strongman yesterday." "Their girlfriend?" "Yes, she was a contortionist. And clowns share everything.
Connor Garrett (Spellbound Under The Spanish Moss: A Southern Tale of Magic)
World War II, Korea was divided in two parts.”  Thomas blew smoke toward the ceiling.  “The Russians occupied the north, and the U. S. occupied the south  They thought after a while the two parts would get back together as one country, but the Russians set up a communist government in the north.  We set up a democratic government in the south.  So now the North Koreans think they can take over the South and make it all one communist country.” “I knowed it had something to do with them communists,” Grandpa nodded his head energetically. “They’s gonna take over the whole world if we don’t stop them.” “Looks like Harry Truman’s going to try to stop them,” WC said.  “We heard on the radio while we drove down here that lots of U. S. soldiers was already fighting in Korea.  I expect they’ll start drafting lots more soldiers right soon.” “Will you have to go back to the army?” Jeannie asked Uncle Thomas. “I don’t know, Honey. I think they’ll take younger men than me and WC, but I guess if they call us up, we’ll have to go.” “I sure hope you don’t have to go. War scares me.” Betty Lou folded her arms across her chest. “War’s a pretty scary thing. But I guess somebody’s got to go.” “Do you reckon they’ll start rationing again?” Grandma asked. “I still got some of them ration books in my bureau. Wonder if I could still use them?” Jeannie turned to Grandma. “What’s rationing?” “During the war they was certain things you couldn’t buy unless you had the stamps in the ration books.” Aunt Lillian explained. “Like what?” “Shoes, sugar, meat, gasoline, all sorts of stuff like that.” Grandma said.
Mary Jane Salyers (Appalachian Daughter)
After World War II, Korea was divided in two parts.”  Thomas blew smoke toward the ceiling.  “The Russians occupied the north, and the U. S. occupied the south  They thought after a while the two parts would get back together as one country, but the Russians set up a communist government in the north.  We set up a democratic government in the south.  So now the North Koreans think they can take over the South and make it all one communist country.” “I knowed it had something to do with them communists,” Grandpa nodded his head energetically. “They’s gonna take over the whole world if we don’t stop them.” “Looks like Harry Truman’s going to try to stop them,” WC said.  “We heard on the radio while we drove down here that lots of U. S. soldiers was already fighting in Korea.  I expect they’ll start drafting lots more soldiers right soon.” “Will you have to go back to the army?” Jeannie asked Uncle Thomas. “I don’t know, Honey. I think they’ll take younger men than me and WC, but I guess if they call us up, we’ll have to go.” “I sure hope you don’t have to go. War scares me.” Betty Lou folded her arms across her chest. “War’s a pretty scary thing. But I guess somebody’s got to go.” “Do you reckon they’ll start rationing again?” Grandma asked. “I still got some of them ration books in my bureau. Wonder if I could still use them?” Jeannie turned to Grandma. “What’s rationing?” “During the war they was certain things you couldn’t buy unless you had the stamps in the ration books.” Aunt Lillian explained. “Like what?” “Shoes, sugar, meat, gasoline, all sorts of stuff like that.” Grandma said.
Mary Jane Salyers (Appalachian Daughter)
Where are you going, Albert?” Albert said nothing. How rare, Quinn thought: Albert speechless. “Not really your concern, Quinn,” Albert said finally. “You’re running out.” Albert sighed. To his three companions he said, “Go ahead and get in the boat. The Boston Whaler. Yes, that one.” Turning back to Quinn he said, “It’s been good doing business with you. If you want, you can come with us. We have room for one more. You’re a good guy.” “And my crews?” “Limited resources, Quinn.” Quinn laughed a little. “You’re a piece of work, aren’t you, Albert?” Albert didn’t seem bothered. “I’m a businessman. It’s about making a profit and surviving. It so happens that I’ve kept everyone alive for months. So I guess I’m sorry if you don’t like me, Quinn, but what’s coming next isn’t about business. What’s coming next is craziness. We’re going back to the days of starvation. But in the dark this time. Craziness. Madness.” His eyes glinted when he said that last word. Quinn saw the fear there. Madness. Yes, that would terrify the eternally rational businessman. “All that happens if I stay,” Albert continued, “is that someone decides to kill me. I’ve already come too close to being dead once.” “Albert, you’re a leader. You’re an organizer. We’re going to need that.” Albert waved an impatient hand and glanced over to see that the Boston Whaler was ready. “Caine’s a leader. Sam’s a leader. Me?” Albert considered it for a second and shook the idea off. “No. I’m important, but I’m not a leader. Tell you what, though, Quinn: in my absence you speak for me. If that helps, good for you.” Albert climbed down into the Boston Whaler. Pug started the engine and Leslie-Ann cast off the ropes. Some of the last gasoline in Perdido Beach sent the boat chugging out of the marina. “Hey, Quinn!” Albert shouted back. “Don’t come to the island without showing a white flag. I don’t want to blow you up!
Michael Grant (Fear (Gone, #5))
cover the twenty-five in sacks soaked in gasoline. Then they set fire to them. Shrieking, transformed into human torches, some managed to put out the flames by rolling on the ground but were left with terrible burns. Those who threw themselves into the river like flaming meteors drowned. Macedo, Loaysa, and Velarde finished off the wounded with their revolvers.
Mario Vargas Llosa (The Dream of the Celt)
The United States is absolutely ripe for a rise in gasoline taxes. The nominal gasoline excise tax rate has been fixed at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1994.29 Inflation alone has reduced the real value of that tax per gallon by around 30 percent. As with other federal tax rates, the U.S. excise tax rate on gasoline is extremely low by international comparison. We might conservatively assume that by 2015 an extra 0.5 percent of GDP could be collected by some combination of a higher gasoline excise tax and modest carbon levies on other fossil fuels (such as on coal at the utilities). Other
Jeffrey D. Sachs (The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity)
My teeth clatter in my mouth as everything ripples and shudders in the storm of shells, whining, whizzing. The kid on the bicycle rolls out of sight. Untouched. A miracle. A dream. The shells abruptly cease and there is only the settling creak of the car seat, a scatter of twittering birds in the shrubs and trees. I could use some gum. Where do you buy gum so early besides the service station? It seems wrong to go there since we don't need any gasoline. We don't drive enough. A tank of gas lasts us forever. I get behind the wheel and in the mirror I can see my eyelids fluttering. I sit squeezing the steering wheel until I realize I haven't started the engine. The garage conceals me. I don't want to go out into the open. A horse whinnys – are they bringing up the artillery? It's the farm field where old Wallam tills a little garden, his yard is the biggest and runs alongside the back of ours to the farm where his family has their orchards. What's wrong with me? Sounds of explosions, bullets, voices of men. Volleys. I smell smoke. Burning things, festering ruptured corpses with maggots pulsing under horrible skin and the shells, the horse, it's hit, it shrieks, explodes apart – can we pull the gun by hand? The crew is dead too, bullets are making their bodies jump even after they have broken apart like smashed holiday nuts. I want to scream. Maybe I am? I begin breathing rapidly. I don't know how long I am there but I hear the screen door open and I key the ignition. “Car troubles?” Mr. Kincaid calls out to me from the front porch. “No troubles,” I say setting my arm out the window and holding the mirror to keep my hand steady. “Lovely day.” The sun was really rising, taking the temperature up with it, hot shards of searing light coming over the treetops to stab at everything that couldn't find the shade. I couldn't find the shade.
Leonard Mokos (The Bad Canadian)
Gather six to 12 months of checking, savings, and credit card statements, and break your income and expenses down into categories and then line items. I have suggested some here, but add your own as needed. Check to see if your bank or credit card company provides reporting that categorizes charges or lets you assign categories—your work may already be almost done for you: •Income—paychecks, interest, dividends, rents, royalties, business income, pension, social security, child support, spousal support •Housing—mortgage/rent, property taxes, HOA dues, insurance •Utilities—gas, electric, propane, phone, TV/Internet, trash, water/sewer •Food—groceries, dining out •Auto—car payments, gasoline, repairs, insurance •Medical—health insurance, doctor/dentist visits, prescriptions, physical therapy •Entertainment—travel, concerts/shows, sports •Clothing—personal purchases, dry cleaning, uniforms •Personal care—hair/nails, gym/yoga, vitamins/supplements •Miscellaneous—gifts, pets, donations •Children—education, activities, school lunches, childcare You can use a spreadsheet or pen and paper to take note of income and expenses as you go through statements, then calculate a monthly average for each item.
Debra Doak (High-Conflict Divorce for Women: Your Guide to Coping Skills and Legal Strategies for All Stages of Divorce)
the three major sectors (electricity, transportation, and industry) all produce comparable emissions. But they’d be affected very differently by an economy-wide carbon price. For example, coal fueled about one-quarter of US electricity in 2019, and each metric ton of that coal was sold for about $39.7 A carbon price of $40 for each ton of CO2 emitted would effectively double that cost to power plant operators and so be a strong inducement for them to forswear coal. In contrast, that same carbon price would increase the effective price of crude oil by only about 40 percent above $60 per barrel. And if that cost were passed through to the pump, gasoline would increase by only some $0.35 per gallon. Since that’s small compared to how much pump prices have varied historically, consumers wouldn’t have much incentive to move away from gasoline. So reductions in emissions from power (and, as it turns out, heat) are much easier to encourage than reductions from transportation, fundamentally because oil packs a lot more energy per carbon atom than does coal.
Steven E. Koonin (Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters)
There was too much to gamble on in space. Fuel, for one thing. Men had experimented with fuel for ten years now and still the only thing they had was a combination of liquid oxygen and gasoline. They had tried liquid hydrogen but that had proved too cold, too difficult to confine, treacherous to handle, too bulky because of its low density. Liquid oxygen could be put under pressure, condensed into little space. It was safe to handle, safe until it combined with gasoline and then it was sheer death to anything that got within its reach. Of course, there had been some improvements. Better handling of the fuel, for instance. Combustion chambers stood up better now because they were designed better. Feed lines didn't freeze so readily now as when the first coffins took to space. Rocket motors were more efficient, but still cranky.
Frank Belknap Long (The Science Fiction Bundle)
This history of DDT use makes it clear that the trajectory of its rise and fall has some obvious similarity to the ascent and eventual demise of leaded gasoline but that the overall cumulative impact of the insecticide’s large-scale and decades-long use is much harder to assess. Leaded gasoline did enable higher combustion efficiencies but there is little doubt that the health benefits resulting from reduced automotive emissions were far outweighed by the introduction of a known and persistent neurotoxin into the environment. In contrast, DDT’s indisputably positive role in eliminating malaria from many countries and reducing its burdens in others could have been even more positive had we not resorted to massive spraying of crops, which burdened the environment with a persistent pollutant and led to the widespread rise of DDT/DDE tolerance among targeted insects.
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
p. 362 "There are nights I lie awake wondering what the moment was we lost the Germany I knew. Some might point to the invasion of Poland ... There are a million such moments. Kristallnacht, the Night of the long Knives, the Jewish boycotts, the race laws ... But sometimes I think it was the moment right before the gasoline was poured on the books. The moment the most educated country in the world willingly, joyously, wholeheartedly turned away from knowledge.
Brianna Labuskes
First, every major, far-reaching advance carries its own inherent concerns, if not some frankly undesirable consequences, whether immediately appreciated or apparent only much later: leaded gasoline, a known danger from the very start, and chlorofluorocarbons, found undesirable only decades after their commercial introduction, epitomize this spectrum of worries. Second, rushing to secure commercial primacy or deploying the most convenient but clearly not the best possible technique may not be the long-term prescription for success, a fact that was clearly demonstrated by the history of “beaching” the submarine reactor for a rapid start of commercial electricity generation. Third, we cannot judge the ultimate acceptance, societal fit, and commercial success of a specific invention during the early stages of its development and commercial adoption, and much less so as long as it remains, even after its public launch, to a large extent in experimental or trial stages: the suddenly truncated deployments of airships and supersonic airplanes made that clear. Fourth, skepticism is appropriate whenever the problem is so extraordinarily challenging that even the combination of perseverance and plentiful financing is no guarantee of success after decades of trying: there can be no better illustration of this than the quest for controlled fusion.
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
Propelled by the oil shock, fears of scarcity wafted across the nation like a bad smell. Rumors of shortages in any number of goods—gasoline, salmon, cheese, onions, raisins—caused brief, unwarranted episodes of anxiety, some of them about commodities one would never imagine could run out. The Great Toilet Paper Panic of 1973 occurred after talk-show host Johnny Carson joked about a shortage, causing frightened consumers to buy out stores.
Charles C. Mann (The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World)
How did the Wright brothers achieve their world-changing feat? They neither relied on divine inspiration nor started with a clean slate. You could best describe the first plane as a recombination of known ideas and technologies. 1 As management professor Andrew Hargadon says, all innovations represent some break from the past, built from pieces of the past. The Wrights’s genius was the insight that combining a light gasoline engine, some cables, a propeller, and Bernoulli’s principle would result in a flying contraption.
Michael J. Mauboussin (More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places)
Before we go driving anywhere, we need gasoline.” See, we’ve been using gasoline by the gallon-ful to run the generator for the Xbox and the toaster oven and the RC helicopter and the massage chair and the Christmas lights and all that jazz. I had what I THOUGHT was a brilliant plan to get us some easy electricity. Y’know those wheels that mice run on in labs and junk? Well, I was going to grab a treadmill from the high school gym and . . . Quint
Max Brallier (The Last Kids on Earth)
Licorice tattoo turned a gun metal blue Scrawled across the shoulders of a dying town Took the one eyed-jacks across the railroad tracks And the scar on its belly pulled a stranger passing through He's a juvenile delinquent, never learned how to behave But the cops would never think to look in Burma-Shave And the road was like a ribbon and the moon was like a bone He didn't seem to be like any guy she'd ever known He kind of looked like Farley Granger with his hair slicked back She says, I'm a sucker for a fella in a cowboy hat How far are you going? Said depends on what you mean He says I'm only stopping here to get some gasoline I guess I'm going thataway just as long as it's paved And I guess you'd say I'm on my way to Burma Shave And with her knees up on the glove compartment She took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like root beer And she popped her gum and arched her back Hell, Marysville ain't nothing but a wide spot in the road Some nights my heart pounds like thunder Don't know why it don't explode 'Cause everyone in this stinking town's got one foot in the grave And I'd rather take my chances out in Burma Shave Presley's what I go by, why don't you change the stations? Count the grain elevators in the rearview mirror She said mister, anywhere you point this thing It got to beat the hell out of the sting Of going to bed with every dream that dies here every mornin' And so drill me a hole with a barber pole And I'm jumping my parole just like a fugitive tonight Why don't you have another swig and pass that car if you're so brave I wanna get there before the sun comes up in Burma Shave And the spiderweb crack and the mustang screamed The smoke from the tires and the twisted machine Just a nickel's worth of dreams and every wishbone that they saved Lie swindled from them on the way to Burma Shave And the sun hit the derrick and cast a batwing shadow Up against the car door on the shotgun side And when they pulled her from the wreck You know she still had on her shades They say that dreams are growing wild Just this side Of Burma Shave
Tom Waits
Many other industries have their practice patterns measured. In 2009, the utility company Positive Energy (now Opower) was interested in reducing power use in neighborhoods. Their data showed that some households used far more electricity than their neighbors. After all, there are no standardized protocols on turning lights on or off when one vacates a room. Just ask anyone who’s argued with a spouse about this issue. The company decided to mail each household a regular feedback report that compared their electricity and natural gas usage to that of similarly sized households in their neighborhood. Playing on the benchmarking theme, the data feedback intervention resulted in an overall reduction in household energy use. When people saw they were outliers, they modified their habits so their usage fell more into line with that of their peers. In a year, this simple intervention reduced the total carbon emissions of the participating houses by the equivalent of 14.3 million gallons of gasoline, saving consumers more than $20 million.4 Lots of utility companies now take this approach—and it works.
Marty Makary (The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care--and How to Fix It)
This is the Prius,” he said. The car he pointed to was a shell with wires hanging out. “It is an example of what they look like when we are done,” he said. This particular examination had proven exceedingly useful because when the second-generation Prius was released in the mid-2000s, some wondered whether Toyota had cheated on the fuel economy tests. Hillebrand’s team had showed that, if the company wanted to, it in fact could game federal evaluators. That was because the car could be programmed with advance knowledge of the curves, stops, and hazards that all automakers knew the test featured. So armed, it could adjust and conserve gasoline. Hillebrand’s team did not demonstrate that the Prius folks did cheat. But the opportunity to do so was sufficient. He sent word to the Environmental Protection Agency, which devised a randomized test that was harder to con.
Steve Levine (The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World)
The panicky Romanians left and German troops filled the town. They suddenly descended like locusts: masses of gray uniformed men, endless trucks, tanks, cars. We were petrified by what was going to happen. We had made sure to prepare bread, candles, gasoline for the petrol lamps, some food and wait for the convulsion. Again, like almost three yeas before, one power would leave, another take over. Nobody could foresee whether the Germans would hold the line, whether the Russians would bomb, whether an artillery battle would take place - everything was fate. The Germans gathered to reorganize their units, on the flight Westward, after crossing the river Dniester. They did not resist along the river Prut, but fled. We were again in no-man's-land for a day or two, until the Russians returned.
Pearl Fichman (Before Memories Fade)
in the 1870s, according to Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, some five thousand people died annually in kerosene explosions from the lamps in their homes.8 Gasoline is more volatile than kerosene, yet we drive our cars without any fear of explosion.
Alex Epstein (The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels)
A blanket could be used to keep you warm on a cold night. Just pour some gasoline on it and light it on fire. 

Jarod Kintz (Blanket)
it was the tzero that ultimately caught their imagination, like it did for Musk. Eberhard, who was growing increasingly worried about global warming, saw potential for commercialization and a chance to show that gasoline wasn’t the only answer for motor vehicles. At the same time, he and Tarpenning had noticed that lithium-ion batteries had been improving at a rapid rate and were getting cheaper, thanks largely to their use in laptop computers. The auto industry, too, no longer seemed as impenetrable as it once was. Since the 1990s, automakers had been outsourcing many aspects of vehicle production, including the sourcing of components and in some cases even assembly. The men figured it would be possible for a start-up to design and build at least a prototype, with the hope of later raising more money to advance their ambitions. If things went well, a low-volume electric sports car with kick-ass acceleration might
Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
Later I helped some boys build Southern California’s first model airplane powered by a (hand-built ) gasoline engine.
Albert Scott Crossfield (Always Another Dawn: The Story of a Rocket Test Pilot)
After opening the doors to the engine compartment, they pulled the lead off the number three spark plug and attached it to the one there. They placed that in the bottom of the boat and poured in some gasoline. Wouldn’t need much, only takes a cup or two. And they might have used a lot more. Wouldn’t have taken long for fumes to fill the whole compartment. That would have been like having several sticks of dynamite waiting for a spark. Greg comes to get his boat. He doesn’t open and check the engine compartment for fumes. He just jumps in, hits the ignition. End of story.
Aaron Stander (Murder in the Merlot (Ray Elkins Thrillers #8))
Quinn wrote a script. He took the character Luke Gray out of the store and, in an inspired moment, renamed him Fibber McGee. He called his script Fibber McGee and Molly, but for some reason the agency people handling the Johnson account didn’t like it. They wanted to call it Free Air. It was, after all, about a middle-aged pair of married vagabonds who travel down America’s highways, stopping occasionally for gasoline and some engaging talk about Johnson’s Car Wax. But there was a problem with this title: Sinclair Lewis had used it on a short story and, as Yoder was told, wanted $50,000 for its release. So Fibber it was—perhaps the luckiest bad break in all radio. An audition record was made, and Johnson’s Wax bought the show. It would premiere on Monday night, April 16, 1935, with Smackout still running on the same (Blue) network, as a six-a-week quarter-hour feature at 10 A.M.
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
Raleigh was struck by a torpedo early in the attack. Like Utah, she occupied a berth usually used by an aircraft carrier. At 0756 the two torpedoes were dropped about 300 yards from the ship. One hit the ship below the eighty pound armor belt and another passed about twenty-five yards ahead of the ship. The one which hit the ship caused immediate flooding of the two forward boiler rooms and the forward engine room. General Quarters was sounded at once, and the anti-aircraft battery went into action promptly. Men not at the guns were ordered to jettison weights on the port side, especially those high up on the ship. About 0900 the ship received a bomb hit from a dive-bomber. This was dropped from about 800 feet and passed through three decks and out the side of the ship. It exploded clear of the vessel at frame 112 and caused damage typical of a near-miss. Luckily the compartment, which held 3,500 gallons of aviation gasoline, was left intact. The ship counterflooded, but the construction of the ship was not favorable to a great deal of counterflooding as loss of buoyancy was more important than list. Due to defective hatches the main deck had some free water surface, which, added to that produced by the damage, was almost fatal. The jettisoning of topside weights and the reduction of free surface by pumping water from the main deck saved the ship. It certainly would have been lost in a seaway, as it developed negative stability. This was gradually overcome, partly by lashing an available barge alongside. 80-G-32448 USS Raleigh after taking one torpedo hit amidships and one bomb hit aft.
Homer N. Wallin (Why, How, Fleet Salvage And Final Appraisal [Illustrated Edition])
Oil imports nearly tripled between 1967 and 1973. With US demand for imports so strong, there was virtually no cushion of extra oil supplies on global markets to help absorb a shock to supplies. The Arab embargo kept about 4.4 million barrels of oil a day off the market: 9 percent of the total supply. For the first time in its history, the United States could not make up for the loss. The shock was unprecedented. Gasoline prices, which had hovered along at the same level year after year for decades, spiked. In some markets, crude oil prices jumped from $5.40 a barrel to $17 a barrel—a 600 percent increase in a matter of weeks.
Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)