Sonic Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Sonic. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Isabelle drifted over, Jace a pace behind her. She was wearing a long black dress with boots and an even longer cutaway coat of soft green velvet, the color of moss. "I can't believe you did it!" she exclaimed. "How did you get Magnus to let Jace leave?" "Traded him for Alec," Clary said. Isabelle looked mildly alarmed. "Not permanently?" "No," said Jace. "Just for a few hours. Unless I don't come back," he added thoughtfully. "In which case, maybe he does get to keep Alec. Think of it as a lease with an option to buy." Isabelle looked dubious. "Mom and Dad won't be pleased if they find out." "That you freed a possible criminal by trading away your brother to a warlock who looks like a gay Sonic the Hedgehog and dresses like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?" Simon inquired. "No, probably not.
Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
That you freed a possible criminal by trading away your brother to a warlock who looks like a gay sonic the Hedgehog and dresses like the childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
You...you lost your faith?" "No...just my convictions. I still very much believe in God- just not a god who condones human tithing." Lev begins to feel himself choking up with an unexpected flood of feeling, all the emotions that had been building up throughout their talk- throughout the weeks- arriving all at once like a sonic boom. "I never knew there was a choice.
Neal Shusterman (Unwind (Unwind, #1))
My heartbeat is a pulse, and it pumps out sonic vibrations that resonate with her mind as she lays her head on my chest. Listen silently and you can hear the frequency of love.
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.
Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)
My love may be invisible, but that doesn’t mean you can’t taste it. (It tastes like a sonic boom, only not as bitter).
Jarod Kintz (This is the best book I've ever written, and it still sucks (This isn't really my best book))
Sensitivity isn't being wimpy. It's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom.
Jeff Buckley
Dalek Sec: The Doctor will open the Ark! The Doctor: Ha ha, the Doctor will not. Dalek Sec: You have no way of resisting! The Doctor: Mm, you got me there. [withdrawing the sonic screwdriver] Although, there is always this. Dalek Sec: A sonic probe? The Doctor: [with jocular bravado] That's screwdriver. Dalek Sec: It is harmless. The Doctor: Ohh, yes. Harmless is just the word: that's why I like it! Doesn't kill, doesn't wound, doesn't maim. But I'll tell you what it does do: It is very good at opening doors. [He pushes the switch and the doors explode inwards; Jake's squad and some Cybermen run in and open fire.]
Russell T. Davies
The sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who might have worked, having been canonically established as being ineffective on wood, but nobody had ever figured out how to use the controls on the blasted thing.
Jim C. Hines (Codex Born (Magic Ex Libris, #2))
I don't make sonic booms. I want a whip. I like the idea of walking around making sonic booms everywhere.
Karen Marie Moning (Iced (Fever, #6))
Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Dieu! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge.
Douglas Coupland (Generation A)
The music defied classification. If I had been writing a review of the show, I would have labeled it progressive, guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll. But the guitars made sounds guitars didn’t always make. Symphonic sounds. Sacred sounds. The music dug in so deep you didn’t hear it so much as feel it, reminding me of a dream I used to have when I was a kid, where I would be standing on a street corner, I would jump into the air, flap my arms, and soar up into the sky. That’s the only way I could describe the music. It was the sonic equivalent of flight.
Tiffanie DeBartolo (How to Kill a Rock Star)
Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. It was for fear of being beaten to this beat that black soldiers avoided the Saigon bars where their white comrades kept the jukeboxes humming with Hank Williams and his kind, sonic signposts that said, in essence, No Niggers.
Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer, #1))
I wanted to say, “I’m the Doctor and this is my companion,” but I doubted Sophie was a fan of the long-running BBC series. Forget the TARDIS and the sonic screwdriver, the Doctor’s best gadget was the psychic paper. I can’t tell you how many times I wished I had some.
Kevin Hearne (Tricked (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #4))
[The Doctor] pulled the thing out of Prince Boris's mouth, waving it around. 'Oh. Blimey. This is not a spatula. What is it?' I [Amy] stared at the stubby thing. It looked like the world's chunkiest novelty gift pen... I coughed. 'That, Doctor, is the sonic screwdriver.' 'Ah,' Dr Smith boggled. 'Right. Is it? Oh dear.' Another pause. 'What does it do?' 'Well... it screws things... sonically. On a good day, we fight off monsters with it.' 'Monsters, eh?' Dr Smith nodded gravely and... pointed it at the doorway like a gun and said, hopefully, 'Pew! Pew! Pew!' He turned back to me. 'Like that?' 'Other way up,' I said gently.
James Goss (Doctor Who: Dead of Winter)
Isabelle looked dubious. "Mom and Dad won't be pleased if they find out." "That you freed a possible criminal by trading away your brother to a warlock who looks like a gay Sonic the Hedgehog and dresses like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Band? Simon inquired. "No, probably not.
Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
Mamá y papá no estarán nada contentos si lo descubren. -¿Que liberaste a un posible criminal intercambiándolo por tu hermano a un brujo que parece una especie de Sonic el Erizo en versión gay y se viste como el Roba Niños de Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? -preguntó Simon-. No, probablemente no. [pp.158]
Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
The old sound was alcoholic. The tradition was finally broken. The music is sex and drugs and happy. And happy is the joke the music understands best. Ultra sonic sounds on records to cause frontal lobotomies. Hey, don't be afraid. You'd better take drugs and learn to love PLASTIC. All diffrent kinds of plastic- pliable, rigid, colored, colorful, nonattached plastic. - Lou Reed (1965-1968)
Legs McNeil (Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk)
What matters is that we're here
Sonic the Hedgehog
That's the only way I could describe the music. It was the sonic equivalent of flight
Tiffanie DeBartolo
Today all sounds belong to a continuous field of possibilities lying within the comprehensive dominion of music. Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe! And the musicians: anyone and anything that sounds!
R. Murray Schafer (The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World)
At Sonic I just paid for two large Dr. Peppers. The curious part is I ordered one sweet tea. That's the kind of money-making transaction I need to adopt at BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm. Buy Two, Get One of Lesser Value.
Jarod Kintz (BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm presents: Two Ducks Brawling Is A Pre-Pillow Fight)
Pearl Jam is a band I have a lot of respect for. Nirvana and Sonic Youth I feel the same way about. Mumford & Sons, My Morning Jacket, Wilco, Givers, and Foo Fighters are just some of my favorites. I respect bands that give me something of themselves that I can feel. ("Posing" bands turn me off generally speaking.) It all has to do with a feeling I have about them. That is what music is to me, a feeling. It's similar with people too.
Neil Young (Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream)
I was ten when I heard the music that ended the first phase of my life and cast me hurtling towards a new horizon. Drenched to the skin, I stood on Dunoon’s pier peering seawards through diagonal rain, looking for the ferry that would take me home. There, on the everwet west coast of Scotland, I heard it: like sonic scalpels, the sounds of electric guitars sliced through the dreich weather. My body hairs pricked up like antennae. To my young ears these amplified guitars sounded angelic, for surely no man-made instrument could produce that tone. The singer couldn't be human. His voice was too clean, too pure, too resonant, as though a robot larynx were piping words through vocal chords of polished silver. The overall effect was intoxicating - a storm of drums, earthquake bass, razor-sharp guitar riffs, and soaring vocals of astonishing clarity. I knew that I was hearing the future.
Mark Rice (Metallic Dreams)
I can appreciate that,” says Henry. He’s adding to the list. I look over his shoulder. Sex Pistols, the Clash, Gang of Four, Buzzcocks, Dead Kennedys, X, the Mekons, the Raincoats, the Dead Boys, New Order, the Smiths, Lora Logic, the Au Pairs, Big Black, Pil, the Pixies, the Breeders, Sonic Youth… Henry, they’re not going to be able to get any of that up here.” He nods, and jots the phone number and address for Vintage Vinyl at the bottom of the sheet. “You do have a record player, right?” My parents have one,” Bobby says. Henry winces. What do you really like?” I ask Jodie. I feel as though she’s fallen out of the conversation during the male bonding ritual Henry and Bobby are conducting. Prince,” she admits. Henry and I let out a big Whoo! And I start singing “1999” as loud as I can, and Henry jumps up and we’re doing a bump and grind across the kitchen. Laura hears us and runs off to put the actual record on and just like that, it’s a dance party.
Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)
[...] to overcome my own hypersensitivity, I had no choice but to turn fearless.
Kim Gordon (Girl in a Band)
Piece of cake! :D
Sonic the Hedgehog
The sky turned a deep purple and all at once the stars and moon came out — and the sun shone at the same time. He had reached a layer of the upper atmosphere where the air was too thin to contain reflecting dust particles.
Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff)
At the moment of impact, I couldn’t help but look up at André, at first wondering, like a good many others, if we were experiencing an earthquake and then, having discovered we were not, out of sheer concern for his well-being. The sonic resonance was so intense I even observed our soundman remove his headphones to protect his ears.
Cary Elwes (As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride)
The sonic world of the foyer and vestibule comes at him distorted and from a distance, as if someone’s moving furniture underwater.
Dominic Smith (The Last Painting of Sara de Vos)
In sound we are born, in sound we are healed
Mehtab Benton (Gong Therapy)
The gong is not a musical instrument; the gong is God. It is the most pure sound that man could create out of which comes all music, all sounds and all words.
Yogi Bhajan
Every limbed animal has the Sonic hedgehog gene.
Neil Shubin (Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body)
Raw, alive and honest to the point of disgusting it's listener, Placebo set out to inspire mystery and confusion. Admitting to relishing groups who could make their audience vomit with the sheer intensity of their musical vibrations, Brian clearly knew how to make an impact. Discussing sonic overload with unsettling enthusiasm, he claimed "Some frequencies can make you physically ill or make your bowels loose. The Swans used to do it. By the end of gigs people would vomit because the frequencies were so nasty.
Chloe Govan (Misunderstood - The Brian Molko Story)
He had already decided that X rays, sonic probes, neutron beams, and all other nondestructive means of investigation would be brought into play before he called up the heavy artillery of the laser. It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but perhaps men were barbarians, beside the creatures who had made this thing.
Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey (Space Odyssey, #1))
Somebody put a Fascist Toejam cassette, 300 watts of sonic apocalypse, on to the van stereo, Isaiah gallantly handed Prairie up into the lurid fuchsia padding of this rolling orgy room, where she became indistinct among an unreadable pattern of Vomitones and their girlfriends, and quickly, in an arc unexpectedly graceful, they had all turned outward, tached up, engaged, and like a time machine departing for the future, forever too soon for Zoyd, boomed away up the thin, cloudpressed lane.
Thomas Pynchon (Vineland)
When people bitch about the death of the vinyl LP as a medium (and lord knows they bitch) what they’re mostly lamenting is the death of this kind of listening. Music as a concerted sonic experience, rather than the backing track to a flashing screen. What
Steve Almond (Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us)
Oh<" said American Stepmom, nodding fast, her flying squirrel hoodie nodding one second slower than her head. "Yes, yes, of course. But What if the X factor starts to dance the electric bugaloo with my sonic screwdriver and I get sent back to ancient Egypt?
Carlos Hernandez (Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe (Sal and Gabi, #2))
Is life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they don’t bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to be admonished? Is it less rousing if they don’t rattle your windows and nerves with indiscriminate sonic booms just because they can?
Rabih Alameddine (An Unnecessary Woman)
Isabelle: Mom an Dad won't be pleased if they find out. Simon: That you freed a possible criminal by trading away your brother to a warlock who looks like a gay Sonic the Hedgehog and dresses like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? No, probably not.
Cassandra Clare (City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1))
The Gong is a brotherhood of tones perfectly united and blended, a cosmic entity. In it the law of cohesion manifests fully. It is a mass of atoms and molecules; it is a host of tones, of cosmic lives. It is a concentric organic body. Through which the energy of sound flows uninterrupted.
Dane Rudhyar
The first one hundred pages were fueled by early Misfits (“Where Eagles Dare [fast version],” “Horror Business,” “Hybrid Moments”) and Blanck Mass (“Dead Format”). David Bowie is in every book, and I always put on Purple Rain and Daydream Nation when I write the final pages; so thanks to him and Prince and Sonic Youth.
Colson Whitehead (The Underground Railroad)
2100 Hours: The lights went out inside the compound. People throughout the auditorium began to shriek. It was chaos.           Then they experienced what felt like a sonic boom. Pack’s vehicle had blown apart, metal fragments hurled a quarter mile away. The CEV had knocked the main gate over as if it were a fist going through papier-mache. Once the explosion had run its course, the car was in flames, which caught some of the crew still wearing the night vision devices off guard.
John M Vermillion (Packfire (Simon Pack, #9))
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Mayank Tanwar
In England, people had been loudly proclaiming the death of the guitar and the birth of the synthesizer, but Sonic Youth and other American guitar bands started to create a buzz.
Kim Gordon (Girl in a Band)
Oklahoma Haiku "Don't know why they ain't got twister fries at Sonic." 'McDonald's got'em.
Beryl Dov
Both lyrically and sonically, glam metal is the sensible accompaniment for removing one's pants for money.
Chuck Klosterman (Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota)
According to the EPA, all the booming was—I quote—‘only mechanical sonic devices that simulate
Dean Koontz (The House at the End of the World)
This area produces a protein given the whimsical name Sonic Hedgehog,
Brian Switek (Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature)
-  What do you get if you tape a stick of dynamite to a hedgehog? SONIC BOOM!
Zakaria Abdulaziz (JOKES FOR KIDS : Over 400 Funny Jokes, Riddles , Chemistry Jokes , Tongue Twisters And Knock-Knock Jokes For Kids.)
David Bowie is in every book, and I always put on Purple Rain and Daydream Nation when I write the final pages; so thanks to him and Prince and Sonic Youth.
Colson Whitehead (The Underground Railroad)
Real spies don't have all the cool gadgets you see in the movies," Dak said, watching Sera struggle with the lock. "Though I sure wish we had a sonic screwdriver right about now.
Jennifer A. Nielsen (Behind Enemy Lines (Infinity Ring, #6))
The best way to describe the sonic environment at the '98 CES is: Imagine that the apocalypse took the form of a cocktail party.
David Foster Wallace
Fortunately, there’s an app for that! It’s called Sonic Sleep Coach, created by Daniel Gartenberg, PhD, who has been awarded more than $1 million in NIH grants to study sleep.
Dave Asprey (Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever)
foulest of moods, after a morning spent growling at her cheap, knockoff reagents for not dissolving, then not precipitating, then not sonicating, then not being enough for her to run her entire assay.
Ali Hazelwood (The Love Hypothesis)
Even when I’m caught off guard by a lathery shade of peach on the bottom corner of a painting at the Met, as if being reminded that I haven’t seen all the colors, and how there’s more to see, and how one color’s newness can invalidate all of my sureness. To experience infinity and sometimes too the teasing melancholy born from the smallest breakthroughs, like an unanticipated shade of peach, like Buster Keaton smiling, or my friend Doreen’s laugh—how living and opposite of halfhearted it is. Or my beautiful mother growing out her gray, or a lightning bolt’s fractal scarring on a human body, or Fantin-Latour’s hollyhocks, or the sound of someone practicing an instrument—the most sonically earnest sound. Or how staring at ocean water so blue, it leaves me bereft. In postcards, I’ll scribble “So blue!” because, what else?
Durga Chew-Bose (Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays)
I remember how the book talked about the pressure to please and be perfect that every woman falls into and then projects onto her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough. No woman can ever outrun what she has to do. No one can be all things - a mother, a good partner, a lover, as well as a competitor in the workplace.
Kim Gordon (Girl in a Band)
The Chronic is sonically incredible, but it’s hard to drive around singing songs about, ‘Eazy-E can eat a big fat dick,’” Rock wrote on his website. “But I got a feeling I’ll be singing ‘Gin and Juice’ when I’m ninety.
Ben Westhoff (Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap)
Years have passed since that day And I have long since forgotten the crush I had on that one beautiful, young flaming woman. I guess it goes to show that we can't get what we please if we always did Well then where would we be? (Fiery Princess, A Short Sonic Poem)
Logan Pethtel
When Congress approved the decision to retire the SR-71, the Smithsonian Institution requested that a Blackbird be delivered for eventual display in the Air and Space Museum in Washington and that we set a new transcontinental speed record delivering it from California to Dulles. I had the honor of piloting that final flight on March 6, 1990, for its final 2,300-mile flight between L.A. and D.C. I took off with my backseat navigator, Lt. Col. Joe Vida, at 4:30 in the morning from Palmdale, just outside L.A., and despite the early hour, a huge crowd cheered us off. We hit a tanker over the Pacific then turned and dashed east, accelerating to 2.6 Mach and about sixty thousand feet. Below stretched hundreds of miles of California coastline in the early morning light. In the east and above, the hint of a red sunrise and the bright twinkling lights from Venus, Mars, and Saturn. A moment later we were directly over central California, with the Blackbird’s continual sonic boom serving as an early wake-up call to the millions sleeping below on this special day. I pushed out to Mach 3.3.
Ben R. Rich (Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed)
Hardcore groups were singing songs about Ronald Reagan. I wasn't interested in this and preferred to sing about the darkness shimmering beneath the shiny quilt of American pop culture. I suppose you could say that Sonic Youth was always trying to defy people's expectations.
Kim Gordon (Girl in a Band)
Two dudes in line behind me argue loudly and irately first about some quarterback, then about some politician, then about Sonic hamburgers vs. Whataburger hamburgers. It must be exhausting to have so many strong opinions. I only have mild preferences, and usually not even that.
Lou Berney (Dark Ride)
And when she told us her wedding song - of course, they've already picked their wedding song, and of course, it's "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong - I said that choosing that song is the sonic equivalent of buying picture frames and never replacing the photos of the models.
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
The sudden noise through the headphones is disconcerting—a massive, evil-sounding slab of guitar, seemingly played with the sole intention of terrifying anyone who hasn’t yet lived through a roughly equivalent sonic experience, such as riding their tricycle under a malfunctioning cement mixer full of dying children.
Caitlin Moran (How to Build a Girl)
It was the best kind of class to have in the afternoon, an exercise in almost pure language, demanding nothing more than fractional consciousness since there wasn't the slightest hope of understanding what those poems were all about, and we drowsed and smiled, happy in our own little angel-infancy, snug in our Thamesian punt, and when the sonic belch of experimental jets went ripping across the desert we came close to applauding the symbolism; but a trembling applause it would have been, for we knew that it signaled the death of our drowsy England and the beginning of a new mortality, just months away now, the start of job, mate, child, desk, drink, sit, squat, quiver, die.
Don DeLillo (Américana)
They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, 'Arek!' Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark.
Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness)
Gainesville, FL was soft on teen shoplifters in the 90s. The police were rarely involved. But you got banned from the store. This divided friend groups. Some had to wait outside. They would be beside every record store. Caught with a Sonic Youth CD down their shirt. Waiting. I'd join them. Not because I was banned. I just liked flirting with the Bad Girls.
Damon Thomas (Southern Gothic Children's Book: A Rural Gloom Graphic Novel)
I was speaking metaphorically,’ Eggor said, speaking laconically.
Martin Adams (Sonic the Hedgehog in Robotnik's Laboratory)
A fantastic Riot Boy, Trash the Senses.. -Thurston Moore
David Rat (Happy Ending)
Gong is the only instrument that can create the vibration of affirming. Life becomes yes to you and the word no is eliminated from your dictionary.
Yogi Bhajan
Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries, because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up.
Kim Gordon
You...you lost your faith?" "No...just my convictions. I still very much believe in God- just not a god who condones human tithing." Lev begins to feel himself choking up with an unexpected flood of feeling, all the emotions that had been building up throughout their talk- throughout the weeks- arriving all at once like a sonic boom. "I never knew there was a choice.
Neal Shusterman (Unwind (Unwind, #1))
Several Sonic the Hedgehog games involved a quest to collect seven “Chaos Emeralds” that could be harnessed to obtain special powers. Inside the OASIS, dozens of different quests on Mobius Prime allowed you to collect the seven Chaos Emeralds, and I’d completed all of them. But if there was a way to trade the emeralds for one of the shards, I still hadn’t discovered it.
Ernest Cline (Ready Player Two (Ready Player One, #2))
medicine hadn’t really changed much since the days of leeches and poultices; nowadays they whirred one in centrifuges, realigned the body’s magnetic field, bombarded the victim with sonic waves, tapped into the cells to interrogate the RNA, and then admitted their ignorance without actually coming out and saying so. The only thing that had changed was that the bills were bigger.
Dan Simmons (Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1))
They have an almost infinite capacity for calculations and data manipulation. That would obviously be disastrous since the next natural step will be for them to use the AOI weapons for their own aims . He looked out to the street. The war had eliminated normal activity. Seattle’s densely populated suburbs had been hit with two Sonic-bombs . However, it’s possible that Deuce Lipton has finally gotten off the fence. He may well have
Brandt Legg (The List Keepers (The Justar Journal #3))
Sevro, swarmed by his daughters, makes faces at them as they eat. But when the air cracks with a sonic boom, he bolts upright, looks at the sky, and runs off into the house, urging his children to stay put. He returns a whole half an hour later arm in arm with his wife, hair a mess, two jacket buttons missing, touching a white napkin to a bloodied, split lip. My old friend Victra, immaculate in a high-collared green jacket threaded with gemstones, beams devilishly across the patio at me. She’s seven months pregnant with their fourth daughter. “Well, if it isn’t the Reaper in the leathery flesh. Apologies, my goodman. I’m dreadfully late.” Her long legs cover the distance in three strides. I greet her with a hug. She squeezes my butt hard enough to make me jump. She kisses Mustang on the head and slides into a chair, dominating the table. “Hello, gloomy one,” she says to Electra.
Pierce Brown (Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga, #4))
Advice. Who’s the coolest, toughest, hottest rocker girl you can think of?” “Debbie Harry,” Mom said. “Tha—” “Not finished,” Mom interrupted. “You can’t ask me to pick only one. That’s so Sophie’s Choice. Kathleen Hanna. Patti Smith. Joan Jett. Courtney Love, in her demented destructionist way. Lucinda Williams, even though she’s country she’s tough as nails. Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth, pushing fifty and still at it. That Cat Power woman. Joan Armatrading.
Gayle Forman (If I Stay (If I Stay, #1))
Nintendo not letting itself make a browser Mario game has not stopped a flash flood of in-browser Mario games. Super Mario Flash, New Super Mario Bros. Flash, Infinite Mario, and the amazing Super Mario Crossover, which lets you play the original SMB games using characters from Castlevania, Excitebike, Ninja Gaidan, and more. (If you like that, try Abobo's Big Adventure.) There are free (and unlicensed) Mario games where he rides a motorbike, takes a shotgun to the Mushroom Kingdom, decides to fight with his fists, is replaced by Sonic, replaces Pac-Man in a maze game, and plays dress-up. They receive no admonition from Nintendo's once-ferocious legal department. Why not? Iwata's explanation is commonsensical: "[I]t would not be appropriate if we treated people who did someone based on affection for Nintendo as criminals." This is also why no one has been told by lawyers to stop selling Wario-as-a-pimp T-shirts.
Jeff Ryan (Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America)
The whales always fell silent when the throbbing hum of humanity grew overwhelming. Whenever a ship of any size came near, I had to take off the headset to protect my ears. I wondered if a species that had taken millennia to evolve such a delicate and sophisticated sense of hearing could adapt to humanity’s sonic onslaught. My notes from the time bear witness to the effect on my own primitive ears: “I have been listening to boats all day; my head is throbbing; the silence of my canvas tent feels good tonight—poor whales.” That
Alexandra Morton (Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us)
When the Bolide Fragmentation Rate shot up through a certain level on Day 701, marking the formal beginning of the White Sky, a number of cultural organizations launched programs that they had been planning since around the time of the Crater Lake announcement. Many of these were broadcast on shortwave radio, and so Ivy had her pick of programs from Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Tiananmen Square, the Potala Palace, the Great Pyramids, the Wailing Wall. After sampling all of them she locked her radio dial on Notre Dame, where they were holding the Vigil for the End of the World and would continue doing so until the cathedral fell down in ruins upon the performers’ heads and extinguished all life in the remains of the building. She couldn’t watch it, since video bandwidth was scarce, but she could imagine it well: the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, its ranks swollen by the most prestigious musicians of the Francophone world, all dressed in white tie and tails, ball gowns and tiaras, performing in shifts around the clock, playing a few secular classics but emphasizing the sacred repertoire: masses and requiems. The music was marred by the occasional thud, which she took to be the sonic booms of incoming bolides. In most cases the musicians played right through. Sometimes a singer would skip a beat. An especially big boom produced screams and howls of dismay from the audience, blended with the clank and clatter of shattered stained glass raining to the cathedral’s stone floor. But for the most part the music played sweetly, until it didn’t. Then there was nothing.
Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
First, there is hardly an innocent app; if it’s not tracking you now, it may be doing so in the next week or month: “There is an entire industry based upon these trackers, and apps identified as ‘clean’ today may contain trackers that have not yet been identified. Tracker code may also be added by developers to new versions of apps in the future.” Second is that even the most innocent-seeming applications such as weather, flashlights, ride sharing, and dating apps are “infested” with dozens of tracking programs that rely on increasingly bizarre, aggressive, and illegible tactics to collect massive amounts of behavioral surplus ultimately directed at ad targeting. For example, the ad tracker FidZup developed “communication between a sonic emitter and a mobile phone. . . .” It can detect the presence of mobile phones and therefore their owners by diffusing a tone, inaudible to the human ear, inside a building: “Users installing ‘Bottin Gourmand,’ a guide to restaurants and hotels in France, would thus have their physical location tracked via retail outlet speakers as they move around Paris.
Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power)
God's creation was linguistic, & the letters of the first potent word that (S)He uttered contained all the forms of creation, each form presided over by the name of a letter of the alphabet, which is in turn composed of letters, each of which has a name, & so on to infinity... Creation, on other words, is eternal & ongoing: "the multitude of letters swells out into the infinitude," & "letters are continually generating other letters." The alphabet speaks a divine language, ... each letter calling up, but never pinning down, the enigmatic nature of reality, the word of God. (S.177)
Guy L. Beck (Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound)
she approached the town of Pampa. This part of the Panhandle was so flat that it was paradoxically vertiginous, a two-dimensional planetary surface off which, having no trace of topography to hold on to, you felt you could fall or be swept. No relief in any sense of the word. The land so commercially and agriculturally marginal that Pampans thought nothing of wasting it by the half acre, so that each low and ugly building sat by itself. Dusty dead or dying halfheartedly planted trees floated by in Leila’s headlights. To her they were Texan and therefore lovely in their way. The Sonic parking
Jonathan Franzen (Purity)
Think of a power cut and how it brings into focus the eerie quiet that befalls a house when the various mechanical drones that our brains are so adept at tuning out - the low hum of central heating, the buzz of the refrigerator, the churn of the dryer - actually stop. The removal without forewarning of the small domestic symphony we seldom otherwise notice has a disquieting effect. But enough of the dishwasher. What of the cosmic infinity? What of the godhead? I'm sitting in my kitchen with a cup of tea, listening to the sound the universe made as it expanded 600,000 years after the Big Bang. It sounds like Hawkwind.
Harry Sword (Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion)
I know as soon as we hit the sweet spot, an intangible instant when the music gains control of fluttering wings to take real flight - soaring, swooping, diving and rising in the small studio. No single one of us is in control. The wall of sound is its own thing - lifted, weight shared, by five pairs of hands. I shake hair from closed eyes just because I need to move. If I let the pressure build and build and keep it in my hands, in the guitar, I'll explode. We carve out places for the verses, the chorus repetitions, and the coda. We line the edges of sonic space with rhythm and melody and stand Scope's sharp samples at each corner.
Emma Trevayne (Coda (Coda, #1))
Except, of course, this one wasn’t in the script. At the moment of impact, I couldn’t help but look up at André, at first wondering, like a good many others, if we were experiencing an earthquake and then, having discovered we were not, out of sheer concern for his well-being. The sonic resonance was so intense I even observed our soundman remove his headphones to protect his ears. As the fart continued, I looked back at André. What struck me, besides, of course, the sheer immensity of the wind, was that steam appeared to be rising from his hairpiece, which, given that it was a particularly hot day, was apparently not unusual for him.
Cary Elwes (As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride)
The soundscape of the world is changing. Modern man is beginning to inhabit a world with an acoustic environment radically different from any he has hitherto known. These new sounds, which differ in quality and intensity from those of the past, have alerted many researchers to the dangers of an indiscriminate and imperialistic spread of more and larger sounds into every corner of man’s life. Noise pollution is now a world problem. It would seem that the world soundscape has reached an apex of vulgarity in our time, and many experts have predicted universal deafness as the ultimate consequence unless the problem can be brought quickly under control.
R. Murray Schafer (The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World)
There had been an attempt over the summer to mix that Camden Lock lot with this Caldwell lot, but Keisha Blake did not especially care for Baudelaire or Bukowski or Nick Drake or Sonic Youth or Joy Division or boys who looked like girls or vice versa or Anne Rice or William Burroughs of Kafka's Metamorphosis or CND or Glastonbury or the Situationists or Breathless or Samuel Beckett or Andy Warhol or a million other Camden things, and when Keisha brought a wondrous Monie Love 7-inch to play on Leah's hi-fi there was something awful in the way Leah blushed and conceded it was probably OK to dance to. They had only Prince left, and he was wearing thin.
Zadie Smith (NW)
—it was his business to help them play. He could think of nothing better to do with his life, for he knew that when they felt free to play, their souls showed; who they were came out more clearly than at almost any other time. And the more one got used to letting one’s self show, unafraid, the more joy came walking into one’s life. And then the Self showed itself still more—and the cycle continued, joy engendering joy, endless. He leaned on the wall, warm with the thought of what his work was freeing those around him to be. Then the matter-gain on the 4D chessboard across the room went out again in a scream of feedback, and he grinned and went off to find the sonic screwdriver, and a brush and dustpan for the pieces that had blown up— —
Diane Duane (The Wounded Sky (Star Trek #13))
We hear the crack of a bullwhip because its tip is moving faster than the speed of sound, creating a shock wave, a small sonic boom. A thunderclap has a similar origin. It was once thought that airplanes could not travel faster than sound. Today supersonic flight is commonplace. But the light barrier is different from the sound barrier. It is not merely an engineering problem like the one the supersonic airplane solves. It is a fundamental law of Nature, as basic as gravity. And there are no phenomena in our experience—like the crack of the bullwhip or the clap of thunder for sound—to suggest the possibility of traveling in a vacuum faster than light. On the contrary, there is an extremely wide range of experience—with nuclear accelerators and atomic clocks, for example—in precise quantitative agreement with special relativity.
Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
Subsequent experiments conducted by Tom Danley in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid and in Chambers above the King's Chamber suggest that the pyramid was constructed with a sonic purpose. Danley identifies four resident frequencies, or notes, that are enhanced by the structure of the pyramid, and by the materials used in its construction. The notes form an F Sharp chord, which according to ancient Egyptian texts were the harmonic of our planet. Moreover, Danley's tests show that these frequencies are present in the King's Chamber even when no sounds are being produced. They are there in frequencies that range from 16 Hertz down to 1/2 Hertz, well below the range of human hearing. According to Danley, these vibrations are caused by the wind blowing across the ends of the so-called shafts—in the same way as sounds are created when one blows across the top of a bottle.
Christopher Dunn (The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt)
From the river to the sea. From here to eternity. Swimming and diving in a river to rest by the sea, on the shore. There are forests all around, outside this unique tunnel of water and love and light. The green is powerful, more cutting-edge than dream-like. Really, really intense. It hurts. It cuts. The leaves, the nettle. Stay inside. Warm inside. Plenty of air inside. The forests and jungles all around are peaceful, quiet, quiet, peaceful, but too vivid to be bearable in this Matrix, in this matrix of sound, sonic oceanic tunnel, natural flowing watercourses, light, different shades of grey, white, black, yellow, blue… The green outside is religious, fanatic, horror vacui, but calm, calming from a distance, from a safe distance. Love and hate in everything that is, in the green every nettle and leave and in the river and sea every fish. Floating on a cloud made of feathers while sleeping on a dream while sleeping on an immaculate hotel bed on an island, tout seul.
Alexandre Alphonse (Ostinato, by Eluvium)
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The word derives from Greek μουσική (mousike; "art of the Muses"). The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their recreation in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms. Music can be divided into genres and subgenres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to personal interpretation, and occasionally controversial. Within the arts, music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art, and auditory art. It may also be divided among art music and folk music. There is also a strong connection between music and mathematics. Music may be played and heard live, may be part of a dramatic work or film, or may be recorded. To many people in many cultures, music is an important part of their way of life. Ancient Greek and Indian philosophers defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies and vertically as harmonies. Common sayings such as "the harmony of the spheres" and "it is music to my ears" point to the notion that music is often ordered and pleasant to listen to. However, 20th-century composer John Cage thought that any sound can be music, saying, for example, "There is no noise, only sound. Musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez summarizes the relativist, post-modern viewpoint: "The border between music and noise is always culturally defined—which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus ... By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be.
Music (Sing for Joy Songbook)
If water is bombarded with intense sound waves, under the right conditions, then air bubbles can form which quickly contract and then suddenly disappear in a flash of light. The conventional explanation of what is being seen here is that a shock wave, a little sonic boom, is created inside the bubble, which dumps its energy, causing the interior to be quickly heated to flash point. But a more dramatic possibility, first suggested by the Nobel prize-winner Julian Schwinger, has been entertained. Suppose the surface of the bubble is acting like a Casimir plate so that, as the bubble shrinks, it excludes more and more wavelengths of the zero point fluctuations from existing within it. They can't simply disappear into nothing; energy must be conserved, so they deposit their energy into light. At present, experimenters are still unconvinced that this is what is really happening, but it is remarkable that so fundamental a question about a highly visible phenomena is still unresolved.
John D. Barrow (The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe)
El problema no era su trabajo, que me parecía magnífico, sino su gusto musical. (...) Del walkman salía a todo volumen una música horrenda de cualquiera de esos grupos que los veinteañeros suelen escuchar. Mientras que pudiera probarse científicamente que su música era inferior a lo que escuchábamos los de mi generación, todo estaba bien (...) Sonic Youth durante horas, y, de repente, el Beethoven tardío. Después, Grand Ole Opry, catos gregrorianos, Shostakovich, John Coltrane. (...) Estaba dedicándose a gastarse los primeros cheques de su vida en una exploración metódica de nuevos tipos de música, escuchándolos con atención, formándose distintas opiniones sobre ellos, odiando algunos y disfrutando de todo el proceso. Era así en todos los demás aspectos de su vida. Tenía barba y pelo medio largo, y un día sin ningún miramiento, se lo afeitó todo y apareció calvo: "Pensé que sería interesante probar este aspecto algún tiempo, ver si la forma en la que la gente interactúa conmigo cambia". Era irritante lo abierto que estaba a todo y lo dispuesto a probar cualquier novedad; además, era deprimente porque me hacía darme cuenta de mi propia cerrazón mental.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals)
I hope at 50 I'll be dancing like Gianluca Vacchi Party, whiskey, Bellini, Martini, Bloody Maries Bad & Boujee, Tutti Fruity booty, type that really moves me Kundalini rising, energy fill me completely I hope at 50 I'll be writing books like JK Rowling Pen and paper take me places, countries far and foreign Find a cafe up in Edinburgh, write in Scotland Let the stories in my head come out, bloom and blossom I hope at 50
I'll be wealthy like Carlos Slim Buying yachts and mansions and my mother shiny things Encrusted diamond dial on a new Patek Philippe Chill in Maldives but do charity in Ardabil I hope at 50
I'll be funny like Stephen Colbert Cracking witty jokes, making everyone laugh in tears Laughter it goes round and round like a carousel Chronic comic sonic sounds of haha everywhere I hope at 50
I'll be stoic like Robert De Niro Zeno school of thought put an end to my evil ego I hope at 50
I'll be fit as The Rock, Dwayne Johnson Hard rock abs to be paired with an even harder mindset I hope at 50,
I'll be wise like Denzel Washington
Wisdom, knowledge and the faith of God under my skin I hope at 50,
I'll find real love like George Clooney
Amal Alamuddin clone is the type that really moves me
Soroosh Shahrivar (Letter 19)
Depression is not sadness, not even a state of mind, it is a (neuro)philosophical (dis)position. Beyond Pop’s bipolar oscillation between evanescent thrill and frustrated hedonism, beyond Jagger’s Miltonian Mephistopheleanism, beyond Iggy’s negated carny, beyond Roxy’s lounge lizard reptilian melancholy, beyond the pleasure principle altogether, Joy Division were the most Schopenhauerian of rock groups, so much so that they barely belonged to rock at all. Since they had so thoroughly stripped out rock’s libidinal motor – it would be better to say that they were, libidinally as well as sonically, anti-rock. Or perhaps, as they thought, they were the truth of rock, rock divested of all illusions. (The depressive is always confident of one thing: that he is without illusions.) What makes Joy Division so Schopenhauerian is the disjunction between Curtis’s detachment and the urgency of the music, its implacable drive standing in for the dumb insatiability of the life-Will, the Beckettian ‘I must go on’ not experienced by the depressive as some redemptive positivity, but as the ultimate horror, the life-Will paradoxically assuming all the loathsome properties of the undead (whatever you do, you can’t extinguish it, it keeps coming back).
Anonymous
Watching, the ancient bull whale was swept up in memories of his own birthing. His mother had been savaged by sharks three months later; crying over her in the shallows of Hawaiki, he had been succoured by the golden human who became his master. The human had heard the young whale’s distress and had come into the sea, playing a flute. The sound was plangent and sad as he tried to communicate his oneness with the young whale’s mourning. Quite without the musician knowing it, the melodic patterns of the flute’s phrases imitated the whalesong of comfort. The young whale drew nearer to the human, who cradled him and pressed noses with the orphan in greeting. When the herd travelled onward, the young whale remained and grew under the tutelage of his master. The bull whale had become handsome and virile, and he had loved his master. In the early days his master would play the flute and the whale would come to the call. Even in his lumbering years of age the whale would remember his adolescence and his master; at such moments he would send long, undulating songs of mourning through the lambent water. The elderly females would swim to him hastily, for they loved him, and gently in the dappled warmth they would minister to him. In a welter of sonics, the ancient bull whale would communicate his nostalgia. And then, in the echoing water, he would hear his master’s flute. Straight away the whale would cease his feeding and try to leap out of the sea, as he used to when he was younger and able to speed toward his master. As the years had burgeoned the happiness of those days was like a siren call to the ancient bull whale. But his elderly females were fearful; for them, that rhapsody of adolescence, that song of the flute, seemed only to signify that their leader was turning his thoughts to the dangerous islands to the south-west.
Witi Ihimaera (The Whale Rider)
Linguistic and musical sound systems illustrate a common theme in the study of music-language relations. On the surface, the two domains are dramatically different. Music uses pitch in ways that speech does not, and speech organizes timbre to a degree seldom seen in music. Yet beneath these differences lie deep connections in terms of cognitive and neural processing. Most notably, in both domains the mind interacts with one particular aspect of sound (pitch in music, and timbre in speech) to create a perceptually discretized system. Importantly, this perceptual discretization is not an automatic byproduct of human auditory perception. For example, linguistic and musical sequences present the ear with continuous variations in amplitude, yet loudness is not perceived in terms of discrete categories. Instead, the perceptual discretization of musical pitch and linguistic timbre reflects the activity of a powerful cognitive system, built to separate within-category sonic variation from differences that indicate a change in sound category. Although music and speech differ in the primary acoustic feature used for sound category formation, it appears that the mechanisms that create and maintain learned sound categories in the two domains may have a substantial degree of overlap. Such overlap has implications for both practical and theoretical issues surrounding human communicative development. In the 20th century, relations between spoken and musical sound systems were largely explored by artists. For example, the boundary between the domains played an important role in innovative works such as Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Reich's Different Trains (cf. Risset, 1991). In the 21st century, science is finally beginning to catch up, as relations between spoken and musical sound systems prove themselves to be a fruitful domain for research in cognitive neuroscience. Such work has already begun to yield new insights into our species' uniquely powerful communicative abilities.
Aniruddh D. Patel (Music, Language, and the Brain)
For Dylan, this electric assault threatened to suck the air out of everything else, only there was too much radio oxygen to suck. “Like a Rolling Stone” was the giant, all-consuming anthem of the new “generation gap” disguised as a dandy’s riddle, a dealer’s come-on. As a two-sided single, it dwarfed all comers, disarmed and rejuvenated listeners at each hearing, and created vast new imaginative spaces for groups to explore both sonically and conceptually. It came out just after Dylan’s final acoustic tour of Britain, where his lyrical profusion made him a bard, whose tabloid accolade took the form of political epithet: “anarchist.” As caught on film by D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back, the young folkie had already graduated to rock star in everything but instrumentation. “Satisfaction” held Dylan back at number two during its four-week July hold on Billboard’s summit, giving way to Herman’s Hermits’ “I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am” and Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” come August, novelty capstones to Dylan’s unending riddle. (In Britain, Dylan stalled at number four.) The ratio of classics to typical pop schlock, like Freddie and the Dreamers’ “I’m Telling You Now” or Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual,” suddenly got inverted. For cosmic perspective, yesterday’s fireball, Elvis Presley, sang “Do the Clam.” Most critics have noted the Dylan influence on Lennon’s narratives. Less space gets devoted to Lennon’s effect on Dylan, which was overt: think of how Dylan rewires Chuck Berry (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”) or revels in inanity (“Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”). Even more telling, Lennon’s keening vocal harmonies in “Nowhere Man,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” and “Dr. Robert” owed as much to the Byrds and the Beach Boys, high-production turf Dylan simply abjured. Lennon also had more stylistic stretch, both in his Beatle context and within his own sensibility, as in the pagan balalaikas in “Girl” or the deliberate amplifier feedback tripping “I Feel Fine.” Where Dylan skewed R&B to suit his psychological bent, Lennon pursued radical feats of integration wearing a hipster’s arty façade, the moptop teaching the quiet con. Building up toward Rubber Soul throughout 1965, Beatle gravity exerted subtle yet inexorable force in all directions.
Tim Riley (Lennon)