Vocal Cords Quotes

A giraffe has a black tongue twenty-seven inches long and no vocal cords. A giraffe has nothing to say. He just goes on giraffing.

Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much. Language consists of five basic sounds produced by the vocal cords. They are the vowels a, e, i, o, u. The other sounds are consonants produced by air pressure: s, f, g, and so forth. Do you believe some combination of such basic sounds could ever explain who you are, or the ultimate purpose of the universe, or even what a tree or stone is in its depth?

You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to cauliflower.

There’s something simmering inside of me. Something I’ve never dared to tap into, something I’m afraid to acknowledge. There’s a part of me clawing to break free from the cage I’ve trapped it in, banging on the doors of my heart, begging to be free. Begging to let go. Every day I feel like I’m reliving the same nightmare. I open my mouth to shout, to fight, to swing my fists, but my vocal cords are cut, my arms are heavy and weighted down as if trapped in wet cement and I’m screaming but no one can hear me, no one can reach me and I’m caught. And it’s killing me. I’ve always had to make myself submissive, subservient, twisted into a pleading, passive mop just to make everyone else feel safe and comfortable. My existence has become a fight to prove I’m harmless, and I’m not a threat, that I’m capable of living among other human beings without hurting them. And I’m so tired I’m so tire I’m so tired I’m so tired and sometimes I get so angry. I don’t know what’s happening to me.

Does the giraffe know what he's for? Or care? Or even think about his place in things? A giraffe has a black tongue twenty-seven inches long and no vocal cords. A giraffe has nothing to say. He just goes on giraffing.

My vocal cords lived their own life, wild and free.

By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords." (p. 28)

Crying is really bad for your vocal cords

The only reason I don't kill him," he remember the woman saying, her voice sounding like the scrape of iron against iron, a corrosion of vocal cords, "is because he's not important enough.

Shut up, already. Just once, could I get a demon with no vocal cords? (Anonymous) At least they’re not puking on us this time. (Wynter) Small favor that. (Anonymous)

Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men.

We all received invitations, made by hand from construction paper, with balloons containing our names in Magic Marker. Our amazement at being formally invited to a house we had only visited in our bathroom fantasies was so great that we had to compare one another's invitations before we believed it. It was thrilling to know that the Lisbon girls knew our names, that their delicate vocal cords had pronounced their syllables, and that they meant something in their lives. They had had to labor over proper spellings and to check our addresses in the phone book or by the metal numbers nailed to the trees.

Me: ‘Isn’t there another midwife who can do it?’ Midwife: ‘She’s on her break.’ Me: ‘I’m on my break.’ (Untrue.) Midwife: ‘You don’t get breaks.’ (Depressing but true.) Me: (pleading, in a tone of voice I’ve never managed before, like I’ve unlocked a secret level of my vocal cords) ‘But it’s my birthday.’ (Depressing but true.) Midwife: ‘It’s labour ward – it’s always someone’s birthday.

You got to think a musical instrument is human or, anyway, alive....You take a fiddle now, we say it has a neck, and in the human neck what do you find? Vocal cords like strings, where the sound comes from.

Pain! Deep, tearing, throbbing, needle-sharp, hammer-blunt pain – ripping through his body and through his mind, twisting deep in his guts and slicing at his skin with razors and broken glass. Oskan wanted to scream, but his vocal cords had burned away. He was desperate for water and he could hear it dripping all around him, but his charred tongue found nothing in his mouth but blisters and scorched flesh. For hours he lay on the ropes of the low bed, unable to move, the pressure of the hemp on his destroyed skin sending new agonies deep into his body.

I kept thinking the rest of my sentence would emerge from the air passing through my vocal cords, but nothing happened.

Just because you were given vocal cords does not mean you have to endlessly use them,

...despite the headmaster's romantic claims that the origin of the cravat went back to the silk fascalia worn by Roman orators to warm their vocal cords, Langdon knew that, etymologically, "cravat" actually derived from a ruthless band of Croat mercenaries who donned knotted neckerchiefs before they stormed into battle. To this day, this ancient battle garb was donned by modern office warriors hoping to intimidate their enemies in daily boardroom battles.

He leaned over Augustus to look at me and through tightly strung vocal cords said, “She didn’t want to do it after.” “She didn’t want to dump a blind guy,” I said. He nodded, the tears not like tears so much as a quiet metronome—steady, endless. “She said she couldn’t handle it,” he told me. “I’m about to lose my eyesight and she can’t handle it.

I'm not even capable of an auditory response; my vocal cords have shorted out and my jaw has dropped to the floor. Raunch-y.

my mind struggled top condense all that had led to me being here. My vocal cords fought to express the memories that leaked out; I felt the weight of it all pressing down on me.

Ever since I was small, opera has been a living, breathing part of me. The problem is that as I’ve grown, it’s become more demanding… an entity that controls me. Once a song speaks to my subconscious, the notes become a toxin I have to release through my diaphragm, my vocal cords, my tongue.

There have existed, and for the time being still exist, many cultures whose members refuse to cut the vocal cords of the planet, and refuse to enter into the deadening deal which we daily accept as part of living. It is perhaps significant that prior to contact with Western Civilization many of these cultures did not have rape, nor did they have child abuse (the Okanagans of what is now British Columbia, to provide just one example, had neither word nor concept in their language corresponding to the abuse of a child.)

It wouldn’t really matter if I asked her to please listen to me a thousand more times. That wasn’t something my mother excelled at, much less ever practiced. Listening was reserved for those whose vocal cords took breaks.

Don't you get it yet,Harriet?" Nick says in total exasperation. "i like that you know about the stars in the rain and the shapes of the clouds and the heartbeat rate of the hummingbird. I like that you know that giraffes don't have vocal cords and the sharks can't stop moving. I like the way you stick your little nose in the air.....

The shriek sounded again. No way was it a human cry. No human vocal cord could produce such a bowel-shatteringly terrifying cacophony as that. An explosion of cracking, snapping, and clacking, like some sinister breakfast cereal.

As she died, Mary was alone on the planet as were Dwayne Hoover or Kilgore Trout. She had never reproduced. There were no friends or relatives to watch her die. So she spoke her very last words on the planet to Cyprian Ukwende. She did not have enough breath left to make her vocal cords buzz. She could only move her lips noiselessly. Here is all she had to say about death: 'Oh my, oh my.' . . . Like all Earthlings at the point of death, Mary Young sent faint reminders of herself to those who had known her. She released a small could of telepathic butterflies, and one of these brushed Dwayne Hoover, nine miles away. Dwayne heard a tired voice from somewhere behind his head, even though no one was back there. It said this to Dayne: 'Oh my, oh my." . . .

And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob – earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very hard not to hear of. If Bob could have designed a girl he would have started by getting rid of her vocal cords.

Talking animals were the topic of this morning's Patty Winters Show. An octopus was floating in a makeshift aquarium with a microphone attached to one of its tentacles and it kept asking - or so its "trainer," who is positive that mollusks have vocal cords, assured us - for "cheese." I watched, vaguely transfixed, until I started to sob.

Just because we all have wombs doesn't mean we have to be mothers, just like we all have vocal cords doesn't mean we're all opera singers.

Everybody with a womb doesn’t have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer.’ Gloria Steinem, Chelsea Lately, October 2011

The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

Is that the biggest favor your vocal cords have done to anyone this week?

With a sudden flash of anger, she blurted, "Lash wasn't impotent, all right? He wasn't ... impotent-" The temperature in the room plummeted so fast and so far, her breath came out in clouds. And what she saw in the mirror made her swing around and take a step back from John: His blue eyes glowed with an unholy light and his upper lip curled up to reveal fangs that were sharp and so long they looked like daggers. Objects all around the room began to vibrate: the lamps on the bed stands, the clothes on their hangers, the mirror on the wall. The collective rattling crescendoed to a dull roar and she had to steady herself on the bureau or run the risk of being knocked on her ass. The air was alive. Supercharged. Electric. Dangerous. And John was the center of the raging energy, his hands cranking into fists so tight his forearms trembled, his thighs grabbing onto his bones as he sank down into fighting stance. John's mouth stretched wide as his head shot forward on his spine... and he let out a war cry- Sound exploded all around her, so loud she had to cover her ears, so powerful she felt the blast against her face. For a moment, she thought he'd found his voice- except it wasn't vocal cords making that bellowing noise. The glass in the sliders blew out behind him, the sheets shattering into thousands of shards that blasted free of the house, the fragments bouncing on the slate and catching the light like raindrops... Or like tears.

When I break you, it won’t be your leg. Or your ribs. Or your vocal cords. It’s your mind I’m after, Violet. Your mind and your soul, because that black heart that beats behind your ribcage? That already belongs to me.

You have an unusual voice,' he says. 'Raspy. Quite fetching, really.' 'I damaged my vocal cords a long time ago,' I inform him. 'Screaming.' Oak steps between us, and I am grateful for the reprieve. 'What a fine gentleman you make, Jack.' Jack turns to the prince, his sinister smile dropped back into place. 'Oak and Wren, Wren and Oak. Delightful. Named for woodland creatures, but neither of you so simple.' He glances at Tiernan and Hyacinthe. 'Not nearly as simple as these two.

I practically left my skin in a puddle on the floor. Seriously?! A man’s voice echoed in the cavern, and I had no idea where he was. I fought the urge to run screaming around the cellar like a beheaded chicken with vocal cords, then took a deep breath and winced.

An example of the Peter Pan syndrome is used in Aldous Huxley's 1962 novel Island. In it, one of the characters talks about male "dangerous delinquents" and "power-loving troublemakers" who are "Peter Pans". These types of males were "boys who can't read, won't learn, don't get on with anyone, and finally turn to the more violent forms of delinquency." He uses Adolf Hitler as an archetype of this phenomenon:[15] A Peter Pan if ever there was one. Hopeless at school. Incapable either of competing or co- operating. Envying all the normally successful boys—and, because he envied, hating them and, to make himself feel better, despising them as inferior beings. Then came the time for puberty. But Adolf was sexually backward. Other boys made advances to girls, and the girls responded. Adolf was too shy, too uncertain of his manhood. And all the time incapable of steady work, at home only in the compensatory Other World of his fancy. There, at the very least, he was Michelangelo. Here, unfortunately, he couldn't draw. His only gifts were hatred, low cunning, a set of indefatigable vocal cords and a talent for nonstop talking at the top of his voice from the depths of his Peter-Panic paranoia. Thirty or forty million deaths and heaven knows how many billions of dollars—that was the price the world had to pay for little Adolf's retarded maturation.

Just before words vanish they acquire a sickening pulpy smell, like clumps of dead grass whipped by the wind into dry little spheres, and they spill from the brain and the vocal cords, down through the blood vessels and nerves to the deepest, farthest corners of your body.

If you do have to have an important conversation over the phone, a good tip is to smile, even though the person you’re speaking to can’t see you. We hear emotions in the voice, because facial expressions and emotions both change the shape, length, and therefore sound of the vocal cords. If you smile on the phone, your colleagues will hear the warmth coming through in your voice.

When I am in a situation where I feel uncomfortable about speaking but it is necessary for me to speak, or if I feel 'put on the spot' my voice sounds strained, really weird, and it feels as if I have no control over how I sound in these situations. Sometimes then my voice is barely audible and I am frequently asked to repeat myself. Attempts at speaking are often embarrassing, shaming experiences for me. I sound quite different when speaking with someone I am more relaxed with, but I don't like the way my voice sounds at the best of times; I was horrified when I heard a recording of myself. Because of this inhibition about speaking, I have never learned to project my voice or to use it effectively. I often feel that I could no more use my vocal cords to break a silence, to get somebody's attention or to initiate an interaction than I could run through fire or do something dangerous in my life.

God, I was livid. I still am.” “No, you’re not.” I turned to Colin. “Your skin is no longer flushed, your vocal cords are relaxed, making your voice… You don’t want me to continue.” Colin closed his eyes and sighed. When he opened his eyes, he looked resigned. He took my hand in his and squeezed. “You’re like the un-secret keeper.” “That doesn’t make sense.” I turned back to Manny. “You’re a liar. And you have double standards.” “I beg your pardon?” “I said, you’re a lia—” “I heard you the first time, missy.

Neckties had been required six days a week when Langdon attended Phillips Exeter Academy, and despite the headmaster’s romantic claims that the origin of the cravat went back to the silk fascalia worn by Roman orators to warm their vocal cords, Langdon knew that, etymologically, cravat actually derived from a ruthless band of “Croat” mercenaries who donned knotted neckerchiefs before they stormed into battle. To this day, this ancient battle garb was donned by modern office warriors hoping to intimidate their enemies in daily boardroom battles.

I spend the next few days watching Maï die. I can't stand that voice, that protest. Katzenelenbogen shows up and explains in that rational, no-nonsense, doctoral tone that no one has the right to make such a fuss over a cat, while the whole world. . . . . I kick them out, both him and the world. Maï is no longer a cat. She is a human being in agony. Every living thing that suffers is a human being. She is cuddled in my arms, a small ball of lackluster fur, which gives her a horrible stuffed air already smacking of taxidermists. Every now and then she raises her head, looks at me inquiringly and miaows a question I understand, but am unable to answer. Our vocal cords are totally inadequate there. What goings-on about a mere cat, huh? I hate your guts, you antisentimental, antiemotional, hardheaded rationalists. You are the ones who have raised the going rate of sensitivity. You have put all your emphasis on ideas, and ideas without "emotions" and without "sentimentalism," that's the world you have built, your work. All the pseudo-people who have the Nazi arrogance to be reading this book make my hands ache for a grenade.

Brutality is boring. Over and over, hell night after hell night, the same old dumb, tedious, bestial routine: making men crawl; making men groan, hanging men from the bars; shoving men; slapping men; freezing men in the showers; running men into walls; displaying shackled fathers to their sons and sons to their fathers. And if it turned out that you'd been given the wrong man, when you were done making his life unforgettably small and nasty, you allowed him to be your janitor and pick up the other prisoners' trash. There was always another prisoner, and another. Faceless men under hoods: you stripped them of their clothes, you stripped them of their pride. There wasn't much more you could take away from them, but people are inventive: one night some soldiers took a razor to one of Saddam's former general in Tier 1A and shaved off his eyebrows. He was an old man. "He looked like a grandfather and seemed like a nice guy," Sabrina Harman said, and she had tried to console him, telling him he looked younger and slipping him a few cigarettes. Then she had to make him stand at attention facing a boom box blasting the rapper Eminem, singing about raping his mother, or committing arson, or sneering at suicides, something like that⁠—these were some of the best-selling songs in American history. "Eminem is pretty much torture all in himself, and if one person's getting tortured, everybody is, because that music's horrible," Harman said. The general maintained his bearing against the onslaught of noise. "He looked so sad," Harman said. "I felt so bad for the guy." In fact, she said, "Out of everything I saw, that's the worst." This seems implausible, or at least illogical, until you think about it. The MI block was a place where a dead guy was just a dead guy. And a guy hanging from a window frame or a guy forced to drag his nakedness over a wet concrete floor⁠—well, how could you relate to that, except maybe to take a picture? But a man who kept his chin up while you blasted him with rape anthems, and old man shorn of his eyebrows whose very presence made you think of his grandkids--you could let that get to you, especially if you had to share in his punishment: "Slut, you think I won't choke no whore / til the vocal cords don't work in her throat no more!..." or whatever the song was.

By focusing on the interior of a speaker's larynx and using infrared, he was able to convert the visible vibrations of the vocal cords into sound of fair quality, but that did not satisfy him. He worked for a while on vibrations picked up from panes of glass in windows and on framed pictures, and he experimented briefly with the diaphragms in speaker systems, intercoms and telephones. He kept on into October without stopping, and finally achieved a device that would give tinny but recognizable sound from any vibrating surface - a wall, a floor, even the speaker's own cheek or forehead.

One reason infants can’t remember events when they are very small is that they don’t have the language to describe them. Their vocal cords simply aren’t equipped, until a certain age, which means instead they use their larynxes for emergency situations only. In fact, there is a direct projection that goes from the amygdala of an infant to his voice box, which can make that baby cry very quickly in a situation of extreme distress. It’s such a universal sound that studies have been done showing that just about every other human—even college-age boys who have no experience with babies—will try to provide assistance

The last rain had come at the beginning of April and now, at the first of June, all but the hardiest mosquitoes had left their papery skins in the grass. It was already seven o'clock in the morning, long past time to close windows and doors, trap what was left of the night air slightly cooler only by virtue of the dark. The dust on the gravel had just enough energy to drift a short distance and then collapse on the flower beds. The sun had a white cast, as if shade and shadow, any flicker of nuance, had been burned out by its own fierce center. There would be no late afternoon gold, no pale early morning yellow, no flaming orange at sunset. If the plants had vocal cords they would sing their holy dirges like slaves.

Okay,” Max said. “Now I’m terrified that I, um, said it too late?” His uncertainty turned his words into a question. “Am I too late?” he asked again, as if he actually thought . . . As much as Gina enjoyed watching him squirm, she forced her lungs and vocal cords to start working again. “Are you . . .” She had to clear her throat, but then it really didn’t matter what she said, because the tears in her eyes surely told him everything he wanted to hear. She saw his relief, and yes, he was still scared, she saw that, too, but mixed in with that was hope. And something that looked a heck of a lot like happiness. Happiness—in Max’s eyes. “Are you really asking me for a second chance?” she managed to get it all out in a breathless exhale. He kissed her then, as if he couldn’t bear to stand so close and not kiss her. “Please,” he breathed, as he kissed her again, as he licked his way into her mouth and . . . God . . . She could’ve stood there, kissing Max forever, but the man on the megaphone just shouldn’t shut up. Besides, she wanted to be sure that this was about more than just sex. “Do you want me in your life?” Gina asked him. “I mean, need is nice, but . . .” It implied a certain lack of free will. Want on the other hand . . . “Want,” he said. “Yes. I want you. Very much. In my life. Gina, I was lost without you.” He caught himself. “More lost, or . . .” He shook his head. “Fuck it, I’m a mess, but if for some reason you still love me anyway . . . If you really meant what you said, about . . .” There it was gain, in his eyes. Hope. “Loving me anyway . . .” “I don’t love you anyway,” she told him, her heart in her throat. “I love you because.” She touched his face, his smoothly shaven cheeks. “Although now that you mention it, you are something of a mess, and I’m probably entitled to . . . compensation in certain areas. I mean, in any relationship, you need to negotiate a certain amount of compromise, right?” He actually thought she was serious. “Well, yeah.” “So if, say, I were to point out how incredibly hot you’d look wearing that thong—” Max laughed his relief. “Shit, I thought you were serious.” “Shit,” Gina teased. “I am.” He cupped her face between both of his hands, and the heat in his eyes made her knees weak. “I’ll wear one if you wear one . . .

So I make one phone call, and just like that, we're eating pizza at 6:30. What is this world? You tap seven abstract figures onto a piece of plastic thin as a billfold, hold that plastic device to your head, use your lungs and vocal cords to indicate more abstractions, and in thirty minutes, a guy pulls up in a 2,000-pound machine made on an island on the other side of the world, fueled by viscous liquid made from the rotting corpses of dead organisms pulled from the desert on yet another side of the world and you give this man a few sheets of green paper representing the abstract wealth of your home nation, and he gives you a perfectly reasonable facsimile of one of the staples of the diet of a people from yet another faraway nation. And the mushrooms are fresh.

but the poor boy is in a fair way to becoming an alto, a counter-tenor for life.’ ‘Hoot,’ said Graham, grinning still. ‘Does the swelling affect the vocal cords?’ ‘The back of my hand to the vocal cords,’ said Stephen. ‘Have you not heard of orchitis? Of the swelling of the cods that may follow mumps?’ ‘Not I,’ said Graham, his smile fading. ‘Nor had my messmates,’ said Stephen, ‘though the Dear knows it is one of the not unusual sequelae of cynanche parotidaea, and one of real consequence to men. Yet to be sure there is something to be said in its favour, as a more humane way of providing castrati for our choirs and operas.’ ‘Does it indeed emasculate?’ cried Graham. ‘Certainly. But be reassured: that is the utmost limit of its malignance. I do not believe that medical history records any fatal issue – a benign distemper, compared with many I could name. Yet Lord, how concerned my shipmates were, when I told them, for surprisingly few seem to have had the disease in youth – ’ ‘I did not,’ said Graham, unheard. ‘Such anxiety!’ said Stephen, smiling at the recollection. ‘Such uneasiness of mind! One might have supposed it was a question of the bubonic plague. I urged them to consider how very little time was really spent in coition, but it had no effect. I spoke of the eunuch’s tranquillity and peace of mind, his unimpaired intellectual powers – I cited Narses and Hermias. I urged them to reflect that a marriage of minds was far more significant than mere carnal copulation. I might have saved my breath: one could almost have supposed that seamen lived for the act of love.

I was having a terrible nightmare,” the penis said then, its voice high-pitched, but quite male. The small hole on the round end moved a little bit as it talked—could it possibly be a mouth? Then the head swiveled a little, directing the small hole toward Vesper. “Ooh, a female. Hello there, cute stuff.” “Oh…hello.” Not attached to a man, it actually wasn’t so intimidating. She leaned closer. How could something like that actually articulate sounds? Could there be a tiny tongue, vocal cords in there? “Pick me up why don’t you? I can tell you want to.” Vesper drew back again. She did admit an urge to poke it with her finger, but it was a detached talking penis, and that in itself made it suspect. Then something occurred to her. “Are you under a spell?” “Not exactly,” it replied. “But you can kiss me if you want.

Feeling like a displaced person Laura struggles with being defined by her status as a widow. “Distracted by the word widow, which had taken root, budded and bloomed in her mind like a weed in a vacant lot, Laura opened the dictionary on her desk. Flipping past thousands of words, she used in every-day communication with family, friends, and acquaintances – those little black letters, symbols to express thoughts for the ear to hear and the heart to feel – she wondered, What words gave expression to her pain? What words described the sense of something lurking inside her, or the dark shadows stalking her mind? Widow: a five-letter word, preceded by words like wide, and widget and followed by words like widow’s peak, widow’s weeds, and widower. This little word – widow- in small case, had no business masquerading as a noun: a person, place or thing. In contrast, - widget, a small mechanical object, not a feeling thing, just an object – seemed an honest noun. Widow is not an object, she thought. “It’s a word so thin as to be nothing but a wisp of breath passing through one’s vocal cords and disappearing almost imperceptibly between one’s lips. It has no life of its own. It’s a mere label, and it could just as well be a piece of paper saying, chocolate cookies or best before date.

Et Aldous ouvrit le bal. Il leva bien haut sa batte, comme un chef d’orchestre sa baguette. Un grand silence suivit l’échauffement cacophonique des instruments. Chacun retint son souffle. Et musique, maestro ! Aldous abattit son arme, au hasard. A son signal, toutes les cordes vocales se mirent à vibrer et toutes les belles à tourner, tourner, et encore tourner. Réglé comme du papier à musique. Soulevés par un vent de terreur, les tissus se mêlèrent, se rapprochèrent, se croisèrent par vagues successives. Ce fut un ballet magnifique de voiles, un spectacle de derviches revisité par Pina Bausch. Aldous donna la cadence de la chorégraphie. Jason rythma la symphonie des hurlements, staccato, andante, mezzo forte, forte, fortissimo… Du Beethoven. Au blanc et noir de cette volière d’hirondelles secouée se mêla bientôt le rouge, d’abord par traces impressionnistes, puis par nappes fauves.

My mind was speaking, but my vocal cords were silent. I exhaled in frustration. "Freezed," I finally spouted out. My thoughts froze, just like the rest of me.

It’s quite simple," she says, while Rosentreter wonders, not without anxiety, whether she can read his thoughts. "You draw air into your lungs, you raise your soft palate, air passes over your vocal cords, and you move your lips and tongue. Or, to put it another way, you speak.

What you usually refer to when you say "I" is not who you are. By a monstrous act of deductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords of the thought of "I" in your mind and whatever the "I" is identified with.

The giraffe has no vocal cords and communicates by vibrating the air around its neck

Vocal cords are not rental units. No Hebrew prophet, nor Mohammed, nor any founder of any cult or religion ever spoke the words of anybody but themselves.

You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to cauliflower

I think we go brain-dead when talking with kids. All the sudden I was saying things my mi and da had said to me two decades ago. The words must sit around dormant, generation to generation, waiting to infect our vocal cords when we get older.

They strap you to a table, force your mouth open, insert Jennings gags and ratchet them wide as possible. Pliers remove teeth. Surgical scissors are inserted down your throat to server vocal cords. All without anesthesia.

What you usually refer to when you say “I” is not who you are. By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords or the thought of “I” in your mind and whatever the “I” has identified with.

Some people are just in love with the sound of their voices.   They don't listen; they simply wait until the other person stops talking so they can start speaking again. They view the time during which another person is talking as a resting period for their vocal cords.

A girl has shorter vocal cords than a boy, so it actually takes less effort for her to talk. As for boys‚ their vocal cords double in length during puberty. This can make it a lot of work for them to spit something out! Guys are four times more likely than girls to have a stuttering problem. So, because many boys aren’t as good at talking as girls, they do less of it.

Let me be explicit: It seems to me that the “is” in the above sentence should be taken as the “is” of identity. The mental event and the physical event are identical in exactly the same way that hitting a particular musical note and moving one's vocal cords in a particular way are the same event. Here I go farther than Melnyk, who tells me by private communication that he remains agnostic as to the identity of mental events and their physical realizers. For me, “realization” is best construed as an identity relation between mental-act tokens and physical-act tokens. I think that we need to see that the essentialist Cartesian concepts of “mental” and “physical” as mutually exclusive categories is an obscurantist, religiously based holdover from the seventeenth century, one that should no longer have any place in our discussions of mind

It's a shame you can't transport entire beeches or oaks into the laboratory to find out more about learning. But, at least as far as water is concerned, there is research in the field that reveals more than just behavioral changes: when trees are really thirsty, they begin to scream. If you're out in the forest, you won't be able to hear them, because this all takes place at ultrasonic levels. Scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research recorded the sounds, and this is how they explain them: Vibrations occur in the trunk when the flow of water from the roots to the leaves is interrupted. This is a purely mechanical event and it probably doesn't mean anything. And yet? We know how the sounds are produced, and if we were to look through a microscope to examine how humans produce sounds, what we would see wouldn't be that different: the passage of air down the windpipe causes our vocal cords to vibrate. When I think about the research results, in particular in conjunction with the crackling roots I mentioned earlier, it seems to me that these vibrations could indeed be much more than just vibrations-they could be cries of thirst. The trees might be screaming out a dire warning to their colleagues that water levels are running low.

It looks like Russian,” said Mrs. Knight. Her voice echoed in the lounge. It sounded like her vocal cords were made from the same pale rawhide used for dog toys.

My expression must be a fuck of a lot more dangerously possessive than I realized, because he says, “Didn’t mean to steal your new bride, man. Thanks for not punching me in the throat; I need my vocal cords for my set.” He offers his hand and I shake it, careful not to crush it in my grip. He probably needs those fingers to play a fucking banjo.

larynx (pp. 352–354), and (2) smaller intrinsic muscles that control tension in the glottal vocal folds or that open and close the glottis. These smaller muscles insert on the thyroid, arytenoid, and corniculate cartilages. The opening or closing of the glottis involves rotational movements of the arytenoid cartilages. When you swallow, both sets of muscles work together to prevent food or drink from entering the glottis. Food is crushed and chewed into a pasty mass, known as a bolus, before being swallowed. Muscles of the neck and pharynx then elevate the larynx, bending the epiglottis over the glottis, so that the bolus can glide across the epiglottis rather than falling into the larynx. While this movement is under way, the glottis is closed. Foods or liquids that touch the vestibular folds or glottis trigger the coughing reflex. In a cough, the glottis is kept closed while the chest and abdominal muscles contract, compressing the lungs. When the glottis is opened suddenly, a blast of air from the trachea ejects material that blocks the entrance to the glottis. Sound Production How do you produce sounds? Air passing through your open glottis vibrates its vocal folds and produces sound waves. The pitch of the sound depends on the diameter, length, and tension in your vocal folds. The diameter and length are directly related to the size of your larynx. You control the tension by contracting voluntary muscles that reposition the arytenoid cartilages relative to the thyroid cartilage. When the distance increases, your vocal folds tense and the pitch rises. When the distance decreases, your vocal folds relax and the pitch falls. Children have slender, short vocal folds, so their voices tend to be high pitched. At puberty, the larynx of males enlarges much more than that of females. The vocal cords of an adult male are thicker and longer, so they produce lower tones than those of an adult female. Sound production at the larynx is called phonation (fo.-NA .-shun; phone, voice). Phonation is one part of speech production. Clear speech also requires articulation, the modification of those sounds by voluntary movements of other structures, such as the tongue, teeth, and lips to form words. In a stringed instrument, such as a guitar, the quality of the sound produced does not depend solely on the nature of the vibrating string. Rather, the entire instrument becomes involved as the walls vibrate and the composite sound echoes within the hollow body. Similar amplification and resonance take place within your pharynx, oral cavity, nasal cavity, and paranasal sinuses. The combination gives you the particular and distinctive sound of your voice. That sound changes when you have a sinus infection and your nasal cavity and paranasal sinuses are filled with mucus rather than air.

Kathy waited for the waves of heat to stop running through her. She turned to the left and picked up the oversize serving spoon and fork. She put food on her plate and knew she could not eat it. Illness was in her, and shame for all of them. They despised him and they kept quiet. They were well bred and polite, so they kept quiet. Just as she did. Not making fusses was also part of the gentleman’s agreement. To rise and leave the room was not in her knees and muscles; to call him to account was not in her vocal cords and larynx.

Wolfe has taught me that one of the most important requirements for successful lying is relaxed vocal cords and throat muscles; otherwise you are forced to put on extra pressure to push the lie through, and the result is that you talk faster and raise the pitch and the blood shows in your face.

Just a moment.’ Assad disappeared out the door, and Carl stared at the cup. The combination of words like ‘libido’ and ‘Mona’ made him suddenly thirsty. A little sip couldn’t hurt. He felt the steam and the smell of distant, exotic coasts and dived in. He thought it tasted rather good until the effect kicked in. The combination of neck arteries suddenly opening, oesophagus collapsing, vocal cords scratching like hell and not being able to feel his uvula all made him instinctively grab his throat with one hand and support himself on the edge of the table with the other. If there’d been acid in the cup, it wouldn’t have felt much different. He wanted to swear but not a word came out, only tears and saliva from the corners of his mouth, and he had an unusually keen desire for revenge and ice-cold water by the bucketload. ‘What’s wrong, Carl?’ asked Assad as he came in with the report. ‘Was there too much ginger?

Pour m'occuper, je récitai le peu de Coran que je savais, d'abord à mi-voix, ensuite de toute la force de mes cordes vocales, je scandais les mots du livre saint avec passion. Ma mémoire tarit. J'hésitai un instant avant de reprendre, avec plus de ferveur, ma psalmodie. J'inventais mon propre Coran. Des mots sans suite et sans signification prenaient leur vol, tournoyaient dans l'atmosphère de la chambre, jaillissaient vers le ciel comme des essaims de papillons richement colorés.

he’s quiet as a louse.” Mike looked at me, confused by this. “I think you mean ‘quiet as a mouse,’ ” I told Jessica. “That’s the expression?” Jessica asked. “Really? Because lice are really quiet. They don’t even have vocal cords. While mice are all squeaky.

The lip injections, cheekbone implants, breast implants, ear tuck, liposuction, rib removal, all of that was de rigueur. Standard operating procedure. Her voice coach had annihilated all traces of Tennessee from her vocal cords, eliciting a low, smoky Mae West tone from deep within Remy’s artificial chest. Her long, blond locks were color-treated now, four individual shades of honey blond, highlights so subtle, so perfectly uniform that it took four hours once a week to keep them maintained. Her

Consider the choice someone might give you to eat either apple pie or grub worm pie. Which would you choose? Presumably, you would select the former. Was your choice determined? Of course, this is apparent from the predictability of your choice. And what determined your choice was such causal influences as your desire to eat something you like and your natural aversion to eating worms. But, now, was your choice free? Again, the answer is yes. You were free because you were not externally compelled to give a pro-apple-pie response. However, had something so compelled you, such as the threat of physical violence or manipulation of your vocal cords, then you would not have acted freely.2 This

Michael caught his breath. With some effort he worked his vocal cords. “What do you want?” “Don’t

Sure enough, five minutes later, a scream pierced through the Vaults. It was more animal than human. She’d heard screams like that before—had witnessed enough torture at the Keep to know that when people screamed like that, it meant that the pain was just beginning. By the end, when that sort of pain happened, the victims had usually blown out their vocal cords and could only emit hoarse, shattered shrieks. Celaena gritted her teeth so hard her jaw hurt.

Somewhere inside him, beneath her fingers, was his upper trachea, and in the cavity of his larynx were his vocal cords, two pairs of folded membrane. Everyone had them, but his had been touched by magic, the sounds resonating from them were richer, more mellifluous than what came from everyone else's throats. Of course, his voice wasn't just from his vocal cords. It was from the air he took into his body and what he did with that air. He was better than an alchemist. He took air and turned it into music. She leaned her cheek against his shoulder and let her hand search over his chest, seeking the power of the lungs he kept stowed safe behind his fortressed ribs.

In a naive accounting, speaking seems to cost almost nothing—just the calories we expend flexing our vocal cords and firing our neurons as we turn thoughts into sentences. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. A full accounting will necessarily include two other, much larger costs: 1.The opportunity cost of monopolizing information. As Dessalles says, “If one makes a point of communicating every new thing to others, one loses the benefit of having been the first to know it.”11 If you tell people about a new berry patch, they’ll raid the berries that could have been yours. If you show them how to make a new tool, soon everyone will have a copy and yours won’t be special anymore. 2.The costs of acquiring the information in the first place. In order to have interesting things to say during a conversation, we need to spend a lot of time and energy foraging for information before the conversation.12 And sometimes this entails significant risk. Consider the explorer who ventures further than others, only to rush home and broadcast her hard-won information, rather than keeping it for herself. This requires an explanation.

The booze and lemon pledge Buchanan who choked lyrics, called it singing since guitar strings and vocal cords are made from different kinds of wheat.

Tom Waits was on the jukebox. The man’s voice sounded like demons and angels were playing tug-of-war with his vocal cords.

Throat Let your fingers touch each other as you cup your hands on the bottom of the throat. Be gentle, and hold on to your hands, but do not touch your throat. Helping the thyroid and parathyroid gland, vocal cords, larynx, and lymph nodes, this hand position handles the throat (fifth) chakra that regulates neck and chest. This is the seat of communication and expression. Using therapy to help the patient speak, speak their minds, talk for themselves, and tell their reality. It's also perfect for writer’s block! Collarbone Place your hands with your fingers pointing to the middle of your chest on the sides of your arms. This position gives Reiki to the area of the thymus between the chakras of the throat and the neck. For immune function, the thymus gland is essential. Place yourself behind or on the recipient's side for this next position (it all depends on your height logistics, their height, and how far you can stretch!). Back of the neck and front of the heart Put your left hand under the neck area and your right hand over the top of the heart area of the middle. This role incorporates heart and back care of the heart. They address two regions simultaneously: the chakra of the throat and the chakra of the heart, which helps to express one's heart or to say one's reality. This is a good position to handle high blood pressure; any position on the neck actually helps reduce high blood pressure. Heart Place the hands in a T, a hand positioned horizontally above the breasts, and a hand placed vertically between the breasts. Treating the heart (fourth) chakra governs everything related to the circulatory system, including the pulse, veins, and arteries; the lungs (related to the chakras of the heart and throat); the breasts; and the thymus. Opening Reiki's heart chakra increases the supply of affection, air, and nourishment that can be received and offered. The recipient feels acceptance and a sense of love and compassion when the heart chakra is free and moving.

Childhood is a voice that I’m unburying until my vocal cords hurt.

How do you do this every day?” he asked, hating the sound of his own voice. It felt like he’d spent the night gargling glass. They said he had minor trauma to his throat and vocal cords. Whether it was the screaming or the forced oral sex, Bowie didn’t know.

And God, the way he pronounced it, coated in that strong Spanish accent that rolled his Rs as if his whole body was pitching the sound, not just his tongue and vocal cords. It was so… different from every other way my name had been pronounced. Interesting. Distracting

OM CHANTING Various studies have shown that OM chanting deactivates the limbic part of the brain responsible for our basic emotions (fear, pleasure, anger) and our impulses (hunger, sex, dominance and care of offspring). Since the effectiveness of OM chanting is associated with the experience of vibrations around the ears, scientists have suggested that these sensations are transmitted through the auricular branch of the vagus nerve. As the vagus nerve branches off into the inner ear and larynx, controlling the opening and closing of the vocal cords and tone of the sound, it appears that this is stimulated during the vocalization of the O and M sounds. In addition, by performing chanting in exhalation, the vagus nerve is activated in its role as manager of the parasympathetic system. In addition, chanting, by facilitating the lengthening of the exhalation, further amplifies the effect on the parasympathetic system. This is why this practice helps to calm and relax the body and mind. -Find a quiet place to sit comfortably. -A good position is to sit with your legs crossed and your back straight. -Wear comfortable cotton clothes that do not tighten any part of your body. All body channels should be free and comfortable. Place the palm of your right hand (facing upwards) on the palm of your left hand at navel level. Close your eyes for a few minutes and relax your mind and body. Slowly feel the vibrations that occur in every part of your body. When the vibrations become more intense, start breathing deeply. Hold your breath for a second and then slowly exhale. Initially count to 7 as you exhale. This ought to be duplicated thrice. As you exhale the third time, sing "oooooooooo..." Feel the vibrations in your abdomen (and under your chest). After exhaling, relax for 2 seconds. Breathe in again (slow, deep breaths). As you exhale sing "ooooo..." and feel the vibrations in your chest and neck. After exhaling, relax for 2 seconds. Inhale again (long, deep breath). As you exhale, sing "mmmmmmmm...". Feel the vibrations in your head and neck. After exhaling, relax for 2 seconds. Inhale again and as you exhale say "oooommmm..." or "aaauuummm...". About 80% of the sound should be "aaauuu..." and 20% should be "mmmm...". Repeat the previous steps 3 times (you can do it up to 9 times). After the Om meditation, relax and concentrate on your regular breathing for about 5 minutes. TIPS -Wearing white clothes and being in a white environment will improve your experience. But the rule of white is not fundamental. -A good place could be a quiet room or a garden with shade. Your eyes, ears or other sensory organs should not be disturbed. -Do not consume alcohol for at least 8-10 hours before meditation. -It would be better not to eat or drink anything for at least 2 hours before meditation. The body's channels should not be blocked in order to achieve maximum results. This applies especially to the digestive system. -The best times for this meditation are early in the morning or late at night. -For beginners, singing "aum" can cause dizziness. It is recommended to proceed slowly and try to learn one step at a time. In this way you will prepare body and mind for the next step. -It is very important to open your eyes slowly when your breathing has stabilized. -If you cannot sit on the floor, you can try sitting on a bed or a chair. The most important thing is to keep your back straight. -Doing this kind of meditation in a group brings more peace and harmony to all members than doing it alone.

Beneath our loquacious chatter, there is a silent language…Our common human language is not…something to do with vocal cords and speech. It is, rather, our sense of proportion, our balance, harmony and other aspects of simple and fundamental form.

Beneath our loquacious chatter, there is a silent language…Our common human language is not…something to do with vocal cords and speech. It is, rather, our sense of proportion, our balance, harmony and other aspects of simple and fundamental form.

Everybody with a womb doesn’t have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer.” Gloria Steinem, Chelsea Lately, October 2011

We stare at each other for a long time before he finally speaks in that beautifully dark voice of his, like his vocal cords are shaped from the shadows of Halloween night.

The thing about guys his age, Andrei thought, was they all morphed into one big “bro.” Certain phrases like, “Nah, you’re good... damn, wow, that’s sick... I appreciate you,” have taken such enormous space in the air. Young men use them habitually, and accompany it with that general, polite airiness in the voice that communicates there is no incoming trouble. But that nice tone took a shape on vocal cords, and those phrases redesigned the brain all into one puzzle piece: the modern man. It was like taking a pair of scissors and cutting a man’s unique shape into a rectangle, so all men could be properly put back into place, like gathering playing cards to be shuffled.

Her voice was so perfect a replica of her sister’s as might lead one to suppose that her vocal cords had been snipped from the same line of gut in those obscure regions where such creatures are compounded.

To be free requires that we are not marionettes whose strings are pulled by physical law. Whether the laws are deterministic (as in classical physics) or probabilistic (as in quantum physics) is of deep significance to how reality evolves and to the kinds of predictions science can make. But for assessing free will, the distinction is irrelevant. If the fundamental laws can continually churn, never grinding to a halt for lack of human input and applying all the same even if particles happen to inhabit bodies and brains, then there is no place for free will. Indeed, as is affirmed by every scientific experiment and observation ever conducted, long before we humans came on the scene the laws ruled without interruption; after we arrived, they continued to rule without interruption. To sum up: We are physical beings made of large collections of particles governed by nature’s laws. Everything we do and everything we think amounts to motions of those particles. Shake my hand and particles constituting your hand push up and down against those constituting mine. Say hello, and particles constituting your vocal cords jostle particles of air in your throat, setting off a chain reaction of colliding particles that ripples through the air, knocking into the particles constituting my eardrums, setting off a surge of yet other particles in my head, which is how I manage to hear what you’re saying. Particles in my brain respond to the stimuli, yielding the thought that’s a strong grip, and sending signals carried by other particles to those in my arm, which drive my hand to move in tandem with yours. And since all observations, experiments, and valid theories confirm that particle motion is fully controlled by mathematical rules, we can no more intercede in this lawful progression of particles than we can change the value of pi. Our choices seem free because we do not witness nature’s laws acting in their most fundamental guise; our senses do not reveal the operation of nature’s laws in the world of particles. Our senses and our reasoning focus on everyday human scales and actions: we think about the future, compare courses of action, and weigh possibilities. As a result, when our particles do act, it seems to us that their collective behaviors emerge from our autonomous choices. However, if we had the superhuman vision invoked earlier and were able to analyze everyday reality at the level of its fundamental constituents, we would recognize that our thoughts and behaviors amount to complex processes of shifting particles that yield a powerful sense of free will but are fully governed by physical law.

As you may remember, the vagus nerve connects to many muscles in the face and throat, including the larynx and vocal cords. When we are in a place of safety and security, our voices sound different and we hear a wider range of tones, especially in human voices. We can help create that sense of calmness via the muscles in our mouth and neck when we sing.

Call me that generic, cheap knock-off of a term of endearment like you forgot my real name. One. More. Time. So help me, little siren, I will paint your vocal cords with my cum and brand them with my name.

I don’t believe I ever came across an Australian who succeeded in eradicating the vowel sounds she heard as a youngster. I think it must be like an imprint on our vocal cords — and one completely irreversible.

My great-great-grandchildren will be born with prehensile texting thumbs, no vocal cords and zero capacity to read human facial expressions.

A good medium like Mrs. Ethel Meyers will immediately get “impressions” upon arriving, and sometimes even on the way toward our goal. A little later, she will lapse into a trance, and in this condition, the alleged ghost can operate her vocal cords, and speak to me directly. Sometimes there is another sitter present, and sometimes not. I take notes or use a tape recorder, or both. And sometimes, too, there is an infrared camera present, just in case. After the trance is over, the medium awakens without remembering anything that has just come through her mouth or vocal cords while under the control of an alleged ghost. Sometimes, though not often, the medium recalls all or part of the information thus received because the trance had been light. This does not mean the medium is faking, or that the material obtained is less reliable; it only means that the medium’s trance faculties are not in full operating condition, and perhaps hypnosis is in order to get her “down deeper” into the unconscious condition. Generally speaking, the medium remembers nothing of what went on during her trance state. Now I allow the hosts and other sitters to discuss the case freely and comment upon what they have just heard or witnessed. Often enough, corroboration takes place right then and there, but more often I have to dig it up in the public library, special libraries, or other sources to which I have access. The research always takes place after the investigation is closed. The Sensitive is never kept abreast of the progress of the corroboration until the case is ready for publication or filing.