Willis Tower Quotes

The drinking dens are spilling out There's staggering in the square There's lads and lasses falling about And a crackling in the air Down around the dungeon doors The shelters and the queues Everybody's looking for Somebody's arms to fall into And it's what it is It's what it is now There's frost on the graves and the monuments But the taverns are warm in town People curse the government And shovel hot food down The lights are out in the city hall The castle and the keep The moon shines down upon it all The legless and asleep And it's cold on the tollgate With the wagons creeping through Cold on the tollgate God knows what I could do with you And it's what it is It's what it is now The garrison sleeps in the citadel With the ghosts and the ancient stones High up on the parapet A Scottish piper stands alone And high on the wind The highland drums begin to roll And something from the past just comes And stares into my soul And it's cold on the tollgate With the Caledonian Blues Cold on the tollgate God knows what I could do with you And it's what it is It's what it is now What it is It's what it is now There's a chink of light, there's a burning wick There's a lantern in the tower Wee Willie Winkie with a candlestick Still writing songs in the wee wee hours On Charlotte Street I take A walking stick from my hotel The ghost of Dirty Dick Is still in search of Little Nell And it's what it is It's what it is now Oh what it is What it is now

The sky is a dark bowl, the stars die and fall. The celestial bows quiver, the bones of the earthgods shake and planets come to a halt when they sight the king in all his power, the god who feeds on his father and eats his mother. The king is such a tower of wisdom even his mother can't discern his name. His glory is in the sky, his strength lies in the horizon like that of his father the sungod Atum who conceived him. Atum conceived the king, but the dead king has greater dominion. His vital spirits surround him, his qualities lie below his feet, he is cloaked in gods and cobras coil on his forehead. His guiding snakes decorate his brow and peer into souls, ready to spit fire against his enemies. The king's head is on his torso. He is the bull of the sky who charges and vanquishes all. He lives on the stuff of the gods, he feeds on their limbs and entrails, even when they have bloated their bodies with magic at Nesisi, the island of fire. He cooks the leftover gods into a bone soup. Their souls belong to him and their shadows as well. In his pyramid among those who live on the earth of Egypt, the dead king ascends and appears forever and forever.

Guitar Town was out, and it was doing okay," [Steve] Earle recalled. "But the label didn't want it to happen. Jimmy [Bowen] certainly didn't. He didn't like the record. He didn't like me. But it was out there and got really good reviews, though mostly from the rock side of things. . . . "'Guitar Town' was doing okay as the second single," Earle said. "Then around the same time, Bruce Springsteen walked into Tower Records in L.A. and bought a couple of things. He got Willy DeVille's first solo record, and he bought Guitar Town. A kid who worked there at Tower reported it, and it ended up in a column in Billboard. I sold fifty thousand records the next week and got booked all over the place. So that was it: I had a career largely because Bruce bought my record and it got into print.

Trellised towers of primrose and delicate lily, arousing our senses, like the arabicas of Spring, false pretenses and guises, in maiden's attire, strung carelessly on their wood frame, willy nilly. Sonnet "Trellised Towers

Trellised towers of Primrose and delicate lily, arousing our senses, like the arabicas of Spring, false pretenses and guises, in maiden's attire, strung carelessly on their wooden frames, willy nilly. Sonnet "Trellised Towers

an utterly spellbinding slice of earth, like no place I’d even seen”—a Willy Wonka world of lime-green pools and pink crystal towers and subterranean waterfalls.

I don't like a general who towers over the troops, lordly with elegant locks and trim mustachios. Give me a stumpy soldier glaringly bowlegged, yet rockfirm on his feet, and in his heart a giant.

Is Willis Carrier an anomaly or not? The question has real political and social stakes, because the doxa of market capitalism as an unparalleled innovation engine has long leaned on stories like Willis Carrier’s miraculous cooling device as a cornerstone of its faith.6 In many respects, these beliefs made sense, because the implicit alternatives were the planned economies of socialism and communism. State-run economies were fundamentally hierarchies, not networks. They consolidated decision-making power in a top-down command system, which meant that new ideas had to be approved by the authorities before they could begin to spread through the society. Markets, by contrast, allowed good ideas to erupt anywhere in the system. In modern tech-speak, markets allowed innovation to flourish at the edges of the network. Planned economies were more like the old mainframe computer systems that predated the Internet, where every participant had to get authorization from a central machine to do new work. When Friedrich von Hayek launched his influential argument in the 1940s about the importance of price signals in market economies, he was observing a related phenomenon: the decentralized pricing mechanism of the marketplace allows an entrepreneur to gauge the relative value of his or her innovation. If you come up with an interesting new contraption, you don’t need to persuade a government commission of its value. You just need to get someone to buy it. Entire institutions and legal frameworks—not to mention a vast tower of conventional wisdom—have been built around the Carrier model of innovation. But what if he’s the exception and not the rule?

You can't walk a straight line ... if you're wearing crooked shoes.