Bituminous Quotes & Sayings

If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings. — Neal Stephenson

But on they rould in heaps, and up the Trees Climbing, sat thicker then the snakie locks That curld MEGAERA: greedily they pluck'd The Frutage fair to sight, like that which grew Neer that bituminous Lake where SODOM flam'd; This more delusive, not the touch, but taste Deceav'd; they fondly thinking to allay Thir appetite with gust, instead of Fruit Chewd bitter Ashes, which th' offended taste VVith spattering noise rejected: oft they assayd, Hunger and thirst constraining, drugd as oft, VVith hatefullest disrelish writh'd thir jaws VVith foot and cinders fill'd; so oft they fell Into the same illusion, not as Man Whom they triumph'd once lapst. Thus — John Milton

Or else the cloud hovered, having barely left the lips, dense and slow, and suggested another vision: the exhalations that hang over the roofs of the metropolises, the opaque smoke that is not scattered, the hood of miasmata that weighs over the bituminous streets. Not the labile mists of memory nor the dry transparence, but the charring of burned lives that forms a scab on the city, the sponge swollen with vital matter that no longer flows, the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement: this is what you would find at the end of your journey. — Italo Calvino

A city built on rivers and bituminous coal, Pittsburgh in the '90s has survived the boom and bust years. — Bill Dedman