Quotes & Sayings About Combustion

It is arguable whether the human race have been gainers by the march of science beyond the steam engine. Electricity opens a field of infinite conveniences to ever greater numbers, but they may well have to pay dearly for them. But anyhow in my thought I stop short of the internal combustion engine which has made the world so much smaller. Still more must we fear the consequences of entrusting a human race so little different from their predecessors of the so-called barbarous ages such awful agencies as the atomic bomb. Give me the horse. — Winston Churchill

If he was in danger of anything at all, it was spontaneous submissive combustion due to his master's teasing. — Kim Dare

We are not going to move this world by criticism of it nor conformity to it, but by the combustion within it of lives ignited by the Spirit of God. — Vance Havner

If I had my way," Dionysus said, "I would cause your molecules to erupt in flames. We'd sweep up the ashes and be done with a lot of trouble. But Chiron seems to feel this would be against my mission at this cursed camp: to keep you little brats safe from harm."
"Spontaneous combustion is a form of harm, Mr. D," Chiron put in.
"Nonsense," Dionysus said. "Boy wouldn't feel a thing. Nevertheless, I've agreed to restrain myself. I'm thinking of turning you into a dolphin instead, sending you back to your father. — Rick Riordan

If I dwell at some length on the tremors and gropings of that distant night, it is because I insist upon proving that I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel. The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets-not crime's prowling ground. Had I reached my goal, my ecstasy would have been all softness, a case of internal combustion of which she would hardly have felt the heat, even if she were wide awake. But I still hoped she might gradually be engulfed in a completeness of stupor that would allow me to taste more than a glimmer of her. — Vladimir Nabokov

Faerie: where it's only a little weird to realize that my boyfriend is older than the internal combustion engine. — Seanan McGuire

I'm not dead yet. It's all good. (Omari)
Good. That whole spontaneous combustion thing can be a real buzzkill. Ruins your clothes, too. (Nero) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

It is a mistake," he said, " to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century. Once it was well known that cigarettes increased the incidence of lung cancer, the obvious remedy was to stop smoking, but the desired remedy was a cigarette that did not cause cancer. When it became clear that the internal-combustion engine was polluting the atmosphere dangerously, the obvious remedy was to abandon such engines, and the desired remedy was to develop non-polluting engines. — Isaac Asimov

Their love story: It's when logic fell in love with paranoia and paranoia learned to love logic; logic grounded paranoia and paranoia turned up the heat because logic never knew where that heat would come from. Logic needs to be stimulated and paranoia needs to be soothed and therefore they need each other, which resulted in the birth of combustion. The end. — Donna Lynn Hope

Thermophilic composting requires no electricity and therefore no coal combustion, no acid rain, no nuclear power plants, no nuclear waste, no petrochemicals and no consumption of fossil fuels. The composting process produces no waste, no pollutants and no toxic by-products. Thermophilic composting of humanure can be carried out century after century, millennium after millennium, with no stress on our ecosystems, no unnecessary consumption of resources and no garbage or sludge for our landfills. And all the while it will produce a valuable resource necessary for our survival while preventing the accumulation of dangerous pathogenic waste. — Joseph Jenkins

Their sudden intimacy was like the explosive combustion that engulfs and consumes a moth that has fluttered too close to a candle flame; a completely unexpected turn of events that took both of them unawares and swept them irresistibly up and out of themselves as it hurled them into each other's arms. — Jack Whyte

Arson is a respected profession among certain subcultures in Jersey, and the good ones don't get caught. The good ones channel lightning and mysterious acts of spontaneous combustion. — Janet Evanovich

It can scarcely be denied that the fundamental phenomena which first led mankind into chemical inquiries are those of combustion. — William Crookes

It's so easy to demagogue the issue and make someone who speaks out against the internal-combustion engine sound like an insane communist, when the truth is that the internal-combustion engine is the biggest threat to our lives, in terms of what it's doing to our environment and how it's depleting the ozone layer and so forth. — Bill Maher

Flash fire."
She turned her head as far as she could, trying to look at him. "I don't know what that means."
He shifted on the branch. "First time I was on a submarine, we had a flash fire. It's a combustion explosion. A flammable mist builds up in the air, then suddenly, bam. Think super high temperatures and a rapidly moving flame front. It kills by asphyxiation. Burns up all the available oxygen. It's devastating. — Dana Marton

He leaves less than a foot of space between us and I'm 10 inches away from spontaneous combustion. — Tahereh Mafi

Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on general principles. — John Dewey

A society sufficiently sophisticated to produce the internal combustion engine has not had the sophistication to develop cheap and efficient public transport?'
'Yes, boss... it's true. There's hardly any buses, the trains are hopelessly underfunded, and hence the entire population is stuck in traffic — Ben Elton

Success is not due to spontaneous combustion. You have to set yourself on fire. — Various Attributed Sources

Globally the Greens have arisen like a spontaneous combustion, a reaction to the narrow-minded state-backed exploitation of resources and wealth for a few at the expense of the many. — Bob Brown

Theater is the crucible where we can create the dynamics of life without suffering the flames of their combustion. — Tom Althouse

What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired an ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk? — Loren Eiseley

And the flames are every colour of the rainbow."
"They can't be," observed Daffy.
"Well, they are," she said cheekily. "Have you been there, that you know so much about it?"
"No," said Daffy, very calm, "but I'd wager I know more than you about the chemical processes of combustion."
Mary rolled her eyes. Did he hope to dazzle her with syllables? — Emma Donoghue

It's pretty boring, working by yourself. The scene happens in between the two of you, and then you don't know what it's going to be because it's a kind of combustion. So, you do take something from every actor you work with. — Julianne Moore

About eight days ago I discovered that sulfur in burning, far from losing weight, on the contrary, gains it; it is the same with phosphorus; this increase of weight arises from a prodigious quantity of air that is fixed during combustion and combines with the vapors. This discovery, which I have established by experiments, that I regard as decisive, has led me to think that what is observed in the combustion of sulfur and phosphorus may well take place in the case of all substances that gain in weight by combustion and calcination; and I am persuaded that the increase in weight of metallic calyxes is due to the same cause ... This discovery seems to me one of the most interesting that has been made since Stahl and since it is difficult not to disclose something inadvertently in conversation with friends that could lead to the truth I have thought it necessary to make the present deposit to the Secretary of the Academy to await the time I make my experiments public. — Antoine Lavoisier

Typical of the fundamental scientific problems whose solution should lead to important industrial consequences are, for example, the release of atomic energy, which experiment has shown to exist in quantities millions of times greater than is liberated by combustion. — Arthur Compton

They'd found it worked on Nico better than nectar, helping to cleanse the fatigue and darkness from his system with less danger of spontaneous combustion. — Rick Riordan

Think about it, Lee - we already know that intelligent minds produce finely tuned devices. Look at the space shuttle. Look at a television set. Look at an internal combustion engine. We see minds producing complex, precision machinery all the time.

So the existence of a supermind - or God - as the explanation for the fine - tuning of the universe makes all sense in the world. — Lee Strobel

What would happen if you melted? You know, you never really hear this talked about much, but spontaneous combustion? It exists! ... [people] burn from within ... sometimes theyll be in a wooden chair and the chair wont burn, but therell be nothing left of the person. Except sometimes his teeth. Or the heart. No one speaks about this, but its for real. — Keanu Reeves

The internal combustion engine, one of the greatest technological advancements in history, has an unfortunate downside, namely air pollution so thick that, very soon, sixty-four packs of crayons will include the color Sky Brown — Cuthbert Soup

The battlefields of World War I established the importance of petroleum as an element of national power when the internal combustion machine overtook the horse and the coal-powered locomotive. — Daniel Yergin

A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out. The famous lovers usually end up dead. A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love. — Madeleine L'Engle

I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York-the Blessed Sacrament ... I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion. — Dorothy Parker

Creativity is the mother of all energies, nurturer of your most alive self. It charges up every part of you. When you're plugged in, a spontaneous combustion occurs that 'artists' don't have a monopoly on. — Judith Orloff

Now I must take you to a very interesting part of our subject-to the relation between the combustion of a candle and that living kind of combustion which goes on within us. In every one of us there is a living process of combustion going on very similar to that of a candle, and I must try to make that plain to you. For it is not merely true in a poetical sense-the relation of the life of man to a taper; and if you will follow, I think I can make this clear. — Michael Faraday

I believed in immaculate conception and spontaneous combustion. I believed in aliens from outer space and vampires, prophecy, and the resurrection of the dead. I had deja vu many times each day. I was thirteen. — Kate Braverman

This mystery of use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like magic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happily lost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting the burden of one's support on the shoulders of others. — Edward Bellamy

Concentrate on the question. Oooh, interesting. I haven't seen that stone in that position before. Have you had a history of spontaneous combustion in your family?"
His eyes widened in surprise.
I grinned."Just kidding. — Katie MacAlister

For the first time there was constructed with this machine [locomotive engine] a self-acting mechanism in which the interplay of forces took shape transparently enough to discern the connection between the heat generated and the motion produced. The great puzzle of the vital force was also immediately solved for the physiologist in that it became evident that it is more than a mere poetic comparison when one conceives of the coal as the food of the locomotive and the combustion as the basis for its life. — Carl Ludwig

Jeff opened blue eyes, grinned at me. "If you're feeling left out ... " I almost threw out an instinctive no, but I decided to throw him a bone. "Oh, Jeff. It'd be too good - you and me. Too powerful, too much emotion, too much heat. We'd come together and boom" - I clapped my hands together - "like a moth to a flame, there'd be nothing left." His eyes glazed over. "Combustion?" "Totally." He was quiet for a moment, his index finger tracing a pattern on the knee of his jeans. Then he nodded. "Too powerful. It'd destroy us both." I nodded solemnly. "Probably so." But I leaned over, pressed my lips to his forehead. "We'll always have Chicago." "Chicago," he dreamily repeated. "Yeah. Definitely." He cleared his throat, seemed to regain a little composure. "When I tell this story later, you kissed me on the mouth. With tongue. And you were handsy." I chuckled. "Fair enough. — Chloe Neill

The idea of gas engines was by no means new, but this was the first time that a really serious effort had been made to put them on the market. They were received with interest rather than enthusiasm and I do not recall any one who thought that the internal combustion engine could ever have more than a limited use. All the wise people demonstrated conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never thought that it might carve out a career for itself. That is the way with wise people
they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work. — Henry Ford

Wiping grime from his hands, Nick contemplated one of the world's great mysteries: why man had ever combined computers and the internal combustion engine. — Robin Kaye

Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn. — Mark Twain

Within a decade, the internal combustion engine automobile is likely to look exactly like what it is - a machine that converts gasoline into much more heat than forward motion, a bizarre antiquity. — Stephen Petranek

Beethoven and Wagner for many years wrung our hearts. But now we are sated with them and derive much greater pleasure from ideally combining the noise of streetcars, internal-combustion engines, automobiles, and bust crowds than from rehearsing, for example, the 'Eroica' or the 'Pastorale' ... away! les ust be gone, since we shall not much longer succeed in restraining a desire to create a new musical realism by a generous distribution of sonorous blows and slaps, leaping numbly over violins, pianofortes, contrabasses, and groaning organs, Away! — Luigi Russolo

The existence of birds demonstrated that heavier-than-air flight was physically possible and prompted efforts to build flying machines. Yet the first functioning airplanes did not flap their wings. The jury is out on whether machine intelligence will be like flight, which humans achieved through an artificial mechanism, or like combustion, which we initially mastered by copying naturally occurring fires. — Nick Bostrom

I'm still going to move them out of my wanigan, but I'll give you odds two-to-one that after they move out there's going to be spontaneous combustion. — Tom Kizzia

It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five-year period. — Al Gore

Fear is like the steam that fires the combustion engine. You need fear to get a performance going. — Rachel Weisz

A combustion engine of ambition and disappointment. — Tina Fey

Andrus turned the engine and gave her a suspicious look. "You smell like ... " He shifted into drive. "What?" "Nothing, but - did something happen inside?" Could he really smell ... that? He crinkled his nose. "Your face is red and your scent is ... " Oh, God. He can! Kill me now! Giant bomb, falling tree, spontaneous combustion ... anything! — Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty? — Mark Steyn

While greenies and their media flunkies continue to savage the gasoline-powered internal-combustion engine and rhapsodize about hybrids, hydrogen, electrics, natural gas, propane, nuclear, and God-knows-what-other panaceas, perhaps including bovine urine, there are no realistic, economically viable alternatives. None. Zero. Like it or not, as long as we remain dependent on the private automobile for transportation (roughly 80 percent of all movement in the nation is by car), we are harnessed to the IC gas engine. — Brock Yates

If the numbers mean anything, they tell us that vastly more life is left in the reviled internal-combustion engine than any of the blue-state lefties could imagine. First, that madman Bush wins, and now this news. How depressing. — Brock Yates

Like a lot of what happens in novels, inspiration is
a sort of spontaneous combustion
the oily rags of the head and heart. — Stanley Elkin

Fulfilling the four needs [spiritual, mental, physical, social] in an integrated way is like combining elements in chemistry. When we reach a "critical mass" of integration, we experience spontaneous combustion-an explosion of inner synergy that ignites the fire within and gives vision, passion, and a spirit of adventure to life. — Stephen Covey

The advent of ebooks is no more going to kill the pleasure of reading than the introduction of the internal combustion engine made horses extinct. — Michael A. Stackpole

Once desire was turned on, combustion gave it a life of its own. Once it was turned on it became a raging wildfire, uncontrollable and uncontainable, the type of conflagration that had to be allowed to burn itself out. — Eric Jerome Dickey

What the hell do you want from me?" "Spontaneous combustion. — Poppet

A steady recognition that the evils which prevent the fullness of moral development are precisely the elements which are also the source of the power that gives existence to whatever moral accomplishments we see about us may eventually lead us to a tolerance we grant to the internal-combustion engine: it is noisy and smelly, and occasionally, it refuses to start, but it is what gets us to wherever we get.
We must somehow learn to understand and so to tolerate- not destroy- the free society. — Michael Polanyi

On the social front it was a question of Amistics, which was a term that had been coined ages ago by a Moiran anthropologist to talk about the choices that different cultures made as to which technologies they would, and would not, make part of their lives. The word went all the way back to the Amish people of pre-Zero America, who had chosen to use certain modern technologies, such as roller skates, but not others, such as internal combustion engines. All cultures — Neal Stephenson

Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong naming from the ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition ; there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms. — John Milton

So many of man's inventions - the syringe, the sword, the pen, the gun - were metaphorical cocks, but the internal combustion engine had to have been dreamt up by a man who had looked upon the human heart. — Joe Hill

The cars haven't advanced that much since we were kids. When you boil it down, it's still a gas combustion engine. — Dana Brunetti

I believe fuel cells will finally end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine ... Fuel cells could be the predominant automotive power source in 25 years. — Bill Ford

I believe fuel cells could end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine. — William Clay Ford Jr.

They'd made the bricks from the local earth, processed through some of the mining equipment and fired in a kiln powered by combustion. It could only have been more primitive if they'd dug a cave and painted bison on the walls. — James S.A. Corey

If I want a word, I make it. I don't like combustion. It's too quiet. I have some stuff in a state of combustication. — Julius Sumner Miller

Today, if nothing else, at least I can incinerate these humans with fire from their internal combustion engines and appease your spirit with their screams. — Reki Kawahara

Our opposition will never understand the Democratic Party. Our Party is
to the unpracticed eyes of the old Republican Tories
a mysterious contraption that usually seems to be moving in a thousand directions. What they don't know is what hurts them. For all that movement in the Democratic Party is caused by the internal combustion of creative ferment, of ideas, of people vigorously committed to the proposition that change and social progress are not only to be desired; they are necessities of twentieth-century America. — Hubert H. Humphrey

Holding back technology to reserve business models is like allowing blacksmiths to veto the internal combustion engine in order to protect their horseshoes. — Don Tapscott

The process of history is combustion. — Novalis

Possibly the tragedy of the bicycle is that it was invented too close in time to the car. In the historical scheme, pedal power hardly got under way before the combustion engine appeared and, not only took over the roads, but changed our view of machines. We've forgotten that pedal power is a potent form of energy. — Richard Ballantine

Spontaneous combustion of grassroots politics is the future. — Dick Morris

in this you have failed
you have invalidated your dysfunctional efforts
of innocence
of perverted virginity
with a mangy face before the eye of God
not even summations of crawling
not even rust cutters or combustion
as if to test your blue vaginal mirrors
inside a Protestant Crimea
listening to your fallacious absorption neurosis

you've forfeited your flames
you've cast into the moat
salacious bonfire bathing
you've given up the power of deepened torturing rums
of magnetic chromosomal nerves
for a weakly neutered clairaudience of failure — Will Alexander

I like people to be surprised by the turn of events. I don't want things just to be pat and formulaic. If there's some sort of internal combustion in the character or a desire to change the way things are going, that makes for conflict, which is the essence of drama. — Miranda Richardson

[Trip] "You're a pain in the ass. A wordy pain in the ass."
"Here are two more words for you. Interfering jerk."
"Stubborn idiot."
"Government patsy."
"Bookworm," Trip shot back, and then he had her up against her car, his mouth on hers, his hands on her body, taking as much of her as he could get. She came right back at him, curling her hands into his shirt, trying to drag him closer, which was impossible since the only thing between them was a couple of thin layers of clothing and enough heat to cause spontaneous combustion. — Penny McCall

Pain has an odd way of expressing itself in the acts of business. No matter how many setbacks a leader might experience, there always seems to be a new opaque watermark of endurance testing, invisibly triggered for erratic combustion in each compounding decision. Every CEO in the world knows this, yet few have the good sense to walk away from the table when their cards are hot. Why win in Act Two when a comeback in Act Three gives you a longer biography? Ego is not so much about immortality as it is about demonstrating stately resistance to nightmarish attacks in public forums. Any good smack to the head is a continuity wake up call, or at least another invitation to be interviewed by Charlie Rose. — Ken Goldstein

What is chemistry in a relationship, Really? Chemistry can be spontaneous combustion that excites, incites, often harms. But not understood. Chemistry can also be that which is studied, intentional, and knows how to be repeated and improved upon. Do you have the right chemistry? — Lucille Anderson

I think the internal combustion engine will disappear from the streets of our cities in the next thirty years because transportation will be mass transportation, or probably electrical power. — Gaylord Nelson

The most likely victim of spontaneous human combustion is a solitary woman, 75 percent of all known cases of SHC are women. I tell her that some people believe that arsonist poltergeists are to blame, that the spirits of firestarters roam the cities setting souls on fire. — Kevin Wilson

In every combustion there is disengagement of the matter of fire or of light. A body can burn only in pure air [oxygen]. There is no destruction or decomposition of pure air and the increase in weight of the body burnt is exactly equal to the weight of air destroyed or decomposed. The body burnt changes into an acid by addition of the substance that increases its weight. Pure air is a compound of the matter of fire or of light with a base. In combustion the burning body removes the base, which it attracts more strongly than does the matter of heat, which appears as flame, heat and light. — Antoine Lavoisier

The outward manifestations of an inner combustion are never very directed. — Nick Hornby

The substitution of the internal combustion engine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind. — Winston Churchill

The harsh reality is that America moves on four wheels, powered by conventional internal-combustion engines. At this point, while the elite media (excluding Newsweek) trumpet the benefits of hybrids and Ford and Toyota plan to lead the nation into a low-powered, high-mileage hybrid Utopia, the multitudes remain loyal to the gas-guzzling family bus in the driveway. — Brock Yates

I hung a picture of him above my bed and learned by hand the internal workings of the female combustion engine. — Shannon Celebi

Of all the unexpected qualities of an unexpected universe, the sheer organizing power of animal and plant metabolism is one of the most remarkable ... Where it reaches its highest development, in the human mind, we forget it completely ... So important does nature regard this unseen combustion ... that a starving man's brain will be protected to the last while his body is steadily consumed. — Loren Eiseley

To me the bicycle is in many ways a more satisfactory invention than the automobile. It is consonant with the independence of man because it works under his own power entirely. There is no combustion of some petroleum product..to set the pedals going. Purely mechanical instruments like watches and bicycles are to be preferred to engines that depend on the purchase of power from foreign sources ... The price of power is enslavement. — Louis J. Halle

We have a tremendous investment in facilities for (internal combustion engines, transmissions, and axles) and I can't see throwing them away just because the electric car doesn't emit fumes. — Henry Ford II

Electromagnetic theory and experiment gave us the telephone, radio, TV, computers, and made the internal combustion engine practical - thus, the car and airplane, leading inevitably to the rocket and outer-space exploration. — Gregory Benford

If three hundred years of chainsaws, CFCs, depleted uranium, automobiles, genetic engineering, airplanes, routine international trade, computers, plastics, endocrine disruptors, pesticides, vivisection, internal combustion engines, feller bunchers, dragline excavators, televisions, cell phones, and nuclear (and conventional) bombs are not enough to convey the picture, then that picture will never be conveyed. — Derrick Jensen

Vampires, contrary to popular belief, don't incinerate when exposed to sunlight. If that were true, there would be a heck of a lot more stories about spontaneous combustion around the world. They are, however, very sensitive to sunlight and their skin cannot take long term exposure without damaging and burning it, which was painful. From Vampire Princess Rising book two of the Winters Saga — Jami Brumfield

When you mix with the wrong energy, there's bound to be an explosion. Pay attention and switch lanes when the signal changes. What's really real, is ultimately revealed. — T.F. Hodge

Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire. — Arnold H. Glasow

The physiological combustion theory takes as its starting point the fundamental principle that the amount of heat that arises from the combustion of a given substance is an invariable quantity-i.e., one independent of the circumstances accompanying the combustion-from which it is more specifically concluded that the chemical effect of the combustible materials undergoes no quantitative change even as a result of the vital process, or that the living organism, with all its mysteries and marvels, is not capable of generating heat out of nothing. — Robert Mayer

The trick is to think of life as a process rather than a substance. When a candle is burning, there is a flame that clearly carries energy. When we put the candle out, the energy doesn't "go" anywhere. The candle still contains energy in its atoms and molecules. What happens, instead, is that the process of combustion has ceased. Life is like that: it's not "stuff"; it's a set of things happening. When that process stops, life ends. — Sean Carroll

And she ran out of the diesel combustion and right to me and we held each other and we were not empty at all.
"Holling," she said. "I was so afraid I wouldn't fine you."
"I was standing right here, Heather." I said. "I'll always be standing right here. — Gary D. Schmidt

A Zendo is not a peaceful haven
but a furnace room for the combustion
of our egotistical delusions. — Eido Shimano Roshi

The foodstuff, carbohydrate, is essentially a packet of hydrogen, a hydrogen supplier, a hydrogen donor, and the main event during its combustion is the splitting off of hydrogen. — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

I think you're very brave," he whispered. "You're a fire that should burn itself out in five seconds of brilliant combustion. I know what it's like to put forth that much energy, and yet you do it night after night. And nobody - not marquesses nor guardians nor physicians, not the whole weight of society's expectations - can make you stop." She let out a sigh, a trembling sigh that had her lips brushing against his thumb. So much like a kiss. "If people want you to stop talking, or to stop dressing the way you do, or to change who you are, it's because you hurt their eyes. We've all been trained not to stare into the sun. — Courtney Milan