Gas Light Quotes & Sayings

A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particularly and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement - and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy. — Alan Watts

BECAUSE THIS MONEY came from Texas, the rise of Lyndon Johnson sheds light on the new economic forces that surged out of the Southwest in the middle of the twentieth century, on the immense influence exerted over America's politics, its governmental institutions, its foreign and domestic policies by these forces: the oil and sulphur and gas and defense barons of the Southwest. As the robber barons of the last century looted the nation's earth of its wealth - its coal and coke, its oil and ore, its iron, its forests, the very surface of its earth to provide a footing for the rails of their railroads - and used part of that wealth to ensure that the nation's government would not force them to give more than a pittance of their loot back to the nation's people, so the robber barons of this century have drained the earth of the Southwest of its riches and have used those riches to bend government to their ends. — Robert A. Caro

I've been breastfeeding for two years. I could light the gas ring with my nipples. — Jo Brand

You think you are reading proof, whereas you are merely reading your own mind; your statement of the thing is full of holes & vacancies but you don't know it, because you are filling them from your mind as you go along. Sometimes
but not often enough
the printer's proof-reader saves you
& offends you
with this cold sign in the margin: (?) & you search the passage & find that the insulter is right
it doesn't say what you thought it did: the gas-fixtures are there, but you didn't light the jets — Mark Twain

Hassler flips burgers on a grill in the shadow of the remnants of the Seattle Gas Light Company, a collection of rusted cylinders and ironwork that looms in the distance like the ruins of a steampunk skyline. The expanse of emerald grass runs down to the edge of Lake Union, which sparkles under the late afternoon sun. It's June. It's warm. The entire city seems to be out taking advantage of this rare, perfect day. — Blake Crouch

I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don't remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is 'Disappear Here' and even though it's probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light. — Bret Easton Ellis

There's a fleeting moment that exists for every individual just before they do something truly life-altering. Its that flash of insight and sanity that stalls your heartbeat and bloo flow - a quick warning - just before you explode and make a fool of yourself. Or that incredible brief instant of clarity you have before you floor the gas pedal and run the red light. It's a split second of self admonishment in which you realise that what you're about to do is wrong, but just as quickly choose to ignore that realisation and do it anyway. It's too fast to catch, too bright to see, utterly gone even before you've blinked and therefore, it does a person absolutely no good at all. And yet, there it is. — Heather Killough-Walden

He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate. — Edith Wharton

Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people. — Edward Robert Harrison

For those people who are going to tune in strictly for the pyrotechnics, we have better and bigger explosions. That's a prerequisite of any sequel. But in terms of this, what we're really monitoring is watching the gas industry light our institutions, light our regulatory agencies, light our democracy on fire. — Josh Fox

By the time we had passed St Clement Dane's, the pavements had grown less crowded, and as we drew by the Temple, thick woolly clouds of vapour were curling up from the steep lanes leading down to the river on our right and were beginning to suffuse the light from the gas-lamps and to deepen the gloom of the quieter streets of that quarter. Past St Paul's, on through the sepulchral City and up beyond Bishopsgate, the breeze had dropped and the haze grew thicker and heavier. By the time we had arrived at our rendezvous with Lestrade in a warren of dismal backstreets in Spitalfields, we were mired in the drab wraiths of a summer fog. — Seamus Duffy

Billboards, billboards, drink this, eat that, use all manner of things, everyone, the best, the cheapest, the purest and most satisfying of all their available counterparts. Red lights flicker on every horizon, airplanes beware; cars flash by, more lights. Workers repair the gas main. Signs, signs, lights, lights, streets, streets. — Neal Cassady

If she had seen his face when, safe in his own room, he looked at the picture of a severe and rigid young lady, with a good deal of hair, who appeared to be gazing darkly into futurity, it might have thrown some light upon the subject, especially when he turned off the gas, and kissed the picture in the dark. — Louisa May Alcott

[On writing more Sherlock Holmes stories.] 'I don't care whether you do or not,' said Bram. 'But you will, eventually. He's yours, till death do you part. Did you really think he was dead and gone when you wrote "The Final Problem"? I don't think you did. I think you always knew he'd be back. But whenever you take up your pen and continue, heed my advice. Don't bring him here. Don't bring Sherlock Holmes into the electric light. Leave him in the mysterious and romantic flicker of the gas lamp. He won't stand next to this, do you see? The glare would melt him away. He was more the man of our time than Oscar was. Or than we were. Leave him where he belongs, in the last days of our bygone century. Because in a hundred years, no one will care about me. Or you. Or Oscar. We stopped caring about Oscar years ago, and we were his bloody *friends.* No, what they'll remember are the stories. They'll remember Holmes. And Watson. And Dorian Gray. — Graham Moore

Astfgl peered around through the swirling gas clouds. At least he was in the right place. The whole point about the end of the universe was that you couldn't go past it accidentally.
The last few embers winked out. Time and space collided silently, and collapsed.
Astfgl coughed. It can get so very lonely, when you're twenty million light-years from home.
"Anyone there?" he said.
YES.
The voice was right by his ear. Even demon kings can shiver.
"Apart from you, I mean," he said. "Have you seen anybody?"
YES.
"Who?"
EVERYONE.
Astfgl sighed. "I mean anyone recently."
IT'S BEEN VERY QUIET, said Death. — Terry Pratchett

Before reaching Grassy Butte, though, Dad spied a farmhouse with two pumps in the drive and a red-and-white sign out front saying DALE'S OIL COMPANY. Another sign said CLOSED, but a light was on in the house and Dad pulled in, saying, "I believe we might prevail on Dale. What do you think?"
"Prevail on Dale," I repeated to Swede.
"To make a sale," she added.
"And if we fail, we'll whale on Dale
"
"Till he needs braille!"
"Will you guys desist?" Dad asked. — Leif Enger

The best way to get America back to work, and reduce our deficit, is hire all the photographers in the country, position them on street corners, and have them take pictures of all the license plates of red-light runners, who will then receive a fine and all will be fine. But wait! Nobody will run red lights, because not only are gas prices too high, but with no jobs to be late to, nobody has anywhere to go. — Jarod Kintz

The government taxes you when you bring home a paycheck.
It taxes you when you make a phone call.
It taxes you when you turn on a light.
It taxes you when you sell a stock.
It taxes you when you fill your car with gas.
It taxes you when you ride a plane.
It taxes you when you get married.
Then it taxes you when you die.
This is taxual insanity and it must end. — J. C. Watts

That tank," Bucktooth pointed at the gas gauge on the dashboard of the decidedly unfredneck-like '65 Dodge Dart, "is almost empty. We ain't going much farther."
"Indeed it is." A solemn Phosphate agreed. "I suggest we stop the car and weigh our options."
"What options?" Professor Buckley asked. "Why do-that is- we've been traveling up and down this path for over an hour without seeing anyone or encountering anything. Even the doughnut shop cannot be relocated. In light of this, what options do we have?"
It was difficult to argue with the ex-history teacher's typically alarmist position. Brisbane's reliable old automobile had indeed been expending its remaining fuel supply in what seemed to be a hopeless effort to exit the unnamed dirt path. After leaving the doughnut shop and the blonde presidential descendant who worked there, they'd been unable to find DeMohrenschildt Lane again, or any other side street. — Donald Jeffries

In depression, buy gas balloons; they would make you feel lighter. — Vikrmn

As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

As the plow pushes through a parking lot of light fluffy snow, the snow clumps together in bigger and bigger chunks. Out in space, pressure hitting a gas cloud has a similar effect, except, instead of snowballs, you get stars! — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

All my life, I have loved balloons - all balloons - the heavy English sort, immense and round, that have to be pushed about, and the gay, light, gas-filled French ones that soar into the air the moment you let go of them. — Elizabeth Bibesco

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part ... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? — Richard Feynman

He squinted up at the straining muscular backs of the stone men supporing the dome. "You'll have to take me to some museums," he said. He was being the young man on the road, following the sun because gray weather made him suicidal, writing his poetry in his mind in diners and gas station men's rooms across the country. "But I did see a show of Hopper once. And I like his light. It was kind of lonely or something.
Or, "The world's a mess, it's in my kiss,' like John and Exene say," he mumbled. We were in a leather store on Market Street being punks on acid with skunk-striped hair and steel-toed boots. — Francesca Lia Block

People even talk of being "on the wrong side of history," as though they knew not only what the last twenty years had produced, but what the next twenty years were going to produce as well. The idolization of "progress," of "moving with the times," is part of the same movement. "Now that we live in the twenty-first century . . ." people begin, as though it were obvious that one's ethics or theology ought to change with the calendar. All this is a form of creeping pantheism, of looking at certain trends in the wider world and deducing that they are what "God" is doing. (It's also very selective; it cheerfully screens out all the inventions of modernism, such as guillotines and gas chambers, which do not exactly fit the picture of an upward journey into light.) — N. T. Wright

As the light began to fade, the architects lit the library's gas jets, which hissed like mildly perturbed cats. — Erik Larson

Switching to light-coloured roofs and roadways would have the equivalent effect on greenhouse gas emissions to taking one billion cars off the road for eleven years. — Steven Chu

Dye a specsuit any color other than the original red, and any stalker would put down five hundred for it without batting an eyelash"
"It's light, comfortable, not too tight, and you don't sweat in it from the heat. You can go right through a fire in this thing, and no gas will penetrate it. It's even bulletproof, they say. Of course, fire toxic gas, and bullets -these are only Earth perils. The Zone doesn't have those; in the Zone you have other worries. — Arkady Strugatsky

When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I'm sure it made the work seem that much more urgent. — George Carlin

Look, I get it. I'm a white, heterosexual man. It's really easy for me to say, 'Oh, wow, wasn't the nineteenth century terrific?' But try this. Imagine the scene: It's pouring rain against a thick window. Outside, on Baker Street, the light from the gas lamps is so weak that it barely reaches the pavement. A fog swirls in the air, and the gas gives it a pale yellow glow. Mystery brews in every darkened corner, in every darkened room. And a man steps out into that dim, foggy world, and he can tell you the story of your life by the cut of your shirtsleeves. He can shine a light into the dimness, with only his intellect and his tobacco smoke to help him. Now. Tell me that's not awfully romantic? — Graham Moore

No end of blessings from heaven and earth. As we climb up out of the Moab valley and reach the high tableland stretching northward, traces of snow flying across the road, the sun emerges clear of the overcast, burning free on the very edge of the horizon. For a few minutes the whole region from the canyon of the Colorado to the Book Cliffs - crag, mesa, turret, dome, canyon wall, plain, swale and dune - glows with a vivid amber light against the darkness on the east. At the same time I see a mountain peak rising clear of the clouds, old Tukuhnikivats fierce as the Matterhorn, snowy as Everest, invincible. "Ferris, stop this car. Let's go back." But he only steps harder on the gas. "No," he says, "you've got a train to catch." He sees me craning my neck to stare backward. "Don't worry," he adds, "it'll all still be here next spring." The — Edward Abbey

You can't get away, I can't fill my car up at a gas station without Coors Light, Bud Light, Corona, whatever, it's just the way it is. — Kirk Windstein

I remember that day very clearly: I had received a phone call. A friend had been in an accident. Perhaps she would not live. She had very little face, and her spine was broken in two places. She had not yet moved; the doctor described her as "a pebble in water." I walked around Brooklyn and noticed that the faded peri-winkle of the abandoned Mobil gas station on the corner was suddenly blooming. In the baby-shit yellow showers at my gym, where snow sometimes fluttered in through the cracked gated windows, I noticed that the yellow paint was peeling in spots, and a decent, industrial blue was trying to creep in. At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God. When I walked into my friend's hospital room, her eyes were a piercing, pale blue and the only part of her body that could move. I was scared. So was she. The blue was beating. — Maggie Nelson

The orange light looks like a gasoline fire. It comes in through people's rear windows, bounces off their rearview mirrors, projects a fiery mask across their eyes, reaches into their subconscious, and unearths terrible fears of being pinned, fully conscious, under a detonating gas tank, makes them want to pull over and let the Deliverator overtake them in his black chariot of pepperoni fire. — Neal Stephenson

Don't you remember how you once answered a question of mine? Me - I shall never forget your words. Those words of yours opened my eyes; they brought me the light of day. I asked you how the Germans could send Jewish children to die in the gas chambers. How, I asked, could they live with themselves after that? Was there really no judgement passed on them by man or God? And you said: Only one judgement is passed on the executioner - he ceases to be a human being. Through looking on his victim as less than human, he becomes his own executioner, he executes the human being inside himself. But the victim - no matter what the executioner does to kill him - remains a human being forever. Remember now? — Vasily Grossman

And the more I thought of what had happened, the wilder and darker it grew. I reviewed the whole extraordinary sequence of events as I rattled on through the silent gas-lit streets. There was the original problem: that at least was pretty clear now. The death of Captain Morstan, the sending of the pearls, the advertisement, the letter, - we had had light upon all those events. They had only led us, however, to a deeper and far more tragic mystery. The Indian treasure, the curious plan found among Morstan's baggage, the strange scene at Major Sholto's death, the rediscovery of the treasure immediately followed by the murder of the discoverer, the very singular accompaniments to the crime, the footsteps, the remarkable weapons, the words upon the card, corresponding with those upon Captain Morstan's chart, - here was indeed a labyrinth in which a man less singularly endowed than my fellow-lodger might well despair of ever finding the clue. — Arthur Conan Doyle

You're not just looking up into a curtain of black. You're looking into the eye of the universe. Stare for a while and you start to realize -- on a deep, gut level -- that the moon is a giant rock circling us in space. The sun is a violent, fusion-fueled ball of plasma and gas millions of miles away that destroyed the atmospheres of all of the inner planets (including Mars, which is farther away from it than we are) and would do the same to ours if we weren't lucky enough to have a magnetic field that diverts the solar wind. The cute little pinpricks of light you see out there are other giant, explosive, incredibly pissed-off balls of gas floating in an infinite void, most of which are far more impressive than our puny sun. And that smear of milky white through the sky? That's the center of our own galaxy -- a gigantic pinwheel circling a supermassive black hole like floating detritus around the vortex of a flushing toilet. — Johnny B. Truant

If he died now, Grainier probably wouldn't know it until they came into the light of the gas lamps either side of the doctor's house. After they'd moved along for nearly an hour without conversation, listening only to the creaking wagon and the sound of the nearby river and the clop of the mares, it grew dark. — Denis Johnson

It was dusk when I drove back into downtown Detroit. I was annoyed by how much traffic there was at that hour of the day. Being a guy with two good legs who doesn't mind ankling, I hadn't realized the car situation had gotten so bad in the city. I almost had two smack-ups with people who refused to yield to me. Then I bumped someone from behind, intentionally, at the new flashing traffic light on Jefferson. The guy in the car had refused to move - he just sat there waiting because the light was red. After I bumped him (not that hard), the squirt hopped out of his car red in the face, and I must admit the sight of him gave me my first laugh in two days. He said, "Can't you see it's a red light?" I told him a red light is just a suggestion. Then I pressed the gas lightly and started pushing his car further out into the intersection whilst he stood there in disbelief. "Better get back in, your car is leaving without you," I said. — W.K. Berger

Embracing a low carbon economy will be as momentous as the previous industrial revolutions. As the shift from coal to oil did. And the shift from gas light to electric light. It has the potential to give us the competitive edge in the new global economy. The scale of the challenge is extraordinary. We will need to reinvent in the way we live our lives, the way our world works — Charles Hendry

In this manner, in early days, were formed those vast and prodigious layers of coal, which an ever - increasing consumption must utterly use up in about three centuries more, if people do not find some more economic light than gas, and some cheaper motive power than steam. All — Jules Verne

The cute little pinpricks of light you see out there are other giant, explosive, incredibly pissed-off balls of gas floating in an infinite void, most of which are far more impressive than our puny sun. — Johnny B. Truant

BILLS! BILLS! BILLS!' she screamed. 'IS THAT ALL YOU CAN BRING ME? THESE BILLS?'
'Yes, mam, that's all I can bring you.'
I turned and walked on.
It wasn't my fault that they used telephones and gas and light and bought all their things on credit. Yet when I brought them their bills they screamed at me - as if I had asked them to have a phone installed, or a $350 t.v. set sent over with no money down. — Charles Bukowski

That's the first sign you know you're a Libertarian. You see the red light. You stop. You realize that there's not a car in sight. And you put your foot on the gas. — Gary Johnson

He recognized his own fear in them, and now that he knows what it looks like he sees it everywhere - in the man who pumps gas across the street, in the teenage girls who stumble down the sidewalk, in the transvestite prostitute who steps forward and back, indecisive, at the intersection while Andres prays for the light to turn green. It is a fear that he can't get away from, and seeing it in others doesn't make him feel any safer. — Natalia Sylvester

I imagined that at the end of the line there would be a door that opened into a beam of light. Welcome to fat-guy heaven. Come on in! There's always an NFL game on. The beer is free. You don't have to wake up tomorrow. You have no responsibilities. And you can eat all the barbecue you want in the middle of a gas station. — Jim Gaffigan

Let us gather together in the great cities, and light huge bonfires of a million gas-jets, and shout and sing together, and feel brave. — Jerome K. Jerome

Gas Lights - Without Oil, Tallow, Wicks or Smoke. It is not necessary to invite attention to the gas lights by which my salon of paintings is now illuminated; those who have seen the ring beset with gems of light are sufficiently disposed to spread their reputation; the purpose of this notice is merely to say that the Museum will be illuminated every evening until the public curiosity be gratified. — Rembrandt Peale

It is very different to make a practical system and to introduce it. A few experiments in the laboratory would prove the practicability of system long before it could be brought into general use. You can take a pipe and put a little coal in it, close it up, heat it and light the gas that comes out of the stem, but that is not introducing gas lighting. I'll bet that if it were discovered to-morrow in New York that gas could be made out of coal it would be at least five years before the system would be in general use. — Thomas A. Edison

Deciding you should get divorced because you've run out of love is like deciding you should sell your car because it has run out of gas. No reasonable person would ever do that. You simply put more gas in your car and go on. If your marriage "love low" light comes on, pull over and start putting love back into your marriage. Once you've filled it back up, then you can go on. SOWING — Craig Groeschel

It is unlikely that we will ever see a star being born. Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the very young, but never their actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event. Stars are born inside thick clouds of dust and gas in the spiral arms of the galaxy, so thick that visible light cannot penetrate them. — Heinz Pagels

Does the customer invent new product or service? The customer generates nothing. No customer asked for electric lights. There was gas and gas mantles, which gave good light. — W. Edwards Deming

I used to have to wear a gas mask to school when I was a kid because of the dust. I would tell people that the first light I saw was in a movie theater, because the sun was just a little glow. — Dennis Hopper

Two suns burned in a copper sky overhead. One was large and somewhat oblong and gave off a dull orange light. The other was small and possessed a brilliant white incandescence at its core, ringed farther out by a silver corona. Large eruptions of reddish gas flowed from the surface of the orange sun, swirling through the void at a frightening pace, extending toward the smaller, bluish white sun. The flowing gases painted land and sky in startling colors, and whenever the gases wrapped entirely around the smaller sun, the void between them filled with an incandescent brilliance. The light cut the long flatness of space in half, sweeping aside all other illumination and shadow. Then the crimson gas flow would spiral inward and vanish in the blink of an eye, leaving the two suns to shine in the copper sky once more. — Ryu Mitsuse

Parasols with miniature electric gas lamps atop them were all the rage. Hers had a pink light in it, which meant she belonged to a family that allowed its children to follow the quaint old practice of dating. White indicated that a girl's family would arrange a courtship for her, and blue identified a married woman. Green stood for a woman who wasn't keen on men at all, but whose head could be turned by the sight of a pretty skirt. — Lia Habel

Zeal was like gas, most dangerous when you could not see it. The wrong spark could light it at any time. — Frances Hardinge

As an anonymous wit is supposed to have put it: Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people. — David Christian

In discussing the state of the atmosphere following a nuclear exchange, we point especially to the effects of the many fires that would be ignited by the thousands of nuclear explosions in cities, forests, agricultural fields, and oil and gas fields. As a result of these fires, the loading of the atmosphere with strongly light absorbing particles in the submicron size range (1 micron = 10-6 m) would increase so much that at noon solar radiation at the ground would be reduced by at least a factor of two and possibly a factor of greater than one hundred. — Paul J. Crutzen

Thirty- eight years old and he was finished. He sipped at the coffee and remembered where he had gone wrong
or right. He'd simply gotten tired
of the insurance game, of the small offices and high glass partitions, the clients; he'd simply gotten tired of cheating on his wife, of squeezing secretaries in the elevator and in the halls;
he'd gotten tired of Christmas parties and New Year's parties and birthdays, and payments on new cars and furniture payments
light, gas, water
the whole bleeding complex of necessities.
He'd gotten tired and quit, that's all. The divorce came soon enough and the drinking came soon enough, and suddenly he was out of it. He had nothing, and he found out that having nothing was difficult too. It was another type of burden. If only there were some gentler road in between. It seemed a man only had two choices
get in on the hustle or be a bum. — Charles Bukowski

Life Will Put Many Red Lights In Front Of You, But Sometimes We Must Push On The Gas And Trust God — Kendrick Lamar

Although they [light and medium trucks] have only 5% of the transportation market ... , they account for fully 35% of greenhouse gas emissions from freight transportation. — David Suzuki

A quick run past the rabbits' execution shed, a turn around the kittens' quicklime pit, a moment's hesitation beyond the monkeys' gas-chamber
and they are gone: ay, not so long ago these canines fled away into the storm. It would be pleasant to report that that night Dr. Boycott dreamt of many a woe, and all his whitecoat-men with shade and form of witch and demon and large coffin-worm were long be-nightmared. One might even have hoped to add that Tyson the old died palsy-twitched, with meagre face deform. But in fact
as will be seen
none of these things happened. Slowly the rain ceased, the grey rack blowing away and over Windermere as first light came creeping into the sky and the remaining inmates of Lawson Park woke to another day in the care and service of humanity. — Richard Adams