Grinds Quotes & Sayings

Below the mill the rivers merge. First they flow close beside each other, undecided, overawed by their longed-for intimacy, and then they fall into each other and get lost in one another. The river that flows out of this melting pot by the mill is no longer either the White or the Black, but it is powerful and effortlessly drives the mill wheel that grinds the grain for bread.
Primeval lies on both the White and Black rivers and also on the third one, formed out of their mutual desire. The river arising from their confluence below the mill is called The River, and it flows on calm and contented. — Olga Tokarczuk

Writers choose to drink because of their inability to cope with the daily hassles of being part of a society. Why shouldn't they? Every day an intelligent human being is plagued with bills, horrifying news stories and general idiocy that slowly grinds away at their psyche, breaking off pieces of it that may never fit again. — Thor Benson

Only in drama does it end with the tragedy; in life it grinds on. Moanday, tearsday, happy days, right through to Shatterdays. And Again. — Gayla Reid

When the world grinds you down, bent to tear you apart, cling to what you hold dear, and stay true to your heart. For the world has a way to dismantle your cause, to exploit what you lack and expose all your flaws. But when every layer of your being is gone, and it seems there's no point anymore to go on; just remember one thing, at the end of the day, when you have self-respect they can't take that away. — Wes Fesler

When understanding fails, there is always more force in reserve. As the "experiments in material and human resources control" collapse and "revolutionary development" grinds to a halt, we simply resort more openly to the Gestapo tactics that are barely concealed behind the facade of pacification. When American cities explode, we can expect the same. The technique of "limited warfare" translates neatly into a system of domestic repression - far more humane, as will quickly be explained, than massacring those who are unwilling to wait for the inevitable victory of the war on poverty. Why should a liberal intellectual be so persuaded of the virtues of a political system of four-year dictatorship? The answer seem all to plain. — Noam Chomsky

When I am assailed with heavy tribulations, I rush out among my pigs rather than remain alone by myself. The human heart is like a millstone in a mill: when you put wheat under it, it turns and grinds and bruises the wheat to flour; if you put no wheat, it still grinds on, but then 'tis itself it grinds and wears away. So the human heart, unless it be occupied with some employment, leaves space for the devil, who wriggles himself in and brings with him a whole host of evil thoughts, temptations, and tribulations, which grind out the heart. — Martin Luther

But in science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. Not the man who finds a grain of new and precious quality but to him who sows it, reaps it, grinds it and feeds the world on it. — Francis Darwin

No one who does not live with constant pain can imagine the toll it takes. The way it grinds you down. The sheer damnable tedium of it. — Mary Doria Russell

Three were the fates. Poverty that chains; gray drudgery that grinds the hope away, and gaping ignorance that starves the soul. — Edwin Markham

We can prevent Europe from becoming a spiritless machine that, in the end, grinds to a halt. — Jan Peter Balkenende

It's not the cost (although that pinches), or the time (though that grinds). After a while, it's the sheer galling indignity of being asked to prove, pay, and prove all over again that you're a worthy parent. Any true parent will tell you that that is impossible to prove in advance. — Scott Simon

You realize that running is something I only do on the treadmill while wearing my sneaks and running gear, correct?" She trots next to me, trying to keep up on feet that are clad in expensive suede boots with a heel as tall as my hand.

I walk even faster. "Can't hear you. Embarrassment is short-circuiting my nervous system."

"If embarrassment is causing your malfunction now, I'd love to know what it was that caused you to run across the quad."

As if she doesn't know. Before I can respond, though, Tucker shows up on my right.

"Where's the fire?" he drawls.

Hope grinds to a halt. "Thank God you caught up with us." She runs a hand across her forehead in an exaggerated motion. "I'm not cut out for outdoor exertions. — Elle Kennedy

law grinds the poor, rich men rule the law — Oliver Goldsmith

She is the gin. Cold, intoxicating. Gives you a rush, makes you warm inside, makes you lose your head. Take too much, it makes you sick and shuts you down.
He is the coffee, hot, steaming, filtered. You have to add stuff to it to make it taste good. Grinds your stomach, makes you jittery, wired, and tense. Bad trip, keeps you up, burns you out.
Coffee and gin don't mix, never do, everybody keeps trying and trying to make it taste good. — Henry Rollins

The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the grain. — Charles Dickens

That woman grinds my grits, and that's a fact. — Nancy E. Turner

No one is talking about the man behind the ass. It was a lot of 'Miley twerks on Robin Thicke,' but never, 'Robin Thicke grinds up on Miley.' They're only talking about the one that bent over. So, obviously there's a double standard. — Miley Cyrus

We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. — Emily St. John Mandel

Many systems require slack in order to work well. Old reel-to-reel tape recorders needed an extra bit of tape fed into the mechanism to ensure that the tape wouldn't rip. Your coffee grinder won't grind if you overstuff it. Roadways operate best below 70 percent capacity; traffic jams are caused by lack of slack. In principle, if a road is 85 percent full and everybody goes at the same speed, all cars can easily fit with some room between them. But if one driver speeds up just a bit and then needs to brake, those behind her must brake as well. Now they've slowed down too much, and, as it turns out, it's easier to reduce a car's speed than to increase it again. This small shock - someone lightly deviating from the right speed and then touching her brakes - has caused the traffic to slow substantially. A few more shocks, and traffic grinds to a halt. At 85 percent there is enough road but not enough slack to absorb the small shocks. — Sendhil Mullainathan

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The New Your energy goes beyond anything you'll find anywhere else. It's too much for some people and it grinds them down, but it lifts up and animates the rest of us. — Lawrence Block

I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face. — May Sarton

The world rolls round forever like a mill; it grinds out death and life and good and ill; it has no purpose, heart or mind or will. — James Thomson

What grinds me the most is that we're sending kids out into the world who don't know how to balance a checkbook, don't know how to apply for a loan, don't even know how to properly fill out a job application, but because they know the quadratic formula we consider them prepared for the world? — Chris Colfer

As a student of business administration, I know that there is a law of evolution for organizations as stringent and inevitable as anything in life. The longer one exists, the more it grinds out restrictions that slow its own functions. It reaches entropy in a state of total narcissism. Only the people sufficiently far out in the field get anything done, and every time they do they are breaking half a dozen rules in the process. — Roger Zelazny

Nobody else gets to see you like that," he declares. "Ye're claimed." His words douse me in gasoline. His eyes light the match. And when he grinds himself against me, all that's left to do is burn for him. — A. Zavarelli

Environment grinds us, forces us to adjust, and
consciously or not
kills our most precious possession: that something which enables us to speak with ourselves and with God. — Mieczyslaw Jastrun

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

It was through eavesdropping that I learned that you could buy fresh peanut butter at Whole Foods from a machine that grinds it in front of you. I had wasted so much of my life eating stupid old, already-ground peanut butter. So, yeah, I highly recommend a little nosiness once in a while. — Mindy Kaling

What made Einstein special was his impertinence, his nonconformity, and his distaste for dogma. Einstein's genius reminds us that a society's competitive advantage comes not from teaching the multiplication or periodic tables but from nurturing rebels. Grinds have their place, but unruly geeks change the world. (Walter Issacson, Wired) — Alexandra Robbins

But smart has to have a depth as well as a length. Some smart brushes over a problem. And some smart grinds exceeding slow, like the mills of God, and it grinds fine, and when it comes up with an answer, it has been tested. — Terry Pratchett

Whether life grinds a man down or polishes him depends on what he's made of. — Kathryn Kuhlman

We are all made of broken glass. The school grinds along on grief and anger. — Justine Larbalestier

Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men. — Victor LaValle

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them. — Emily Bronte

As for my damned literature, God knows what a business it is, grinding along without a scrap of inspiration or a note of style. But it has to be ground, and the mill grinds exceeding slowly though not particularly small ... The treadmill turns; and, with a kind of desperate cheerfulness, I mount the idle stair. — Robert Louis Stevenson

He grabs the swing by the seat and it grinds to a halt. Oz's fingers brush along the skin of my thigh.
My heart stutters. Stupid heart. Stupid short skirt. Stupid deep blue eyes and wild charcoal hair. Stupid, stupid, stupid me for licking my suddenly dry lips. — Katie McGarry

Sometimes when the year grinds to its end and the new term begins I feel I'm living the life of a fruit fly - the endless ephemeral cycle, each new semester a "fresh start" that leads to the same moribund conclusions. — Julie Schumacher

A healthy pair of eyes should see everything that can be
seen and not say, "No! Too bright!" (which is a symptom of
ophthalmia).
A healthy sense of hearing or smell should be prepared for
any sound or scent; a healthy stomach should have the same
reaction to all foods, as a mill to what it grinds.
So too a healthy mind should be prepared for anything.
The one that keeps saying, "Are my children all right?" or
"Everyone must approve of me" is like eyes that can only
stand pale colors, or teeth that can handle only mush. — Marcus Aurelius

We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly. — Catherynne M Valente

The human heart is like a millstone in a mill: when you put wheat under it, it turns and grinds and bruises the wheat to flour; if you put no wheat, it still grinds on, but then 'tis itself it grinds and wears away. — Martin Luther

A new danger now beset him [Grotius], the danger of becoming simply a venal pleader, a creature who grinds out arguments on this or that side, for this or that client: a mere legal beast of prey. Fortunately for himself and for the world he took a higher view of his life-work: his determination clearly was to make himself a thoroughly equipped jurist, and then, as he rose more and more in his profession, to use his powers for the good of his country and of mankind. — Andrew Dickson White

We are not gods. We make mistakes. We do not live very long.
Sometimes someone grinds ink, mixes it with water, arranges paper, takes up a brush to record our time, our days, and we are given another life in those words. — Guy Gavriel Kay

A party is like a sausage machine, it grinds up all sorts of heads together into the same baloney ... — Henrik Ibsen

Like sheaves of corn it gathers you unto itself. It threshes you to make you naked. It sifts you to free you from your husks. It grinds you to whiteness. It kneads you until you are pliant. And then it assigns you to its sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast. All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's Heart. — Khalil Gibran

Children make prayers so thoughtlessly, building them up like sand castles - and they are always surprised when suddenly the castle becomes real, and the iron gate grinds shut. — Catherynne M Valente

Randy grinds his teeth for about a mile, and then says, "If there is any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselves down to this incredibly narrow laser-beam focus on one tiny little subject and think about nothing else." "Whereas women can't?" "I suppose women can. They rarely seem to want to. What I'm characterizing here, as the female approach, is essentially saner and healthier." "Hmmmm. — Neal Stephenson

God's mill grinds slow, but sure. — George Herbert

The wheel of the Good Law moves swiftly on. It grinds by night and day. The worthless husks it drives from out the golden grain, the refuse from the flour. The hand of fate guides the wheel; the revolutions mark the beatings of the heart of manifestation. — H. P. Blavatsky

Never can a new idea move within the law. It matters not whether that idea pertains to political and social changes or to any other domain of human thought and expression - to science, literature, music; in fact, everything that makes for freedom and joy and beauty must refuse to move within the law. How can it be otherwise? The law is stationary, fixed, mechanical, 'a chariot wheel' which grinds all alike without regard to time, place and condition, without ever taking into account cause and effect, without ever going into the complexity of the human soul. — Emma Goldman

When the machine grinds to a halt, the cogs themselves begin wondering about their function. — Ken Knabb

Risk, as first articulated by the economist Frank H. Knight in 1921,45 is something that you can put a price on. Say that you'll win a poker hand unless your opponent draws to an inside straight: the chances of that happening are exactly 1 chance in 11.46 This is risk. It is not pleasant when you take a "bad beat" in poker, but at least you know the odds of it and can account for it ahead of time. In the long run, you'll make a profit from your opponents making desperate draws with insufficient odds. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is risk that is hard to measure. You might have some vague awareness of the demons lurking out there. You might even be acutely concerned about them. But you have no real idea how many of them there are or when they might strike. Your back-of-the-envelope estimate might be off by a factor of 100 or by a factor of 1,000; there is no good way to know. This is uncertainty. Risk greases the wheels of a free-market economy; uncertainty grinds them to a halt. — Nate Silver

The national question is purely a peasant question ... the best way to eliminate nationality is a massive factory with thousands of workers ... , which like a millstone grinds up all nationalities and forges a new nationality. This nationality is the universal proletariat. — Mikhail Kalinin

I'm going to fuck you until you're seeing stars, Ava." His voice is harsh as he grinds his hips against me. I whimper. "You won't be going to work tomorrow because you won't be able to walk. Get in the car. — Jodi Ellen Malpas

I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow "transcend" the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger — Mary Karr

God grinds the axes he intends to use. — Dave Sim

I clench my teeth and push forward. My pen grinds out the first and eldest word: an Ink-borne lance of black fire, scratched into a sheet of ice.
-The Penitent God — S.G. Night

The old house had a thousand doors in it.

All old houses do. You can see them if you know how to look: the noontime shadow of a windowpane crawling with intent across a floor; unmeasured angles of wall meeting wall; fireplaces grown chill with unused years. Archways with unseen contours you can trace with a finger in the cracks as brick grinds against brick in settling walls. Some nights, and some houses are doorways entire, silhouettes against the evening's last light black on black like an opening into a darker sky. You just have to look. An eye-corner glance will do, if you don't turn and stare and explain it away. — Michael Montoure

A good idea turns every cog in your mind, making you scared of bed in case the whole machine grinds to a halt. — Trevor Baylis

I'm as vulnerable as anybody to the toxicity of the American nuclear family. But I wouldn't call it disease or moral failure as much as I would point the finger at a system that grinds people down like a metal file. Who doesn't need a drink? Who isn't going to crack and lash out at the people they love? — Susie Bright

When we die, we die. No more. Once the spider-thread of life is severed, the human body is but a mass of corrupting vegetable matter. A feast for worms. That is all. Tell me, what is more ridiculous than the notion of an immortal soul; than the belief that when a man is dead, he remains alive, that when his life grinds to a halt, his soul
or whatever you call it
takes flight? — Marquis De Sade

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down. — J.R.R. Tolkien

In a good-natured way he had almost decided that Princeton was one part deadly Philistines and one part deadly grinds, and to find a person who could mention Keats without stammering, yet evidently washed his hands, was rather a treat. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Blue hadn't expected him to come back, and she stumbled on nothing. He grabbed her just as she was about to step into the roller pan. April, who'd been doing some X-rated grinds to "Baby Got Back," immediately stopped dancing. Jack sat Blue on her feet. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Law grinds the poor, and rich men rule the law. — Oliver Goldsmith

So I telled her my 'maginin's o' places from old books'n'pics in the school'ry. Lands where the Fall'd never falled, towns bigger'n all o' Big I. an' towers o' stars'n'suns blazin' higher'n Mauna Kea, bays of not jus' one Prescient Ship but a mil'yun, Smart boxes what make delish grinds more'n anyun can eat, Smart Pipes what gush more brew'n anyun can drink, places where it's always spring an' no sick, no knucklyin' an' no slavin'. Places where ev'ryun's a beautsome purebirth who lives to be one hun'erd'n'fifty years. — David Mitchell

In relations between the rich and the strong, between the rich and the poor, between the master and the servant, it's liberty that grinds down, and the law which liberates. — Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

I might shatter into a million pieces," he grinds out but drops my hands. "I'll put you back together again," I promise. — Lynetta Halat

Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones out of our minds, come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil. — Natalie Goldberg

He's as tall as the door, and I'm standing here without remembering the walk across the shadowed parking lot. When he turns to face me the world grinds into slow motion. Even my heartbeat draws out interminably. — Poppet

What ever truth drops on it eventually grinds to a powder. — Art Blakey

But remember that intent is everything. One does not just jump, one lifts into the air, one rises. In the same way the lifted leg of an arabesque becomes a wing, and not a mechanical leverage like a raised trap door. This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics. The dancer tries to express something; the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds. The acrobat is lost in a web of muscles the dancer is all but invisible in projected idea. — Agnes De Mille

Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out. — Emily St. John Mandel

The fact is that at different stages of your life, and under the influence of different inspirations, you write different things. The point is not necessarily to find your voice, which grinds out the same sort of thing again and again, but to find a vehicle for people who are far more important than the author: the characters. — Vikram Seth

Hat came before has dissolved from me, lost like milk teeth. But I think, rather, that it has always been as it is, and there was never a beforethis nor will there be an afternow. I am accepting. This is not a thing to be solved, or conquered, or destroyed. It is. I am. We are. We conjugate together in darkness, plotting against each other, the Labyrinth to eat me and I to eat it, each to swallow the hard, black opium of the other. We hold orange petals beneath our tongues and seethe. It has always been so. It grinds against me and I bite into its skin.. — Catherynne M Valente

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us. — Thomas Holcroft

It is natural not to care about a sister certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night. — Gertrude Stein

The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-esteem interact to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin. — Carl Sagan

My world grinds to a loud, screeching halt. Big Red? What the ever-loving knuckle f**k?
I gape up at him, too shocked to even form a proper glare. And he squints back, that inane smile still in place, as if he's waiting for me to answer. My mind is stuck on one thing.
He'd called me Big Red. Big Fucking Red. — Kristen Callihan

Wadsworth Moor
Where the millstone of sky
Grinds light and shadow so purple-fine
And has ground it so long
Grinding the skin off the earth
Earth bleeds her raw true darkness
A land naked now as a wound
That the sun swabs and dabs
Where the miles of agony are numbness
And harebell and heather a euphoria — Ted Hughes

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Endless cricket, like endless anything else, simply grinds you down. — Ted Dexter

One of the most terrible things about the English education System in Ireland is its ruthlessness ... it is cold and mechanical, like the ruthlessness of an immensely powerful engine. A machine vast, complicated ... It grinds night and day; it obeys immutable and predetermined laws; it is as devoid of understanding, of sympathy, of imagination, as is any other piece of machinery that performs an appointed task. Into it is fed all raw human material in Ireland; it seizes upon it inexorably and rends and compresses and remoulds ... — Patrick Pearse

A city of Dreadful Nights:
The world rolls round forever like a mill, it grinds out life and death and good and ill. It has no purpose, heart, nor mind, nor will. — James Thompson

The nation in arms is virtually a communist state: the people must be paid wages and fed and protected and regimented behind the lines as much as on the front. Minds must be kept loyal and at the right pitch of hate, so that successive drafts of fighters are accepted without murmurings. Letters and newspapers must be censored while the propaganda mill grinds on. As for decisions of strategy and overall command, they must please many masters: dissenters in the cabinet, the heads of the allied states and public opinion. Hence failures must be disguised or concealed. — Jacques Barzun

Sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence - nobles of great power all of them; but, most especially the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every doorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a garment that the wind shook. The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds — Charles Dickens

When the world grinds you down, you pick a handful of fires to hold close to your heart. — Robert Jackson Bennett

In every room there is a mirror before which he stands attentively and chews his rage, and from the constant chewing, from the grumbling and mumbling and the muttering and cursing his jaws have gotten unhinged and they sag badly and, when he rubs his beard, pieces of his jaw crumble away and he's so disgusted with himself that he stamps on his own jaw, grinds it to bits with his big heels. — Henry Miller

Have you noticed that they put advertisements in with your bills now? Like bills aren't distasteful enough, they have to stuff junk mail in there with them. I get back at them. I put garbage in with my check when I mail it in. Coffee grinds, banana peels ... I write, "Could you throw this away for me?" — Andy Rooney

The press, important as is its office, is but the servant of the human intellect, and its ministry is for good or for evil, according to the character of those who direct it. The press is a mill which grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill the hopper with poisoned grain, and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread. — William C. Bryant

I'm so dopesick, my tears taste like urine. It's as if the air itself were made of broken glass. I try to stop twitching. To stay still, to stop my very breath, let the pain stay inside. The slightest movement grinds tiny shards into my pores. Breathing is like gulping from a bag of claws. I want to die. Want to pass out. Want to stop ... this ... fucking ... feeling. — Jerry Stahl

Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness. — Thomas Huxley

Nature grinds all of us. Keep count of the ounce of pleasure you get. In the long run, nature did her work through you, and when you die your body will make other plants grow. Yet we think all the time that we are getting pleasure ourselves. Thus the wheel goes round. — Swami Vivekananda

Africa is cruel ... it takes your heart and grinds it into powdered stone - and no-one minds — Elspeth Huxley

And speaking of this wonderful machine:
[840] I'm puzzled by the difference between
Two methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet's mind,
A testing of performing words, while he
Is soaping a third time one leg, and B,
The other kind, much more decorous, when
He's in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought,
The abstract battle is concretely fought.
The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar
[850] A canceled sunset or restore a star,
And thus it physically guides the phrase
Toward faint daylight through the inky maze.
But method A is agony! The brain
Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.
A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the will
Can interrupt, while the automaton
Is taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before. — Vladimir Nabokov

They say time heals. No, it just wears away pain. It grinds everything to dust. — Neal Asher

Why do you need that thing?" September asked. "None of the airports back home have them."
"They do. You just can't see them right," Betsy Basilstalk said with a grin. "All customs agents have them, otherwise, why would people agree to stand in line and be peered at and inspected? We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say, lines on maps are silly. Where you live, the awful machinery is smaller, harder to see. Less honest, that's all. Whereas Rupert here? He's as honest as they come. Does what it says on the box. — Catherynne M Valente

The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die
it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives. — Annie Dillard