Quotes & Sayings About Insulation

There had hung the sense of buffering, insulation, she had noticed the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix. And had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair. — Thomas Pynchon

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters. — Ross Macdonald

I look up at the ceiling, at all the hardcover fiction. So very few people want it. It is operating as insulation rather than stock. The argument rages on about whether it is better to have books or ebooks, but while everyone gets heated about the choices, the hardcover fiction molders quietly away. — Deborah Meyler

All his life there was only one thing Lec was allowed to believe. It had surrounded him, cocooned him, constricted him with the same stifling softness as the layers of insulation around him now. For the first time in his life, Lev feels those bounds around his soul begin to loosen. — Neal Shusterman

I love to write out of doors and sleep out of doors, too. If I sleep under the open sky it becomes part of the writing experience, part of my insulation from the world. — Margaret Bourke-White

Smart development invests in insulation, efficient cars, and ever-renewed sources of energy. Dumb growth crashes around looking for more oil. — Donella Meadows

I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs. Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions; nudge System 1 (the heuristic or experiential system) out of the important ones. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

She was convinced the country was about to succumb to revolutionary socialism. Her own circumstances encouraged this belief: just on the edge of the really rich country set, she shared their views and opinions but lacked the financial and architechtural insulation from real or imagined political troubles. She found crushed larger cans and cigarette packets in her front garden and interpreted these as menacing signals from the Perthshire proletariat. Every flicker and dim of electric light was a portent of class war. — James Robertson

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique. — Neil Gaiman

The revolution is built on three simple facts. (1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons - a circuit of nerve fibers. (2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. (3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become. — Daniel Coyle

True story: Some homeowner's burning a yard pile just like this one. And he goes inside for lemonade and opens the cabinet under the sink to toss something in the trash, and this rat's down in the bottom, gnawing a chicken bone. The rat had been driving the guy crazy for months, living in the walls and scampering through the attic at night like it had combat boots. So the guy grabs a rolling pin and beats it to death. Then he takes it outside and throws it on the burning pile." "Good story," said Coleman. "What's the problem?" "The rat's not dead. The heat wakes him up. It jumps off the pile and makes a beeline for the house. Except now its fur's on fire. The homeowner tries to intercept, but it zips between his legs, runs back inside and gets in the walls. Ignited the insulation. Whole place burned down. — Tim Dorsey

Don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience ... — Louise Erdrich

Magic is a kind of energy. It is given shape by human thoughts and emotions, by imagination. Thoughts define that shape - and words help to define those thoughts. That's why wizards usually use words to help them with their spells. Words provide a sort of insulation as the energy of magic burns through a spell caster's mind. — Jim Butcher

insulation prevents you from making the change and finding the understanding you set out to achieve in the first place. — Seth Godin

I learned that life can change in an instant. It can flip over like a box of Styrofoam peanuts, and you're left scrambling to gather enough insulation to survive, before it all blows away. After that, you sink down into what's left, like a fragile glass vase with a crack in it, trying to avoid further damage.

One bold year is worth a dozen timid ones.... — Lisa Wingate

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present. — Ross Macdonald

The rich are not a contented tribe. The demands from others to share their wealth become so tiresome, so insistent, they often decide they must insulate themselves. Insulation eventually breeds a mild form of paranoia. — Felix Dennis

Tangled
Before the earth has greeted the sunrise
our tangled bodies have spilled into the light.
Like the calming hum of stars singing a lullaby.
our beacon of breath infuses night.

For one brief moment in that space between
.
breath
our dreams merge,

oblivious to the insulation of distinct bodies,
connected only by pure love. — Beryl Dov

The interesting thing about the feeling of loss when a book is borrowed is that the book's quality rarely matters. So mysterious is the power of books in our lives that every loss is a serious loss, every hole in the shelf a crater. Our books are ourselves, our characters, our insulation against those very people who would take away our books. someone should invent markers for bookcases to note 'missing persons.'
~Roger Rosenblatt, Writer — Estelle Ellis

With plastic siding that was cracked and fading, the trailer squatted on stacked cinder blocks, a temporary foundation that had somehow become permanent over time. It had a single bedroom and bath, a cramped living area, and a kitchen with barely enough room to house a mini refrigerator. Insulation was almost nonexistent, and humidity had warped the floors over the years, making it seem as if he were always walking on a slant. The linoleum in the kitchen was cracking in the corners, the minimal carpet was threadbare, and he'd furnished the narrow space with items he'd picked up over the years at thrift stores. Not a single photograph adorned the walls. — Nicholas Sparks

In another sense, however, burglars are idiots, incapable of using a door when cutting through drywall for twenty minutes will do the trick. But then they'll get stuck in the insulation, or they'll trip and plummet through the roof into the wrong grocery store, or they'll accidentally set fire to the very place they've been trying so hard to enter (it's happened). — Geoff Manaugh

Cocooning is about insulation and avoidance, peace and protection, coziness and control - a sort of hyper-nesting. — Faith Popcorn

I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage. Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live, — Edward R. Murrow

Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals. — Daniel Coyle

The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it's only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse. — Terence McKenna

Snowy, milky, chalky. A color that is the absence of color. Every morning he ties his shoes, packs newspaper inside his coat as insulation against the cold, and begins interrogating the world. — Anthony Doerr

They had to evacuate the grade school on Tuesday. Kids were getting headaches and eye irritations, tasting metal in their mouths. A teacher rolled on the floor and spoke foreign languages. No one knew what was wrong. Investigators said it could be the ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation, the electrical insulation, the cafeteria food, the rays emitted by microcomputers, the asbestos fireproofing, the adhesive on shipping containers, the fumes from the chlorinated pool, or perhaps something deeper, finer-grained, more closely woven into the basic state of things. — Don DeLillo

The succession multiplied the harm. Each passed on his conception of the papacy unchanged. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Every day we are paying more for energy than we should due to poor insulation, inefficient lights, appliances, and heating and cooling equipment - money we could save by investing in energy efficiency. — Bernie Sanders

29. Most loneliness results from insulation rather than isolation. In other words, we are lonely because we insulate ourselves, not because others isolate us. — James C. Dobson

The battery was a lithium thionyl chloride non-rechargeable. I figured that out from some subtle clues: the shape of the connection points, the thickness of the insulation, and the fact that it had "LiSOCl2 NON-RCHRG" written on it. — Andy Weir

Now the leatherback turtle overcame the heat issue via a simple, but evolutionarily impossible solution; it is the only reptile that possesses fatty insulation known as brown adipose tissue, and the only reptile that regulates a high body temperature. This brown adipose tissue is the expression of the UCP1 gene, and, aside from the leatherbacks, is found only in mammals, amphibians, and fishes. Not one other reptile has UCP1. — B.C. Chase

I can't stop thinking about what Caroline said to Minna about death. It isn't an infection, she said. She might be right. Then again, we've nested in the walls like bacteria. We've taken over the house, its insulation and its plumbing - we've made it our own. Or maybe it's life that's the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleaning, a cure. — Lauren Oliver

I used a sophisticated method to remove sections of plastic (hammer), then carefully removed the solid foam insulation (hammer again). — Andy Weir

Better use of space, improving the insulation, getting more daylight into the buildings, reducing the energy consumption of the air conditioning and heating systems, making sure that the internal air quality is good, that we have increased natural ventilation opportunities in the mid seasons. You know these are some of the things we can do to become environmentally friendly. — Ken Yeang

Scientists are cautiously beginning to question the view that the brain is the sole and absolute ruler over the body. The gut not only possesses an unimaginable number of nerves, those nerves are also unimaginably different from those of the rest of the body. The gut commands an entire fleet of signaling substances, nerve-insulation materials, and ways of connecting. There is only one other organ in the body that can compete with the gut for diversity - the brain. The gut's network of nerves is called the "gut brain" because it is just as large and chemically complex as the gray matter in our heads. Were the gut solely responsible for transporting food and producing the occasional burp, such a sophisticated nervous system would be an odd waste of energy. Nobody would create such a neural network just to enable us to break wind. There must be more to it than that. — Giulia Enders

I was dishwasher, then promoted to chef in a local kitchen in a restaurant in Seattle, and I was working on a building site as well, putting in insulation and painting houses, and then doing some classes at a community college nearby. — Alexis Denisof

Although he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain. — Dean Koontz

I was raised on the Hudson, in a house that had been the stable of the financier and Civil War general Brayton Ives. In midcentury, we had fire pits in the floor for heating, and rats everywhere, because they nested in the hay insulation. — Mark Helprin

The crime scene was a small burned out house, blackened support beams sticking up like rotten teeth from the piles of char and ash on the ground. The occasional curl of half-burned insulation lay like thin snakes, poisonous and waiting. — Alex Hughes

I ate fiberglass insulation. It wasn't cotton candy like the guy said ... my tummy itches. — Steve Carell

The availability of private insurance provides tremendous insulation for millions of individuals. — Lawrence Summers

To be brutally honest, for much of that time, I was the only person in the world with Parkinson's. Of course, I mean that in the abstract. I had become acutely aware of people around me who appears to have the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, but as long as they didn't identify with me, I was in no rush to identify with them. My situation allowed, if not complete denial, at least a thick padding of insulation. — Michael J. Fox

Poetry, is the insulation that lies between the inner walls of the mind. — Robert M. Hensel

It was here I learnt that corporate principles and military principles are basically the same. Insulation. Illusion. Hype. Activity. — Tarun J. Tejpal

As we have pointed out, the principle of the tree of knowledge is to be independent of God. It means that we make our decisions independently. Although Cain performed a good deed, it was independent of God. Everything that is good yet independent of God results in death. This is similar to insulation which severs the flow of electricity. Regardless of the substance that is used as insulation - it may even be diamond - electricity is cut off nonetheless. As long as it causes insulation, it does not matter whether the material is good or bad. Likewise, if a thing keeps us away from God, it brings death, regardless of how good it is. — Witness Lee

Thank God she wasn't wearing shorts. She hadn't shaved her legs in a week, theorizing that October in the mountains was pretty darn cold and she might need the extra layer of insulation. — Victoria Dahl

We have embraced the 21st century by entering such cutting-edge industries as brick, carpet, insulation and paint. Try to control your excitement. — Warren Buffett

The owl, that bird of onomatopoetic name, is a repetitious question wrapped in feathery insulation especially for Winter delivery. — Hal Borland

But we must also look at renewable heat technology. More combined heat and power schemes, putting waste heat to better use. More district heating schemes. And more electric air and ground-source heat pumps, drawing warmth from the outside world to heat the indoors. Better insulation, smarter homes, and more efficient heating can help us cut our energy demand. — Chris Huhne

The anorexic is the fuse nakedly exposed to the direct power of modern media, a psyche whose wiring has no insulation. The anorexic is an analog to the ideologue, who is likewise devoid of common sense, independent ego, culture, intuitive intelligence, etc.: all the ideologue has to orient himself by is the formalist or abstractivist directives inlaid in modern mass-culture. Both are forms of the True Believer, minds in whom factors of self-active life are reduced to negligibility and pathos reigns. — Kenny Smith

Big Cyndi crossed the room with an agility that belied the bulk. She wrapped me in an embrace that made me feel as if I'd been mummified in wet attic insulation. In a good way. — Harlan Coben