Oscillate Quotes & Sayings

I listened to a lot of The Stooges when I was writing "Oscillate," imagining our hero moving through his days naturally embodying the spirit of a real punk. I say real, because today's idea of 'punk as fashion accessory' doesn't even register with him, it's more about the way he engages with the world. — Travis Mathews

David Eagleman describes how you can take a male stickleback fish and have a female fish trespass on its territory. The male gets confused, because it wants to mate with the female, but it also wants to defend its territory. As a result, the male stickleback fish will simultaneously attack the female while initiating courtship behavior. The male is driven into a frenzy, trying to woo and kill the female at the same time. This works for mice as well. Put an electrode in front of a piece of cheese. If the mouse gets too close, the electrode will shock it. One feedback loop tells the mouse to eat the cheese, but another one tells the mouse to stay away and avoid being shocked. By adjusting the location of the electrode, you can get the mouse to oscillate, torn between two conflicting feedback loops. — Michio Kaku

Desire changes its character by 180 degrees. Often, when first aroused, it is felt as the desire to have. The desire to touch is, partly, the desire to lay hands on, to take. Later, transformed, the same desire becomes the desire to be taken, to lose oneself within the desired. From these two opposed moments come one of the dialectics of desire; both moments apply to both sexes and they oscillate. Clearly the second moment, the desire to lose oneself within, is the most abandoned, the most desperate, and it is the one that Caravaggio chose (or was compelled) to reveal in many of his paintings. — John Berger

And so a miserable but possible scenario is that countries in the bottom billion oscillate between the traps and limbo, perhaps switching in the process from one trap to another..
Let me be clear: we cannot rescue them. The societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within. In every society of the bottom billion there are people working for change, but usually they are defeated by the powerful internal forces stacked against them. We should be helping the heroes. So far, our efforts have been paltry: through inertia, ignorance, and incompetence, we have stood by and watched them lose.
Let me be clear: we cannot rescue them. These societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within. — Paul Collier

I oscillate between being cynical and being naive on a regular basis. I always think that not much shocks me until something much too obvious does. — Rabih Alameddine

The male intimacy and raw honesty was already developing on the page 'Oscillate Wildly' with these characters. Being explicit would not only distract and alienate certain audiences, it would limit who has access to the film, and that's something I think a lot about with this story. — Travis Mathews

When you're a teenager, your essence is so specific to being a teenager, and everything becomes so extreme. Your emotions are on the surface, and you oscillate between different things at one time. — Bel Powley

I think it's reasonable to suppose that one could oscillate between being biologically 20 and biologically 25 indefinitely. — Aubrey De Grey

It's not like it used to be where everybody has a record company to belong to. — Edwin Starr

To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to attain efficiency in outward doing without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself, means that education accepts the present social conditions as final, and thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating them. A reorganization of education so that learning takes place in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful activities is a slow work. It can be accomplished only piecemeal, a step at a time. — John Dewey

There are things in this world that the children hear, but whose sounds oscillate below an adult's sense of pitch. — Edmund De Waal

Whatever a person's politics, lawyers have to understand that we are, for most people, the gateway for them to have access to the third branch of government. — Patricia Millett

I oscillate between life and death, happiness and sadness, good and evil. — Alexander McQueen

Even now, despite Angeline's watchfulness, she'd occasionally oscillate between random topics, like how shepherd's pie wasn't a pie at all and why it was pointless for her to take class in typing when technology would eventually develop robot companions to do it for us. — Richelle Mead

I routinely oscillate between exultation and despair. Maybe at the end of the day I feel pretty good about what I've written, but the next morning I see that it's crap. Then I start again - make a new outline, do some more research, try to rethink the whole question. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The old concept of chronological, orderly, symmetrical development of character died when it was discovered that the unconscious motivations are entirely at odds with fabricated conventions. Human beings do not grow in perfect symmetry. They oscillate, expand, contract, backtrack, arrest themselves, retrogress, mobilize, atrophy in part, proceed erratically according to experience and traumas. Some aspects of the personality mature, others do not. Some live in the past, some in the present. Some people are futuristic characters, some are cubistic, some are hard-edged, some geometric, some abstract, some impressionistic, some surrealistic! — Anais Nin

Sudden revelations vanish just as suddenly. — Marty Rubin

Like the librarians of Babel in Borges's story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all the others, we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable. In the name of completeness, we would like to believe that a unique order exists that would enable us to accede in knowledge all in one go; in the name of the unattainable, we would like to think that order and disorder are in fact the same word, denoting pure chance.
It's possible also that both are decoys, illusions intended to disguise the erosion of both books and systems. It is no bad thing in any case that between the two our bookshelves should serve from time to time as joggers of the memory, as cat-rests and as lumber-rooms. — Georges Perec

There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself. — W. Somerset Maugham

I like changing my hairstyle, much to my mother's annoyance. It depends on my state of mind. — Fernando Torres

Darkness can be funny. It can be quirky. There are different ways that that stuff comes out as a creative person. But the actual conflicted, twisted, decaying, rotting soul? That's not me. No more. — Nikki Sixx

We don't always walk from one state of mind into another. We might just oscillate back and forth for a whole lifetime within the polarities of a certain state of mind. — Frederick Lenz

I oscillate between agnosticism and atheism. — Brad Pitt

titillate an ocelot?' Answer: 'Oscillate its tit a lot. — Thomas Caplan

"Oscillate Wildly" is in many ways a story of first love and how it challenges our hero's guarded sense of what's possible. — Travis Mathews

I initially wanted to tell 'Oscillate Wildly' story because it wasn't one I had heard or seen before. The invisibility piece resonated most. Somewhere over the past couple of years I realized that I've essentially been making movies for my teenage self who struggled with isolation and my own brand of invisibility living in rural Ohio. — Travis Mathews

This is the end, Fuka-Eri informed him in a whisper. One sentence, as always. Time stopped, and the world ended. The earth ground slowly to a halt, and all sound and light vanished. — Haruki Murakami

Movies make teenagers have quippy answers for every question. Nothing seems to faze them, and they're like, 'Oh, whatever.' You're not like that when you're a teenager. You're really earnest. Things really feel like life or death. And you kind of oscillate between emotions at one time. It's very emotionally draining being a teenager. — Bel Powley