Spinal Quotes & Sayings

I would love to do a comedy spoof, like a Spinal Tap kind of thing. — Matthew McGrory

Intuition comes in several forms:
- a sudden flash of insight, visual or auditory
- a predictive dream
- a spinal shiver of recognition as something is occurring or told to you
- a sense of knowing something already
- a sense of deja vu
- a snapshot image of a future scene or event
- knowledge, perspective or understanding divined from tools which respond to the subconscious mind — Sylvia Clare

Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof? — Victor Hugo

If someone can enjoy marching to music in rank and file, I can feel only contempt for him; he has received his large brain by mistake, a spinal cord would have been enough. — Albert Einstein

The spinal nerves from C1 to C6 enable flexion of the neck, C1 to T1 enables the extension of the neck, C1 to C5 enables shoulder movements and flexion of the elbows, C1 to C6 enables the extension of the elbows and wrists, T7 to L1 enables the movement of the abdominal muscles, L1 to L5 enable movement of the thigh, legs, knees and toes. — Solomon Barroa

It's such a fine line between stupid and clever. — Michael McKean

I'm ticking things off my list: I had a tumor removed; I had spinal surgery; I had four surgeries in three months. — Jennifer Grey

What's happening here? What's going on? Then you hear yourself mumbling: "Dogs fucked the Pope, no fault of mine. Watch out! ... Why money? My name is Brinks; I was born ... born? Get sheep over side ... women and children to armored car ... orders from Captain Zeep." Ah, devil ether - a total body drug. The mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column. The hands flap crazily, unable to get money out of the pocket ... garbled laughter and hissing from the mouth ... always smiling. Ether is the perfect drug for Las Vegas. — Hunter S. Thompson

The physical concerns and misalignment we experience in the spinal vertebrae of our body are often directly correlated with the spiritual energetic ability to flow freely as well. — Dashama Konah Gordon

Saxon, if you are unfamiliar, is a British heavy-metal band that has been around since the mid-'70s and was in no small part the inspiration for Spinal Tap. — Adam Schlesinger

When I was growing up, This is Spinal Tap [1984] was the ultimate comedy, and it was the kind of thing I wanted to do. But you get to a point with parody where you can't go much further because ultimately it's feeding off of somebody else's creativity. — Ben Stiller

Researchers and biotech executives foresee the day when the effects of many catastrophic diseases can be reversed. The damaged brains of Alzheimer's disease patients may be restored. Severed spinal cords may be rejoined. Damaged organs may be rebuilt. Stem cells provide hope that this dream will become a reality. — George Woolf

I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap. — Robert Wyatt

After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head, too, and before leaving work she planned to simmer it and study the exposed cranium for contusions. I was asked to pass this information along to the chief medical examiner, and, looking back, I perhaps should have chosen my words more carefully. 'Fire up the kettle,' I told him. 'Ol'-fashioned skull boil at five p.m. — David Sedaris

I was lucky enough to get to perform on stage in front of 20 million people on TV, and 150 thousand in concerts. For 15 minutes I got to be a rock star, the 15 minutes is great! It turns into Spinal Tap after 20 minutes. — Mark Mothersbaugh

I found the head nurse and asked her, and she said Dan has been flown back to America on account of they can take better care of him there. I asked her if he is okay, and she said, 'Yeah, if you can call two punctured lungs, a severed intestine, spinal separation, a missing foot, a truncated leg, and third degree burns over half the body okay, then he is just fine. I thanked her, and went on my way. — Winston Groom

People in Japan and the Faeroe Islands kill dolphins and pilot whales by running steel rods into their spinal columns while they squeal in pain and terror and thrash in agony. (In Japan, it's illegal to kill cows and pigs as painfully and inhumanely as they kill dolphins.) The lack of compassion for dolphins and whales indicates that humans' "theory of mind" is incomplete. We have an empathy shortfall, a compassion deficit. And human-on-human violence, abuse, and ethnic and religious genocide are all too pervasive in our world. No elephant will ever pilot a jetliner. And no elephant will ever pilot a jetliner into the World Trade Center. We have the capacity for wider compassion, but we don't fully live up to ourselves. Why do human egos seem so threatened by the thought that other animals think and feel? Is it because acknowledging the mind of another makes it harder to abuse them? We seem so unfinished and so defensive. Maybe incompleteness is one of the things that "makes us human. — Carl Safina

She once watched a documentary and learned that the brain was 2 percent of a human's body weight, and it was a testament to the neck and the spinal cord that it managed to hold the whole thing upright. — Tracy Ewens

Network Spinal Analysis represents the epitome of body work; it is at the leading of body/mind/spirit integration. This work will transform the planet. — Candace Pert

Hello?" I ask.
No one is there. Not a word. Not a whisper. Not a single sound resonating from the other side of the receiver.
"Hello? Anyone there?" I ask again. Repeating myself. I am beginning to feel rather anxious now. Scared, would be a better word to use. Shivers have begun to creep up my spinal cord, and I can feel the urgency of goose pimples begin to line up on by frightened pale skin. — Keira D. Skye

Red Bull are backing a spinal-injury research charity called Wings For Life, which I am an ambassador for, with a programme called Faces for Charity that will run at this year's British Grand Prix. — Mark Webber

Network Spinal Analysis inspires us to trust the healing power within. — Deepak Chopra

This book denounces the cultism in chiropractic but supports the appropriate use of spinal manipulation and the research efforts required to solidify its scientific basis. If you are contemplating or receiving chiropractic care, it might help protect both your pocketbook and your health. — Samuel Homola

Oh, and I spend a lot of time on The Walking Dead reddit. Too much time. Last night I stayed up until two a.m. arguing with some neckbeard about whether or not you could kill a zombie with another zombie's spinal column. — Sierra Simone

We lived the life with Keith Moon. It was all Spinal Tap magnified a thousand times. — Roger Daltrey

No one can ever use his heart to listen or touch or feel or see or smell. It's just a lump of muscle pumping mechanically inside your ribs. It has no will and no ability to do anything but go on pumping until it gives up and withers away or is choked by some disease. Your spinal cord, on the other hand, feels. The central nervous system pours out from the spinal cord, and with it one feels pain. Pain is the most trustworthy sensation a human being can know because it teaches us what hurts. With the spinal cord, one can hear what will hurt, smell the sting of suffering, taste it, feel it, and see the world with new eyes. I learned a long time ago not to follow my heart, the hunk of meat flexing in the chest. I trust the tube locked up in a column of bone, the tube that shows me what pain is. — Joshua S. Porter

You do have a tendency to severe spinal cords."
"Only for you. — Darynda Jones

There are people who think the film 'This Is Spinal Tap' is simply a very funny 'mockumentary.' Well, with Yes, we lived it. Take the hilarious scene in the film in which the bass player is trapped in a giant pod - that actually happened to Alan one night. — Rick Wakeman

That was Embassy Pictures, they went bankrupt shortly after This is Spinal Tap came out. — Harry Shearer

I don't understand people who go to amusement parks. I spend most of my time trying NOT to be nauseous. 'Excuse me, could you strap me in upside down? I'd like to be as sick as humanly possible. I feel great today, I think I'll go down to Funland and snap my neck on the back of a ride. Honey, let's bring the kids, I want to give them a spinal cord injury for Christmas.' — Dom Irrera

The economy - once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance, has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated ... The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered ... The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government. — C. Wright Mills

I was in the pilot for Spinal Tap before it was a movie. — Nina Blackwood

Girl going past clinging to a young man's arm. Putting up her face like a duck to the moon. Drinking joy. Green in her eyes. Spinal curvature. No chin, mouth like a frog. Young man like a pug. Gazing down at his sweetie with the face of a saint reading the works of God. Hold on, maiden, you've got him. He's your boy. Look out, Puggy, that isn't a maiden you see before you, it's a work of imagination. Nail him, girlie. Nail him to the contract. Fly laddie, fly off with your darling vision before she turns into a frow, who spends all her life thinking of what the neighbours think. — Joyce Cary

Imagine someone reaching straight into your chest, past the bones and blood and guts, and taking a nice firm hold on your spinal cord. Now imagine that they start shaking you so fast, the world starts bulging and buckling under you. Imagine not being able to figure out later if the thought in your head is really yours or an unintentional keepsake from someone else's mind. Imagine the guilt of knowing you saw someone's deepest, darkest fear or secret ... — Alexandra Bracken

Once we understand just how to control genes, we have the potential for spinal cord regeneration, bone regeneration, and so on. It might also give us plumper chickens. — Jack Horner

What makes spinal-cord injuries as devastating as they are is that everything about them plays out in absolutes: they are instantaneous, utterly disabling and horribly permanent. — Jeffrey Kluger

A man is as young as his spinal column. — Joseph Pilates

Man is in a transition stage; he has 31 pairs of spinal nerves which keys him to the solar month, but the nerves in the so-called cauda-equina - literally horse-tail, at the end of our spinal cord, are still too undeveloped to act as avenues for the spiritual ray of the sun. — Max Heindel

That's it from me for now, listeners. But something in me says that this is no ending. The night outside is bright and breezy and full of dangerous secrets. There is a taste in the air like tarnished silver, like the flesh of an extinct animal now only remembered through our spinal cord and the hairs on our back. — Joseph Fink

The movie Spinal Tap rocked my world. It's for rock what The Sound of Music was for hills. They really nailed how dumb rock can be. — Jack Black

Tod Clifton's one with the ages. But what's that to do with you in this heat under this veiled sun? Now he's part of history, and he has received his true freedom. Didn't they scribble his name on a standardized pad? His Race: colored! Religion: unknown, probably born Baptist. Place of birth: U.S. Some southern town. Next of kin: unknown. Address: unknown. Occupation: unemployed. Cause of death (be specific): resisting reality in the form of a .38 caliber revolver in the hands of the arresting officer, on Forty-second between the library and the subway in the heat of the afternoon, of gunshot wounds received from three bullets, fired at three paces, one bullet entering the right ventricle of the heart, and lodging there, the other severing the spinal ganglia traveling downward to lodge in the pelvis, the other breaking through the back and traveling God knows where. — Ralph Ellison

I have a needle being stuck into my spine, can anyone please define "a little pain"? — Pandora Poikilos

Continuous scans of the brain to measure changes in blood flow) could control a robot hundreds of miles away just by imagining moving different parts of his body. The subject could see from the robot's perspective, thanks to a camera on its head, and when he thought about moving his arm or his legs, the robot would move correspondingly almost instantaneously. The possibilities of thought-controlled motion, not only for "surrogates" like separate robots but also for prosthetic limbs, are particularly exciting in what they portend for mobility-challenged or "locked in" individuals - spinal-cord-injury patients, amputees and others who cannot communicate or move in their current physical state. — Eric Schmidt

Thinking brainlessly with their spinal cords. — Kurt Vonnegut

Among other things, these nerves give power to the muscles and give sensation to the skin. It is through the spinal nerves that you can direct movement and feel temperature, pressure, and pain. These sensations are not just normal parts of life; they also provide a natural alarm system: they warn you that a bodily structure is about to sustain some damage or has already been damaged. — Robin McKenzie

But the idea that we can rid ourselves of animal illusion is the greatest illusion of all. Meditation may give us a fresher view of things, but it cannot uncover them as they are in themselves. The lesson of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science is that we are descendants of a long lineage, only a fraction of which is human. We are far more than the traces that other humans have left in us. Our brains and spinal cords are encrypted with traces of far older worlds. — John N. Gray

The majority of people living with chronic pain have the symptoms attributed to conditions that are not fully understood, including Spinal Stenosis, Fibromyalgia, Diabetic Neuropathy, Arthritis, and Restless Leg Syndrome. These diagnoses provide a label allowing the patient to be classified and guiding physicians to treat, but often do not reflect the true cause of symptoms. Using approaches presented in Walking Well Again, both patients and clinicians are guided to recognizing and treating the hidden causes of pain, which often results in relief in just one or two days. — Stuart M. Goldman

Celida stood on the top step next to the door with Evers and his girlfriend Rachel. Bauer, three days post-op after his spinal surgery, was there too, talking to Zoe. The rest of his teammates were inside already, along with DeLuca and Travers. It meant the world to him that the guys had come out to pay their respects today. — Kaylea Cross

Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, brain and spinal cord disorders, diabetes, cancer, at least 58 diseases could potentially be cured through stem cell research, diseases that touch every family in America and in the world. — Rosa DeLauro

Let me use a second metaphor. Imagine that you found a tangle of seaweed on the edge of the shore and lifted it. The heaviest parts rest on the sand in a mesh, but some skeins extend vertically. This neural network is shaped like that: it looks like a tangled skein of a hundred thousand golden threads that has been drawn upward. The mass of it gathers in the pelvis, but strands from the same network extend upward to the spinal cord and brain. — Naomi Wolf

It's been studied to the point where we know that the impact on humans would be from consuming the most infected parts of the cow; that is, the brain and the spinal cord. — Ann Veneman

Traditional sitting postures - whether on a bench, zafu, or some other type of support - were developed to make the most of the body's natural energy flow. An upright, neutrally aligned spine allows for the most efficient movement of energy. When the spine, and therefore the spinal cord, is in an easy, neutral position, the nervous system has a much better chance of finding equilibrium, which creates a supportive environment for the mind to quiet. — Charlotte Bell

I think it's important that, as a matter of course, the brain and spinal column were removed from this cow, and that would be the material that would cause concern in terms of human health. And therefore we're confident in the safety of the food supply. — Ann Veneman

Gross man seldom or never realizes that his body is a kingdom, governed by Emperor Soul on the throne of the cranium, with subsidiary regents in the six spinal centres or spheres of consciousness. This theocracy extends over a throng of obedient subjects: twenty-seven thousand billion cells (endowed with sure if seemingly automatic intelligence by which they perform all duties of bodily growths, transformations, and dissolutions) and fifty million substratal thoughts, emotions, and variations of alternating phases in man's consciousness in an average life of sixty years. Any — Paramahansa Yogananda

I got really, really sick with a spinal infection that put me in a hospital for a couple of months, and it was touch and go. I had my guitar with me, and as soon as I got well enough to play, there was nothing else to do in that hospital. The nurses would come in and request songs. — Robert Hunter

The most sacred part of the human body is the brain and spinal system, revered from all antiquity and symbolized again and again in all the religions of the world. While other parts of the body are of great interest to the student, the mysterious working of the spinal fires by means of which liberation is finally attained is so tremendous that many years must be spent in understanding even the fundamental principles. The spine is the rod which budded, the Yggdrasil Tree, the flaming sword, the staff of comfort, the wand of the Magi. — Manly P. Hall

Could we please not assault the patient with the crushed spinal cord," she said as she did, "because this makes me very uncomfortable. — James S.A. Corey

The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time. — J.G. Ballard

Dr.Costa then offered important clues to differentiate the syndrome from polio. in tick paralysis there is no fever, the spinal fluod is normal, the knee jerk and other reflexes are lost early, the patient is passive and apathetic, and, of course, the child has had a recent tick bite, or an attached tick is found. — Pamela Nagami

According to the Yogis, there are three principal nerve currents: one they call the Ida, the other the Pingala, and the middle one the Sushumna, and all these are inside the spinal column. The Ida and the Pingala, the left and the right, are clusters of nerves, while the middle one, the Sushumna, is hollow and is not a cluster of nerves. This Sushumna is closed, and for the ordinary man is of no use, for he works through the Ida and the Pingala only. Currents are continually going down and coming up through these nerves, carrying orders all over the body through other nerves running to the different organs of the body. The task before us is vast; and first and foremost, we must seek to control the vast mass of sunken thoughts which have become automatic with us. The evil deed is, no doubt, on the conscious plane; but the cause which produced the evil deed was far beyond in the realms of the unconscious, — Swami Vivekananda

Campaign ads are the backbone of American democracy if American democracy suffered a gigantic spinal injury. — John Oliver

You can't really dust for vomit. — Christopher Guest

Josh's father felt Josh should bond with his fellow injured patients in the ward. This was something I really dissuaded Josh from doing. I didn't want him to hear the hardships, battles, and frustrations that others were going through. I also didn't want Josh to take on their fears and frustrations. We were always pleasant and polite to everyone else in the ward, but my only concern was Josh, and it was enough for us to focus just on his issues. I found the whole Acute Spinal Ward experience extremely negative and distressingly sad with no great healing or recovery objective. The message from the medical team was always, without fail, acceptance of the prognosis. This was totally the opposite message of what we presented and instilled into Josh. We slowly gained evidence that our non-traditional approach was working. — Josh Wood

There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It's more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you're in its grip, it's as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else. — Philip Roth

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly. — Tariq Ali

He adored telling this story of near disaster and how he had triumphed, just as he relished the report of how he went on stage every night on tour in his The Cosmic Dance of Shiva, requiring all manner of spinal flexibilities and related actions, while his sacroiliac was painfully out of place. — Walter Terry

Five things I'd rather do than swatch for my new project
1. Get a spinal tap.
2. Scrub the bathtub after all three of my daughters have come home from "Sandbox day" at the park.
3. Babysit two-year-old triplets while simultaneously diffusing a bomb.
4. Bathe a cat.
5. KNIT MY NEW PROJECT. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Route 27 was the spinal cord of Florida, practically vacant since the interstates, which took them up through towns with main streets that had the same early-evening closing hours since 1957. The only signs of life were the parking lights of local police cars on side streets, waiting for the local delinquents. Clewiston, Sebring, Clermont, Leesburg. — Tim Dorsey

The two-point rhythm of walking's stride clears the mind for thinking. (N.B.: Perhaps, after telling the spinal circuits to "take a walk," the forebrain shifts to automatic pilot, so to speak, freeing the neocortex to ponder important issues of the day.) Many philosophers were lifetime walkers, who found that bipedal rhythms facilitated creative contemplation and thought. In his short life, e.g., Henry David Thoreau walked an estimated 250,000 miles--ten times the circumference of earth. — David B. Givens

I have arthritis. The space around my spinal cord has become compressed. — Carrie Ann Inaba

My fiancee's brother-in-law was recently paralysed in an accident and it really brought home the fact that thousands of young people live with spinal injuries. It's an issue I wish had more coverage. — Gary Lineker

Chakras are energy centers where the body's life energy is concentrated. The concept of chakra is found in the Hindu tradition in India & some disciplines of Buddhism. Of the seven major chakras, six are located along the spinal cord & one is located at the crown of the head. The chakras are closely related to the endocrine system,which secretes hormones, and they are known to influence each and every part of the human body through the autonomic nervous system. They are highly attuned sensors that respond to the state of your physical, mental & spiritual health. — Ilchi Lee

If you are standing still and decide to take a step, the movement of your leg on the basis of your decision involves axons that originate in cell bodies located in the movement control regions in the frontal cortex (just behind your forehead) and that travel uninterrupted to the base of the spinal column (in the region of your lower back). — Joseph E. Ledoux

Even the clearest localization of pain in one area may, in fact, be originating from a distant area ... The reference of pain implies the existence of convergence of inputs within the spinal cord. This leads to the necessary involvement in central neural circuits in the simplest of peripheral disorders. It also leads to the possibility that the basic disorder is entirely central ... — Patrick David Wall

When your spinal cord freezes up, you're vulnerable to everything. But he [Chrestopher Reese] was tough as nails. And he kept a great, kind of dark sense of humor about it, but also was able to accomplish amazing things. — Robin Williams

brain and other nerve-related problems such as headaches from concussions, vascular dementia (dementia caused by blood vessel problems in the brain), migraines, Bell's palsy (a paralysis of the facial nerve), and tinnitus (ringing of the ears). He emphasized he was influenced by research that had been done in Israel on light therapy and the brain. Dr. Shimon Rochkind, a neurosurgeon at Tel Aviv University, originally pioneered work using lasers to treat injuries in the peripheral nervous system, that is, all the nerves in the body except those in the brain and spinal cord. Injury to peripheral nerves can lead to problems sensing or moving. — Norman Doidge

Paleontological evidence suggests that the early farmers had more spinal issues, worse teeth, and more anemia and vitamin deficiencies - and died younger - than the populations of human foragers who preceded them. — Leonard Mlodinow

In better company, they found among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons, one of which held the other in its embrace. One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, still had a few strips of a garment which had once been white, and around her neck was to be seen a string of adrezarach beads with a little silk bag ornamented with green glass, which was open and empty. These objects were of so little value that the executioner had probably not cared for them. The other, which held this one in a close embrace, was the skeleton of a man. It was noticed that his spinal column was crooked, his head seated on his shoulder blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other. Moreover, there was no fracture of the vertebrae at the nape of the neck, and it was evident that he had not been hanged. Hence, the man to whom it had belonged had come thither and had died there. When they tried to detach the skeleton which he held in his embrace, he fell to dust. — Victor Hugo

I remember seeing 'Spinal Tap' at a young age and being like, 'That's how you perform comedy.' — Bill Hader

Already many of the surrounding buildings had disappeared beneath the proliferating vegetation. Huge club mosses and calamites blotted out the white rectangular faces, shading the lizards in their window lairs. Beyond the lagoon, the endless tides of silt had begun to accumulate into enormous glittering banks, here and there overtopping the shoreline like the immense tippings of some distant goldmine. The light drummed against his brain, bathing the submerged levels below his consciousness, carrying him downwards to warm pellucid depths, where the nominal realities of time and space ceased to exist. Guided by his dreams, he was moving back into his emergent past, through a succession of ever stranger landscapes centered on the lagoon, each of which seemed to represent one of his own spinal levels. — J.G. Ballard

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice. — Albert Einstein

There's a little Spinal Tap in all of us. — Alice Cooper

Birds and periodic blood.
Old recapitulations.
The fox, panting, fire-eyed,
gone to earth in my chest.
How beautiful we are,
he and I, with our auburn
pelts, our trails of blood,
our miracle escapes,
our whiplash panic flogging us on
to new miracles!
They've supplied us with pills
for bleeding, pills for panic.
Wash them down the sink.
This is truth, then:
dull needle groping for the spinal fluid,
weak acid in the bottom of the cup,
foreboding, foreboding.
No one tells the truth about truth,
that it's what the fox
sees from his scuffled burrow:
dull-jawed, onrushing
killer, being that
inanely single-minded
will have our skins at last. — Adrienne Rich

I lost my spinal column a good many years ago. There ain't no surgery can put it back. Even if there was, I wouldn't want it. I like it better this way. More comfortable. — David Goodis

Nathan stared at the floor. "Honestly? He's a C5-6 quadriplegic. That means nothing works below about here ... " He placed a hand on the upper part of his chest. "They haven't worked out how to fix a spinal cord yet." I stared at the door, thinking about Will's face as we drove along in the winter sunshine, the beaming face of the man on the skiing holiday. "There are all sorts of medical advances taking place, though, right? I mean ... somewhere like this ... they must be working on stuff all the time. — Jojo Moyes

The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics. — Sam Harris

If you've ever seen the movie Spinal Tap, I think you know where we should try and reach by the end of our crime Story. — Shawn Coyne

If you like, you could call this the psychology of total equivalence, let's say neuronics for short, and dismiss it as biological fantasy. However, I am convinced as we move back through geophysical time, so we reenter the amnionic corridor, and move back through spinal and archeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch, each with a distinct ecological terrain, its own flora and fauna, as recognizable to anyone else as they would be to a traveller in a Wellsian time machine. Except that this is no scenic railway, but a total reorientation of the personality. If we let these buried phantoms master us as we reappear, we'll be swept back helplessly in the floodtide like pieces of flotsam. — J.G. Ballard

As far as getting my start, it was really Norman Lear, even aside from being on 'All in the Family.' He helped me get my start as a director. He was the one who said, 'Let him do 'Spinal Tap.' Let him give it a try,' because I had been trying for years to get that thing off the ground. — Rob Reiner

It's absurd that the same word is used to describe someone raping, torturing, mutilating, and killing a child; and someone stopping that perpetrator by shooting him in the head. The same word used to describe a mountain lion killing a deer by one quick bite to the spinal column is used to describe a civilized human playing smackyface with a suspect's child, or vaporizing a family with a daisy cutter. The same word often used to describe breaking a window is used to describe killing a CEO and used to describe that CEO producing toxins that give people cancer the world over. Check that: the latter isn't called violence, it's called production. — Derrick Jensen

Once I had kids, my whole attitude changed. I was like, "You make a spinal cord from scratch and we'll talk." — Pat Benatar

He solved at a stroke the great question of the direction of nerve-currents in their travel through brain and spinal cord. — Charles Scott Sherrington

Posture and Social Status...
During the 18th century in European and American society, aspects including station in life, status and dress could easily identify those of financial means. In fact, the garments of this era would hold the wearer in a position that would support and require proper posture. Women, and sometimes men, wore stays in order to shape the torso. Among the more privileged, even children wore stays since people believed these improved their posture and enhanced straight spinal growth. Certain movements were constrained by the cut and design of many garments, including details of the sleeve and back that would hold the person in proper posture. — Cindy Ann Peterson

Has there ever been an Inquisitor who didn't die a horrible death?" Simon wondered out loud. " It's like being the drummer in Spinal Tap. — Cassandra Clare

I became a clown when these docs came to the house in Berkeley and asked me to come cheer up kids. I'd just had my third spinal fusion and I was looking for something to take my mind off the pain I was in. — Wavy Gravy

It stung God. They say his spinal cord ran straight out of the sun. — Anne Carson

I remember once, years ago, I met Sting, and he told me that he had seen 'Spinal Tap' 50 times. He said: 'Every time I watch it, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.' — Rob Reiner

Neither logic nor scientific evidence supports such a belief. Although spinal manipulation can relieve certain types of back pain, neck pain, and other musculoskeletal symptoms, there is no scientific evidence that it can restore or maintain health. As a result of expressing my opinion on this subject, I have been called a chiropractic heretic. — Samuel Homola

And upper to midcervical spinal cord, above C4. — David Baldacci

He could swear he did not look back, could not - by any optical chance, or in any prism - have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture - which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never - consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past. — Vladimir Nabokov