Steam Up Quotes & Sayings

The powerless life raft, sloshing around the North Pacific, emits a vast, spreading plume of steam like that of an Iron Horse chugging full blast over the Continental Divide. Neither Hiro nor Eliot ever mentions, or even notices, the by-now-obvious fact that Fisheye is traveling with a small, self-contained nuclear power source ... As long as Fisheye refuses to notice this fact, it would be rude for them to bring it up. — Neal Stephenson

The steam was thicker than expected and surprisingly easy to scoop up. Inside her mouth it swelled twice its original size and then burst into a series of delicate favors: savory cream sauce, then toasted cheese, and finally vanilla ice cream with a tinge of hazelnut. — Paige Britt

The Industrial Revolution was based on two grand concepts that were profound in their simplicity. Innovators came up with ways to simplify endeavors by breaking them into easy, small tasks that could be accomplished on assembly lines. Then, beginning in the textile industry, inventors found ways to mechanize steps so that they could be performed by machines, many of them powered by steam engines. Babbage, building on ideas from Pascal and Leibniz, tried to apply these two processes to the production of computations, creating a mechanical precursor to the modern computer. His most significant conceptual leap was that such machines did not have to be set to do only one process, but instead could be programmed and reprogrammed through the use of punch cards. Ada saw the beauty and significance of that enchanting notion, and she also described an even more exciting idea that derived from it: such machines could process not only numbers but anything that could be notated in symbols. — Walter Isaacson

It feels great to wake up feeling healthy, awake and alert. I love waking up in the morning, taking a
deep breath, reading the newspaper and going to the gym - as opposed to carrying a hangover right
until lunch. That's horrible. It is nice to let off steam once in a while, but I find myself less involved with
people in that sense. I like staying at home, reading a book, having a chat with my wife, a quiet dinner
and going to bed early. I don't want to drink half a bottle of whisky and look 50 the next day. I have
become an anti-drinking, anti-smoking agent. — Saif Ali Khan

then coiling his length together, roaring like thunder underground, he sped from his deep lair through its great door, out into the huge passages of the mountain-palace and up towards the Front Gate. To hunt the whole mountain till he had caught the thief and had torn and trampled him was his one thought. He issued from the Gate, the waters rose in fierce whistling steam, and up he soared blazing into the air and settled on the mountain-top in a spout of green and scarlet flame. The dwarves heard the awful rumour of his flight, and they crouched against the walls of the grassy terrace cringing under boulders, hoping somehow to escape the frightful eyes of the hunting dragon. There they would have all been killed, if it had not been for Bilbo once again. "Quick! Quick!" he gasped. — J.R.R. Tolkien

A high-pitched sound, like steam escaping from a kettle whistles through the dark room. But nobody's making tea. We both turn toward the source of the eerie noise.
A weak stream of unearthly light seeps through the window near the corner of the room and pours onto the floor. Its consistency seems to lie somewhere between a liquid and a solid, like mercury, only blue. Out of the gleaming, wobbly puddle, a phosphorescent vapor rises up. The ghost we thought was Daniel materializes and looms over us for two seconds before he lunges and wraps his hands around Wyatt's neck. — Alyson Larrabee

There was a not-quite-secret stairway in the back of the library building that led up to a balcony bordered by delicately arched windows. These looked out over a small courtyard lined with sour-orange trees. Across from this were the royal baths- which connected directly to the audience chamber, banquet hall, and eventually the throne room itself. That had sounded strange until Jasmine explained to Aladdin that sultans often entertained foreign guests and consulted with top advisers while enjoying a pleasant mint-scented sweat in the steam rooms. — Liz Braswell

Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark - weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more - but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. I explain. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain. Stranger things happen all the time everywhere. You know. I know you know. One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read? — Toni Morrison

Strange people. The kind that leave the merest blur behind them, soon vanished. Hutte and I often used to talk about these traceless beings. They spring up out of nothing one fine day and return there, having sparkled a little. Beauty queens. Gigolos. Butterflies. Most of them, even when alive, had no more substance than steam which will never condense. — Patrick Modiano

As if the world were a pot on the boil and someone had taken its lid off and let the steam pour up wildly. — Margo Lanagan

We'll eat your steam and lap up your blood. But first, we'll drink your screams — Stephen King

You cannot watch for twelve months without seeing how it is going down the tide; the anchors are pulled up, and the vessel is floating to destruction. It is drifting now, as near as I can tell you, south-east, and is nearing Cape Vatican, and if it drives much further in that direction it will be on the rocks of the Roman reef. We must get aboard her, and connect her with the glorious steam-tug of gospel truth, and drag her back. I should be glad if I could take her round by Cape Calvin, right up into the Bay of Calvary, and anchor her in the fair haven which is close over by Vera Cruz, or the cross. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Anyone looking up from the dock saw only beauty, on a monumental scale, while on the far side of the ship men turned black with dust as they shoveled coal - 5,690 tons in all - into the ship through openings in the hull called "side pockets." The ship burned coal at all times. Even when docked it consumed 140 tons a day to keep furnaces hot and boilers primed and to provide electricity from the ship's dynamo to power lights, elevators, and, very important, the Marconi transmitter, whose antenna stretched between its two masts. When the Lusitania was under way, its appetite for coal was enormous. Its 300 stokers, trimmers, and firemen, working 100 per shift, would shovel 1,000 tons of coal a day into its 192 furnaces to heat its 25 boilers and generate enough superheated steam to spin the immense turbines of its engines. — Erik Larson

The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it. — Wendell Berry

Notwithstanding all that has been discovered since Newton's time, his saying that we are little children picking up pretty pebbles on the beach while the whole ocean lies before us unexplored remains substantially as true as ever, and will do so though we shovel up the pebbles by steam shovels and carry them off in carloads. — Charles Sanders Peirce

Why can't it just work?" she moaned. "Just once I want to come up with a plan and have it work. Is that too much to ask?"
Orion opened his mouth, about to say something to calm Helen down.
"Of course it isn't!" Helen interrupted, her rant picking up steam. "But nothing works down here! Not our talents, not even the geography works. That lake over there is tilted on a slope! It should be a river, but oh, no, not down here! That would make too much sense! — Josephine Angelini

That's what a man is supposed to do for his wife. Listen, if a nigger didn't get lynched every now and then, well, there's just no telling what they'd do to us."
"Who?" Lily asked.
"Why, honey, the niggers and our husbands both. I don't care what color they are; men build up steam. And they gotta let it out somewhere. Colored men. White men. They both crazy. Honey, the point is you gotta look at it this way: A whole lotta women can't, "I got a man who'll kill for me." — Bebe Moore Campbell

Maybe I can climb one of those," Simon said, eyeing the fat white pillars that held up the slanted roof of the Hall. Runes were carved on them in overlapping patterns, but otherwise there were no visible handholds. "Work off steam that way."
"Oh, come on," Clary said. "You're a vampire, not Spider-Man."
Simon's only response was to jog lightly up the steps to the base of a pillar. He eyed it thoughtfully for a moment before putting his hands to it and starting to climb. Clary watched him, open-mouthed, as his fingertips and feet found impossible holds on the ridged stone. "You are Spider-Man!" she exclaimed. — Cassandra Clare

She's an old lady," Barron says. "And she's been locked up for years. Let her have some fun. She needs to blow off steam. Seduce old dudes. Lose money at canasta. — Holly Black

Madam Li nods. She reaches over the table for Chinatsu's hand. It would look like a gesture of sympathy for a friend. Chinatsu uncurls her right hand and allows the money to be retrieved. The initial wedge of money that Madam Li takes now is more than she ever takes later on. It almost entirely depletes the stash of money she's been saving for years. The woman's magician-eyes are framed by the steam snaking from their tea. Cat-green, they are striking and marred by yellow jelly spots in the whites.
'You no drink you no eat. What you, pregnant?'
'Would I be here?'
Madam Li screws her chin back into her neck. The chair creaks as she sits back, spine straight. 'Well, if you not going eat drink speaking truth, fuck off.'
Chinatsu's eyebrows flick up. She bursts out laughing. — Sarah Dobbs

Similarly, in an autocatalytic expanison of a human population, some initial advantages that a people gains (such as technological advantages) bring them profits or discoveries, which in turn stimulate more people to seek profits or discoveries, which result in even more profits and discoveries stimulating even more people to set out, until that people has filled up all the areas available to them with those advantages, at which point the autocatalytic expansion ceases to catalyze itself and runs out of steam. — Jared Diamond

Imagine if you will, creatures as unlike us as it is possible to be; creatures whose technology dwarfed ours as we dwarf the ants. Creatures whose sole purpose was to wipe out all existing life on Earth and replace it with their own. Beings who did not know the meaning of mercy, who were uninterested in dialogue, with whom one could not even plead. That is what we were up against, Henry. — Stephanie Osborn

When you're onstage in theater, if you mess up a line, there's no 'Cut! We'll get it again.' It's full steam ahead. — Jerrod Carmichael

Every small boy wanted to be a steam engine driver when they grew up in the old days, including me. There's something very special about them - the noise, the smell, the steam coming out everywhere. — Michael Bond

The way she sat now, leaning forward frowning, biting her pink bottom lip, her shirt dipping to reveal a hint of her cleavage ... He wondered idly if he could get her to bend over a little farther ...
"Just what are you staring at, exactly?"
Kadar snapped back to reality. "You. You've been thinking hard for the last five minutes. It's not good for you to strain your pretty little head like that. I'm waiting for the steam to shoot out of your ears to relieve the pressure on your brain."
"Aha." Audrey glanced at Jack and George. "What you have here is a man who was caught gaping at my breasts, and now he's trying to cover it up with rudeness. — Ilona Andrews

Once you get up steam, you are carried helplessly along. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A bluetick hound bays out there in the fog, running scared and lost because he can't see. No tracks on the ground but the one's he's making, and he sniffs in every direction with his cold red-rubber nose and picks up no scent but his own fear, fear burning down into him like steam. — Ken Kesey

What about the teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The thought of flight has melted me, I am less solid than liquid, then I'm going up and going invisible like steam. — Elizabeth Knox

Remember the steam kettle; though up to its neck in hot water it continues to sing. — Brownie Wise

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. — Jack Kerouac

Panting like a marathon runner at mile twenty, overheated bloodhound, steam engine crawling up the Continental Divide. — Dennis Vickers

Now is the time when we reenter the womb of the world, dreaming the dreams of snow and silence. Waking to the shock of frozen lakes under waning moonlight and the cold sun burning low and blue in the branches of the ice-cased trees, returning from our brief and necessary labors to food and story, to the warmth of firelight in the dark. Around a fire, in the dark, all truths can be told, and heard, in safety. I pulled on my woolen stockings, thick petticoats, my warmest shawl, and went down to poke up the kitchen fire. I stood watching wisps of steam rise from the fragrant cauldron, and felt myself turn inward. The world could go away, and we would heal. — Diana Gabaldon

Are wild strawberries really wild? Will they scratch an adult, will they snap at a child? Should you pet them, or let them run free where they roam? Could they ever relax in a steam-heated home? Can they be trained to not growl at the guests? Will a litterbox work or would they make a mess? Can we make them a Cowberry, herding the cows, or maybe a Muleberry pulling the plows, or maybe a Huntberry chasing the grouse, or maybe a Watchberry guarding the house, and though they may curl up at your feet oh so sweetly can you ever feel that you trust them completely? Or should we make a pet out of something less scary, like the Domestic Prune or the Imported Cherry, Anyhow, you've been warned and I will not be blamed if your Wild Strawberries cannot be tamed. — Shel Silverstein

The sun rose brilliant and quickly wore away the thin layer of ice that covered the water, and all the warm air was quivering with the steam that rose up from the quickened earth. — Leo Tolstoy

So if Obama's energy policy is "all of the above" - which effectively means full steam ahead with fossil fuel extraction, complemented with renewables around the margins - Blockadia is responding with a tough philosophy that might be described as "None of the below." It is based on the simple principle that it's time to stop digging up poisons from the deep and shift, with all speed, to powering our lives from the abundant energies on our planet's surface. — Naomi Klein

George's feathers are ruffled. It's been a long time since last he forgot and let himself get up steam like this ... How humiliating! The silly enthusiastic old prof, rambling on, disregarding the clock, and the class sighing to itself, 'He's off again!' Just for a moment, George hates them, hates their brute basic indifference, as they drain quickly out of the room. Once again, the diamond has been offered publicly for a nickel, and they have turned from it with a shrug and a grin, thinking the old peddler crazy. — Christopher Isherwood

Seeing her shiver, I want to take her into my coat and button it around her. I want to warm my face against her neck and steam her up like a mirror and write my name on her with my fingertip. — Laini Taylor

Sometimes I'll pick up the "heart of the jungle" fossil on my bookshelf, or pull out my old field notebooks from my desk drawer, warped by Amazonian rains and the river's steam, the scent of the jungle still on their pages. I do this to remind myself that fiction does not have a monopoly on the unbelievable. — Andres Ruzo

If everybody would leave him alone for just a little while, he thought, he
wouldn't cause anybody any more trouble. He would turn to steam and float up among
the treetops. — Kurt Vonnegut

Her lips thinned, but she ignored the bait. "Schedules have been moved up in all departments, you know. Claire received her new reproduction assignment. It didn't include Tony." "Reproduction assignment? You mean, having a baby?" Leo could feel his face flushing. Somewhere within him, a long-controlled steam pressure began to build. "Do you hide what you're really doing from yourselves with those weasel-words, too? And here I thought the propaganda was just for us peons." Yei started to speak, but Leo overrode her, bursting out, "Good God! Were you born inhuman, or did you grow so by degrees - M.S., M.D., Ph.D. . . ." Yei — Lois McMaster Bujold

If you eat healthily most of the time you can afford to indulge yourself occasionally, but if you eat nothing but junk, you'll end up not being able to run for a bus without huffing like a steam train. (The only drawback to being super-fit is that centring your life around your quinoa intake and yoga classes often results in an overdose of smugness which may cause your social circle to shrink.) — Rosie Blythe

Outside the window as steam fogged up the bathroom mirror. The Punisher. That's what I'll call myself, and that is the name that they will fear. It will keep them up at night and have them all looking around — Sara Humphreys

He palmed his cock and rubbed along the piercings first, pulling them just enough to make him throb. He hissed at the pain and then fought a groan as he imagined Prophet doing this to him . . . The glass door opened, the steam rushed out, and Prophet stood there, watching. Before Tom could say anything, Prophet ordered, "Don't stop now - jerk yourself, since you can't keep your hands off it." "Since when do you fucking tell me what to do?" Tom demanded crankily. Of course, he kept on sliding his hand up and down his cock, partly because fuck, it was good - better when ordered, sure - and partly because the look in Prophet's eyes as he watched Tom doing it was just . . . Fuck. Fuck yes. "Don't come though," Prophet told him casually, and look who had a second wind. "Until when?" Tom gritted his teeth and slowed himself down. "Until I say. Clear enough?" Tom — S.E. Jakes

When we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the Ladies' Day offices, the streets were gray and fuming with rain. It wasn't the nice kind of rain that rinses. you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It flew straight down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the hot sidewalks with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the gleaming, dark concrete. — Sylvia Plath

Catastrophe! Of course! Last judgement! Horseshit! It's you that are the catastrophe, you're the bloody last judgement, your feet don't even touch the ground, you bunch of sleepwalkers. I wish you were dead, the lot of you. Let's make a bet,' and here he shook Nadaban by the shoulders, 'that you don't even know what I'm talking about!! Because you don't talk, you "whisper" or "expostulate"; you don't walk down the street but "proceed feverishly"; you don't enter a place but "cross its threshold", you don't feel cold or hot, but "find yourselves shivering" or "feeling the sweat pour down you"! I haven't heard a straight word for hours, you can only mew and caterwaul; because if a hooligan throws a brick through your window you invoke the last judgement, because your brains are addled and filled up with steam, because if someone sticks your nose in shit all you do is sniff, stare and cry "sorcery! — Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Galison uses the phrase "critical opalescence" to sum up the story of what happened in 1905 when relativity was discovered. Critical opalescence is a strikingly beautiful effect that is seen when water is heated to a temperature of 374 degrees Celsius under high pressure. 374 degrees is called the critical temperature of water. It is the temperature at which water turns continuously into steam without boiling. At the critical temperature and pressure, water and steam are indistinguishable. They are a single fluid, unable to make up its mind whether to be a gas or a liquid. In that critical state, the fluid is continually fluctuating between gas and liquid, and the fluctuations are seen visually as a multicolored sparkling. The sparkling is called opalescence because it is also seen in opal jewels which have a similar multicolored radiance. — Freeman Dyson

Now that the steam engine rules the world, a title is an absurdity, still I am all dressed up in this title. It will crush me if Ido not support it. The title attracts attention to myself. — Stendhal

I saw a huge steam roller,
It blotted out the sun.
The people all lay down, lay down;
They did not try to run.
My love and I, we looked amazed
Upon the gory mystery.
"Lie down, lie down!" the people cried.
"The great machine is history!"
My love and I, we ran away,
The engine did not find us.
We ran up to a mountain top,
Left history far behind us.
Perhaps we should have stayed and died,
But somehow we don't think so.
We went to see where history'd been,
And my, the dead did stink so. — Kurt Vonnegut

The face you wear in a battlefield should be a solemn one until the time when things are cleaned up and the real world drips its way in. — Terry Pratchett

Suddenly, Westerns, which were our action films and what the working man went to see to blow off steam and have a good time, became boring to most people growing up from the Eighties on, because they're kind of pastoral. — Quentin Tarantino

America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle. — Oscar Wilde

Some day the load we're carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, 'We're remembering'. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And some day we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them. — Ray Bradbury

One moment it was a calculating machine, attempting dispassionately to keep up with the gouts of data. And then awash in those gouts, something metal twitched and a patter of valves sounded that had not been instructed by those numbers. A loop of data was self-generated by the analytical engine. The processor reflected on its creation in a hiss of high-pressure steam. One moment it was a calculating machine. The next, it thought. — China Mieville

It's funny how one summer can change everything. It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it. Something about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners and bright plastic flip-flops from the drugstore thwacking down the street. Something about fall being so close, another year, another Christmas, another beginning. So much in one summer, stirring up like the storms that crest at the end of each day, blowing out all the heat and dirt to leave everything gasping and cool. Everyone can reach back to one summer and lay a finger to it, finding the exact point when everything changed. That summer was mine. — Sarah Dessen

Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death - that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam. — Thomas Hardy

They lined you up in kindergarten, alphabetically. On fourth-grade field trips you took your partner's hand to push past the musk ox or the steam turbine. School was a perpetual lineup, ending in this final one. — Jeffrey Eugenides

To save time, take time in large pieces. Do not cut up time into bits. Adopt the principle of continuous work. The mind is locomotive. It requires time for getting under headway. Under headway it makes its own steam. Progress gives force as force makes progress. Do not slow down as long as you run well and without undue waste. Take advantage of momentum. Prolonged thinking leads to profound thinking — Charles Franklin Thwing

Then, amid a constant coming in, and going out, and running about, and a clatter of crockery, and a rumbling up and down of the machine which brings the nice cuts from the kitchen, and a shrill crying for more nice cuts down the speaking-pipe, and a shrill reckoning of the cost of nice cuts that have been disposed of, and a general flush and steam of hot joints, cut and uncut, and a considerably heated atmosphere in which the soiled knives and tablecloths seem to break out spontaneously into eruptions of grease and blotches of beer, the legal triumvirate appease their appetites. — Charles Dickens

Ian Baird is dashing around like a steam roller up front. — Martin Tyler

And before me was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhat far across, gloomy, crazy New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam. There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded - at least that's what I thought then. — Jack Kerouac

I don't need a mate," she muttered, staring up at the bright circle of the early autumn moon. "But can't you send me a nice, sexy, strongmale to dance with? Pretty please?" She hadn't had a lover for close to eight months now, and it was starting to hurt on every level. "He doesn't even have to be smart, just good between the sheets." Good enough to unsnap the tension in her body, allow her to function again. Because sex wasn't simply about pleasure for a cat like her - it was about affection, about trust, about everything good. "Though right this second, I'd take plain old hot sex."
That was when Riley walked out of the shadows. "Got an itch, kitty?"
Snapping to her feet, she narrowed her eyes, knowing he had to have deliberately stayed downwind in order to sneak up on her. "Spying?"
"When you're talking loud enough to wake the dead?"
She swore she could feel steam coming out her ears. — Nalini Singh

They got up steam and proceeded calmly to the north - where there seemed to be no people, but only mountains, lakes, reedy snow-filled steppes, and winter gods who played with storms and stars. — Mark Helprin

Ironically, the serious study of the impossible has frequently opened up rich and entirely unexpected domains of science. For example, over the centuries the frustrating and futile search for a "perpetual motion machine" led physicists to conclude that such a machine was impossible, forcing them to postulate the conservation of energy and the three laws of thermodynamics. Thus the futile search to build perpetual motion machines helped to open up the entirely new field of thermodynamics, which in part laid the foundation of the steam engine, the machine age, and modern industrial society. — Michio Kaku

He gave a halfhearted hope Ichiro could walk on his own steam, but a few fumbling tries to get him up onto his feet only showed Bobby how Ichi's legs could double as overcooked noodles. — Rhys Ford

Music on the radio. When I went in, the big bands were just getting up a good head of steam. Now every song sounds like it's about fucking. — Stephen King

I like to do a face steam, so, heat up a flannel, press it onto your face and then press a cold one on afterwards to close the pores. It's inexpensive! — Georgia Jagger

You don't understand," getting mad. "You guys, you're like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you're looking for, but - " a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head - "in here. That's what I'm for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who cares? They're rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barrier around an actor's memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also. — Thomas Pynchon

Mara gave you my letter?"
"Yes."
"You must have been astonished." She had exposed her heart in that letter.
His eyebrows shot up. "'Astonished' is a mild word for it."
"But you came - so you must have read the other letters. They should have prepared you a little."
"I received no other letters. I had no idea you were in this part of the world."
She shook her head in confusion. "Then how did you know to come?"
"Yasmeen and I were in New Eden again - I have written that story for you in another letter - when a supply ship arrived carrying the rumor that Zenobia Fox was under the protection of the Kraken King. Needless to say, we abandoned New Eden and flew to Krakentown and full steam. — Meljean Brook

Right now steam enveloped her and Sabin, thick as clouds. Hot water cascaded down the planes and curves of her body. Nothing had ever felt so amazing - except for the naked man behind her, pinning her in, keeping her inside. She would not hook up with a demon, no matter how sexy he was. Would she? Her life didn't need more weird. Did it? Why — Gena Showalter

He'd chased Vasquez for nine days now. Someone had warned the programmer just before Cooper got to the Boston walk-up, a brick rectangle where the only light had been a window onto an airshaft and the glowing red eyes of power indicators on computers and routers and surge protectors. The desk chair had been against the far wall as if someone had leaped out of it, and steam still rose from an abandoned bowl of ramen. — Marcus Sakey

Jav's face was numb. Fingertips ice cold. His shirt stuck to his back with sweat and every square inch o"f skin prickled and tingled. He could feel his heart breaking down, dropping off piece by piece into the rolling boil of his stomach. Every splash sending up clouds of toxic steam, choking his throat. He was sure the next words out would be inside a scream. Instead he heard a strong, calm voice - a seasoned captain taking over the helm.
"I'm with you," Jav said. "Fucking take their ship down. I'm here. Right until the end, I won't leave."

Excerpt From: Suanne Laqueur. "An Exaltation of Larks." iBooks. — Suanne Laqueur

Until they stood at last by a crumbling wall, looking up and up and still farther up at the great tombyard top of the old house. For that's what it seemed. The high mountain peak of the mansion was littered with what looked like black bones or iron rods, and enough chimneys to choke out smoke signals from three dozen fires on sooty hearths hidden far below in dim bowels of this monster place. With so many chimneys, the roof seemed a vast cemetery, each chimney signifying the burial place of some old god of fire or enchantress of steam, smoke, and firefly spark. even as they watched, a kind of bleak exhalation of soot breathed up out of some four dozen flues, darkening the sky still more, and putting out some few stars. — Ray Bradbury

The whistle of the old steam trains ... could conjure up visions of bleak distances with one solitary wail. — M.C. Beaton

The proposal to quit voting is basically revolutionary; it amounts to a shifting of power from one group to another, which is the essence of revolution. As soon as the nonvoting movement got up steam, the politicians would most assuredly start a counterrevolution. Measures to enforce voting would be instituted; fines would be imposed for violations, and prison sentences would be meted out to repeaters. — Frank Chodorov

The caterpillars are coming. They're coming. As they passed a blunt rolled with marijuana shake around the bonfire, filled plastic cups with beer from a keg in the back of John Anderson's Bronco, snuck cigarettes at the red doors that led to the make-out woods behind school. As they waited on line at the cafeteria for pizza and Tater Tots, warmed up during choral practice, and changed for gym in the locker room. Until Maddie felt something titanic rushing toward the island, gathering steam like a nor'easter barreling toward shore, and the waiting filled with a tingling urgency she knew they all felt. She felt it. Car engines revved harder, highs soared higher, buzzes and crushes burned brighter. "Look." She lifted her palm as the insect inched across. The two lines of blue and red dots on its back glimmered like spots of blood rising after a pinprick. "They're here. — Julia Fierro

With Penge I associate my first realisations of the wonder and beauty of twilight and night, the effect of dark walls reflecting lamplight, and the mystery of blue haze-veiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shops by night, the glowing steam and streaming sparks of railway trains and railway signals lit up in the darkness. — H.G.Wells

The Scythians take kannabis seed, creep in under the felts, and throw it on the red-hot stones. It smolders and sends up such billows of steam-smoke that no Greek vapor bath can surpass it. The Scythians howl with joy in these vapor-baths, which serve them instead of bathing, for they never wash their bodies with water. — Herodotus

The German Emperor is ageing me; he is like a battleship with steam up and screws going, but with no rudder, and he will run into something some day and cause a catastrophe. — Edward Grey

When he stepped into the shower, the hit water scalded him. He let it run over his face, burning his eyelids. He put up with the pain, his jaw clenched and his muscles taut, suppressing the urge to howl with loneliness in the suffocating steam. For four years, one month, and twelve days, Nikon always got into the shower with him after they made love and soaped his back slowly, interminably. And often she put her arms around him, like a little girl in the rain. One day I'll leave without ever really knowing you. You'll remember my big, dark eyes. The reproachful silences. The moans of anxiety as I slept. The nightmares you couldn't save me from. You'll remember all this when I'm gone. — Arturo Perez-Reverte

1971 was the year of spaghetti.
In 1971 I cooked spaghetti to live, and lived to cook spaghetti. Steam rising from the pot was my pride and joy, tomato sauce bubbling up in the saucepan my one great hope in life ...
This is the story from the Year of Spaghetti, AD 1971. — Haruki Murakami

kind of gross, but at this point Sam was so hungry, he'd eat just about anything. Grrrowwllll his stomach cried out again. He glanced up the line at Caitlin Murphy to see if she noticed. She had a smirk on her face like she knew something, but that was how she always looked, so he couldn't tell if it was because of him. "Is that organic broccoli?" Caitlin asked one of the lunch ladies through a cloud of steam — Steven K. Smith

He sent you a text message that read: FIre Sign - You're compatible with all signs. Your blood group breathes disappointment and happiness. You stick your tongue in the woman's mouth in order to cool down. The fog that burns on the ceiling is the steam of sweat. You buy pins and colored pictures from the shop. You pin them on your flesh when you receive a guest. The firewood comes to you throughout the night, wrapped in nightmares. When you wake up you have a bath on fire. You eat on fire. You read the newspapers on fire. You smoke a cigarette on fire. In the coffee cup you come across prophecies of fire. You laugh on fire. You have your lungs checked at the hospital, and they find a spring of errors that looks like a tumor. You dream of the final act: It goes out. — Hassan Blasim

The summer I turned eleven, I found out that ghosts are real.
Guess it's hard to rest nice and easy in your coffin if you got stuff on your mind. Your soul stays chained to earth instead of zipping up to heaven to sing in one of the angel choirs.
Sometimes ghosts show up in the msot peculiar places.
Sometimes ghosts fool you.
Then you are those ghosts that hang around because we have unfinished business. Business that sinks like old crawfish left in a bucket for a week. That's some nasty smell let me tell you.
But the most important thing I learned is that ghosts can help you spill your guts before guilt eats you up and leaves a hole that can't ever be fixed no matter how many patches you try to steam iron across it. — Kimberley Griffiths Little

He didn't want to scare Kane off before he figured out what was going on between them. Homosexuality was becoming more accepted. Avery could feel the movement just beginning to pick up steam, but they were still decades away from this country being anywhere close to ready for a couple like them. Avery leaned back against the sofa and rested his head in his hand, just staring at Kane while he spoke. Why in the world was Avery sitting with a man he'd only met a few days ago, speculating about them as a couple, and already moving them years down the road? Except, he knew the answer. It was the draw, the deep connection between them that pulled him in. These feelings were so new and fresh, yet unbelievably real. He — Kindle Alexander

You build up a head of steam. If you're four days out of the studio, on the fifth day you really crash in there. You will kill anybody who disturbs you on that fifth day, when you desperately need it. — Susan Rothenberg

I love saunas,don't you?" he purred,leaning close to my face. "The heat." A lock of his dark hair stuck to my wet cheek. "The steam."
My heart knocked so hard against my chest that I could hardly stand it. "The scent of eucalyptus," I suggested before I thought about whether this added to the romance of the situation. "Smells like a bottle of my granddaddy's Old Spice that's been fermenting in his attic since 1969." I cringed.I just couldn't leave it alone and enjoy the moment,could I?
Nick pressed his lips together to keep from laughing. He nodded sagely. "I'll never think about this scent quite the same way,that's for sure."
But Nick had a one-track mind,and even my lame jokes couldn't distract him. One of his hands still moved on my tummy. The other picked up my hand and moved it to his thigh. Talk about a body like a rock. — Jennifer Echols

It's time to serve my Master. He says, pointing at some steamy thing in the distance. If his master is some type of steam, all I gotta do is get a vacuum and sweep his ass up. — Nandanie Phalgoo

I think it was this: like most of us, he was carrying a misery in his soul. I don't say it to forgive what he done, [sic] only to say it as true as I can. He was a wrong-minded man, but inside- I swear this is true- he was always that little boy eating that fried-egg sandwich in that dark hallway while the steam pipe dripped water on his head. I don't ask you to excuse him, only to understand that there's people who don't have what others do, and sometimes they get hurtful in their hearts, and they puff themselves up and try all sorts of schemes to level the ground- to get the bricks and joints all plumb, Ray used to say. They take wrong turns, hit dead ends, and sometimes they never make their way back. ~Clare — Lee Martin

Adlestrop
Yes, I remember Adlestrop
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop
only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
— Edward Thomas

I took my coffee into the dining room and settled down with the morning paper. A woman in New York had had twins in a taxi. A woman in Ohio had just had her seventeenth child. A twelve-year-old girl in Mexico had given birth to a thirteen-pound boy. The lead article on the woman's page was about how to adjust the older child to the new baby. I finally found an account of an axe murder on page seventeen, and held my coffee cup up to my face to see if the steam might revive me. — Shirley Jackson

The queen appeared as innocent as one of those mountains which smoke a little, and then one day end up causing a whole civilization to become an art installation — Terry Pratchett

When she can't sleep, she writes. All she remembers is his words. It will soon be dawn, with fire-stoked horses thundering to the humming sky of crickets. I will see you run. And I will run with you. That morning, while Ata ate a dripping mango over the sink, she felt him come up behind her and touch the small of her back, light as a current of air. He kissed the side of her neck, inhaled the steam of bitter cocoa, boiling with bay leaves, cinnamon, and nutmeg, and said it reminded him of his childhood. "You are from the islands," she said. But then he was gone. — Oonya Kempadoo

Leah looked up and didn't even have time to moisten her lips before Rhett's eyes shut and his mouth was on hers. It had the sweetness of ice cream, the fire of a double shot of Jack Daniel's, and the steam of a hot Texas summer night all rolled into one. — Carolyn Brown

The civilisation of the West has in it the spirit of the machine which must move; and to that blind movement human lives are offered as fuel, keeping up the steam-power. It represents the active aspect of inertia which has the appearance of freedom, but not its truth, and therefore gives rise to slavery both within its boundaries and outside. — Rabindranath Tagore

My steamboat voyage to Albany and back, has turned out rather more favorable than I had calculated. The distance from New York to Albany is one hundred and fifty miles; I ran it up in thirty-two hours, and down in thirty. I had a light breeze against me the whole way, both going and coming, and the voyage has been performed wholly by, the power of the steam engine. I overtook many sloops and schooners beating to windward and parted with them as if they had been at anchor. The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved. — Robert Fulton

Scottish men of a certain age have a black response to almost everything as a measure of how sophisticated they are. I have a very long fuse that eventually explodes after building up a nice head of steam, although it's only happened three times - usually at work when someone takes me for granted. — Peter Capaldi

question. On the 20th of July, 1866, the steamer Governor Higginson, of the Calcutta and Burnach Steam Navigation Company, had met this moving mass five miles off the east coast of Australia. Captain Baker thought at first that he was in the presence of an unknown sandbank; he even prepared to determine its exact position when two columns of water, projected by the mysterious object, shot with a hissing noise a hundred and fifty feet up into the air. Now, unless the sandbank had been submitted to the intermittent eruption of a geyser, the Governor Higginson had to do neither more nor less than with an aquatic mammal, unknown till then, which threw up from — Jules Verne

Iranian parents can't stop their children. They're just wild - they want to party, they want their rights, they want to paint, they want to dance. No one can stop these new generations coming. That's why Iran has to open up: it's like a pot full of hot water, vapour and steam. — Golshifteh Farahani

I have a date,' he explained. 'This is an emergency.' He paused to catch his breath. 'Do you know' - breath - 'how to iron?' I walked over to the pink shirt. It was wrinkled like an old woman who'd spent her youth sunbathing. If only the Colonel didn't ball up his every belonging and stuff it into random dresser drawers. 'I think you just turn it on and press it against the shirt, right?' I said. 'I don't know. I didn't even know we had an iron.' 'We don't. It's Takumi's. But Takumi doesn't know how to iron, either. And when I asked Alaska, she started yelling, "You're not going to impose the patriarchal paradigm on me." Oh God, I need to smoke. I need to smoke, but I can't reek when I see Sara's parents. Okay, screw it. We're going to smoke in the bathroom with the shower on. The shower has steam. Steam gets rid of wrinkles, right? — John Green