Surplus City Quotes & Sayings

My name is Matthew Swift. I'm a sorcerer, the only one in the city who survived Robert Bakker's purge. I was killed by my teacher's shadow and my body dissolved into telephone static and all they had left to bury was a bit of blood. Then we came back, and I am we and we are me, and we are the blue electric angels, creatures of the phones and the wires, the gods made from the surplus life you miserable excuse for mortals pour into all things electric. I am the Midnight Mayor, the protector of the city, the guardian of the night, the keeper of the gates, the watcher on the walls. We turned back the death of cities, we were there when Lady Neon died, we drove the creature called Blackout into the shadows at the end of the alleys, we are light, we are life, we are fire and, would you believe it, the word that best describes our condition right now is cranky.
Would you like to see what happens when you make us mad? — Kate Griffin

The human heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, downward slope of hatred. — Honore De Balzac

I've said goodbye to the overworked notion that architecture has to save the world. — Peter Zumthor

To bring oneself to a frame of mind and to the proper energy to accomplish things that require plain hard work continuously is the one big battle that everyone has. When this battle is won for all time, then everything is easy. — Thomas Buckner

I don't really get nervous. — Shamir

I've never wanted to do anything but be a newspaperman ever since I was 13. — Irv Kupcinet

I think I can take responsibility for that in that I was the audience. I was the voice of sanity around whom all these crazies did their dance. And I reacted in the same way that a member of the audience would have reacted. — Mary Tyler Moore

There's a phrase that critics of economic forecasting like to use: Give an economist a result you want, and he'll find the numbers to justify it. This entire city is filled with number crunchers who look at the exact same data and interpret it in widely disparate ways on everything from the federal budget deficit to the Social Security surplus." "Meaning that data can be manipulated." "Of course it can, depending on who's paying the meter and whose political agenda is being furthered, — David Baldacci

What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth. — Boris Pasternak

Already nature is serving all those uses which science slowly derives on a much higher and grander scale to him that will be served by her. When the sunshine falls on the path of the poet, he enjoys all those pure benefits and pleasures which the arts slowly and partially realize from age to age. The winds which fan his cheek waft him the sum of that profit and happiness which their lagging inventions supply. — Henry David Thoreau

If you look at the data, the inner city that was the riot zone lost 55,000 jobs in the ten years from 1992 to 2002, instead of gaining a surplus of 50,000. — Tom Hayden

A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs - something, anything ... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla. — Emil Cioran

They are perfect; how else?-they shall never change: We are faulty; why not?-we have time in store. — Robert Browning

What-e're thou art,
Act well thy part. — David O. McKay

world is a drama, we are the actors with our play role — Michale Callahan