Quotes & Sayings About The Speed Of Sound

What we've got here is a lunatic genius ghost-in-the-computer monorail that likes riddles and goes faster than the speed of sound. Welcome to the fantasy version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. — Stephen King

Every bitter joule of rage had been converted into speed. She was empty. There was no pain. The air whistled past her ears. She listened intently. That silent music was all there was. It was the sound of the universe showing her mercy. — Chris Cleave

Lieutenant Commander Sibley added a few final flourishes as he brought the Jade up to cruising speed. "If you have to hurl, Staff Sargent, bite the black tab at the base of your faceplate. It'll open a pouch."
No answer. Not even the sound of a lost lunch.
"Staff?"
Her telltales were green. She was conscious. Heart pumping at sixty/sixty. Respiration slow and steady.
Then it dawned on him. While he'd been flying a pattern designed to test the limits of Human physiology, his passenger had gone to sleep. — Tanya Huff

That spin became so violent, it was hard to know how to get out of it. I was able to get it under control and break the speed of sound ... I could feel myself break the speed of sound. I could feel the air building up and then I hit it. — Felix Baumgartner

There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. — Wallace Stegner

I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum total of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity, the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can't be retrieved. What if I am stuck down here for good? — Elizabeth Wurtzel

An hour and thirty-one minutes after launch, my pressure altimeter halts at 103,300 feet. At ground control the radar altimeters also have stopped-on readings of 102,800 feet, the figure that we later agree upon as the more reliable. It is 7 o'clock in the morning, and I have reached float altitude ... Though my stabilization chute opens at 96,000 feet, I accelerate for 6,000 feet more before hitting a peak of 614 miles an hour, nine-tenths the speed of sound at my altitude. — Joseph Kittinger

I love a challenge, and trying to become the first person to break the speed of sound in freefall is a challenge like no other. — Felix Baumgartner

She sat at the window of the train ... The window frame trembled with the speed of the motion, the pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed across the glass as luminous streaks, once in a while ... She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up ... It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance. She thought: For just a few moments
while this lasts
it is all right to surrender completely
to forget everything and just permit yourself to feel. She thought: Let go
drop the controls
this is it. — Ayn Rand

Beethoven
his thoughts moving at
the speed of sound
transforming emotion into music
and for a moment
it was like joy
was a tangible thing
like you could touch it
like for the first time
we could watch love and
hate dance together
in a waltz of such precision and beauty
that we finally understood
the history wasn't important
to know the man
all we ever had to do was
listen. — Shane Koyczan

It fires .50 cal at twice the speed of sound. It will hit him before he ever hears the shot." My mother crossed her arms. "I'd like to see him bounce that off his chest. — Ilona Andrews

There's a lot of scientific evidence demonstrating that focused attention leads to the reshaping of the brain. In animals rewarded for noticing sound (to hunt or to avoid being hunted, for example), we find much larger auditory centers in the brain. In animals rewarded for sharp eyesight, the visual areas are larger. Brain scans of violinists provide more evidence, showing dramatic growth and expansion in regions of the cortex that represent the left hand, which has to finger the strings precisely, often at very high speed. Other studies have shown that the hippocampus, which is vital for spatial memory, is enlarged in taxi drivers. The point is that the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing. — Daniel J. Siegel

On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound. — Joseph Brodsky

They would set their course toward it, seeing it grow bigger silently and imperceptibly, a motionless growth
and then, when they were at it, when they were about to bang their noses with a shock against its seeming solid mass, the sun would dim. Wraiths of mist suddenly moving like serpents of the air would coil about them for a second. Grey damp would be around them, and the sun, a copper penny, would fade away. The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncreation. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed. — T.H. White

Long practise in driving a racing car at a hundred miles an hour or so gives first-class training in control and judging distances at high speed and helps tremendously in getting motor sense, which is rather the feel of your engine than the sound of it, a thing you get through your bones and nerves rather than simply your ears. — Eddie Rickenbacker

Tardiness is next to wickedness in a society relentless in its consumption of time as both a good and a service
as tweet and Instagram, film clip and sound bite, as sporting event, investment opportunity, Tinder hookup, and interest rate
its value measured not by its texture or its substance but by the speed of its delivery, a distinction apparent to Andy Warhol when he supposedly said that any painting that takes longer than five minutes to make is a bad painting. — Lewis H. Lapham

Jaime had never realised that trees made a sound when they grew, and no-one else had realised it either, because the sound is made over hundreds of years in waves of twenty-four hours from peak to peak. Speed it up, and the sound a tree makes is vrooom. — Terry Pratchett

I tried to take some of the same records that were important to me on my album Full Speed that my fans really vibed with content-wise and just made sure that the production and actual sound was put together differently and wasn't rushed as much. — Kid Ink

There's a hum that happens inside my head when I hit a certain writing rhythm, a certain speed. When laying track goes from feeling like climbing a mountain on my hands and knees to feeling like flying effortlessly through the air. Like breaking the sound barrier. everything inside me just shifts. I break the writing barrier. And the feeling of laying track changes, transforms, shifts from exertion into exultation. — Shonda Rhimes

Bach is played altogether too fast. Music that presupposes a visual comprehension of lines of sound advancing side by side becomes chaos for the listener; high speed makes comprehension impossible. Yet — Albert Schweitzer

Hockey is a club that holds its members tightly, the bond forged by shared hardship and mutual passion, by every trip to the pond, where your feet hurt and your face is cold and you might get a stick in the ribs or a puck in the mouth, and you still can't wait to get back out there because you are smitten with the sound of blades scraping against ice and pucks clacking off sticks, and with the game's speed and ever-changing geometry. It has a way of becoming the center of your life even when you're not on the ice. — Wayne Coffey

There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into different shapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces. — Edgard Varese

Evanton creaked his way toward the sound of the bell at a speed that made snails look fast - if he decided to answer the door at all. If you made the mistake of ringing the bell while he was already on the way, he got angry. Kaylin had learned this early. On the other hand, if he'd actually failed to hear the door when she was expected, and she failed to ring the bell a second time, he also got angry. It was very much lose-lose, with hope wedged in to add anxiety. — Michelle Sagara

Speaking more generally about what attracted him to bluegrass banjo, he said it was 'just the sound of the instrument, and then the fire, you know; the speed and all that. I was attracted by the intensity of it, really. And I was drawn to that incredible clarity-- when something is going along real fast and every note is absolutely clear. That, to me, was really amazing-- the Earl Scruggs instrumentals...' But Garcia refused to commit himself to just one style of music. Though bluegrass became his overriding obsession for about two years, he still dabbled in folk, old-timey and blues whenever the opportunity arose and there were players around. — Blair Jackson

As impossible as it may sound, but the CEC uses a calibration gear of 1,000 teeth to project a one day's measure of time (PI) onto a right triangle alongside the speed of light value (x=2.99792458) while uttering thereby the time it takes light to reach Earth coming from the Sun (8.3 minutes). — Ibrahim Ibrahim

Music stays in the air. / It travels at the speed of breath / at the sound of light. / It is never not heard. / It can wait centuries if it has to. — Alexis De Veaux

spin the rings above the speed of sound to establish the harmonic connection." Langford — Michael C. Grumley

Take one child, limitless dreams, unlimited potential, pure innocence and a sponge-like brain. Force them by law to spend at least ten years of their precious youth being force-fed the most useless information. Constantly reminding them that they're only as good as their grades in a system that teaches useless mind-numbing subjects and claims to confirm our intellect with repetition and random memory tests. I didn't give a flying fuck about the square route of the number nine or the speed of sound; I just so desperately wanted to know the basics. Happiness, love, the things that we need in our lives; the things that help us to find confidence in ourselves, our ability and our dreams. — K.A. Hill

I wanted to run faster than the speed of sound, but nobody,no matter how much pain they're in, can run that fast. — Sherman Alexie

To listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. You listen not only to the 'music,' but to the essence of the person speaking. You listen not only for what someone knows, but for what he or she is. Ears operate at the speed of sound, which is far slower than the speed of light the eyes take in. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow our mind's hearing to your ears' natural speed, and hear beneath the words to their meaning. — Peter Senge

I could not see the speedometer, and was not accustomed to travelling in an open vehicle, but I estimated that we were consistently exceeding the speed limit. Discordant sound, wind, risk of death - I tried to assume the mental state that I used at the dentist. — Graeme Simsion

For quite some time now, like the foetus inside a womb, a terrible knowledge had been ripening within me and filling my soul with frightened foreboding: that the Infinite Universe is inflating at incredible speed, like some ridiculous soap bubble. I become obsessed with a miser's piercing anxiety whenever I allow myself to think that the Universe may be slipping out into space, like water through cupped hands, and that, ultimately - perhaps even today, perhaps not till tomorrow or for several light years - it will dissolve for ever into emptiness, as though it were made not of solid matter but only of fleeting sound. — Tadeusz Borowski

For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don't want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound. — Martin Amis

A tailwind, on the other hand, is one of the most beautiful experiences you can have on a bike. There's no wind in my ears, so I hear everything around me. The chain purrs sweetly as it pulls the gears under the coaxing of my legs. The soft hiss of my tires on the smooth hard pavement, the sound of little critters scurrying in the desert around me as I pass. Smells aren't as big a deal out here in the dry desert, but even the smells are more accessible in a tailwind, since I'm moving through air at a slower relative speed, and the smells linger around my face long enough to register and enjoy them.
Relative progress, speed, sights, smells, sounds. It all goes together to create a gestalt for the ride that's pure sweetness, and I never want it to end.
Hozho. — Neil M. Hanson

Of course, if Saint Peter could come out today upon these streets below he would find all he could wish, voices from nowhere, music from unpopulated boxes, men ascending divine distances in gas balloons, and traveling at the speed of sound, apparitions from nowhere appear on the screen; the sick are raised from the dead, life is prolonged so that every detail of pain may be relished, the blind are given eyes and the cripples forced to walk, and there is an item which can blow a city of the beloved enemy into a place where their sins will be brought home to them, with of course as much noise as the trumpets on the walls of Jericho — William Gaddis

The car picked up speed, and the sound seemed to lull me.I could relax, I thought as I felt the tingling of circulation in my limbs. I was in Trent's car, wrapped in a blanket, and held in his arms. He wouldn't let anything hurt me.
He wasn't singing, though,I mused.Shouldn't he be singing? — Kim Harrison

I once met an RAF pilot who told me of what he called a "bird strike". This, rather unfairly in my view, made it sound as if it was the bird's fault; as if the little feathered chap had deliberately tried to head-butt twenty tons of metal travelling in the opposite direction at just under the speed of sound, out of spite. — Hugh Laurie

She was coming. She was moving close to the hall. He felt himself slip away from his body into pure listening; yes, it was she. All the sounds of the night rose to confuse him, yet he caught it; a low irreducible sound which she could not veil, the sound of her breathing, of the beat of her heart, of a force moving through space at tremendous and unnatural speed, causing the inevitable tumult amid the visible and the invisible. — Anne Rice

From a building right in front of my windows, I can observe the speed of the sunrises and sunsets. The voices of children playing, laughing, yelling, and crying on the playground crawl up to the eighth floor, where I write. Their voices sound so innocent from a distance. — Andrea Hirata

Is this ... I mean ... have you ever been kissed before?"
My head shakes frantically. I can't control it.
His face lights up.
I don't know why he's happy that he's trying to make out with a pajama wearing, frozen, virgin kisser. That doesn't sound like happy times at all.
"So I'm your first?"
I nod again. The same speed as before. That's it - I've lost control of all bodily function.
"I like that," he says, his mouth slowly descending. He presses his lips softly against mine. — Jay McLean

Pressure hulls collapse at the speed of sound. Once that starts, you're inside your own little imploding atomic bomb, and you're gone. — Graham Hawkes

The elements of voice and style are braided together like twine, consisting of these attempts to copy other artists, or an instrument, or even the sound of a bird or passing train. Added to these characteristics are emotions and thoughts that register as various vocal quirks, like hiccups, sighs, growls, warbles - a practically limitless assortment of choices. Most of these choices are made at the speed of sound on a subconscious level, or one would be completely overwhelmed by the task. — Linda Ronstadt

All things seek for comfort and no one wants discomfort. A sound mind does not just improve speed; it increases efficiency and joy, and bond the body and the soul perfectly as well! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Something that I consider 'my invention', since I haven't seen it done anywhere before is 'Super-speed photography'. Now normal high-speed photography involves either a very fast camera at a high frame rate or the act of 'freezing' the motion using flash, while the actual exposure is actually quite long. For much of my high-speed photography with flash I was using shutter speeds of two seconds to give me time to break or shoot whatever my subject was and trigger the flash with a sound activated device. But then I started playing with the idea of using the flash trigger of the camera to actually cause the event. — Desmond Downs

He wanted to argue like this forever. This was better than nothing. There was no exhausting his anger at his father, and every word, however well intentioned or intentionally barbed, was a pull at a scab on his bloody heart. It was too late for any of this. There could ultimately be no healing. Marty had terminal cancer, and so did the two men have a cancer between them. They were terminal together, as father and son. They remained, momentarily exhausted, but it was really only that quiet between lightning and thunder as sound lags behind speed. The lightning had cracked the ground already, you just hadn't heard it yet. — David Duchovny

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud. — George Steiner

There are certain things that I will do viscerally to affect people emotionally, with speed changes and sound, and various other things. Sure there are links; the same kind of sensibilities went into it and I worked on writing that script as well so there was an emphasis on a minimalisation of dialogue as far as possible, to focus on the visual and to put it in another language, of course. — Mel Gibson

Longest free fall, highest skydive, and youngest person to break the speed of sound. You only set three world records. - Amy, to Dan — C. Alexander London

Even with the active efforts of my electronic gear to preserve my hearing, the explosion of the drop ship stabs my eardrums. I can feel the shock wave from the detonation radiating through me as it moves away from the source at the speed of sound, and it feels like someone has thrown me to the ground and then jumped on my chest. For a moment I think that the drop ship must have had some low-yield nuclear ordnance on one of its pylons, and I'm convinced that Sergeant Fallon has just blown up half the PRC, and us along with it. I'm vaguely aware that I'm prone on the ground all of a sudden, knocked off my feet by the impulse of the shock wave. — Marko Kloos

I like that you challenge me. That's new. I like that you don't go easy on me. I like that you question everything. I want you to keep questioning everything. I like how you smell. I like seeing the fight in your eyes. I like seeing anger color your cheeks. I like hearing your breathing stop when I'm close to you and I like feeling your heart pick up its speed in your chest when were close like this. I like that a lot, actually, the sound of your heart beating. So alive, a frantic mess of beats. I like the feeling of you in my arms, the way our bodies align. I like watching your eyes close and knowing I'm the reason, the reason you're feeling this." -Everett — Whitney Barbetti

As we went through mach one, the nose started dropping, so we just cranked that horizontal stabilizer down to keep the nose up. We got it above mach one, and once we got it above the speed of sound, then you have supersonic flow over the whole airplane, so you have no more shock waves on it that are causing buffeting ... You really don't think about the outcome of any kind of a flight, whether it's combat, or any other kinds of flights, because you really have no control over it ... — Chuck Yeager