We Are Electric Quotes & Sayings

One of the most essential and mundane of human activities - taking care of children - requires high levels of anxious vigilance ... [Parents] dare not risk assuming that the sudden quiet from the toddlers' room means they are studying with Baby Einstein. Visualize fratricidal stranglings and electric outlets stabbed with forks: this is how we have reproduced our genomes. — Barbara Ehrenreich

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God. — Charles Kingsley

Before we snap to judge someone who's done a horrible crime, is it possible that all of us in the worst possible circumstances could be capable of something like that? So it's about not judging people before really considering what the circumstance was and that not all murderers are created equal. We have a tendency in our society to just say murder? Cut and dried. Go away forever. Or maybe you should have the electric chair yourself. — Jack Black

I think it modern society as a whole, but definitively in Brazil, spaces are so well divided and there are so many barriers, and so many divisions, so many lines and so many borderlines, basically telling you that you should be here but not here. This is my space and this is your space, and this is expressed very dramatically in architecture, we have a very kind of aggressive, almost medieval concept for architecture, which is basically keeping people out. So you get high walls, fences, and electric fences, and divisions like that. — Kleber Mendonca Filho

I have to admit we are locked in the most exquisite mysterious muck. This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multi-directional and has a mayor. To describe it takes many hundreds of thousands of words. Our muck is only a part of a much greater muck
the nation-state
which is itself the creation of that muck of mucks, human consciousness. Of course all these things also have a touch of sublimity
as when Moonbelly sings, for example, or all the lights go out. What a happy time that was, when all the electricity went away! If only we could re-create that paradise! By, for instance, all forgetting to pay our electric bills at the same time. All nine million of us. Then we'd all get those little notices that say unless we remit within five days the lights will go out. We all stand up from our chairs with the notice in ours hands. The same thought drifts across the furrowed surface of nine million minds. We wink at each other, through the walls. — Donald Barthelme

If, in the very intense electric field in the neighbourhood of the cathode, the molecules of the gas are dissociated and are split up, not into the ordinary chemical atoms, but into these primordial atoms, which we shall for brevity call corpuscles; and if these corpuscles are charged with electricity and projected from the cathode by the electric field, they would behave exactly like the cathode rays. — Joseph John Thomson

We dance. Sweet, downcast, through-the-lashes-glances bely every beating she got at thirteen, every lash of the tongue from her dad at fourteen, every heroin high that let her out for awhile, every hour and day she had to be tough.

She is so natural and soft. Her shoulders are down, hips loose and swinging as we close together. I swear I'm growing chest hair just looking at her. I've been a boy in public before, but I've never seen her like this. That's it exactly; I haven't seen her at all, except in glimpses, in half-confessional role-play sex. And here she is - pressed tight against my chest, hips grinding against my crotch to the bass bump of the music. Her thigh along mine is electric heaven. Two drag queens cannot decide whether we are breeders or in drag. I stroke my mascara-made mustache at them - but none of it matters with hands in suede and the way she smiles. — Various

Oersted would never have made his great discovery of the action of galvanic currents on magnets had he stopped in his researches to consider in what manner they could possibly be turned to practical account; and so we would not now be able to boast of the wonders done by the electric telegraphs. Indeed, no great law in Natural Philosophy has ever been discovered for its practical implications, but the instances are innumerable of investigations apparently quite useless in this narrow sense of the word which have led to the most valuable results. — William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

Green vegetables are something that fascinate chefs; the ability to keep vegetables green. How do we keep them green? What makes them green? Why are they green? And then that sort of army green. Why do they go from bright vibrant electric green to army green, and how can we avoid that? — Wylie Dufresne

I'll practice the new me in front of guests. I kind of like some of them, the guests. One has a soft, soft voice but I'm afraid he, too, may be practicing his new personality on me and that maybe he has trained himself with electric shock to his balls or some other place just as tender and soft, so that we are both living a lie. — Carol Emshwiller

As a species, we are forever sticking our finger into the electric socket of the universe to see what will happen next. — Terry Pratchett

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

In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow. Nor does the alchemy stop here. In the transmuted world new significances arise which are scarcely to be traced in the world of symbols; so that it becomes a world of beauty and purpose - and, alas, suffering and evil. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

Ralph J. Cordiner, chairman of General Electric, expressed the attitude of top business management toward education this way: "Two of our most outstanding presidents, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Coffin, never had an opportunity to attend college. Although some of our present officers have doctor's degrees, twelve out of forty-one have no college degrees. We are interested in competency, not diplomas. — David J. Schwartz

But if we establish the working hypothesis that the UFOs are machines, we also have to assume the following:
a) They are not built by human beings..
b) They are flying by means of artificial fields of gravity..
c) They produce high-tension electric charges in order to push the air out of their paths, so it does not start glowing, and strong magnetic fields to influence the ionized air at higher altitudes. — Hermann Oberth

Last reason for reading horror: it's a rehearsal for death. It's a way to get ready. People say there's nothing sure but death and taxes. But that's not really true. There's really only death, you know. Death is the biggie. Two hundred years from now, none of us are going to be here. We're all going to be someplace else. Maybe a better place, maybe a worse place; it may be sort of like New Jersey, but someplace else. The same thing can be said of rabbits and mice and dogs, but we're in a very uncomfortable position: we're the only creatures - at least as far as we know, though it may be true of dolphins and whales and a few other mammals that have very big brains - who are able to contemplate our own end. We know it's going to happen. The electric train goes around and around and it goes under and around the tunnels and over the scenic mountains, but in the end it always goes off the end of the table. Crash. — Stephen King

Resonance is a real 'here today' phenomena that just hasn't been looked at very carefully, and that is because of the (nonsense) that physicists have been putting out about 'energy' for decades. Electronic resonance has been used in radio tuners since their inception, while in the field of electric power resonance is avoided like the plague." "My system is not 'of the future' but here on this earth with all of the world's present problems." McKie said his real-world solid-state electronic system could be understood today, if physicists were not teaching that it cannot be achieved.
"...When physicists decide to 'come clean' and say that they don't know it all, we'll all be a lot closer to the gleaming world that you are describing. — Jeane Manning

If I look at my own recordings, I think generally there is a focal point within the song and often it's the instrumental bridge or a guitar solo where we try to do something unexpected, something beautiful or weird, or beautiful because it is weird. And of course I fail half the time, but yes that is the goal, to create even a few seconds of bliss, or sadness. The electric guitar is a great instrument for doing this because it is capable of surprising you. There are so many different sounds available. — Dean Wareham

Too many of us treat guns with genial familiarity. Guns should give us the heebie-jeebies. They are killing machines. That is all they are. We should dread them the way we dread cancer and cyanide and electric chairs. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

[On writing more Sherlock Holmes stories.] 'I don't care whether you do or not,' said Bram. 'But you will, eventually. He's yours, till death do you part. Did you really think he was dead and gone when you wrote "The Final Problem"? I don't think you did. I think you always knew he'd be back. But whenever you take up your pen and continue, heed my advice. Don't bring him here. Don't bring Sherlock Holmes into the electric light. Leave him in the mysterious and romantic flicker of the gas lamp. He won't stand next to this, do you see? The glare would melt him away. He was more the man of our time than Oscar was. Or than we were. Leave him where he belongs, in the last days of our bygone century. Because in a hundred years, no one will care about me. Or you. Or Oscar. We stopped caring about Oscar years ago, and we were his bloody *friends.* No, what they'll remember are the stories. They'll remember Holmes. And Watson. And Dorian Gray. — Graham Moore

I have sat in the dark here electric (haha) typer off lights out radio off drinking in the dark lighting cigarettes in the dark there was fire off the match we are all burning together burning brothers and sisters I like it I like it I like it. — Charles Bukowski

Much of the big media outlets in North America are owned by arms manufacturers, like Westinghouse, or G.E. [General Electric]. That's unacceptable. So we're not getting editorial policy, we're not getting a vision of truth. People just don't know what is going on anymore, and that's really dangerous stuff. — Denis Halliday

According to the L.A. Times, Attorney General John Ashcroft wants to take "a harder stance" on the death penalty. What's a harder stance on the death penalty? We're already killing the guy? How do you take a harder stance on the death penalty? What, are you going to tickle him first? Give him itching powder? Put a thumbtack on the electric chair? — Jay Leno

I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth. We take an electric saw to the hide of those who insult our mother. We — J.D. Vance

I also came across the word neoteny, which means "remaining young." It's something which we as humans have developed into a survival trait. Other animals, when they are young, have a curiosity about the world, a flexibility of response, and an ability to play which they lose as they grow up. As a species we have retained it. As a species, we are forever sticking our fingers into the electric socket of the universe to see what will happen next. It is a trait that will either save us or kill us, but it is what makes us human beings. I would rather be in the company of people who look at Mars than people who contemplate humanity's navel - other worlds are better than fluff. — Anonymous

Some of us are darkness lovers. We do not dislike the early and late daylight of June, but we cherish the increasing dark of November, which we wrap around ourselves in the prosperous warmth of wood stove, oil and electric blanket. Inside our warmth we fold ourselves, partly tuber, partly bear, in the dark and its cold - around us, outside us, safely away from us. We tuck ourselves up in the comfort of cold's opposite, warming ourslves by thought of the cold, lighting ourselves by darkness's idea. — Donald Hall

In Eastern Europe, we are suspicious of the 'h' and the 'j.' The 'h,' when it is small, looks like a chair. Is it an electric chair? We don't know. Is it a regular chair sitting on a trap door? Again, we don't know. When it's big, the 'H' is always dangerous. If you pass under it, maybe the bar will fall on you. If you go over it, possibly the bar will shoot up when you're halfway across. And the 'j,' whether big or small, is always a hook. In Eastern Europe, we don't get caught. — James Marshall

For electric power generation, we are very optimistic about solar-thermal technology, and we're intrigued by the potential of enhanced geothermal energy to replace coal-based power generation. Traditional carbon capture and sequestration-based coal power generation is somewhat unlikely to be competitive. — Vinod Khosla

The use of electronics is a natural extension of the instrument - it is an electric guitar. So we guitarists have been plugging into something since 1931, and we are not about to stop now. Current advances in technology means we can have a huge array of sounds at our fingertips, and this offers amazing possibilities to the contemporary composer. It is always a guitar (I don't play synthesizer) but it becomes something else all together - more like sculpting sound in real time using metal wires, 5 fingers and a pick. — Tim Brady

Los Angeles is a city looking for a ritual to join its fragments, and The Doors are looking for such a ritual also. A kind of electric wedding. We hide ourselves in the music to reveal ourselves. — Jim Morrison

Life was so much simpler in pre-video days when everyone refused invitations because the 'Forsyte Saga' was on. Now we all just have a long list of unwatched shows, all of which, it seems, our friends are raving about. I feel as outdated as if I wore a Fair Isle sweater, ate Pot Noodle and had a two-bar electric fire in the sitting room. — Simon Hoggart

We are staring at each other, forgetting about the harsh reality and I can feel my heart reacting. He touches my cheek and the familiar electric current runs through me. His hands are warm, caressing my pale skin. His deep-blue eyes are filled with serenity and passion. I keep telling myself to breathe, but I am unable to exhale the air from my lungs. Then he leans forward and his lips touch mine, increasing the temperature in my body. He kisses me gently, trying to break his way through, testing to see if I let him in. His lips are sweet and warm. A few seconds later it is all over and he disappears once again, leaving me uncontrollably awake and trying to gather my wild thoughts. — Joanna Mazurkiewicz

I was the apprentice of Robert James Bakker. I'm sure you've heard of him. I am a sorcerer. I was there when Bakker died. We ... made it happen. I too have met death, and did not have to peel the bones away from my chest to survive the encounter. I am also, and incidentally, the Midnight Mayor, the blue electric angels, the fire in the wire, the song in the telephones, and we are having a bad week. Be smart; fear us. — Kate Griffin

We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce, then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light - his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow. — Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

Ah!' said Michel, tempted, 'you have modern poems?'
'Of course. For instance, Martillac's 'Electric Harmonies,' which won a prize last year from the Academic of Sciences, and Monsieur de Pulfasse's 'Meditations on Oxygen;' and we have the 'Poetic Parallelogram,' and even the 'Decarbonated Odes ... '
Michel couldn't bear hearing another word and found himself outside again, stupefied and overcome. Not even this tiny amount of art had escaped the pernicious influence of the age! Science, Chemistry, Mechanics had invaded the realm of poetry! 'And such things are read,' he murmured as he hurried through the streets, ' perhaps even bought! And signed by the authors and placed on the shelves marked 'Literature.' But not one copy of Balzac, not one work by Victor Hugo! Where can I find such things-where, if not the Library ... — Jules Verne

I take small, shallow breaths, even though my lungs are begging for more air. I feel the heat of Ten's controlled breaths against my face. As we stand there, it feels as if an electric charge is growing between us, so powerful that it would shock us if we moved even a millimeter closer together. And yet I feel like I want to. — Jenny Lynne

The Queen and Electric Light Orchestra harmonies are so distinct and fit in our songs so well sometimes, but we don't know how to do them properly. — Nate Ruess

How cruel is the golden rule
When the lives we lived are only golden-plated?
And I knew that the lights of the city were too heavy for me
Though I carried carats for everyone to see.
And I saw God cry in the reflection of my enemies
And all the lovers with no time for me
And all of the mothers raise their babies
To stay away from me.
Tongues on the sockets of electric dreams
Where the sewage of youth drowned the spark of my teens
And I knew that the lights of the city were too heavy for me (too heavy for me)
Though I carried carats for everyone to see (everyone to see).
And pray they don't grow up to be — Fall Out Boy

An electric chain seems to vibrate, as it were, between our brain and him or her preserved there [in a Daguerreotype] so well by the limner's cunning. Time, space, both are annihilated, and we identify the semblance with the reality. — Walt Whitman

The dreamers dream from the neck up, their bodies securely strapped to the electric chair. To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture killing and recreating, death always a step in advance. To spit on the past is not enough. To proclaim the future is not enough. One must act as if the past were dead and the future unrealizable. One must act as if the next step were the last, which it is. Each step forward is the last, and with it a world dies, one's self included. We are here of the earth never to end, the past
never ceasing, the future never beginning, the present never ending. The never-never world which we hold in our hands and see and yet is not ourselves. We are that which is never
concluded, never shaped to be recognized, all there is and yet not the whole, the parts so much greater than the whole that only God the mathematician can figure it out. — Henry Miller

At one point in the story, following a brazen daytime bank robbery, Electro is shown escaping from the authorities by climbing up the side of a building, as easily as Spider-Man . . . we see one observer exclaim, "Look!! That strangely-garbed man is racing up the side of the building!" A second man on the street picks up the narrative: "He's holding on to the iron beams in the building by means of electric rays - using them like a magnet!! Incredible!"

There are three feelings inspired by this scene. The first is wonder as to why people rarely use the phrase "strangely-garbed" anymore. The second is nostalgia for the bygone era when pedestrians would routinely narrate events occurring in front of them, providing exposition for any casual bystander. And the third is pleasure at the realization that Electro's climbing this building is actually a physically plausible use of his powers. — James Kakalios

Our car is constantly in motion. It is raining in the streets we glide through, and this constitutes one more added pleasantness. Some people find it frightfully agreeable to see that it is raining and at the same time be permitted to sense that they themselves are not getting wet. The image produced by a gray, wet street has something consoling and dreamy about it, and so you stand now upon the rear platform of the creaking car that is rumbling its way forward, and you gaze straight ahead. Gazing straight ahead is something done by almost all the people who sit or stand in the electric. — Robert Walser

We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form. — Arthur Machen

No sound, once made, is ever truly lost. In electric clouds, all are safely trapped, and with a touch, if we find them, we can recapture those echoes of sad, forgotten wars, long summers, and sweet autumns. — Ray Bradbury

bewildering feeling of being rushed, things are happening too quick. Too fast. I figured I couldn't get into any worse trouble than murder. Johnny and I would be hiding for the rest of our lives. Nobody but Dally would know where we were, and he couldn't tell anyone because he'd get jailed again for giving us that gun. If Johnny got caught, they'd give him the electric chair, and if they caught me, I'd be sent to a reformatory. I'd heard about reformatories from Curly Shepard and I didn't want to go to one at all. So we'd have to be hermits for the — S.E. Hinton

We're taught to talk about the world as a world of as states conceived as unified, coherent entities. If you study international relations (IR) theory, there's what's called "realist" IR theory, which says there is an anarchic world of states and states pursue their "national interest." It's in large part mythology. There are a few common interests, like we don't want to be destroyed. But, for the most part, people within a nation have very different interests. The interests of the CEO of General Electric and the janitor who cleans his floor are not the same. — Noam Chomsky

In this world, there is no true freeze frame. Pictures do not escape time. But they do sit in it. Pictures are men grabbing at wind to make themselves feel less beaten by the driving current of this river. We pinch brushes to pinch moments, feelings, and ... that thing that was just now but now it's gone. Did you catch that? We push buttons and point electric boxes. Did you get that? And most of the time we never go back to look. I got it (I think). But we feel better, like fishermen hooking everything but reeling rarely. — N.D. Wilson

One night after dinner a group of us were talking about the supernatural, and one of our dinner guests said that when the electric light was invented, people began to lose the dimension of the supernatural. In the days before we could touch a switch and flood every section of the room with light, there were always shadows in the corner, shadows which moved with candlelight, with firelight; and these shadows were an outward and visible sign that things are not always what they seem; there are things which are not visible to the mortal human being; there are things beyond our ken. — Madeleine L'Engle

As we curve around into the loop of the City Circle, I can see that a couple of other stylists have tried to steal Cinna and Portia's idea of illuminating their tributes. The electric-light-studded outfits from District 3, where they make electronics, at least make sense. But what are the livestock keepers from Distric 10, who are dressed as cows, doing with flaming belts? Broiling themselves? Pathetic. — Suzanne Collins

The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself. — Jean Baudrillard

BEAST She calls you Beast, for that is what you are. And Beauty. The surprise is not the compliment, not the truth, that she is beautiful. The surprise is not that we wish to help her. The surprise is not even the electric warmth that rises at the sound of her voice, even when she is shouting. The surprise is how much I long to hear her call me, just once more, Ivan. — Meagan Spooner

Everything we think we know, everything we think we see, everything we believe we feel, taste, smell, or hear, everything we "remember" (our pasts), everything we want to happen (our futures), everything that has ever existed or will ever exist, only exists right now. All of these things are nothing more than electric signals being passed through our brains and bodies, right now. It is all energy flowing through us right now. "The past" exists only in our minds. We are the ones who bring it into reality. We are the ones who bring it into the present. We are the ones who make it "real". — Dan Pearce

Jack Welch, the transformational former CEO of General Electric and business guru, says that an effective mission statement answers the question "How are we going to win in this business?" He believes, after years of experience, that this is the most effective way to convey your business' mission to the world, and that winning should be your business objective. — Devon Wilcox

And our lips. There isn't enough skin, enough spit, enough time, for the lost years that our lips are trying to make up for as they find each other. We kiss. The electric current switches to high. The lights throughout all of Brooklyn must be surging. — Gayle Forman

Several of the inventions and discoveries which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph, the breech-loading gun, india-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first appeared in Dickens's lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in his books. Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce's "invention" in Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, "of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures," and it is also an important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the "invention" is! — George Orwell

There were some crucial things Vera's parents were forgetting about crosses, was what Peter said. One was that Jesus was nailed to His by enemies, not by Mary and Joseph. And another, he said, was that it killed Him. Christ's cross killed Him. We've got to remember what crosses are, Peter said. They're not just decorations on steeples. They're murder weapons, he said, the same as guns, or gas chambers, or electric chairs. — David James Duncan

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. — Elon Musk

The data are not easy to come by, but a mid 1940s study by the US Rural Electrification Authority reports that, with the introduction of the electric washing machine and electric iron, the time required for washing a 38 lb load of laundry was reduced by a factor of nearly 6 (from 4 hours to 41 minutes) and the time taken to iron it by a factor of more than 2.5 (from 4.5 hours to 1.75 hours).2 Piped water has meant that women do not have to spend hours fetching water (for which, according to the United Nations Development Program, up to two hours per day are spent in some developing countries). Vacuum cleaners have enabled us to clean our houses more thoroughly in a fraction of the time that was needed in the old days, when we had to do it with broom and rags. — Ha-Joon Chang

"We must learn that the electric Universe of motion is divided into wave cycles which are equally divided into opposite expressions" — Walter Russell

Archibald MacLeish affirmed that 'A poem should be equal to / not true'. As a defiant statement of poetry's gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a retuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive, like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it. — Seamus Heaney

The relationship between the famous and the public who sustain them is governed by a striking paradox. Infinitely remote, the great stars of politics, film and entertainment move across an electric terrain of limousines, bodygurads and private helicopters. At the same time, the zoom lens and the interview camera bring them so near to us that we know their faces and their smallest gestures more intimately than those of our friends.
Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free to range, and we find ourselves experimenting like impresarios with all the possibilities that these magnified figures seem to offer us. — J.G. Ballard

In order to give these customers what they want within an appropriate timescale, we are committed to developing a broad range of technologies-including plug-in hybrid, electric vehicle and FCV, corresponding to the simultaneous diversification of energy sources. — Yoshikazu Tanaka

We are striking it big in the electric light, better than my vivid imagination first conceived. Where this thing is going to stop Lord only knows. — Thomas A. Edison

We will remember what it was like to lose you, our pain the black background of our electric blue joy. We will remember that there are few answers to our questions; the questions that seem to float into an endless expanse of sky. — Kelly Wilson

Let us begin with the fine-structure constant ... The fine-structure constant is really the ratio of two natural units or atoms of action ... We obtain action when we multiply energy by time ... We are challenged to find a unified theory of electric particles and radiation in which the electrostatic type of action and the quantum type of action are traced to their source. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

There are tons of people in the West who love fiddles, banjos and mandolins. If you got to any cowboy poetry and music gathering those are the instruments they use. It's acoustic music. We don't do that much modern country that has electric guitars and a lot of volume. It's a gentler form of music. It's from the land and comes from the ranchers and farmers. — Michael Martin Murphey

Historians are wont to name technological advances as the great milestones of culture, among them the development of the plow, the discovery of smelting and metalworking, the invention of the clock, printing press, steam power, electric engine, lightbulb, semiconductor, and computer. But possibly even more transforming than any of these was the recognition by Greek philosophers and their intellectual descendants that human beings could examine, comprehend, and eventually even guide or control their own thought process, emotions, and resulting behavior.
With that realization we became something new and different on earth: the only animal that, by examining its own cerebration and behavior, could alter them. This, surely, was a giant step in evolution. Although we are physically little different from the people of three thousand years ago, we are culturally a different species. We are the psychologizing animal. — Morton Hunt

If we think we are tired or ill, it is only because we have done something to unbalance the bodily conductivity of the universal electric current which motivates it. — Walter Russell

Elephant, beyond the fact that their size and conformation are aesthetically more suited to the treading of this earth than our angular informity, have an average intelligence comparable to our own. Of course they are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves
nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin's lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it. This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets
and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other. — Beryl Markham

Cultural messages inform the populace that if they aren't perpetually electric they are missing out on the pinnacle of relatedness. Every pop-cultural medium portrays the height of adult intimacy as the moment when two attractive people who don't know a thing about each other tumble into bed and have passionate sex. All the waking moments of our love lives should tend, we are told, toward that throbbing, amorous apotheosis. But "in love" merely brings the players together, and the end of that prelude is as inevitable as it is desirable. True relatedness has a chance to blossom only with the waning of its intoxicating predecessor. (207) — Thomas Lewis

The world of the grotesque is the darkness within us. Well before Freud and Jung shined a light on the workings of the subconscious, this correlation between darkness and our subconscious, these two forms of darkness, was obvious to people. It wasn't a metaphor, even. If you trace it back further, it wasn't even a correlation. Until Edison invented the electric light, most of the world was totally covered in darkness. The physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two. They were directly linked. Like this." Oshima brings his two hands together tightly. "But today things are different. The darkness in the outside world has vanished, but the darkness in our hearts remains, virtually unchanged. Just like an iceberg, what we label the ego or consciousness is, for the most part, sunk in darkness. And that estrangement sometimes creates a deep contradiction or confusion within us. — Haruki Murakami

These trans are driven, I thought, like the mind, by electric current, and at once I was imagining all the pylons and the wires running down the valley, creating a path, a network, that was separate from the landscape so that we could pass through it at great speed, as thoughts also hurtle by so fast but are rarely in contact with reality. The mind likes to move on rails, I decided after a couple of days in Maroggia, always the same old reflections and anxieties and obsessions, one leading to the other with great predictability. The same switches, the same buffers and terminuses that you never get beyond. — Tim Parks

Now Momma's done away with the old black kettle she used to cook in when I was just littleAnd the door ain't sprung on her electric rangeThat little old farm and home we had it ain't there no more and that's too badFolks are doing away with the simple things ... — Dolly Parton

And my car back then, a Studebaker as I recall, was powered, as are most of all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused, addictive, and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.
When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won't be any left. Cold turkey.
Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn't the TV news is it? Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on. — Kurt Vonnegut

No trees in sight, just concrete
Still I see
Two roads twist and turn in front of me
No signs, but screams
Which way's reality?
So you choose; yeah, you choose
Maybe you lose
The sidewalk paved in hitches
Broken hearts not fixed by stitches
But morning's coming soon
No right in sight, just questions
And you find
There is no map to Mecca
It's just life
No right answer; perfect marks
It's no big deal; it's just your heart
Falling stars and lightning sparks
This will only sting a bit
We are all just
Magnets for fate
Stumbling, skipping, running at our pace
Making choices, losing voices
Making wishes for forgiveness
But morning's coming soon

And no matter where you sit, how fast you sip
The coffee tastes the same on magnet lips

"Magnets for Fate"
-Electric Freakshow — Cat Patrick