Windup Quotes & Sayings

What we do know is that the era of climate change is upon us and the extraordinary in California today will become the ordinary of tomorrow. — Chris Hayes

You think the whole electrical system is fried?" Chuck said, "Good possibility." "That would mean fences." Chuck picked up an apple as it floated onto his foot. He went into a windup and kicked his leg and fired it into the wall. "Stee-rike one!" He turned to Teddy. "That would mean fences, yes. — Dennis Lehane

Somebody once asked me if I believed in God. It was probably the windup to some major proselytizing, but it's a good question. Do I believe in God? That somebody made all this happen for a reason, that there's something waiting for us after we die? That there's a purpose to all this crap? I don't know. I'd like to be able to say "Yes, of course" almost as much as I'd like to be able to say "Absolutely not," but there's evidence on both sides of the fence. Good people die for nothing, little kids go hungry, corrupt men hold positions of power, and horrible diseases go uncured. And I got Shaun, maybe the only person who could make it seem worthwhile to me. I got Shaun. So, is there a God? Sorry to dodge the question, but I just don't know. — Mira Grant

windup train that made a lot of noise. Every time it bumped into something it turned around and went the other way. Fudge liked it a lot. He likes anything that's noisy. — Judy Blume

It is economically irrational to exclude large environmental costs from the balance sheets of the producers and the consumers. You are only kidding yourself if you export those costs on to society as a whole. — John Holdren

She is an animal. Servile as a dog. And yet if he is careful to make no demands, to leave the air between them open, another version of the windup girl emerges. As precious and rare as a living bo tree. Her soul, emerging from within the strangling strands of her engineered DNA. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Anderson takes a shuddering breath, forcing away the memories. She is the opposite of the invasive plagues he fights every day. A hothouse flower, dropped into a world too harsh for her delicate heritage. It seems unlikely that she will survive for long. Not in this climate. Not with these people. Perhaps it was that vulnerability that moved him, her pretended strength when she had nothing at all. — Paolo Bacigalupi

He had always believed himself to be a flimsy man, a chip in the current of life. But since the birth of his son, and the burst of love this had produced, he had discovered within himself a solidity of character he had never thought possible, an expanding sense of life's importance and his place within its web. He wanted to be a man of whom it could be said that he had put others before himself and died in their defense. Thus the newly inducted and personally transformed Private Jock Alvado shoved his terror aside, stepped over the rail, and turned his back on the maw of space below him; Peter and Apgar did the same. They jumped. — Justin Cronin

Lions and tigers, and bears, oh my! - Dorothy in Wizard of Oz — L. Frank Baum

It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay to antiquity its due reverence. — Desiderius Erasmus

What exists beneath the sea?
I'd always pictured it in colors of emerald and aquamarine, where black velvet fish with sequined eyes swim among plankton.
But, when my eyes adjust, I see gray stones, lost anchors, wet wood, buttons, hooks, and eyes, the salem witches who wouldn't float, stars and stripes, missing vessels, windup toys, the souls of Romeo and Juliet, peaches, cream, pistons, screams, cages of ribs and birds, tunnels, nutcracker soldiers, satin bows, drugstore signs, Pandora box ripped open at its hinges. — Kelly Easton

Now, let us consider the life of Johannes Cabal, if briefly. He is closing on his thirtieth year and is ageing better than most, although this is a product of a lifestyle where sunlight is shunned rather than the assiduous use of moisturiser. He stands a little over six feet tall. He is blond, blue eyed, and, perforce, pale. These are not unusual characteristics; those are coming. — Jonathan L. Howard

I don't think you should limit what you read. — Nate Silver

[T]he cascade of discoveries in neuroscience and genetics has created an image of individuals as automata, slaves to their genes or neurotransmitters, with no more free will than a child's windup toy. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Well, I think when you come here and wave a Mexican flag in our face in a country that's giving a lot of these people an opportunity that they've never had before, I think a lot of Americans are insulted, whether they're first-, second-, third-, fourth- or fifth-generation Americans. — Henry Bonilla

Originally, 'The Windup Girl' started as a short story - a very gnarly, complicated short story set in Bangkok that didn't work very well. — Paolo Bacigalupi

A precursor to the Social Darwinists, Hobbes argued from th premise that the primordial human condition was a war fought by each against each, so brutal and incesssant that it was impossible to develop industry or even agriculture or the arts while that condition persisted. It's this description that culmintes in his famous epithet "And the life of man, solitary, poor, brutish, and short." It was a fiction to which he brought to bear another fiction, that of the social contract by which men agree to submit to rules and a presiding authority, surrendering their right to ravage each other for the sake of their own safety. The contract was not a bond of affection or identification, bot a culture or religion binding togetehr a civilization, only a convenience. Men, in his view, as in that of many other European writers of the period, are stark, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategy and not by nature ... — Rebecca Solnit

Is this how you will die? Is this what you were meant for? To simply be bled out like a pig?
A spark of rage flickers, an antidote to despair.
Will you not even try to survive? Did the scientists make you too stupid even to consider fighting for your own life?
Emiko closes her eyes and prays to Mizuko Jizo Bodhisattva, and then the bakeneko cheshire spirit for good measure. She takes a breath, and then with all her strength she slams her hand against the knife. The blade slices past her neck, a searing line.
"Arai wa?!" the man shouts.
Emiko shoves hard against him and ducks under his flailing knife. Behind her, she hears a grunt and thud as she bolts for the street. She doesn't look back. She plunges into the street, not caring that she shows herself as a windup, not caring that in running she will burn up and die. She runs, determined only to escape the demon behind her. She will burn, but she will not die passive like some pig led to slaughter. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Then there was your voice
Like a windup tin toy
Like the sweetest nails on a chalkboard
That I ever heard — Michelle Dalton

Sometimes I feel like a windup doll, like I have to reach behind and turn my golden key to produce a greeting, a laugh, whatever the socially acceptable reaction should be. — Jessica Knoll

I use my single windup, my double windup, my triple windup, my hesitation windup, my no windup. I also use my step-n-pitch-it, my submariner, my sidearmer and my bat dodger. Man's got to do what he's got to do. — Satchel Paige

The first time I faced him I watched him take that easy windup and then something went past me that made me flinch. The thing just hissed with danger. We couldn't touch him ... Every one of us knew we'd met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ball park. — Ty Cobb

I always tried to watch the pitcher and his complete windup from the moment he had the ball in his glove all the way through his motion, and tried to follow it all the way out of his hand, all the way to home plate. — Harmon Killebrew

I take my pen from my breast pocket and reach for Fitz's hand, write the still-unfamiliar address down on his palm. "Tell her I'll be home as soon as I can. Tell her to call me so I know how Sophie's doing. And if you can work it into the conversation, feel free to break the news about the arraignment."
As I head down the hall, Fitz's laughter follows me. "Coward," he calls out.
I look over my shoulder and grin. "Sucker," I answer. — Jodi Picoult

As far as 'Windup Girl' becoming a hit - none of us expected that. 'Night Shade' was just hoping not to lose their shirts, and I had grown up hearing from everyone that science fiction didn't sell, so all of our expectations were very low. — Paolo Bacigalupi