Machines Quotes - Page 32

• I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.

  Edith Wharton

  Cogs, Use, Found

  Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.791, Delphi Classics

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• The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they didn't use them for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interest of survival they trained themselves to be agreeing machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking and then they thought it too.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Animal, Thinking, Ideas

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• They say - "they" being the great philosophers, or possibly the cast of Seinfeld - that breaking up is like pushing over a Coke machine. You can't just do it, you have to set the thing in motion, rock it back and forth a few times.

  Jennifer Weiner

  Rocks, Coke, Pushing

  Jennifer Weiner (2001). “Good in Bed: A Novel”, Atria Books

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• It was her first book, an indigo cover with a silver moonflower, an art nouveau flower, I traced my finger along the silver line like smoke, whiplash curves. ... I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails.

  Janet Fitch

  Beach, Art, Flower

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• The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life - the homebound writer's irritants. But also being kept waiting is the human conditon.

  Paul Theroux

  Revenge, Party, Home

  Paul Theroux (2004). “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town”, p.3, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Be kind to me, or treat me mean I'll make the most of it, I'm an extraordinary machine

  Fiona Apple

  Mean, Be Kind, Treats

  Song: Extraordinary Machine, Album: Extraordinary Machine, 2005

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• When your dawn theater sounds to clear your sinuses: don't delay. Jump. Those voices may be gone before you hit the shower to align your wits. Speed is everything. The 90-mph dash to your machine is a sure cure for life rampant and death most real. Make haste to live. Oh, God, yes. Live. And write. With great haste.

  Ray Bradbury

  Real, Writing, Mph

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• I became, in other words, more like Holmes than the man himself: brilliant, driven to a point of obsession, careless of myself, mindless of others, but without the passion and the deep-down, inbred love for the good in humanity that was the basis of his entire career. He loved the humanity that could not understand or fully accept him; I, in the midst of the same human race, became a thinking machine.

  Laurie R. King

  Passion, Men, Thinking

  Laurie R. King (2010). “The Beekeeper's Apprentice: or, On the Segregation of the Queen”, p.287, Macmillan

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• She was an alien, really - a sort of eating, pooping, tantrum machine - and he didn't understand anything about her species.

  Christopher Moore

  Tantrums, Aliens, Eating

  Christopher Moore (2009). “A Dirty Job: A Novel”, p.36, Harper Collins

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• I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.

  May Sarton

  Innocent Person, Faces, Grind

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• The last light, in the last window, went out. Only the unstoppable machine of the sea still tears away at the silence with the cyclical explosion of nocturnal waves, distant memories of sleepwalking storms and the shipwrecks of dream.

  Alessandro Baricco

  Dream, Memories, Light

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• . . . freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine . . . It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.

  Erich Fromm

  Love Life, Men, Venture

  Erich Fromm (1963). “War Within Man: A Psychological Enquiry Into the Roots of Destructiveness”

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• I Xeroxed a mirror. Now I have an extra Xerox machine.

  Steven Wright

  Funny, Humor, Mirrors

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• The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time—the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes—and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine…dispensed Time in blowing weathers.

  Ray Bradbury

  Feet, Wrinkles, Dust

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• The machine conceals the machinations.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.108, Penguin

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• Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.

  John Cheever

  Beautiful, Country, Believe

  John Cheever, Blake Bailey (2009). “John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings”

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• I know it’s stupid to not own a gun yet have so many triggers, but in some other world gigantic seashells hold humans to their ears and listen to the echo of machines.

  Jeffrey McDaniel

  Stupid, Gun, Echoes

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• God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.

  C. S. Lewis

  Running, Men, Car

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.54, HarperCollins UK

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• Maybe it was a Patty Hearst thing. Stockholm syndrome or whatever it's called when you're being held against your will but then you become sucked in and fall in love. Or if not exactly love, you fall into something you can't see out of. 'I can't shoot a machine gun' becomes 'Hey, this hardly has any kick-back!

  Augusten Burroughs

  Falling In Love, Love You, Gun

  Augusten Burroughs (2004). “Running With Scissors”, p.106, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• If you own a machine, you are in turn owned by it, and spend your time serving it.

  Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Turns, Ifs, Serving

  Marion Zimmer Bradley (2002). “The Forbidden Circle”, p.175, Penguin

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• Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages

  Elias Canetti

  Scandal, Hostage

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• I want to throw up because we're supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I'm amazed we're not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.

  David Wojnarowicz

  Running, Loving Life, America

  David Wojnarowicz (1990). “David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame”, University Galleries

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• Where is the angry machine of all of us? Why is God such a blurred magician? Why are you begging for your life if you believe those things? Prove to me that you’re better than the rabbits we ate last night.

  Barry Hannah

  Believe, Night, Rabbits

  Barry Hannah (2010). “Long, Last, Happy: New and Collected Stories”, p.49, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Mistake, Writing, Errors

  Yevgeny Zamyatin (2007). “We”, p.10, Modern Library

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• It is quite possible for a work of literature to operate as a war machine upon its epoch.

  Monique Wittig

  War, Literature, Epoch

  Monique Wittig (1992). “The Straight Mind: And Other Essays”, Beacon Press (MA)

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