The Air Loom, for all its florid craziness, can be seen to have a function and a rationale: as a miraculous, if temporary, fix for a breaking mind, a coping strategy for a life that had become too brutally contradictory to sustain otherwise.
My head and shoulders melted first, followed by my hips and knees. Before long I was a puddle, soaking into the pretty cotton prints. I drenched the quilt she never finished, rusted the metal parts of her sewing machine. I was pure liquid loss...
A feather taped to a vibrator is a tickling machine to induce hunger, and NOT a sex toy. So you won’t have to ask if you see it in my fridge.
We are still fearful, superstitious and all-too-human creatures. At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers' apprentic...
It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the g...
Failures are much more dramatic than successes, and people like drama. I think this is why automobile races draw such crowds. People expect spectacular crashes, which we tend to find more interesting than cars just racing around the track. The same i...
[after Clark fails at lighting all the exterior Christmas lights at the "lighting ceremony" in front of the entire family] Frances: Talk about pissing your money away. I hope you kids see what a silly waste of resources this was. Audrey: He worked re...
Raoul Duke: [driving the white Caddy] Now this was a superior machine. Ten grand worth of gimmicks and high-priced special effects. The rear windows lit up with a touch like frogs in a dynamite pond. The dashboard was full of esoteric lights and dial...
Hospital Administrator: Ah, I see you have the machine that goes ping. This is my favorite. You see we lease it back from the company we sold it to and that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account. [Everyone in the r...
[the X-Men help Senator Kelly, a victim of Magneto's mutant machine] Senator Kelly: I was afraid they'd... Prof. Charles Francis Xavier: Treat you like a mutant? [pause] Prof. Charles Francis Xavier: We're not what you think. Not all of us. Senator K...
The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating way. We feel there is so much in us that has not got an expression in capitalism. You know, capitalism is a machine that recognizes outward financial,...
I read stories aloud at every stage. I listen to my writer friends when they kindly offer criticism. I listen to my husband when he tells me something doesn't seem right. I have my mother's boyfriend, Loring Janes, read to make sure I get everything ...
A lot of people my age think stand up sucks.
By Time and Age full many things are taught.
I am 54 and age is slowly writing itself on my face.
Even in this glowering age, morality animates our lives with meaning.
Every age can be enchanting, provided you live within it.
It doesn't matter what age you are, an effective song will move you.
Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
I refuse to age disgracefully in rock 'n' roll.
I would prefer to be forgotten, then rediscovered in a different age.
