There is a common tendency to turn off one's imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one ...
You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul.
The Bedlam that greeted James Tilly Matthews, then, was not so much a baroque spectacle of depravity as an exhausted and run-down public institution, its building falling apart and its professional image tarnished.
Many had suspected that the political disasters of the past few years had a hidden cause. The bloodiness of the French mob rule was something unnatural, with a pitiless and inhuman progression that had never been seen before.
What the hell?” Ian asked, holding his hands over the front of his Christmas briefs. Sara had ordered them from the Internet, and he'd worn them to please her. Too bad there hadn't been enough time for the underwear to meet with an unfortunate acci...
I've decided to donate my arsenal of machine guns to a hunting charity. That should help raze a million bucks.
I had a dream about you. We were shoveling dollar bills and used diapers and laughing like children. I was dancing like I had a fog machine in my pants, and I did, which is my moves were so mysterious.
But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.
I blended into the kitchen like a blender, but I made so much noise that I nearly woke up the strawberries and bananas. You should hear me make love. (I sound like an ice machine, but I’m as motionless as an empty ice cube tray.)
Ricky just listens. He isn't shocked. He isn't surprised. He listens to me because he knows. He knows the shame and the guilt and the sorrow and the rage. And he does not judge me. He just listens.
[Jean] had the guts to kill herself, and I admire her for it, although, of course, she was quite crazy at the time, with a brain misfiring like a cross-wired laptop. Pressing the keystrokes , the screen read . Pressing the keystrokes , the screen rea...
I stopped thinking and watched in horror as Tex banged the portafilter on top of the espresso machine. Monty hit a button and was drowned out by Tex’s voice shouting, “Fucking steam! Give me some more fucking steam, you monster!” Which was foll...
It would take a civilization far more advanced than ours, unbelievably advanced, to begin to manipulate negative energy to create gateways to the past. But if you could obtain large quantities of negative energy—and that's a big “IF”—then you...
Only two things change when you get older: the energy in your voice and the time of night you feel it's appropriate to call someone. In your 20s, people call at 2 a.m. and yell, 'Are you up?' into the answering machine. Now, someone calls after 8 p.m...
In L.A., I was meeting people who were all actors. My mind started to open up to what acting was. I didn't realize that Brad Pitt was a real person. I didn't think he was a robot or a machine, but I thought you were just born into acting - that it's ...
There has been evidence throughout history of cycles when the earth gets warmer and cycles when the earth gets colder. We should always be wise stewards of the earth and all of our natural resources. But as a policymaker, I won't be guided by the glo...
I always had all of these childhood fantasies about wanting to invent things, like a spaceship or a time machine. And everyone's imagined what it would be like to go back in time and change things, to see what would happen if you had a different life...
I am so pathetic with machines in real life, it's not a joke. I'd rather walk, or even run, than take the car out myself. I like to be driven around. Yes, I like fancy cars, and fancy bikes, too. It's my dream to learn how to ride one myself, but for...
I didn't have cable television growing up; there were only six channels you could watch then. The only really good channel was channel 10, and they would play 'The Nanny Called Fran' every night for years. I've seen every episode 100 times. I would g...
Look at anyone's bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you're going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that's at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas...
The city was a machine of its own, continuously producing. We were constantly pumped out through its assembly line, in different forms or models. We came hardwired with different stories, dark secrets, vices, and defects. Over time, we fail and come ...
