Before Electricity Quotes

Seventeen's not so young. A hundred years ago people got married when they were practically our age."
"Yeah, that was before electricity and the Internet. A hundred years ago eighteen-year-old guys were out there fighting wars with bayonets and holding a man's life in their hands! They lived a lot of life by the time they were our age. What do kids our age know about love and life? ~ Jenny Han

We take it for granted that we can see at all times of day and night. But there was a time, not all that long ago, in the age before electricity, when night brought total darkness - and with it, a not-so-small amount of terror. We get a sense of this when we go camping or when there's a power outage, and our fear of the darkness is primal. ~ Jake Halpern

On a cold bubbling spring, covered dishes and crocks and pitchers of milk and butter and so on flouated in a circle in the mild whirlpool, like horse on a merry-go-round, in the water that smelled of the mint that grew close by. ~ Eudora Welty

The discipline to rise early is not as difficult as the discipline of going to bed. This did not used to be so. Before electricity and radio and television and the Internet, going to bed soon after dark was not so difficult. There was not much to do. Today the strongest allurements to stay up and be entertained are against us. Therefore, the battle against weariness, which makes us drowsy as soon as we open our Bible in the morning, has to be fought in the evening, not just in the morning. ~ John Piper

How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant, before the speculative eye and the moment of vision came! It was Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who first puzzled his brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk and shellac, and so began the quickening of the human mind to the existence of this universal presence. And even then the science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious facts for nearly two hundred years, connected perhaps with magnetism - a mere guess that - perhaps with the lightning. Frogs' legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings and twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them. Except for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after Gilbert before electricity stepped out of the cabinet of scientific curiosities into the life of the common man… . Then suddenly, in the half-century between 1880 and 1930, it ousted the steam-engine and took over traction, it ousted every other form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected wireless telephone and the telephotograph… . ~ H.G. Wells

Take each dream for what it is and don't drag the dirt from other dreams into it before you've even seen what it has to offer. - The Malwatch ~ Scaylen Renvac

Before Sophie could say anything, Gabe dipped her backward and kissed her again. And she kissed him back. ~ Melanie Dickerson

I was studying the football in my hands, running my fingers over the pigskin, across the letters of the brand name printed on the side.This elongated spheriod that didn't even weigh a whole pound. I was choosing this ridiculous ball of leather in my hands over my own flesh and blood. I was putting myself, my girlfriend, my scholarship
I was putting everything before this little boy that i loved more than anything in this world.
-Will ~ Colleen Hoover

Did you spend the entire Rebellion in the company of smugglers and lowlifes?" He probably meant this to be a cutting remark. Instead Leia found herself thinking of the first time she'd really seen Han's face - in a garbage compactor aboard the Death Star, moments before he fired his blaster at the magnetically sealed walls and nearly killed them all. Leia couldn't help smiling. "Almost, Senator Casterfo. In fact, I wound up married to one." Out ~ Claudia Gray

The firelight burned at Jason's back and made his shadow stretch out across the asphalt before him like a dying man. "Hurry, ~ Clint Stoker

When one of my teammates botches a shot, the coach tells him to stop being a girl. I wish I could tell him that I was a girl two days ago, and two days before that. Nothing is different. A shot is a shot. ~ David Levithan

...[H]uman reason in its pure use, so long as it was not critically examined, has first tried all possible wrong ways before it succeeded in finding the one true way. ~ Immanuel Kant

What is it like to be made vice-president?
On one level, it's a nearly hallucinatory degree of success. I was barely forty years old, and a shaky, sixty-three-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the entire Western world.
It was also like throwing up in convention-hall bathrooms before giving speeches, and after. It was sitting through dinners with men and women with whom I had nothing in common. Spending an enormous amount of time on trains. Promising thins and agreeing to things as advised by people I had barely met, on very little sleep. Huge sums of money were changing hands and everything happening on the grandest scale imaginable while still in most moments remaining pointless and usually outright seedy. I pretended to learn to fly-fish; I watched sporting events. In Maine I was assaulted by a lobster; it seized my lapel in a threatening manner. I tasted local foods and admired factories,farms, department stores, hotels, and (unless I'm misremembering) several empty plots of land....
It was like being given what was almost the nation's highest honor by a man you held in infinite esteem and regarded with perhaps a certain amount of terrified suspicion, a man who disliked you and clearly wanted nothing to do with you, who would scowl and change the subject at the mention of your name. And then being given a very important and very nasty job by that person, and despised for it, almost as much as you despised yourself. ~ Austin Grossman

Well. Um. The thing is…" I inhale, then continue with rapid-fire speed. "Imnotahockeyfan."

A wrinkle appears in his forehead. "What?"

I repeat myself, slowly this time, with actual pauses between each word. "I'm not a hockey fan."

Then I hold my breath and await his reaction.

He blinks. Blinks again. And again. His expression is a mixture of shock and horror. "You don't like hockey?"

I regretfully shake my head.

"Not even a little bit?"

Now I shrug. "I don't mind it as background noise - "

"Background noise?"

" - but I won't pay attention to it if it's on." I bite my lip. I'm already in this deep - might as well deliver the final blow. "I come from a football family."

"Football," he says dully.

"Yeah, my dad and I are huge Pats fans. And my grandfather was an offensive lineman for the Bears back in the day."

"Football." He grabs his water and takes a deep swig, as if he needs to rehydrate after that bombshell.

I smother a laugh. "I think it's awesome that you're so good at it, though. And congrats on the Frozen Four win."

Logan stares at me. "You couldn't have told me this before I asked you out? What are we even doing here, Grace? I can never marry you now - it would be blasphemous."

His twitching lips make it clear that he's joking, and the laughter I've been fighting spills over. "Hey, don't go canceling the we ~ Elle Kennedy

A woman's hand, your hand in its starry paleness only to help you walk downstairs, refracts its beam into my own. Its slightest touch branches out inside me and in a moment will trace above us those delicate canopies where the inverted sky stirs its blue leaves with misty aspen or willow. As for me, to what do I actually owe this remission of a pain that so many others suffer because of less guilt than I feel today? Before I met you I'd known misfortune, despair. Before I met you, come on, those words mean nothing. You know very well that when I first laid eyes on you I recognized you without the slightest hesitation. And from what borders did you come, so fearfully protected against everyone, what initiation to which no one or almost no one was admitted has consecrated what you are. ~ Andre Breton

Described in this way, utilitarianism has little in common with the prosaic, visionless notion of the 'merely utilitarian,' in the sense of a narrowly or mundanely functional or efficient option. No such limited horizon confined the thought and character of the great English-language utilitarian philosophers, whose influence ran its course from the period just before the French Revolution through the Victorian era. Happiness, for them, was more of a cosmic calling, the path to world progress, and whatever was deemed 'utilitarian' had to be useful for that larger and inspiring end, the global minimization of pointless suffering and the global maximization of positive well-being or happiness. It invokes, ultimately, the point of view of universal benevolence. And it is more accurately charged with being too demanding ethically than with being too accommodating of narrow practicality, material interests, self-interestedness, and the like. ~ Bart Schultz

When I went blind at 13, I realized that I wasn't going to be a good baseball or basketball player like I enjoyed before. It forced me to look beyond the obvious, to things that I could still do well. ~ Erik Weihenmayer

The words Lafayette used to describe that triumph - "I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence" - applied to getting his way regarding America as well. Perhaps the most emblematic anecdote foretelling Lafayette's stubborn refusal to give up his American dream was the boyhood story about how one day, one of his Parisian schoolteachers was talking up the virtues of an obedient horse. According to Lafayette, "I described the perfect horse as one which, at the sight of the whip, had the sense to throw his rider to the ground before he could be whipped. ~ Sarah Vowell

There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before ... ~ Leo Tolstoy

When you come fact to face with love, and before the sun sets, you become someone you didn't used to be. It makes the old things new. Makes dead things live. Love makes you into something better. ~ Jonathan Hickman

There are two reasons why the world is in a mess. One is because the world has rejected Christ. The other reason, is because the world will not necessarily listen to those who know God. This often means that Christians end up frustrated because they cannot impart some of the wisdom, God has provided them over the years, to others. Like Joseph, this is where we need to be patient. We cannot always cast our pearl before those who don't want to listen. Joseph was only able to operate in his gifts and abilities, simply because there was a discerning Pharaoh in the land at the time. We can only provide wisdom, when the person (or group) who need it, get desperate enough to listen. ~ Christopher Roberts

There is a fearful moment of reckoning before us should it ever chance that when all our trees shall have been sacrificed on the altar of the patron-fiend of news, the newspaper supply shall suddenly be cut off and we find ourselves some fine morning minus our tidbits of shame and failure and disaster, left to the companionship of our own thoughts. Dante never imagined a terror like this. ~ Adeline Knapp

The long and winding road that leads to your door / Will never disappear, / I've seen that road before it always leads me here, / Leads me to your door. ~ Paul McCartney

Thought he had it all before they called his bluff
Found out that his skin just wasn't thick enough
Wanted to go back to how it was before
Thought he lost everything
Then he lost a whole lot more ~ Nine Inch Nails

Wilson-Donovan wanted to move ahead as quickly as possible to clinical trials on patients, which was why it was so important to test Vicotec's safety now before the FDA hearings in September, which would hopefully put it on the "Fast Track." Peter was absolutely sure that the testing being concluded by Paul-Louis Suchard, the head of the laboratory in Paris, would only confirm the good news he had just been given in Geneva. ~ Danielle Steel

Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself; ... In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

A goal stood before Siddhartha, a single goal: to become empty, empty of thirst, empty of wishing, empty of dreams, empty of joy and sorrow. Dead to himself, not to be a self any more, to find tranquility with an emptied heard, to be open to miracles in unselfish thoughts, that was his goal. Once all of my self was overcome and had died, once every desire and every urge was silent in the heart, then the ultimate part of me had to awake, the innermost of my being, which is no longer my self, the great secret. ~ Hermann Hesse

We have something to hide. We have secrets, worries, thoughts, hopes, desires, passions which no one else gets to know. We are sensitive when people get near those domains with their questions. And now, against all rules of tact the Bible speaks of the truth that in the end we will appear before Christ with everything we are and were ... . And we all know that we could justify ourselves before any human court, but not before this one. Lord, who can justify themselves?1 Bonhoeffer's sermon for Repentance sunday, November 19, 1933 ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

He looked at the carpet, where moments before the creature had lain, then at her again. She didn't seem rattled. "Who are you, Buffy?"
She smiled. "Did that look like a vampire?" She sat down next to him and took a sip from her own whiskey. ~ Nicole Murphy

a man gets burnt out long before his reputation. ~ Terry Hayes

Just bring in the wood before she asks for it, and bring her a flower every time you come back from the field. If it's cold put a shawl around her shoulders, and if it's hot, bring her a glass of water. It's simple. Women only nag when they feel unappreciated. Think of her as your mother who has fallen ill, and treat her accordingly.'(43) ~ Louis De Bernieres

The most fortunate of us, in our journey through life, frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us; and, to fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes should be one of the principal studies and endeavors of our lives. The only method of doing this is to assume a perfect resignation to the Divine will, to consider that whatever does happen, must happen; and that, by our uneasiness, we cannot prevent the blow before it does fall, but we may add to its force after it has fallen. These considerations, and others such as these, may enable us in some measure to surmount the difficulties thrown in our way; to bear up with a tolerable degree of patience under the burden of life; and to proceed with a pious and unshaken resignation, till we arrive at our journey's end. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Ethics are the things that say, 'Don't stick your finger in the socket.' The world says, 'It's okay because we've shut off the electricity.' And at the point that we've chosen to listen to the world and ignore our ethics, we say, 'I'm having a really hard time getting back up. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The merriment of everything from foot-high weeds to hundred-foot oaks, rustling in the wind - grave chuckling of maples and alders, titters from groves of sapling sassafras, silly giggling in the raspberry bushes, a huge belly laugh from the oldest hollow ash tree before the freeway interchange. ~ Diane Duane

Dominic, with the powerful aura, got under my skin before I had a chance to ward him off and now I'm screwed.

Even more now I know his taste and how hard he feels against the soft, wet parts of me.

Dominic just introduced me to the most dangerous man in New York.

Fuck. Fuck. Clarity pours over me.

Does this mean Dominic is a member of the mafia after all?

Only it wasn't only a little kiss, was it? I'm sexually frustrated and Dom is standing there with his hands in his tailored pants pockets, aroused.

The bulge is unmistakable.

"Gabriella…"

God, I'm wet too. If I rub my thighs together, I'll feel how much. He's hard, I'm wet… it's a match made in heaven.

"Gabriella…" he says again, thick and tarnished as I look him up and down.

"Yeah?"

"I said you're too far away," he murmurs, cutting his dark gaze my way. Stirring me. "Come here to me, cara." he hooks two fingers with a motion and smirks like a devil with the key to all my desires. I swear my belly bottoms out as my feet carry me forward. Unable to refuse the invisible rope he has around my waist, pulling me closer.

"Bossy aren't you?"
"I am your boss."
"I don't think you want to remind me of that."

He hums and the rumble hurtles down between my thighs.

How does he do that? Turn me on with just a noise.

"I guess you'd like it if I called you sir, wouldn' ~ V. Theia

Look around. It's almost gone.
If only someone had told me that before. About life. If only I had understood. ~ Marisha Pessl

Before the widespread rise of the Internet and easy publishing tools, influence was largely in the hands of those who could reach the widest audience, the people with printing presses or access to a wide audience on television or radio, all one-way mediums that concentrated power in the hands of the few. ~ Matt Mullenweg

inverted memories of this immediate revelation, memories that in some puzzling fashion one might have before their subject had occurred. The ~ Alan Moore

One must realize that all who have accumulated great fortunes first did a certain amount of dreaming, hoping, wishing, desiring, and planning before they acquired money. ~ Napoleon Hill

You guys know I love you, right?" I glance between them, knowing they'll freak, but it has to be said.
They look at each other, exchanging a look of alarm, both of them wondering what could've possibly happened to the girl they once pegged as the Ice Queen.
"Um, okay ... " Haven says, shaking her head.
But I just smile and grasp them both to me, squeezing them tightly as I whisper to Miles, "Whatever you do don't stop acting or singing, it's going to bring you great happiness."
And before he can respond, I've moved on to Haven, knowing I have to get this over with and quick, so I can get Damen to Ava's, but determined to find a way to urge her to love herself more, and that Josh is worth hanging on to for however long it lasts. "You have so much value," I tell her. "So much to give
I just wish you could see how bright your star truly does shine."
"Um, gag!" she says, laughing as she untangles herself from my grip. "Are you okay? ~ Alyson Noel

Q. Surely it is easier to be objective about other people than about oneself?
A. No, it is more difficult. If you become objective to yourself you can see other people objectively, but not before, because before that it will all be coloured by your own views, attitudes, tastes, by what you like and what you dislike. To be objective you must be free from it all. You can become objective to yourself in the state of self-consciousness: this is the first experience of coming into contact with the real object. ~ P.D. Ouspensky