Behemoths Quotes

F the government is going to put money into the automobile sector, it should break up GM and Chrysler as a condition of financial aid, and it should be even-handed in its treatment of start-up firms like Tesla, Miles, Fisker, and others. It would be terrible to kill the entrepreneurs who have taken great risks to bring new automotive technologies to market by pumping tax dollars into the behemoths that have done everything wrong for the last years. ~ Denis Hayes

A pale, bored woman in white ankle-socks and a white tasselled beret was sitting on a bentwood chair at the corner entrance to the verandah of the writer's club, where there was an opening in the creeper-grown trellis. In front of her on a plain kitchen table lay a large book like a ledger, in which for no known reason the woman wrote the names of the people entering the restaurant. She stopped Koroviev and Behemoth.

'Your membership cards?' she said, staring in surprise at Koroviev's pince-nez, at Behemoth's Primus and grazed elbow.

'A thousand apologies, madam, but what membership cards?' asked Koroviev in astonishment.

'Are you writers?' asked the woman in return.

'Indubitably,' replied Koroviev with dignity.

'Where are your membership cards?' the woman repeated.

'Dear lady...' Koroviev began tenderly.

'I'm not a dear lady,' interrupted the woman.

'Oh, what a shame,' said Koroviev in a disappointed voice and went on: 'Well, if you don't want to be a dear lady, which would have been delightful, you have every right not to be. But look here - if you wanted to make sure that Dostoyevsky was a writer, would you really ask him for his membership card? Why, you only have to take any five pages of one of his novels and you won't need a membership card to convince you that the man's a writer. I don't suppose he ever had a membership card, anyway! What do you think?' said Koroviev, turning to ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

In Control's dreams it is early morning, the sky deep blue with just a twinge of light. He is staring from a cliff down into an abyss, a bay, a cove. It always changes. He can see for miles into the still water. He can see ocean behemoths gliding there, like submarines or bell-shaped orchids or the wide hulls of ships, silent, ever moving, the size of them conveying such a sense of power that he can feel the havoc of their passage even from so far above. He ~ Jeff VanderMeer

Six express tracks and twelve locals pass through Palimpsest. The six Greater Lines are: Stylus, Sgraffito, Decretal, Foolscap, Bookhand, and Missal. Collectively, in the prayers of those gathered prostrate in the brass turnstiles of its hidden, voluptuous shrines, these are referred to as the Marginalia Line. They do not run on time: rather, the commuters of Palimpsest have learned their habits, the times of day and night when they prefer to eat and drink, their mating seasons, their gathering places. In days of old, great safaris were held to catch the great trains in their inexorable passage from place to place, and women grappled with them with hooks and tridents in order to arrive punctually at a desk in the depth, of the city.

As if to impress a distracted parent on their birthday, the folk of Palimpsest built great edifices where the trains liked to congregate to drink oil from the earth and exchange gossip. They laid black track along the carriages' migratory patterns. Trains are creatures of routine, though they are also peevish and curmudgeonly. Thus the transit system of Palimpsest was raised up around the huffing behemoths that traversed its heart, and the trains have not yet expressed displeasure.

To ride them is still an exercise in hunterly passion and exactitude, for they are unpredictable, and must be observed for many weeks before patterns can be discerned. The sport of commuting is attempted by only the bravest and the wildest of Pal ~ Catherynne M. Valente

As the corporation's size and power grew, so did the need to assuage people's fears of it. The corporation suffered its first full-blown legitimacy crisis in the wake of the early-twentieth-century merger movement, when, for the first time, many Americans realized that corporations, now turned behemoths, threatened to overwhelm their social institutions and governments. ~ Joel Bakan

What had happened, for instance, at one of the war's biggest battles, the Battle of Midway? It was in the Pacific, there was something about aircraft carriers. Wasn't there a movie about it, one of those Hollywood all-star behemoths in which a lot of admirals look worried while pushing toy ships around a map? (Midway, released in 1976 and starring Glenn Ford, Charlton Heston, and -- inevitably -- Henry Fonda.) A couple of people were even surprised to hear that Midway Airport was named after the battle, though they'd walked past the ugly commemorative sculpture in the concourse so many times. All in all, this was a dispiriting exercise. The astonishing events of that morning, the "fatal five minutes" on which the war and the fate of the world hung, had been reduced to a plaque nobody reads, at an airport with a vaguely puzzling name, midway between Chicago and nowhere at all. ~ Lee Sandlin

One of the key psychological characteristics of the Tea Party is its oxymoronic love of authority figures coupled with a narcissistic celebration of its own "revolutionary" defiance. It's this psychic weakness that allows this segment of the population to be manipulated by the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. The advantage is that their willingness to take orders has allowed them to organize effectively (try getting one hundred progressives at a meeting focused on anything). The downside is, they see absolutely nothing weird in launching a revolution based upon the ravings of a guy who's basically a half-baked PR stooge shoveling propaganda coal for bloodsucking transnational behemoths like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. ~ Matt Taibbi

You can say on one hand the market is crazy but it's not 1999. People have had their medicine from overexuberance. I find it really interesting that those two businesses, Yahoo! and Google, which are just online advertising businesses, are valued at more than the media behemoths in America. ~ James Packer

We know that power is shifting from brawn to brains, from north to south and west to east, from old corporate behemoths to agile start-ups, from entrenched dictators to people in town squares and cyberspace. ~ Moises Naim

She wandered almost at random, zigzagging streets, following a canal for a bit, stopping to admire the towering red brick buildings that channelled her along, manufacturing heritage trailing along the water. Some were more than eight stories tall, solid behemoths that would outlast whatever food outlet had set up shop on the ground.

Looking up changed things, it revealed all the details on the old buildings: secret towers, spires, turrets. They were castles in the city. Rewards for those that saw beyond their shuffling footsteps. This was a city made for looking up, she thought. ~ Karl Drinkwater

The Great Bailout is mostly over for the banks. But for those troubled behemoths of the nation's housing bust, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lifeline from Washington just keeps getting longer. ~ Charles Duhigg

A nondescript place, but it had inevitably changed over the years; one of the old oaks had been split by lightning and now lay on its side, and the others had grown into behemoths around their fallen comrade. ~ Julie Anne Long