Blackout Quotes

Stirring the pastry cream and putting it in the blast chiller in the island, a total chefly indulgence that I have never once regretted. The house filling with the scent of rich, dark chocolate as the cakes rise in the oven. The treat of the moist trimmings as I even up the layers before spreading the thick custard filling between them. The fudgy frosting smoothed perfectly over the whole thing, and then immediately marred with chocolate cookie crumbs. ~ Stacey Ballis

Trying to forget through reading, I ended up forgetting everything, even reaching a state of self-oblivion, which alone is able to appease suffering: a blackout in the broken dream of this narrative. ~ Anne Garréta

Wow, you survived a blackout. You're made of stronger stuff than ice cream. ~ Lewis Black

Roofies aren't a myth, he said, but studies suggest the fear outpaces the incidence. Turns out, "being roofied" often doesn't involve roofies at all. People just don't realize how common it is to experience a blackout. ~ Sarah Hepola

Britney Spears' album Blackout is one of the hottest-selling CDs in the country. We're in a bad place, people: The world is melting, we're at war, and Two and a Half Men is a huge hit. ~ Chelsea Handler

On the night that the Second World war was declared, there were crowds in the street. It was a summer's night and there was a blackout. On every side you heard people crying: 'Look at the moon!' The moon had been there every minute of their lives and they'd never seen it. ~ Laurens Van Der Post

He kept his shirt-tail hanging out below the hem of his jacket as a white flag to motorists; over four thousand people had been killed in blackout accidents during the first few months of the war. It was safer to take an overseas posting with the British Expeditionary Force. ~ Christopher Fowler

In a blackout, a Polish man was stuck on an escalator for two hours. I asked him, "Why didn't you walk down?" He said, "because I was going up!" ~ Henny Youngman

Carl constantly told horror stories of cursing and beatings from his father and the twenty-four-hour blackout screaming of his alcoholic, pill-popping mother. He used his trauma like a caution sign for what he could do if I didn't silence my backtalk. ~ Maggie Young

I thought for a minute you were going to start a war for me."
Christian held the door open. "You'll know when that day comes. ~ Dannika Dark

What a relief, Nadya thought; in that light he would not be able to tell that she had been crying.
"You mean if it weren't for the blackout you wouldn't have come?" Dasha took up Shchagov's tone, flirting unconsciously, as she did with every unmarried man she met.
"By no means, never. In bright light women's faces are deprived of all their charm; it reveals their spiteful expressions, their envious glances, their premature wrinkles, their heavy cosmetics."
Nadya shuddered at the words "envious glances" - it was as if he had overheard their argument.
Shchagov went on:" If I were a woman, I would make it a law that lights be kept low. Then everyone would soon have a husband."
Dasha looked disapprovingly at Shchagov. He always talked that way, and she didn't like it. All his phrases seemed memorized, insincere. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

But we think that if a human were to violate conventional causality - '

'By time traveling - '

'Please, please don't call it that. If a human were to violate causality, the experience from her point of view would be similar. You would act while in the past, but not be able to recall your actions later, because that period of time for you would be lost between histories: the old one you left and the new one to which you would return. It would exist outside of the normal course of events. It would be, in a very real sense, lost time. ~ Dexter Palmer

Setting my spiced cider down, I put my elbows on my knees and sighed. I loved the solstice, and not just for the food and parties. Cincinnati dropped all of its lights from midnight until sunrise, and it was the only time I ever saw the night sky as it was supposed to be. Anyone thieving during the blackout was dealt with hard, curtailing any problems. ~ Kim Harrison

The L. A. Times is reporting that Britney Spears' album Blackout will be number one on the Billboard charts. Not to toot my horn, but I predicted this on my show a week ago. No one wanted to believe me - even I didn't want to believe me, but now I know how Nostradamus feels. ~ Chelsea Handler

Yesterday evening Mickey and I and other deluded WAAFs went through the blackout and into the wilds of Hammersmith enduring the journey with the thought of the rollicking, witty West End show, Broadway Follies, studded with stars, to which we WAAFs had been invited free. I might say frightful, I might say terrible, awful, boring, tedious, but they only reveal the inadequacy of words. After the third hour, or so it seemed, I was convinced that I had died and was in hell, watching turn after turn in unending procession, each longer, each less funny, each more unbelievably bad than the last. During the interval, Hendon WAAFs rushed to the bar, scruffy WAAFs, obviously from West Drayton, sat still rollicking with mirth in the Stalls. We tossed back whisky and ginger beer and watched in a stupor the longer, duller, apparently unending second half. After came the journey back in the blackout made blue by our opinions of the evening. ~ Joan Rice

I suspect the psychological pressure associated with that crisis caused the first mental blackout I had ever suffered. It contributed to a deterioration in my health that later required the insertion of a heart pacemaker. ~ Kamisese Mara

When he looks back at me, his eyes travel around my face the way fingers dart through the bottom of a drawer, searching for batteries in a blackout. ~ Holly Schindler

Listen. You know what it's like when you're in a room with the light on and then suddenly the light goes out? I'll show you. It's like this.
He turns out the light.
BLACKOUT ~ Harold Pinter

Blackouts can be fun if approached with the right mindset. You just can't sweat the fact that you've lost a small portion of your life for all eternity. Occasionally, little bubbles of memory will float up like surreal Mylar party balloons at unexpected times throughout the net day and start piecing together a colorful, if incomplete, version of reality. ~ Josh Kilmer-Purcell

There was also talk of bringing Al Gore to California to help out, but there was concern that Gray Davis and Al Gore in the same state would cause some kind of rolling personality blackout. ~ Jay Leno

To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout. ~ Umberto Eco

Because around a crisis point, even the tiniest action can assume importance all out of proportion to its size. Consequences multiply and cascade, and anything - a missed telephone call, a match struck during a blackout, a dropped piece of paper, a single moment - can have empire-tottering effects. The Archduke Ferdinand's chauffeur makes a wrong turn onto Franz-Josef Street and starts a world war. Abraham Lincoln's bodyguard steps outside for a smoke and destroys a peace. Hitler leaves orders not to be disturbed because he has a migraine and finds out about the D-Day invasion eighteen hours too late. A lieutenant fails to mark a telegram "urgent" and Admiral Kimmel isn't warned of the impending Japanese attack. "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. ~ Connie Willis

I was in New York City for September 11th, and I was there for the 2003 blackout. I think in hindsight, you get a real perspective as to how unique those moments of crisis are in a place like New York City. ~ Casey Neistat

Marple closed her eyes and fell asleep. It felt good. She felt like a kid again. She'd waited a long time to feel like that. It felt like the universe was folding in on itself. It felt like origami birds being born. - from THE IMMORTALS ACT THEIR AGE ~ Eric Beeny

Don't pack out!

To some people, you make life bright
When you decide to dim your light
Their lives will be full of darkness
Do shine your light in kindness

To some people, you bring out a joy
With their emotions, never ever toy
With your smiles, grease them with oil
And make them glad when their lives boil

To other people, you are the warmth
That kills coldness and brings strength
Don't do it; don't pack out
Else, they will have blackout

You're on earth to do two things here
Wake up and do them now; this year
First, dare to grow and become better
Second, help others to also become greater

Never in any of the four seasons
Should you neglect your gifts for any reasons
The world needs you to make it a better place
Don't pack out; run your race. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Until now, I had conceived of sleep as a kind of model for death. I had imagined death as an extension of sleep. A far deeper sleep than ordinary sleep. A sleep devoid of all consciousness. Eternal rest. A total blackout.

But now I wondered if I had been wrong. Perhaps death was a state entirely unlike sleep, something that belonged to a different category altogether - like the deep, endless wakeful darkness I was seeing now.

Finally, though, no one knows what death is. Who has ever truly seen it? No one. Except the ones who are dead. No one living knows what death is like. They can only guess. And the best guess is still a guess. Maybe death is a kind of rest, but reasoning can't tell us that. The only way to find out what death is is to die. Death can be anything at all. ~ Haruki Murakami

when i love, it happens almost all at once.
it is inconsiderate, unrefined -
a child screeching in a supermarket
it's a thunderclap.
it is a small village blackout.
it is aphrodite rising from the sea foam, fully formed. ~ Salma Deera

So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you we ~ Neal Stephenson

- and I say you still haven't answered my question, Father Bleu."
"Haven't I, dear lady? I thought I stated that death is merely the beginning of - "
"No, no, no!" Her voice was as high as a harpy's. "Don't go all gooey and metaphysical. I mean to ask, what is death the act, the situation, the moment?"
She watched him foxily. The priest in turn struggled to remain polite. "Madame, I'm not positive I follow."
"Let me say it another way. Most people are afraid of dying, yes?"
"I disagree. Not those who find mystical union with the body of Christ in - "
"Oh, come off it!" Madame Kagle shrilled. "People are frightened of it, Father Bleu. Frightened and screaming their fear silently every hour of every day they live. Now I put it to you. Of what are they afraid? Are they afraid of the end of consciousness? The ultimate blackout, so to speak? Or are they afraid of another aspect of death? The one which they can't begin to foresee or understand?"
"What aspect is that, Madame Kagle?"
"The pain." She glared. "The pain, Father. Possibly sudden. Possibly horrible. Waiting, always waiting somewhere ahead, at an unguessable junction of time and place. Like that bootboy tonight. How it must have hurt. One blinding instant when his head hit, eh? I suggest, Father Bleu, that is what we're afraid of, that is the wholly unknowable part of dying - the screaming, hurting how, of which the when is only a lesser part. The how is the part we never know. Unle ~ John Jakes

The words witch and witchcraft, in everyday usage for over a thousand years, have undergone several changes of meaning; and today witchcraft, having reverted to its original connotation of magic and sorcery, does not convey the precise and limited definition it once had during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If witchcraft had never meant anything more than the craft of "an old, weather-beaten crone..." Europe would not have suffered, for three centuries from 1450 to 1750, the shocking nightmare, the foulest crime and the deepest shame of western civilization, the blackout of everything that homo sapiens, the reasoning man, has ever upheld. This book is about that shame...degradation stifled decency, the filthiest passions masqueraded under the cover of religion, and man's intellect was subverted to condone bestialities that even Swift's Yahoos would blush.

Never were so many wrong, so long... ~ Rossell Hope Robbins

Well, this all kind of reminds me of that blackout a few years ago. Remember? I was outside when it happened and it was so dark out I could barely see my own hand, let alone what was up the street. But I kept going forward, step by step, until I reached a familiar corner. Sometimes you just have to push ahead to find what you're looking for. ~ Adam Silvera

The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes. ~ Peter Drucker

I also learned to tell a story. I think I learned from poetry how to time a story. Poetry's timing, beats and pauses. That white space on the page is as important as the black. The bottom of the page is blackout. It's performance. ~ Sandra Cisneros

The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Oh, and you should know ... if you keep calling me harlot, sooner or later I'm going to have a rage blackout, and then I'll wake up to find you - awfully sadly - dead."
"You threaten me? A powerless, physically weak sorceress?" he sneered. "I must amend my treatment of you forthwith."
"You've turned into a sarcastic, unbalanced, judgmental dick." To herself, she muttered, "Man, can I pick 'em."
"If you take issue with the term harlot, then perhaps you shouldn't have slept with half the Lore."
"Half?" she scoffed. "Three-quarters for the win! ~ Kresley Cole

The sky was a sparkling succession of black diamonds on black velvet made crystal clear by the blackout. ~ Sara Sheridan

He went to the kitchen and grabbed the bottle of Jack Daniels from the top of the refrigerator.
'Ah, my last surviving friend,' he said to no one at all.
He unscrewed the cap, and put the bottle to his lips. Better to drink until a blackout, than to remember thoughts like knives that cut him from the inside out, and bled him dry. ~ Sean M. Thompson

Fanfare for the Makers

A cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what?
To the small fire that never leaves the sky.
To the great fire that boils the daily pot.

To all the things we are not remembered by,
Which we remember and bless. To all the things
That will not notice when we die,

Yet lend the passing moment words and wings.

So fanfare for the Makers: who compose
A book of words or deeds who runs may write
As many who do run, as a family grows

At times like sunflowers turning towards the light.
As sometimes in the blackout and the raids
One joke composed an island in the night.

As sometimes one man's kindness pervades
A room or house or village, as sometimes
Merely to tighten screws or sharpen blades

Can catch a meaning, as to hear the chimes
At midnight means to share them, as one man
In old age plants an avenue of limes

And before they bloom can smell them, before they span
The road can walk beneath the perfected arch,
The merest greenprint when the lives began

Of those who walk there with him, as in default
Of coffee men grind acorns, as in despite
Of all assaults conscripts counter assault,

As mothers sit up late night after night
Moulding a life, as miners day by day
Descend blind shafts, as a boy may flaunt his kite

In an empty nonchalant sky, as anglers play
The ~ Louis MacNeice

You both passed out," Percy said. "I don't know why, but Ella told me not to worry about it. She said you were ... sharing?"
"Sharing," Ella agreed. She crouched in the stern, preening her wing feathers with her teeth, which didn't look like a very effective form of personal hygiene. She spit out some red fluff. "Sharing is good. No more blackouts. Biggest American blackout, August 14, 2003. Hazel shared. No more blackouts."
Percy scratched his head. "Yeah ... we've been having conversations like that all night. I still don't know what she's talking about. ~ Rick Riordan

I didn't understand the war. It was new, and they all said it would be there for a long time, but where it was, exactly, was one of the things I didn't understand. It seemed to be out-of-doors, and that was why we had the blackout curtains, so that we didn't have to look at it at night–or it didn't have to look at us, perhaps. Yet on some nights we sat on the balcony and watched searchlights play across the dark sky, and that had to do with the war, too. So the war was in the sky, somehow.

And it was there in the daytime, though I was not sure where. It was why sometimes, during school, whistles blew, and we had to run to the subway station. ~ Lois Lowry

I was convinced before the game that we had a very good chance but today was what you would call in Germany a blackout. ~ Felix Magath

You mean you to tell me you don't eat fish?" Rayna barks. "I told you, Galen! How many times did I tell you?"
"Rayna, be quiet," he says without looking at her.
"We're wasting our time here!" She slams her fork down.
"Rayna, I said-"
"Oh, I heard what you said. And it's about time you listened to someone else for a change."
Now would be a good time to blackout. Or ten minutes ago, before they unveiled the seafood surprise. But I don't even feel remotely dizzy. Or tired. In fact, Rayna's ranting seems to be igniting a weird charge in the room, sparking some sort of hidden energy all around us. So when Galen stands so fast his chair falls over, I'm not surprised. I stand, too.
"Leave, Rayna. Right now," he grinds out.
When Rayna stands, Toraf does, too. He keeps his expression neutral. I get the feeling he's used to outbursts like these. "You're just using her as a distraction from your real responsibilities, Galen," she spits. "And now you've risked us all. For her."
"You were aware of the risks before you came, Rayna. If you feel exposed, leave," Galen says coolly.
Responsibilities? Exposed? I'm waiting for someone to admit they're part of some violet-eye cult, and I didn't make initiation. "I guess I don't understand," I say.
"Oh, well, that's a real shocker, isn't it?" Rayna says. ~ Anna Banks

Occasionally you'll say "Excuse me" when I happen to stand in your way, and "Thank you" when your ball drifts into my court and I hurl it back to you. With these few words, I find comfort in false hopes and hope in false starts. I'll coddle anything instead of nothing. Even thinking that nothing can come of nothing gives me a leg to stand on, something to consider when I wake up in the middle of the night and can see nothing, not the blackout in my life, not the screen, not the cellar, not even hope and false comforts -just the joy of your imagined limb touching mine. I prefer the illusion of perpetual fasting to the certainty of famine. I have, I think, what's called a broken heart. ~ Andre Aciman

Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to ~ Neal Stephenson

My name is Matthew Swift. I'm a sorcerer, the only one in the city who survived Robert Bakker's purge. I was killed by my teacher's shadow and my body dissolved into telephone static and all they had left to bury was a bit of blood. Then we came back, and I am we and we are me, and we are the blue electric angels, creatures of the phones and the wires, the gods made from the surplus life you miserable excuse for mortals pour into all things electric. I am the Midnight Mayor, the protector of the city, the guardian of the night, the keeper of the gates, the watcher on the walls. We turned back the death of cities, we were there when Lady Neon died, we drove the creature called Blackout into the shadows at the end of the alleys, we are light, we are life, we are fire and, would you believe it, the word that best describes our condition right now is cranky.
Would you like to see what happens when you make us mad? ~ Kate Griffin

It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes of the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. We gay guys wore whistles around our necks so we could summon help from other gay men when we were attacked on the streets by gangs living in the projects between Greenwich Village and the West Side leather bars ... The upside was that the city was inexpensive ... ~ Edmund White

The traditional dictionary definition of the difference is that an alcoholic will steal your wallet in a blackout, come to, and apologize for it. A junkie will steal your wallet and then help you look for it. But ultimately I think all addictions boil down to just not being able to be with yourself for any long degree of time. ~ Jerry Stahl

I remember one night in Memphis, I'd come out of a blackout, and I didn't know where I was. I'm feeling through the darkness - I was asleep in the middle of a freeway. I went up to this car in the darkness, and it was a cop car. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

The interesting thing about cities isn't what they do when people are looking," Ben says. "It's what they do when they think nobody's looking. Like, the shit the city is proud of? The shining skyscrapers downtown, the sports stadiums, the public art? You can't judge a city by that. That only tells you what the rich people are doing on a good day. It's what people do on a bad day - a bad day when there are no security cameras watching - that tells you what you really want to know. It's how people act during a blackout, a hurricane, or a siege that tells you the truth about a city. ~ Scott Kenemore

QUESTLOVE: How do you get that back? Does being downtrodden make us spiritual again?

WEST: I don't think it's just a matter of the material conditions; it's a matter of the choices that we make. Our ancestors could have chosen forms of spiritual suicide and spiritual blackout, but they decided not to, even in the midst of slavery, even in the midst of Jim Crow. Great-great grandma could have chosen to commit suicide. But she said no, her kids said no. The love said no. "I choose to be on the love train, even under slave-like conditions." That's a choice we make. All we have had as a people, historically - amid the levels of hatred, the social death of slavery, the civic death of Jim Crow, the psychological death of hating one's self, the spiritual death of giving up and selling out and caving in - all we have is a subversive memory, personal integrity, and courageous witness in the fight for justice. That's all we've got. You do away with the memory, and people can't hear the voice of a Glenn Jones or, my favorite, Gerald Levert. With no memory, you get very little artistic integrity, just a matter of stimulating people for the market, and then no creative witness. ~ Cornel West

Among the many important provisions in the energy bill are the creation of an estimated half million new jobs, increased oil production, blackout protection, controlling fertilizer costs by stabilizing natural gas prices and enacting new efficiency benchmarks. ~ Paul Gillmor

Long distance relationships through mobile communication generally becomes poor because of the weak signals and ends up due to jammed networks ~ Amit Abraham

You died on the island," he says. "We could have gone somewhere else, but there's not much point when it's all falling apart." He gives me a smile that doesn't reach his eyes. "Any plans before that happens? You could always get blackout drunk with me. We could sing inappropriate songs, dress like pirates, and dance over the entrails of our enemies."

I wrinkle my nose. "Is that something I enjoy?"

"Not yet. But only because you've never tried it. I assure you, it comes highly recommended."

"By whom?"

"By me." He huffs. "Honestly, Aileana, everyone ought to dress up like an inebriated pirate at least once. It's much more fun killing things in costume. ~ Elizabeth May

I'm from Downer's Grove, Illinois. We had a blackout there the other day, but fortunately the police made him get back into his car before he got too far. ~ Emo Philips