Condensation Quotes

My love of storytelling comes from oral tradition, the stories from my grandmother and conversations with [my] mother. The world is full of discussions of condensation, drifts, misunderstanding, repetition. These are the materials I work with. My debt is to these women. ~ Lucrecia Martel

In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length. ~ Milan Kundera

"You're thinking too much, as usual," I said.
A dismissive snort as he got to his feet. He tried running again, and didn't fall, but did more lurching than loping, his legs threatening to tangle at every step.
"Apparently this could take a while, so how about you practice and I'll head back to the house - "
He darted past me and veered to block my path.
I smiled. "I knew that'd work. So as I right? It's better when you act, not think?"
A sigh whistled out of his nostrils, condensation hanging in the frigid air.
"You hate that, don't you? We should keep a scorecard, see who's right more often: me or you."
He rolled his eyes.
"Not a chance, huh? You'd never live it down if I beat you. But I am right this time. Your body knows how to move as a wolf. You just need to shut your brain off and let your muscles do their thing." ~ Kelley Armstrong

Doth not this Aethereal Medium in passing out of Water, Glass, Crystal, and other compact and dense Bodies into empty Spaces, grow denser and denser by degrees, and by that means refract the Rays of Light not in a point, but by bending them gradually in curve Lines? And doth not the gradual condensation of this Medium extend to some distance from the Bodies, and thereby cause the Inflexions of the Rays of Light, which pass by the edges of dense Bodies, at some distance from the Bodies? ~ Isaac Newton

The idea that she'll never see Molly Notkin or the cerebral Union or her U.H.I.D. support-brothers-and-sisters or the YYY engineer or Uncle Bud on a roof or her stepmother in the Locked Ward or her poor personal Daddy again is sentimental and banal. The idea of what she's about in here contains all other ideas and makes them banal. Her glass of juice is on the back of the toilet, half-empty. The back of the toilet is lightly sheened with condensation of unknown origin. These are facts. This room in this apartment is the sum of very many specific facts and ideas. There is nothing more to it than that. Deliberately setting about to make her heart explode has assumed the status of just one of these facts. It was an idea but now is about to become a fact. The closer it comes to becoming concrete the more abstract it seems. Things get very abstract. The concrete room was the sum of abstract facts. Are facts abstract, or are they just abstract representations of concrete things? Molly Notkin's middle name is Cantrell. Joelle puts two more matches together and prepares to strike them, breathing rapidly in and out like a diver preparing for a long descent. ~ David Foster Wallace

In July I think
about the idea of being cursed
(because it's not strange to me;
when I look in mirrors I'm
not there, blank walls gleaming
with bloody condensation,
and my shadow behind me
mocking me with his persistence
when I keep telling him
to leave just to leave to let me be). ~ Miriam Joy

The way in which these factors - displacement, condensation, and over-determination - interact in the process of dream-formation, and the question of which becomes dominant and which secondary, are things we shall set aside for later inquiries. ~ Sigmund Freud

dreams are a tremendous condensation that fits the maximum amount of meaning in a collage of often conflicting or strangely appearing symbols. In ~ Steven G. Fox

Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction. The source of Greek and Roman classicism - clarity, order, proportion, balance - is in Egypt. ~ Camille Paglia

High overhead, in the reflected glare of arc lamps, one of the unfinished Fuller domes shut out two thirds of the salmon-pink evening sky, its ragged edge like broken gray honeycomb. The Sprawl's patchwork of domes tended to generate inadvertent microclimates; there were areas of a few city blocks where a fine drizzle of condensation fell continually from the soot-stained geodesics, and sections of high dome famous for displays of static-discharge, a peculiarly urban variety of lightning. ~ William Gibson

The first thing the investigator comes to understand in comparing the dream-content with the dream-thoughts is that work of condensation has been carried out here on a grand scale. ~ Sigmund Freud

Isn't it funny," she said, stroking with an inky finger the beads of condensation on her glass of white wine, "that year was such an unhappy one, for me. Remember poor Reza? And Skandar away so much - and that weather. Do you remember, Nora? I've never had a harder time." (Except, she said "time-e.") "I guess I didn't realize it was ~ Claire Messud

Dream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two foremen in charge of the dream-work, and we may put the shaping of our dreams down mainly to their activity. ~ Sigmund Freud

They can keep men in here, under lock and key, deep in the dungeon until the final moments of their lives, so that men like York and me will never taste the rain. But they cannot keep us from passing our condensation on to the sky. They cannot keep us from raining down in China. ~ Rene Denfeld

I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture. ~ Henri Matisse

The same diversity in their ways of formation and the same rules for its solution hold good also for the innumerable medley of dream contents, examples of which I need scarcely adduce. Their strangeness quite disappears when we resolve not to place them on a level with the objects of perception as known to us when awake, but to remember that they represent the art of dream condensation by an exclusion of unnecessary detail. ~ Sigmund Freud

It has been said that nature does not know extinction. In effect, it knows only change: nothing ever truly disappears, for there is always something - some part, some particle, some formidable semblance - left behind. You can boil water into vapor, but it hasn't disappeared. Curiosity killed the cat, but condensation brought it back. ~ Ronald Malfi

Here's the conundrum: We want to tell our stories! But if condensation is the language of wishes - especially the most verboten and destructive ones - the more you spell the story out, the less aesthetically charged it becomes. The question is whether untransformed experience can ever be aesthetically powerful, or whether it's simply interesting. Literary language is one solution, with its habits of duality - metaphor, irony - and other techniques for saying opposing things at once. For haunting the reader with ghosts of buried meanings.
Your story may be interesting, but what if, paradoxically, it's what you can't say that makes it lasting? ~ Laura Kipnis

The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive 'condensation' of thought. ... Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics is such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard ... Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Méchanique Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words 'it is evident,' he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him. ~ William James

The ice on the next pane was already disturbed, had been wiped away by someone recently. Beads of condensation stood like tiny lenses warping the light. He rubbed the glass and knew what had happened. He saw the woman inside with the auburn hair that she sometimes kept in a bun. This was not his wife. This was someone who wanted that, wanted him like that. 'Hello?' Troy turned toward the voice. ~ Hugh Howey

The first set make the underlying body one - either one of the three5 or something else which is denser than fire and rarer than air - then generate everything else from this, (15) and obtain multiplicity by condensation and rarefaction. Now these are contraries, which may be generalized into 'excess and defect'. ~ Aristotle.

When we gaze at the magnificence of an ancient monument and ascribe its achievement to one man, we are guilty of spiritual embezzlement. We forget the army of craftsmen, unknown and unsung, who preceded him in the darkness of the ages, who toiled humbly - all heroism is humble - each contributing his small share to the common treasure of his time. A great building is not the private invention of some genius or other. It is merely a condensation of the spirit of a people. ~ Ayn Rand

On the terrace of the Pepiniere, the 150 pupils of the Institut Chemique talk chemistry as they leave the auditoria and the laboratory. The echoes of the magnificent public garden of the city of Nancy make the words reverberate; coupling, condensation, grignardization. Moreover, their clothes stay impregnated with strong and characteristic odours; we follow the initiates of Hermes by their scent. In such an environment, how is it possible not to be productive? ~ Victor Grignard

Much history as well as popular imagination not only erases their contingency but implicitly attributes to historical actors intentions and consciousness they could not have possibly had...Once a significant historical event is codified, it travels a sort of condensation symbol and, unless we are very careful, takes on a false logic and order that does a grave injustice to how it was experienced at the time. ~ James C. Scott

The name Maldoror, suggesting as it does evil, gold, horror, dawn, sadness etc., seems a curious hybrid, but on reading the work its full title, Les Chants de Maldoror par Le Comte de Lautreamont, seems to contain & imply the constant switches in narrative emphasis-the self as a game (je-jeu) & the author as observer, participant & invisible man-as well as being an inevitable & accurate condensation of, or hint at, the contents. ~ Alexis Lykiard

I amused myself with mental games in which I changed the focus, deceived myself, forgot altogether what had been troubling me or wrapped in a mysterious haze.
We might call this confused, hazy state melancholy, or perhaps we should call it by its Turkish name, hüzün, which denotes a melancholy that is communal rather than private. Offering no clarity; veiling reality instead, hüzün brings us comfort, softening the view like the condensation on a window when a tea kettle has been spouting steam on winters day. Steamed-up windows make me feel hüzün, and I still love getting up and walking over to those windows to trace words on them with my finger. As I trace out words and figures on the steamy window, the hüzün inside me dissipates, and I can relax; after I have done all my writing and drawings, I can erase it all with the back of my hand and look outside. But the view itself can bring its own hüzün. The time has come to move towards a better understanding of this feeling that the city of Istanbul carries as its fate. ~ Orhan Pamuk

The stars twinkled high above and reflected onto the cold window. I blew on the frosty glass and watched my breath fog up. I traced my initials across the cold glass, the condensation trickling down the pane. ~ Erica Sehyun Song

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity. ~ Walter Mosley

Modernity invented the future, but that's all over. In the current version 'progressive history' camouflages phylogenetic death-drive tactics, Kali-wave: logistically accelerating condensation of virtual species extinction. Welcome to the matricide laboratory. You want it so badly it's a slow scream in your head, deleting itself into bliss. ~ Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987-2007

In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels. ~ Arthur Rimbaud

My master's visualizations were so powerful their condensation into matter was mere signature. Donald Walters, formerly Kriyananda, author of The Path about his guru Yogananda. ~ Goswami Kriyananda

There is no natural phenomenon that is comparable with the sudden and apparently accidentally timed development of science, except perhaps the condensation of a super-saturated gas or the explosion of some unpredictable explosives. ~ Eugene Wigner

If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most importent challenge of our times. ~ Wade Davis

Unk shook his head vaguely. He could think of no apt condensation of his adventures for the obviously ritual mood. Something great was plainly expected of him. He was not up to greatness. He exhaled noisily, letting the congregation know that he was sorry to fail them with his colorlessness. 'I was a victim of a series of accidents,' he said. He shrugged. 'As are we all,' he said. The cheering and dancing began again. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. ~ Jean Baudrillard

She sat there admiring the beauty of the light amber fluid in the clear bottle, the way the condensation on the Miller bottle ran down the black and gold label, like it was a fine piece of art. That was the problem with alcohol. It was so beautiful to look at, how could you resist it? And what kind of place could be more inviting and seductive than a truly elegant cocktail bar? ~ Fannie Flagg

The final condensation. ~ DeWitt Wallace

He dropped back into the couch cushions, stroking the condensation dripping off his glass. "You're in a pickle."
"You want one?" Her eyebrows perked up, though her eyes weren't tracking well. "I think I have a jar in the fridge. ~ Kristin Miller

Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

History is a condensation of all of our greatest triumphs and all of our worst mistakes. Perhaps,by studying,it we can better ourselves as a species. ~ Albert Ong

Where we cannot invent, we may at least improve. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Inspector Hewitt flicked on the defroster to evaporate the condensation our words were forming on the windscreen. ~ Alan Bradley

I whispered things, I'd ever said to anyone else before, held on to him like I was drowning. Condensation fogged the windows and ran in rivulets down the glass. The sounds coming from the street outside felt as if they were a world away. This wasn't how I imagined it would be, but it was perfect, and when it was over, I already was thinking about the next time. ~ Lang Leav

I straighten and stretch my neck side to side. 'I really need to hit something.'
Rafa's mouth quirks. 'I know what you need.'
'In your dreams.' I know where this is going: it's been the same banter for about five decades now. Usually he saves it for an audience.
'In my dreams, Gabe, you end up slick with sweat and moaning.'
'I have food poisoning?'
He laughs, a beer halfway to his lips. Condensation drips from the bottle. He's completely at ease here: three-quarter cargoes, frayed t-shirt, bare feet. 'I'm just saying that if you need distracting, I'm your man.'
'If I wanted to go places everyone else has been, Rafa, I'd take a trip to Disneyland.'
He leans in closer. 'Yeah, but don't you want to know why everyone loves Space Mountain? ~ Paula Weston

The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes. ~ Arthur Miller

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid. ~ Antonin Artaud

The beetle, endemic to Africa's Namib desert - where there is just 1.3 cm of rainfall a year - has inspired a few proof-of-concepts in the academic community, but this is the first time a self-filling water bottle has been proposed. The beetle survives by collecting condensation from the ocean breeze on the hardened shell of its wings. The shell is covered in tiny bumps that are water attracting (hydrophilic) at their tips and water-repelling (hydrophobic) at their sides. The beetle extends and aims the wings at incoming sea breezes to catch humid air; tiny droplets 15 to 20 microns in diameter eventually accumulate on its back and run straight down towards its mouth. NBD ~ Thomas L. Friedman

Bose-Einstein condensation is one of the most intriguing phenomena predicted by quantum statistical mechanics. ~ Wolfgang Ketterle