Florence And The Machine Quotes

It seems that I have been held in some dreaming state
A tourist in the waking world world, never quite awake.
No kiss, no gentle word could wake me from this slumber,
Until I realised that it was you who held me under. ~ Florence + The Machine

There's green eyes in my eyes
And a lover on my mind
And I sing from the piano
Tear my yellow dress and
Cry and cry and cry
Over the love of you ~ Florence Welch

There's a drumming noise inside my head
That starts when you're around
I swear that you could hear it
It makes such an almighty sound
There's a drumming noise inside my head
That throws me to the ground
I swear that you could hear it
It makes such an almighty sound
Louder than sirens
Louder than bells
Sweeter than heaven
And hotter than hell ~ Florence Welch

Then I heard your voice as clear as day,
And you told me I should concentrate,
It was all so strange,
And so surreal,
That a ghost should be so practical.
Only if for a night
And the only solution was to stand and fight,
And my body was bruised and
I was set alight,
But you came over me like some holy rite,
And although I was burning,
You're the only light
Only if for a night ~ Florence Welch

I was a heavy heart to carry
My beloved was weighed down
My arms around his neck
My fingers laced to crown.
I was a heavy heart to carry
My feet dragged across ground
And he took me to the river
Where he slowly let me drown
My love has concrete feet
My love's an iron ball
Wrapped around your ankles
Over the waterfall ~ Florence Welch

It's always darkness before the dawn ~ Florence Welch

For someone so conflicted, who am I to give advice to anybody? It's such a funny, grandiose idea ~ Florence Welch

Concert pianists get to be quite chummy with dead composers. They can't help it. Classical music isn't just music. It's a personal diary. An uncensored confession in the dead of night. A baring of the soul. Take a modern example. Florence and the Machine? In the song 'Cosmic Love,' she catalogs the way in which the world has gone dark, distorting her, when she, a rather intense young woman, was left bereft by a love affair. 'The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out. ~ Marisha Pessl

The complex of seven luxurious homes, swimming pools and lavish stables was surrounded by a twelve-foot wall patrolled by what we believed to be Albanians armed with Skorpion machine pistols. This was strange, given that the family was in the wholesale floristry business. Maybe flower theft was a bigger problem in northern Greece than most people realized. ~ Terry Hayes

You can't do a machine without knowing something about how it's going to work. As for the romantics, the costumes bored me and I don't enjoy doing period clothes. ~ Boris Vallejo

Did you ever hear one of those corny, positive messages on someone's answering machine? 'Hi, it's a great day and I'm out enjoying it right now. I hope you are too. The thought for the day is share the love. Beep.' 'Uh, yeah, this is the VD clinic ... speaking of being positive, your test is back. Stop sharing the love. ~ Andy Rooney

I expressed skepticism, in the first chapter, about the utility of time machines in historical research. I especially advised against graduate students relying on them, because of the limited perspective you tend to get from being plunked down in some particular part of the past, and the danger of not getting back in time for your orals. ~ John Lewis Gaddis

Now, a living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvellous properties and set going by means of the most complex and delicate mechanism. ~ Claude Bernard

Unless one is planning to go shopping - basically begging to be smothered by the ravening throngs of returners and bargain hunters; an embrace as constricting as that hugging machine designed by autistic author Temple Grandin - then Boxing Day feels like a bar after last call when the lights have been turned up. ~ David Rakoff

Yes, iD is a machine vision and sensor browser for the physical world. That's what we have been working on with Coca-Cola, Verizon, Bank of America and Disney to launch content when an image is recognised. ~ Patrick Soon-Shiong

People may be persuaded that the machine is doing good. In fact, good is only capable of being done on a small scale. Evil is more versatile. You can hate those you have never seen, all the vast multitudes of them, but you can only love those you know - and that with difficulty. ~ John Christopher

It's not an academic question any more to ask what's going to happen to a cloud. People very much want to know - and that means there's money available for it. That problem is very much within the realm of physics and it's a problem very much of the same caliber. You're looking at something complicated, and the present way of solving it is to try to look at as many points as you can, enough stuff to say where the cloud is, where the warm air is, what its velocity is, and so forth. Then you stick it into the biggest machine you can afford and you try to get an estimate of what it's going to do next. But this is not very realistic. ~ James Gleick

Idly, I switch the mean machine on and fire up the e-mail program. ~ E.L. James

Skippy's dead, Blowjob! He's dead, and you can't bring him back! Not you, not every bent scientist in every laboratory in the world!' Breathing heavily, Dennis pauses, then turns his dreadful gaze on the others. 'You bummers need to get it through your heads that this is real. None of the stupid bullshit we do to distract ourselves is going to help any more. Spiderman isn't going to help. Eminem isn't going to help. Some fucking gay lame tinfoil time machine isn't going to help. All that stuff is over, don't you see? He's dead! He's dead, and he's going to stay dead for ever! ~ Paul Murray

By turning herself into a fucking machine, she has created a kind of temporary grid. But underneath, in the place of dream and feeling, she is going places that she, on the surface, would not understand. ~ Mary Gaitskill

My head and shoulders melted first, followed by my hips and knees. Before long I was a puddle, soaking into the pretty cotton prints. I drenched the quilt she never finished, rusted the metal parts of her sewing machine. I was pure liquid loss, then, for an hour or two. My grandmother, my grandmother. Gone forever, though I could smell her Chanel perfume on the fabrics. ~ E. Lockhart

Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.

After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.

Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing. ~ Richard P. Feynman

Human milk is like ice cream, penicillin, and the drug ecstasy all wrapped up in two pretty packages. ~ Florence Williams

You've got to get cold to get warm, Phoebe said.
Now that is the truth. That is so true about so many things. You learn it first with sheets and blankets: that the initial touch of the smooth sheets will send you shivering, but their warming works fast, and you must experience the discomfort to find the later contentment. It's true with money and love, too. You've got to save to have something to spend. Think of how hard it is to ask out a person you like. In my case, Claire asked me to go on a date to the cash machine, so I didn't actually have to ask her. Still, her lips were cold, but her tongue was warm. ~ Nicholson Baker

I grew up poor among poor people in a poor town, but I never knew how poor I'd been until I moved to New York. These women with their fresh produce and diamonds and manicures. Even their skin was expensive. What got to me about them wasn't just the way they made me suddenly self-conscious about the ink under my fingernails or the haircut I gave myself in my own bathroom. It wasn't just that they'd spend more in one evening on chocolate, escarole, and jam than I did on the rice and beans and film and photo paper I needed for a week. What enraged me is that they didn't, couldn't, see me. I was less than a machine to them, less than a body. I did not even appear in their line of sight. I was nothing more than a couple of chanted phrases: Cash or charge? Paper or plastic? Thank you, have a nice night. ~ Rachel Lyon

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. ~ Margaret Atwood

Man's word is his wand filled with magic and power! Man comes into the world financed by God, with all that he desires or requires already on his pathway. This supply is released through faith and the Spoken Word. If thou canst believe, all things are possible. ~ Florence Scovel Shinn

Take down Arty and Chick and Papa and the twins, and all that's left of the Jar Kin, and, by then, Lily and me. Open our metal jars and pour all the Binewski dust together into that big battered loving cup that first held only Grandpa B. Bolt us to the hood of your traveling machine and take us on the road again. ~ Katherine Dunn

The smell of the earth, so astoundingly fresh: it strikes Brown like a thing he might eat. His ears throb. His body feels as if it is still moving through the air. He is, he thinks, the first man ever to fly and stand at the exact same time. The war out of the machine. He holds the small bag of letters up in salute. On they come, soldiers, people, the light drizzle of gray.
Ireland.
A beautiful country. A bit savage on a man all the same.
Ireland. ~ Colum McCann

I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I'm not home when people knock. There's daytime silent where I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's how this machine works. ~ Ada Limon

Technology has made it much easier to make and manipulate music. Studio-driven, machine-driven music does not always transcend into being a good live act. Many current acts are great live, but many cannot cut it live. The music is not organic. ~ Vivian Campbell

I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I'd have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank. ~ Jeff Mangum

The thing about Brando was that I'd make these directions, and he'd walk away. He'd heard enough ... to get the machine going. ~ Elia Kazan

I was thrown together with Florence, or 'Florawns' as she was called, a pert girl of nineteen who worked in our kitchen and was sent out to help me. First, I followed her to a butcher where fat sausages hung from the ceiling like aldermen's chains, and I could choose the best of plump ducks, sides of beef, and chops standing guard like sentries on parade. Once the deal was done Florence paid him, gave me a wink and cast a trickle of coins into her apron pocket. So it seemed that serving girls will pay themselves the whole world over.
The size of the Paris market made Covent Garden look like a tinker's tray. And I never before saw such neatness; the cakes arranged in pinks and yellows and greens like an embroidery, and the cheeses even prettier, some as tiny as thimbles and others great solid cartwheels. As for the King Cakes the French made for Twelfth Night, the scents of almond and caramelled sugar were to me far sweeter than any perfumed waters. ~ Martine Bailey

Pass by the synthetic yarn department, then, with your nose in the air. Should a clerk come out with the remark that All Young Mothers In This Day and Age (why can't they save their breath and say "now"?) insist on a yarn which can be machine-washed and machine-dried, come back at her with the reply that one day, you suppose, they will develop a baby that can be machine-washed and -dried. ~ Elizabeth Zimmermann

We could buy a sewing machine and share it," Charlene said. "We could buy cloth and spools of thread and paper patterns and spend pleasant winter evenings dressmaking together. Perhaps by the soft light from beautiful glass oil lamps. We could sit in a pool of golden light from the beautiful glass oil lamps and our silver needles would glimmer and flash as we bowed our heads to the simple yet honest work." But ~ Kate Atkinson

I have got to say, I'm a businessman, I work in business, worked with some very large corporations around the world, and I have never seen a better operating machine than what the New South Wales right machine is. ~ Warren Mundine

103 and the even more basic 2 and 515. So, 1030. A thousand and thirty. A mistake. Maybe. Or, maybe not a mistake. Reacher took fifty dollars from the machine and dug in his pocket for change and went in ~ Lee Child

When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine. ~ Michael Pollan

In short, none of the destructive fantasies that have taken possession of leaders in our own age, from Kemal Ataturk to Stalin, from the Khans of the Kremlin to the Kahns of the Pentagon, were foreign to the souls of the divinely appointed founders of the first machine civilization. With every increase of effective power, extravagantly sadistic and murderous impulses erupted out of the unconscious. This is the trauma that has distorted the subsequent development of all 'civilized' societies. And it is this fact that punctuates the entire history of mankind with outbursts of collective paranoia and tribal delusions of grandeur, mingled with malevolent suspicions, murderous hatreds, and atrociously inhumane acts. ~ Lewis Mumford

You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters. Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and strapped and plugged yourself into the machine. The canopy ground shut and sealed you off. Your oxygen, your very breath, you carried into the chilled vacuum, in a steel bottle. ~ James Salter

I'm like a machine being run over its RPM limit: The bearings are overheating - a minute longer, and the metal is going to melt and start dripping and that'll be the end of everything. I need a quick splash of cold water, logic. I pour it on in buckets, but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist.
Well, of course, it's clear that you can't establish a function without taking into account what its limit is. And it's also clear that what I felt yesterday, that stupid "dissolving in the universe," if you take it to its limit, is death. Because that's exactly what death is - the fullest possible dissolving of myself into the universe. Hence, if we let L stand for love and D for death, then L = f (D), i.e., love and death ... ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

In conclusion, negative energy does exist, and if enough negative energy could somehow be collected, we could, in principle, create a wormhole machine or a warp drive engine, fulfilling some of the wildest fantasies of science fiction. ~ Michio Kaku

Any hope that America would finally grow up vanished with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism, with its born-again regression, its pink-and-gold concept of heaven, its literal-mindedness, its rambunctious good cheer ... its anti-intellectualism ... its puerile hymns ... and its faith-healing ... are made to order for King Kid America. ~ Florence King

Some people seem to believe that for each problem there is a solution readily available - a solution that can be promptly achieved by passing a law and voting some money. I think of this as the vending machine concept of social change. Put a coin in the machine and out comes a piece of candy. If there is a social problem, pass a law and out comes a solution. ~ John W. Gardner

These days, checks are direct-deposited, money comes out of a machine in the wall, and we swipe a plastic card to make a purchase. In other words, your kids can grow up thinking money comes in an endless supply if you don't show them otherwise. ~ Jean Chatzky

Agents do nothing for the good of football. I'd like to see them lined up against a wall and machine-gunned ?some accountants and solicitors with them. ~ Graham Taylor

On September 16, in defiance of the cease-fire, Ariel Sharon's army
circled the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and
Falasteen slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up
checkpoints, barring the exit of refugees, and allowed their Lebanese
Phalange allies into the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops,
watched through their binoculars during the day and at night lit the sky
with flares to guide the path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to
shelter in the refugee camps. Two days later, the first western
journalists entered the camp and bore witness. Robert Fisk wrote of it
in Pity the Nation:
They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the
back yards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry
and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a
hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every
alleyway, there were corpses - women, young men, babies
and grandparents - lying together in lazy and terrible
profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to
death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more
bodies. The patients at the Palestinian hospital had
disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave.
Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves.
Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such
savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the
top of the tower block to the wes ~ Susan Abulhawa

It is one of the greatest Curses visited upon Mankind, he told me, that they shall fear where no Fear is: this astrological and superstitious Humour disarms men's Hearts, it breaks their Courage, it makes them help to bring such Calamities on themselves. Then he stopped short and looked at me, but my Measure was not yet fill'd up so I begg' d him to go on, go on. And he continued: First, they fancy that such ill Accidents must come to pass, and so they render themselves fit Subjects to be wrought upon; it is a Disgrace to the Reason and Honour of Mankind that every fantasticall Humourist can presume to interpret the Skies (here he grew Hot and put down his Dish) and to expound the Time and Seasons and Fates of Empires, assigning the Causes of Plagues and Fires to the Sins of Men or the Judgements of God. This weakens the Constancy of Humane Actions, and affects Men with Fears, Doubts, Irresolutions and Terrours.

I was afraid of your Moving Picture, I said without thought, and that was why I left.

It was only Clock-work, Nick.

But what of the vast Machine of the World, in which Men move by Rote but in which nothing is free from Danger?

Nature yields to the Froward and the Bold.

It does not yield, it devours: You cannot master or manage Nature.

But, Nick, our Age can at least take up the Rubbidge and lay the Foundacions: that is why we must study the principles of Nature, for they are our best Draught.

Peter Ackroyd

Let the machine take care of the machines, and I'll go spend more time with my family, or golf. ~ Mark Goddard

As in any machine, all the wires must be connected to the mains through one main wire. In the same way, you all must be connected to God individually so that you all are connected among yourselves. I have been saying this again and again and again because at the Sahasrara you are being blessed with this collective spirit. ~ Nirmala Srivastava

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep. ~ Loren Eiseley

What you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that's about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that's shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting rosed in a garden that's about to be dug up for a building site. You are -- strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself -- accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God's new world. Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one's fellow human beings and for that matter one's fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and make the name of Jesus honored in the world -- all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. ~ N.T. Wright