Fluorescent Quotes

My goofiest-sounding secret is that I also believe in magic. Sometimes I call it God and sometimes I call it light, and I believe in it because every now and then I read a really good book or hear a really good song or have a really good conversation with a friend and they seem to have some kind of shine to them. The list I keep of these moments in the back of my journal is comprised less of times when I was laughing or smiling and more of times when I felt like I could feel the colors in my eyes deepening from the display before me. Times in which I felt I was witnessing an all-encompassing representation of life driven by an understanding that, coincidence or not, our existence is a peculiar thing, and perhaps the greatest way to honor it is to just be human. To be happy AND sad, and everything else. And yeah, living is a pain, and I say I hate everyone and everything, and I don't exude much enthusiasm when sandwiched between fluorescent lighting and vinyl flooring for seven hours straight, and I will probably mumble a bunch about how much I wish I could sleep forever the next time I have to wake up at 6 AM. But make no mistake about it: I really do like living. I really, truly do. ~ Tavi Gevinson

Time seemed to drag with dreamlike slowness, like a knife through cold honey, and the room took on a surreal golden sheen as if I was looking through that same jar of honey. Maybe at that moment, the sun shone just right though the grimy windows, but the woman, the shelves, the jars, everything in the room appeared in tones of gold and sepia, except for the painting behind the counter. From behind the shopkeeper's head, a fluorescent Mary and Jesus glared at me, their cartoon-like faces reproaching me for being there. ~ Sara Stark

He stayed under the fluorescent street light until the sounds of traffic and nightlife faded into silence, and only then did he look up into the night sky, the way he usually did when he was looking for answers. ~ Grace Curley

fluorescent bulbs were the result of a multimillion-dollar program specially engineered to offer the most hopeless light possible. ~ Marcus Sakey

The great challenge working on this show for me is wearing polyester all day long and having the worst haircut known to man at the top of my head and sitting under fluorescent lights. That is America, people. Polyester, bad haircuts, under fluorescent lights. ~ Rainn Wilson

We get along, we talk music.Lenny Kravitz took me to Harlem to see this little jazz show in the back of a church. It was just shitty fluorescent lights and a small stage piano, but this band tore it up. ~ Penn Dayton Badgley

It was like staring into the face of a familiar stranger. You know, that person you see in a crowd and swear you know, but you really don't? Now she was me - the familiar stranger.

She had my eyes. They were the same hazel color that could never decide whether it wanted to be green or brown, but my eyes had never been that big and round. Or had they? She had my hair - long and straight and almost as dark as my grandma's had been before hers had begun to turn silver. The stranger had my high cheekbones, long, strong nose, and wide mouth - more features from my grandma and her Cherokee ancestors. But my face had never been that pale. I'd always been olive-ish, much darker skinned than anyone else in my family. But maybe it wasn't that my skin was suddenly so white ... maybe it just looked pale in comparison to the dark blue outline of the crescent moon that was perfectly positioned in the middle of my forehead. Or maybe it was the horrid fluorescent lighting. I hoped it was the lighting.

I stared at the exotic-looking tattoo. Mixed with my strong Cherokee features it seemed to brand me with a mark of wildness ... as if I belonged to ancient times when the world was bigger ... more barbaric.

From this day on my life would never be the same. And for a moment - just an instant - I forgot about the horror of not belonging and felt a shocking burst of pleasure, while deep inside of me the blood of my grandmother's people rejoiced. ~ P.C. Cast

In a black and white world, Chase and I would never end up together - our mothers had ensured that - but in that small bathroom, under the harsh fluorescent lights, we dragged each other deeper into the gray - the messy, guilt-ridden space that sat between right and wrong. ~ R.S. Grey

The usual graffiti on the wall. JRH WAS HERE. NICK LOVES CASS. Visitors leaving the worst parts of themselves behind in fluorescent paint. ~ Anthony Horowitz

there's no way I can sleep in any position with so much still unwritten about the glory of basements, where,
with all the promise in crock pot boxes, small animals go to die, piles of laundry hide the machines, rusted tools fall into other rusted tools giving way to unsung sculpture, soiled playing cards and unmatched socks strewn atop a punched-out screen door make a shaggy parquet; and a famished, leggy fluorescent tube barely winks on the entire scene. ~ Kristen Henderson

I created my own space, which was called the cave. It was a live/work space in downtown Los Angeles on 7th and Spring. When I lived there it was quite derelict. I got this massive space and half of it was my bedroom and the other half of it was the back room - no [natural] light, all fluorescent lights. ~ Kesh

Knowledge is power and at the end of the day, our health, the health of our children, the health of our community, and the health of Mother Earth is our responsibility. Therefore, it is imperative that we understand the human and environmental affects of the products that we buy. ~ Obiora Embry

Triton's trident, they put the Royals on trial!
But as much as Galen would love to throw that in their faces, he won't. This is his one chance, however small it is, to turn things around for him and Emma. And he's not about to toss that chance to sea with both hands.
Rachel has pulled more chairs out to accommodate the gathering. The table they circle is shinier than Emma's lip gloss. Unlike the human meetings Galen has attended with Rachel to sell his underwater finds, there is no paperwork on the table, no cups of coffee, no cell phones. Also unlike human meetings, most participants are either dressed in bathing suits or bathrobes. Leave it to Rachel's creative hospitality. It is a sight Galen will never forget, seeing the elderly council of Archives sit uncomfortably in human chairs. If the situation weren't so dire, he'd have to laugh. Especially since Tandel's bathrobe has the human symbol of peace all over it in fluorescent colors.
"Thank you for coming," Galen says. He takes his place next to Grom, who sits at the head of the table. Appropriately, Antonis sits at the head of the other end, accompanied by Rayna and Toraf. Emma is at Galen's left side. He doesn't need to look at her to know she's scowling at him. ~ Anna Banks

Please note, you future dead persons, whenever you shut off a fluorescent bulb or a cathode ray tube and see a residual photon-green glow, that glow is trapped human ectoplasm. Ghosts are forever being snared in lightbulbs. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

We'd better go before I try to make out with you in my kitchen." She laughed out loud, her dark hair shining in the fluorescent lights. "Zack would love that! ~ J.B. Hartnett

In '87, I was about 9 years old, and so at that point I was wearing, like, fluorescent green T-shirts and acid-wash jeans and leg warmers, and my hair was in a ponytail with a scrunchie and I had the teased bangs that were up in a rainbow shape. It was crazy. ~ Malin Akerman

I was working from home at the time and sometimes indulged in a little wander around my yard, a hard reset before I got back to work. Today, however, I had ignored the nice weather and instead put my head on my desk, forehead pressed to the Formica and arms covering my skull.

I had joked with one of my yoga-loving co-workers that I was developing a series of poses that we could do at our desks. A head-in-hands slump over galleys called "Drudge's Hunch". The arms overhead seated stretch called "Fluorescent Salutation". The hand out position used to catch the fire door so it didn't slam and bother everyone. That was "Worrier's Pose".

My current pose was called "Nuclear Fallout". ~ Kory Stamper

Do you always wear Malaysian imitations of Brooks Brothers blue oxford button-downs, Mr. Laney?"

Laney had looked down at his shirt, or tried to.

"Malaysia?"

"The stitch-count's dead on, but they still haven't mastered the thread-tension."

"Oh."

"Never mind. A little prototypic nerd chic could actually lend a certain frisson, around here. You could lose the tie, though. Definitely lose the tie. And keep a collection of felt-tipped pens in your pocket. Unchewed, please. Plus one of those fat flat highlighters, in a really nasty fluorescent shade."

"Are you joking?"

"Probably, Mr. Laney. May I call you Colin?"

"Yes."

She never did call him "Colin," then or ever. "You'll find that humor is essential at Slitscan, Laney. A necessary survival tool. You'll find the type that's most viable here is fairly oblique."

"How do you mean, Ms. Torrance?"

"Kathy. I mean difficult to quote effectively in a memo. Or a court of law. ~ William Gibson

In Vancouver, in Sydney and in Orange County, we live among fluorescent stores and streets so brightly lit that you can read a book after dark; in other places across our global body, there are blackouts and curfews every night. ~ Pico Iyer

From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like; (b) trapshooting looks comparatively easy, because now the stocky older guy who's replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these little fluorescent plates away one after the other, so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir's wake; (c) a clay pigeon, when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia -- erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a corkscrewy way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster.

All the shooters who precede me seem to fire with a kind of casual scorn, and all get eight out of ten or above. But it turns out that, of these six guys, three have military-combat backgrounds, another two are L. L. Bean-model-type brothers who spend weeks every year hunting various fast-flying species with their "Papa" in southern Canada, and the last has got not only his own earmuffs, plus his own shotgun in a special crushed-velvet-lined case, but also his own trapshooting range in his backyard (31) in North Carolina. When it's finally my turn, the earmuffs they give me have somebody else's ear-oil on them and don't fit my head very well. The gun itself is shockingly heavy and stinks of what I'm told is cordite, small pubic spirals of which are still exiting the barrel from the Korea-vet who prec ~ David Foster Wallace

No point in describing the office. No point in even allowing the office to even
register on her eyeballs and take up valuable memory space in her brain.
Fluorescent lights and partitions with carpet glued to them. I prefer my carpet
on the floor, thank you. A color scheme. Ergonomic shit. Chicks with
lipstick. Xerox smell. Everything's pretty new, she figures. ~ Neal Stephenson

The fluorescent lights flickered overhead, casting a sick gray pallor over the room. ~ Denise Grover Swank

I am completely opposed to the British National Party; I couldn't possibly support people who find fluorescent yellow flyers appealing. ~ Robert Clark

All I can think is: I need air. The rest of my thoughts are a blur of radio static and fluorescent lights and lab coats and steel tables and surgical knives ~ Lauren Oliver

Now, if you're Al Gore, you can afford $10 a pop for squiggly-pig-tailed fluorescent light bulbs. But if you're mainstream America, two or three kids, mom and dad working outside the home, that's not a very good deal. ~ Joe Barton

I just assume I'm not invisible. I assume I'm wearing fluorescent clothes, and there's a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption. ~ Neal Stephenson

There was a rumor - a joke? Hard to tell at the DAR - that the fluorescent bulbs were the result of a multimillion-dollar program specially engineered to offer the most hopeless light possible. Cooper didn't know about that, but they did make everyone look two weeks dead. ~ Marcus Sakey

Technology has allowed the world of men in our society to separate itself from the sight and the sounds of killing; from the horror of it, but not from the killing. It must be easy to kill from a roomful of fluorescent lights and wash-and-wear shirts. ~ Caryl Rivers

Fluorescent lights on the ceiling lit up the white Formica top of her desk like an operating table, white-sand beach at high noon, French fries under the heat lamp at McDonald's. ~ Dennis Vickers

And in the evening concealed fluorescent tubes light the room so evenly that it is no longer illuminated, it is a pool of luminosity. ~ Joseph Roth

The earth spins further from help. Beyond us the heart monitors go on, the fluorescent lights buzz, the commentators shout, the casino leaves fall into the desert, sirens blare. But all we hear is the rain. ~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

The walls shrugged themselves loose from their foundations and slid towards the centre of the room, as if attracted by the struggle. The ceiling, a massive rectangular slab of concrete furrowed with fluorescent white, also shuddered loose and loomed down on her. ~ Michel Faber

Ode to Algebra
Thrust into this dingy classroom
we die like lampless moths
locked into the desolation of
fluorescent lights and metal desks.
Ten minutes until the bell rings.
What use is the quadratic formula
in our daily lives?
Can we use it to unlock the secrets
in the hearts of those we love?
Five minutes until the bell rings.
Cruel Algebra teacher,
won't you let us go? ~ Meg Cabot

Some visualize the Pistols era in shades of black and white. It wasn't. Actually, the colors I envision are neon or army dirt green with fluorescent pink
anything that would annoy. ~ John Lydon

To put it in Quaker terms, my inner light flickered a lot, like the overhead fluorescent at a Motel 6, and sometimes, it burnt out altogether. The closest I came to consistent faith was during my senior year religion class, when we learned about the Central and South American liberation theology movements and I became briefly convinced that God was a left-wing superhero who led the global struggle against imperialism and corporate greed. Sort of a celestial Michael Moore. ~ Kevin Roose

Grasping the doorknob, Tengo turned around one last time and was shocked to see a single tear running down from his father's eye. It shone a dull silver color under the ceiling's fluorescent light. To release that tear, his father must have squeezed every bit of strength from what little emotion he still had left. ~ Haruki Murakami

On a very hot day in August of 1994, my wife told me she was going down to the Derry Rite Aid to pick up a refill on her sinus medicine prescription - this is stuff you can buy over the counter these days, I believe. I'd finished writing for the day and offered to pick it up for her. She said thanks, but she wanted to get a piece of fish at the supermarket next door anyway; two birds with one stone and all that. She blew a kiss at me off the palm of her and and went out. The next time I saw her, she was on TV. That's how you identify the dead here in Derry - no walking down a subterranean corridor with green tiles on the walls and long fluorescent bars overhead, no naked body rolling out of a chilly drawer on casters; you just go into an office marked PRIVATE and look at a TV screen and say yep or nope. ~ Stephen King

I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you? ~ Margaret Atwood

His cell-phone rang. Dominic fumbled for it on the nightstand next to the couch, the dim lights not helping his endeavour. He had piercing, generic, banal fluorescent lights on his face all the time at work and at University, it was so bad it made him loathe even natural sunlight. Lucky this apartment's living room light had a dimmer. He flipped open his phone and said hello. 'Hey Dom, how you doin'?' a voice boomed. It was Ben. They proceeded to talk about the upcoming exams, which were deceptively close as it was week 10 at the moment. Yes, they would be alright. Yes, they would meet up afterwards. No, he hadn't studied more than Ben had. As he clapped the phone closed after the genial conversation reached its natural nadir, he had forgotten most of what had been said ~ T.P. Grish

In a world full of monochromatic tadpoles, if you are fluorescent it does not matter what size of tadpole you are. ~ Subroto Bagchi

I invited him over and he stayed forever. I feed him all my bread, the old peppers turned to mush & fluorescent mold, the chicken thighs unthawed & boneless. He ask for more so I give him my left leg. He ask for more & I give him my lungs & lips. More still, and there goes my bladder. He eats it all, all of me, eats the whole damn house, & I live forever in him or maybe it's the other way around. I swallowed. I swallowed him whole & didn't even notice him thrashing inside me. ~ Danez Smith

I make out a schoolbus ... glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Liger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of day-glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus and told him to go to it. ~ Tom Wolfe

Mamá's headlights lit up the yellow fluorescent lines of the road. They were curvy and it seemed like they were being traced out of nothingness by the invisible hand of God - like God was bored, drawing hills and lines with a highlighter. ~ Ingrid Rojas Contreras

SONG OF THE STAR


I am nothing but
Oxygen and hydrogen,
A luminous sphere of plasma
Held together by helium and gravity,
And like a balloon I float on earth,
Waiting to be released back into the sky,
Waiting to go back in the reverse direction
From which I came,
Traveling through a warm tunnel of light,
And out into a dark, cold abyss
Where I will explode into a thousand pieces.
I shall leave behind my body,
Just like air abandons the skin of
A shattered balloon,
And the magnetic dust that carries my
Heart and spirit will lift us back
To congregate and shine
With the stars.
Home again,
In the fluorescent
Kingdom of the constellations,
I will once again be called by
My soul's true name.
And my heart,
It will flicker again,
With every memory
From its many
Lifetimes,
And with every wish
Made by a child. ~ Suzy Kassem

The blinding glare of the ceiling's fluorescent lamps does not penetrate to the bottom of the sea trench in which she sleeps. ~ Haruki Murakami

There was no word for what I was - unable to rent a car but able to stand in front of a room of thirteen-year-olds, sweating under industrial-grade fluorescent lights in the lilac-colored button-down my mom had picked and paid for a few months earlier. I could knock back black coffee and tell them how to ask questions, how to sit down, how to look me in the pupils. Throw away your gum. Don't text at school, at work. Clean your desk, your apartment, your life. Lessons. ~ Harris Sockel

I've always felt safer at night. You can be much more forgiving of yourself, not to mention the world and everyone in it, when your shortcomings aren't threatened by the brazen light of day. And by shortcomings, I mean damage. The scars are still there, but at least they're easier to hide. I never understood why they shine a fluorescent spotlight in the faces of alleged culprits in old movies to get them to tell the truth. Put me to bed and turn off the lights. I'll tell you everything. I'll be who you want me to be, I'll be honest. I'll be who I want to be, I'll be braver. Just don't ignore me. I really do want to be stronger, sweeter, less afraid all the time. Maybe it's a within-the-womb thing, but it's safer in the dark. What they should really warn you about is the light. ~ Anne Clendening

I look just like one of Brianna's UGLY finger paintings. Because now I'm completely covered with: 1. brown peanut-butter stains 2. purple jelly stains 3. white soap suds AND 4. bright fluorescent-green hand soap from the girls' bathroom. ~ Rachel Renee Russell

When I was 15, I wore combat boots with a fluorescent Columbia ski jacket. I was trying to find myself. ~ Eric Wareheim

If you haven't noticed yet, working sucks. Unless you are a racecar driver or an astronaut or Beyonce, working is completely and utterly devoid of awesome. It is hard, it lasts all day, the lighting is generally fluorescent, and, apparently, drinking at your desk is frowned upon. If you ever needed to ruin someone's fun, I mean really poop a party, just move things to the workplace. Fun terminated. ~ Aisha Tyler

It's amazing to think where adventure can lead when you trust your crazy ideas, when you're bold enough to look at only what lies ahead of you. I don't want the normal life. I don't want to go to college because it's the next practical step, just to join the pack, just to follow a leader. I don't want to sit inside a room under fluorescent lights and study and read and memorize other people's ideas about the world. I want to form my own ideas. I want to experience the world with my own eyes.

I'm not going to follow my old friends to avoid the effort of making new ones. I don't want to settle for any job just to get a paycheck, just to pay rent, just to need furniture and cable and more bills and be tied down with routine and monotony. I don't want to own things because they'll eventually start to own me.

Most importantly, I don't want to be told who I am or who I should be. I want to find myself - the bits and pieces that are scattered in places and in people waiting to meet me. If I fall down, I'll learn how to pick myself up again. You need to fall apart once in a while before you understand how you best fit together. ~ Katie Kacvinsky

I have always been interested - indeed, waylaid - by the leading edges of technology, even during my Ph.D. years when I pioneered (but did not publish) agarose gel electrophoresis for RNA fractionation. Also, much later, I was instrumental in showing that Green Fluorescent Protein and RNAi could be made to work in mammalian cells. ~ Martin Evans

Thank you, Department Stores, for the flickering fluorescent lights, dingy yellow wall paint, and adjustable mirrors in the dressing room where I try on bathing suits. You are why I drink. ~ Jen Hatmaker

Jesus had an affinity for prisoners. He had been one, after all. He must have often felt anxiety and isolation in jail, but He identified with the prisoners. He made a point of befriending the worst and most hated, because His message was that no one was beyond reach of divine love, despite society's way of stating the opposite. God, what a nut.
Finally we stood outside an inner gate, showed our IDs to the guards, and got our hands stamped with fluorescent ink. "You don't glow, you don't go," said one cheerful, pockmarked guard, which was the best spiritual advice I'd had in a long time. ~ Anne Lamott

Neon signs don't consume much power, but they look like they do. A cousin of fluorescent lighting, neon is actually quite energy efficient. A neon tube glows coolly when high-voltage, low-amperage electrical power excites the gas within it. ~ Virginia Postrel

I think my father kept struggling to get us into better neighborhoods, better schools. One of the worst jobs he had was folding shirts under these fluorescent lights all day at the equivalent of a Kmart. I remember visiting him at work, thinking, 'When I grow up, I've got to do anything else.' ~ Terry Zwigoff

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one's final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or "It's O.K." or "I'm sorry" or "I love you."

People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system's expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what's most important to them ~ Atul Gawande

The main floor of Penn Station, early,
the first commuters arriving, leaving,
the man outstretched on his coat,
wide circles of survivors forming.
He's half in, half out of his clothes,
being kissed and cardio-shocked,
though he was likely dead before he landed.
This goes on for minutes, minutes more,
until the medics unhook the vanished heart,
move him onto the cot and cover him
with the snow-depth of a sheet
and wheel him the fluorescent length
of the hall through gray freight doors
that open on their own and close at will. ~ Stanley Plumly

Sunday night is my personal weekly Halloween.

I walk along slowly and drag my fingertips along the bars of chocolate. Goddamn, you sexy little squares. Dark, milk, white, I do not discriminate. I eat it all. Those fluorescent sour candies that only obnoxious little boys like. I suck candy apples clean. If an envelope seal is sweet, I'll lick it twice. Growing up, I was that kid who would easily get lured into a van with the promise of a lollipop.

Sometimes, I let the retail seduction last for twenty minutes, ignoring Marco and feeling up the merchandise, but I'm so tired of male voices.

"Five bags of marshmallows," Marco says in a resigned tone. "Wine. And a can of cat food."

"Cat food is low carb." He makes no move to scan anything, so I scan each item myself and unroll a few notes from my tips. "Your job involves selling things. Sell them. Change, please."

"I just don't know why you do this to yourself." Marco looks at the register with a moral dilemma in his eyes. "Every week you come and do this."

He hesitates and looks over his shoulder where his sugar book sits under a layer of dust. He knows not to try to slip it into my bag with my purchases.

"I don't know why you care, dude. Just serve me. I don't need your help." He's not entirely wrong about my being an addict. I would lick a line of icing sugar off this counter right now if no one were around. I would walk into a cane plantation and ~ Sally Thorne

My reason [for making my own paint] is to force a real-time experience of the work. Most work today is experienced by reproduction, and more specifically by computer screen, like jpegs, but an RGB simulation of fluorescent will never fully accurately depict some colors. For example, our eyes are a lot more sophisticated than you might assume. You can feel a lot more going on on the surface of a canvas than you can on the surface of a screen. ~ Ryan McGinness

Ronan wasn't exactly sure why he was angry. Although Gansey had done nothing to invoke his ire, he was definitely part of the problem. Currently, he propped his cell between ear and shoulder as he eyed a pair of plastic plates printed with smiling tomatoes. His unbuttoned collar revealed a good bit of his collarbone. No one could deny that Gansey was a glorious portrait of youth, the well-tended product of a fortunate and moneyed pairing. Ordinarily, he was so polished that it was bearable, though, because he was clearly not the same species as Ronan's rough-and-ready family. But tonight, under the fluorescent lights of Dollar City, Gansey's hair was scuffed and his cargo shorts were a greasy ruin from mucking over the Pig. He was barelegged and sockless in his Top-Siders and very clearly a real human, an attainable human, and this, somehow, made Ronan want to smash his fist through a wall. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

And I Said To My Soul, Be Loud

Madden me back to an afternoon
I carry in me
not like a wound
but like a will against a wound

Give me again enough man
to be the child
choosing my own annihilations

To make of this severed limb
a wand to conjure
a weapon to shatter
dark matter of the dirt daubers' nests
galaxies of glass

Whacking glints
bash-dancing on the cellar's fire
I am the sound the sun would make
if the sun could make a sound

and the gasp of rot
stabbed from the compost's lumpen living death
is me

O my life my war in a jar
I shake you and shake you
and may the best ant win

For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things
and I will ride this tantrum back to God

until my fixed self, my fluorescent self
my grief–nibbling, unbewildered, wall–to–wall self
withers in me like a salted slug ~ Christian Wiman

I always find grocery stores surreal. Fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, wide aisles tempting me to run, vivid ads tugging my gaze this way and that. It seems so far removed from actually eating. Sometimes I have a strange impulse to climb shelves or rip open packaging and taste everything. But I mustn't succumb to pooka mischief. ~ Karen Kincy

…I love you," he said to her, although at that point he was certain she could no longer comprehend the words. "I'd trade places with you in an instant, Mandy Valems… you never deserved this… why would anyone do something so terrible!?" A cold chill froze his heart when he saw her empty eyes again.

The fluorescent lights in the dim room sparked to life all of a sudden, brightness so sharp that it startled him. In a flash, sharp and sudden, quicker than a lightning strike, the bulbs flickered and exploded with a few jingling pops. ~ Rebecca McNutt

He took a trip ... up to ... Elliott's house, his mansion rather. Awful place, twelve bedrooms and swimming pool and media hall and five car garage, but cheap and shoddy all the same, like the one next door and next door to that. A row of Ikea houses, such wealthy mediocrity. His very own son. His big, bald son. Who could believe it. The bigness, the baldness, the stupidity. In a house designed to bore the daylight out of visitors, no character at all, all blonde wood and fluorescent lighting and clean white machinery.
Not to mention his brand new wife, number three, a clean white machine herself. Up from the cookie cutter and into Elliott's life, she might as well have jumped out of the microwave, her skin orange, her teeth pearly white. A trophy wife. But why the word "trophy"? Something to shoot on a safari. ~ Colum McCann

A few weeks later, I'm in a fluorescent-lit classroom in Chelsea awaiting the start of the official Mensa test. I'm sitting next to a guy who's doing a series of elaborate neck stretches, like we're about to engage in a vigorous rugby match. He's neatly laid out four types of gum on his Formica desk: Juicy Fruit, Wrigley Spearmint, Big Red, and Eclipse. I hate this guy. I hope to God he's not a genius. ~ A. J. Jacobs

It was already getting dark out, but I kept my sunglasses on. I didn't want to have to look anybody in the eye. I didn't want to relate to anybody too keenly. Plus, the fluorescent lights at the drug store were blinding. If I could have purchased my medications from a vending machine, I would have paid double for them. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

Red was ruby, green was fluorescent, yellow was simply incandescent. Color was life. Color was everything.
Color, you see, was the universal sign of magic. ~ Tahereh Mafi

Apathetic in my adolescence,
my heart is fluorescent. It flickers
like liquor store lights in the ghetto. ~ Kris Kidd

I am nothing but oxygen and hydrogen,
A luminous sphere of plasma
Held together by helium and gravity,
And like a balloon I float on earth,
Waiting to be released back into the sky,
Waiting to go back in the reverse
Direction from which I came,
Traveling through a warm tunnel of light,
And out into a cold, dark abyss
Where I will explode into a thousand pieces.
I shall leave behind my body,
Just like air abandons the skin of a shattered balloon,
And the magnetic dust that carries my
Heart and spirit will lift us back
To congregate and shine
With the stars.
Home again,
In the fluorescent
Kingdom of the constellations,
I will once again be called by
My soul's true name.
And my heart,
It will flicker again,
With every memory from its many
Lifetimes,
And with every wish
Made by a child.



SONG OF THE STAR by Suzy Kassem ~ Suzy Kassem

The closest you will ever come to seeing vampires burnt by daylight is by inviting a group of Danes for a hygge dinner and then placing them under a 5,000K fluorescent light tube. At first, they will squint, trying to examine the torture device you have placed in the ceiling. Then, as dinner begins, observe how they will move uncomfortably around in their chairs, compulsively scratching and trying to suppress twitches. ~ Meik Wiking

(wizards, even failed wizards, have in addition to rods and cones in their eyeballs the tiny octagons that enable them to see into the far octarine, the basic colour of which all other colours are merely pale shadows impinging on normal four-dimensional space. It is said to be a sort of fluorescent greenish-yellow purple). ~ Terry Pratchett

He motions to the glue brush. "Can I have some?"
I start to grab it so I can pass it to him. He reaches for it at the same time. Our fingers touch, and the moment they do the fluorescent lights overhead flicker and then fizzle out.
Everyone moans, even though we can all still see. There's enough light from the outside filtering in, just not enough for us to really focus on the finer details.
Nick's fingers stroke mine lightly, so lightly that I'm almost not sure the touch is real. My insides flicker like the art room lights. They do not, however, fizzle. I turn my head to look him in the eye.
He leans over and whispers, "It will be hard to be just your friend."
The lights come back on.
"Just a little brownout." The art teacher smiles and holds out her arms. "Welcome to Maine, Zara. Land of a million power failures."
Nick's breath touches my ear. "I heard you didn't drive to school. I'll bring you home after cross-country,okay?"
"Okay," I say, trying to be all calm, but what I really want to do is leap up and do a happy dance all over the art room. Nick is driving me home. ~ Carrie Jones

A man dressed in a radiant white uniform stands below the ragged maw of the jetway holding his hands downwards with fluorescent orange sticks in them, like Christ dispensing mercy on a world of sinners. ~ Neal Stephenson

Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me

and what good does all the re ~ Alex Flinn

One of the big areas I'd like to see a lot more research done on is the sensory problems, and it's real variable. One kid's got sound sensitivity; another one can't tolerate fluorescent lights. I can't stand scratchy clothes. ~ Temple Grandin

And then I'm in a porn store. It's kinda boring, actually. It looks like a regular store - shelves of DVDs and old VHS tapes and a rack of magazines, all under this harsh fluorescent glow. I mean, there are some differences from a regular video store, I guess, like A. At the regular video store, very few of the DVDs have the words guzzling or slut in them, whereas here the opposite seems to be the case, and also B. I'm pretty sure the regular video store doesn't have any devices used for spanking, whereas this place has several. Also, C. There are very few items for sale at the regular video store that make you think, "I have no earthly idea what that is supposed to do or where it is supposed to do it." Other ~ John Green

My life had devolved into a fluorescent haze of desktop Outlook/Internet Explorer/Excel screens by day followed by laptop Chrome/Facebook/Netflix nights. ~ Wayne Gladstone

How can I tell McDermott that this is a very disjointed time of my life and that I notice the walls have been painted a bright, almost painful white and under the glare of the fluorescent lights they seem to pulse and glow. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

The rule of thumb is: the lower the temperature of the light, the more hygge. A camera flash is around 5,500 Kelvin (K), fluorescent tubes are 5,000K, incandescent lamps 3,000K, while sunsets and wood and candle flames are about 1,800K. That is your hygge sweet spot. The ~ Meik Wiking