Magical Devices Quotes

Isn't that dangerous?" I objected. "What if somebody used it on people - what if they put it on replace and turned us all into fictional characters?"
"How do you know they haven't?" asked Marc. ~ Polly Shulman

The nobles had made reading unpopular, as it showed that one couldn't afford to buy spells or magical devices, since one had to get knowledge to do things the ordinary way; even if this view held little logic, the king himself was known to insult readers as "bookfaces" or "unable to think for themselves, so they need to spout what others have said," and these opinions became popular, as did most views expressed by the king or his son. ~ Colleen Chen

For years, the US government loudly warned the world that Chinese routers and other Internet devices pose a "threat" because they are built with backdoor surveillance functionality that gives the Chinese government the ability to spy on anyone using them. Yet what the NSA's documents show is that Americans have been engaged in precisely the activity that the United States accused the Chinese of doing. ~ Glenn Greenwald

This hunger for the magical shortcut has survived to our day in the form of simple formulas for success, ancient secrets finally revealed in which a mere change of attitude will attract the right energy. There is a grain of truth and practicality in all of these efforts - for instance, the emphasis in magic on deep focus. But in the end all of this searching is centered on something that doesn't exist - the effortless path to practical power, the quick and easy solution, the El Dorado of the mind. ~ Robert Greene

Books are like this magical window that you can open no matter where you are and you fall into a different place that´s better than the one you´re trapped in. ~ Kai Cheng Thom

For these were the days when Time was still the horizon of beauty and had not yet begun its slow inexorable destructions. ~ J. Mulrooney

I'm not sure how to pin this feeling down. It's as elusive as the numbness that swirls inside my body. Every day, as the hours creep past, I find myself getting jittery, waiting for the sight of Oskar's tall figure striding into the cavern. And when he does, I can't stop the smile from spreading across my face - especially because his eyes search for me, and when they find me, he smiles right back. That in and of itself is magical ... ~ Sarah Fine

The Space Shuttle is the most effective device known to man for destroying dollar bills. ~ Dana Rohrabacher

I pull away and all the magical qualities of his touch fade. It's the worst feeling in the world. ~ H.M. Ward

Personally, I'm not interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren't, they shouldn't be, and microkernels are just stupid. ~ Linus Torvalds

Sleep: the moon still hasn't moved the width of a constellation since you were a girl. Since you have become a woman, the stars that stand above the halls of Palladios have not yet disappeared behind the domes of San Marco. But only since then has the world become the world. ~ Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Drop dreaming and you are there where you have really been always, but you were never aware. All meditation techniques are just antidream efforts, just dream-negating devices. ~ Rajneesh

All the wild ways he had shown me, mosses and rushes and heather, the home of the curlew and snipe, and the grazing grounds of the geese, all those enchanted fields and the magical willows lying under the edge of the bog, all were to be spoiled, hidden, sold and disenchanted by that terrible force named Progress. ~ Lord Dunsany

your hand
touching mine.
this is how
galaxies
collide. ~ Sanober Khan

Life is magical. If life had no magic, it would be tragic. ~ Debasish Mridha

It were well for many professors if instead of following their own devices, and cutting out new paths of thought for themselves, they would enquire for the good old ways of God's own truth, and beseech the Holy Ghost to give them sanctified understandings and teachable spirits. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

A magical CO2 knob for controlling weather and climate simply does not exist! ~ Willie Soon

Good design is also an act of communication between the designer and the user, except that all the communication has to come about by the appearance of the device itself. The device must explain itself. ~ Donald A. Norman

I grew up listening to Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, and Angela Lansbury, so I grew up wanting to sound like Patti and Bernadette. What I realized, though, is that I can't sound like that, and what makes their performances magical is their uniqueness. ~ Susan Egan

The night is Ours. Rejoicing in the ethereal realms where We are kings. Blessed souls of forgotten immortality. They fear Us in every grasp. ~ Luis Marques

Every computing device today has five basic components: (1) the integrated circuits that do the computing; (2) the memory units that store and retrieve information; (3) the networking systems that enable communications within and across computers; (4) the software applications that enable different computers to perform myriad tasks individually and collectively; and (5) the sensors - cameras and other miniature devices that can detect movement, language, light, heat, moisture, and sound and transform any of them into digitized data that can be mined for insights. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

Although I've always been easily led by my imagination, I was, and I remain, a rational person. ~ Jostein Gaarder

That's the whole burden of this novel - the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Everyone wants to talk about it, and right now music, flat-panel televisions, a whole host of new handheld devices are fun to talk about and very exciting to look at. ~ Kevin Rollins

Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, chinese operas,jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world. ~ Salman Rushdie

Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior. ~ Julian Barnes

Under the law established by the possessor of the greatest number of devices, sickness and the sick will flourish. ~ Italo Svevo

History is replete with the seeds of apocalypse. In particular, the 19th/early 20th Century in France was a time of country-shattering events, whether it was the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte (the creation and brutal upending of a whole new social order, within scarcely more than a decade), or the Great War (which devastated the country to a degree that is hard to believe today, wiping out an entire generation in the trenches). It was no great stretch to imagine a magical war engulfing Europe in 1914, and leaving Paris as a field of ruins filled with magical booby traps–the familiar monuments destroyed, the Seine overflowing with the residue of spells.

It's no secret that I'm fascinated by the narrative of war, and of recovery after war: how people struggle to rebuild lives and go on in the wake of world-shattering devastation; how the past can still cast a long, terrible shadow over everything; how the years before the war become a golden thing, regardless of how many injustices and hardships might have been happening then. I'm equally fascinated by history–the narratives that get preserved and enshrined, the stories that are passed down; and the speed with which some things get forgotten while others endure for generations. For me, the vocabulary and tropes of post-apocalypse were a great way to tackle those subjects, and to imagine what would happen in a city that had such a traumatic event in its past. ~ Aliette De Bodard

It is better than going on loving someone who cannot love me back. Better wasting all that feelings
-Tessa gray ~ Cassandra Clare

Cyber terrorism could also become more attractive as the real and virtual worlds become more closely coupled, with automobiles, appliances, and other devices attached to the Internet. ~ Dorothy Denning

Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact, it isn't like it, it is it. ~ Douglas Adams

Movies have these transcendent moments where everything is just right, from the dialogue to the music to the lighting to the narrative context; everything is just perfect, and something magical happens - the film breaks through the screen and does something to you. ~ Jason Silva

You wrote this right?" he said. "It tells how to defeat Set."
Thoth unfolded the papyrus pages. "Oh, dear. I hate reading my old work. Look at this sentence. I'd never write it that way now." He patted his lab coat pockets. "Red pen - does anyone have one?"
Isis chafed against my willpower, insisting that we blast some sense into Thoth. One fireball, she pleaded. Just one enormous magical fireball?
I couldn't say I was tempted, but I kept her under control.
"Since when does drool make you powerful? ~ Rick Riordan

No, Ben. What I'm asking is: Are you the vehicle, and Georgie rides around in you? That is why Ben's the driver, right? ~ Jonathan Harnisch

Everybody is becoming [a superhero]. In the past I've tried to say, 'Look, we are all crappy superheroes,' because personal computers and mobile phone devices are things that only Bat Man and Mr Fantastic would have owned back in the sixties. We've all got this immense power and we're still sat at home watching pornography and buying scratch cards. We're rubbish, even though we are as gods. ~ Alan Moore

In the world of computers and just devices in general, the lifespan, or the shelf life, is relatively short just because technology moves so fast and the costs drop so quickly and the power, whether it's computing power or memory rises very, very quickly. ~ Nicholas Negroponte

The butter is greasy and it will go rancid and I will smell like an old cheese; but at least it's organic, as they used to say.
To such devices we have descended. ~ Margaret Atwood

Now, what would you like for dinner? Steak? Chicken? I, for one ... I am thinking ... Chinese."
Stunned, Jenera stopped and looked between Nylora and Aleta, "Uh ... I don't think you mean sweet and sour pork, right?"
The older handmaiden laughed heartily, "You catch on quick, my lady." She winked, "Nothing says delicious like a short Chinese man in a darkened alley to whet my appetite. ~ Beth Mikell

You, instinctively, as a girl, have very, uh, strange, supernatural, magical powers that we don't understand. ~ Chad Eastham

Fortunately, because of the spread of smart devices, people take games for granted now. It's a good thing for us, because we do not have to worry about making games something that are relevant to general people's daily lives. ~ Shigeru Miyamoto

I remember that winter because it had brought the heaviest snows I had ever seen. Snow had fallen steadily all night long and in the morning I woke in a room filled with light and silence, the whole world seemed to be held in a dream-like stillness. It was a magical day ... and it was on that day I made the Snowman. ~ Raymond Briggs

The Waverley sisters had married men as steadfast and normal as the women were mercurial and strange. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity. ~ William Strunk Jr.

Ponytail girl leaned over and she and the tall boy kissed and it was carcinogen gums and magical. ~ Aimee Bender

A nuclear weapon of some dimension, whether it's actually a nuclear weapon, or a dirty bomb, or some kind of radiological device. Yes, I think it's probably a near thing. ~ Michael Scheuer

God needs blood to fix the universe, but only his own blood had enough magical power to do it, so he gave himself a body and then killed it. ~ Richard Carrier

There's something magical in not giving up. ~ Nitya Prakash

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience. ~ Chuck Close