Malfunction Quotes

If you improve or tinker with something long enough, eventually it will break or malfunction. ~ Arthur Bloch

I am touched by her life, how it moves forward, pulses and springs. There is no fragmentation, nothing stunted or wedged. I circle back, I regress, the past doesn't let go. It might as well be a malfunction, a scene repeating itself, a scratched vinl record, a stutter. ~ Leila Aboulela

Here we have the heart of the difference between Hayek and Keynes: one knew that markets work to give us the best of all possible worlds, while governments create and exacerbate malfunctions; the other imagined that governments were somehow capable of both perceiving and correcting malfunctions by means of the printing press, provided the right technocrats are in charge. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

The ten-year-old shifter wore long flannel pajama pants and a T-shirt, his blond hair sticking up everywhere in the most adorable way. "No, I'm thirsty. I didn't mean to both you --"
"You're not bothering us," Teresa interjected. Ryan didn't seem to want to let her go, but she didn't care. She needed distance from this male if she wanted to think straight. "I just stopped by to ..." Her brain chose that moment to malfunction. She couldn't even think of a decent lie.
"To kiss Ryan?" the boy asked, all innocence. ~ Katie Reus

Principles are laws that are established by the creator or the manufacturer by which a product functions. If you violate those laws, then you produce malfunction, which is what we call failure. If you obey those laws and align yourself with those laws, then you are guaranteed success. ~ Myles Munroe

The greatest malfunction of spirit is to believe things. ~ Louis Pasteur

This young woman," said Diana, "was responsible for the destruction of the Triumvirate's fleet."
"Well, I had a lot of help," Lavinia said.
"I don't understand," I said, turning to Lavinia. "You made all those mortars malfunction?"
Lavinia looked offended. "Well, yeah. Somebody had to stop the fleet. I did pay attention during siege-weapon class and ship-boarding class. It wasn't that hard. All it took was a little fancy footwork."
Hazel finally managed to pick her jaw off the pavement. "Wasn't that hard?"
"We were motivated! The fauns and dryads did great." She paused, her expression momentarily clouding, as if she remembered something unpleasant. "Um…besides, the Nereids helped a lot. There was only a skeleton crew aboard each yacht. Not, like, actual skeletons, but - you know what I mean. Also, look!"
She pointed proudly at her feet, which were now adorned with the shoes of Terpsichore from Caligula's private collection.
"You mounted an amphibious assault on an enemy fleet," I said, "for a pair of shoes."
Lavinia huffed. "Not just for the shoes, obviously." She tap-danced a routine that would've made Savion Glover proud. "Also to save the camp, and the nature spirits, and Michael Kahale's commandos."
Hazel held up her hands to stop the overflow of information. "Wait. Not to be a killjoy - I mean, you did an amazing thing! - but you still deserted your post, Lavinia. I certainly didn't give you permission - "
"I was acting ~ Rick Riordan

Having pretty much burned every bridge he crossed, our friendship was like a malfunction of his usually deficient people skills. ~ Tammara Webber

During his next visit, my father secretly decided that our bathroom needed towel hooks. Using nails that were too long, my father pierced the door, creating towel hooks on one side, medieval blinding devices on the other ... No matter how inconvenient a household malfunction might be, Kazem can always make it worse, for free. ~ Firoozeh Dumas

Every part of the brain plays a crucial role in the construction of something magnificent which we call "mind". But if we observe closely, the mind doesn't exactly exist as one distinct process or entity or system. It's rather an illusion. We can understand this better if we see the mind as a nation. Think of the nation you live in. Is there really any such thing as a "nation"! A nation is simply the collection of activities of a group of people inside an imaginary border. Likewise, mind is the collection of activities of a group of neurons inside the skull. And just like in a nation, when a few neurons malfunction, others can slowly learn to take their place. But when an entire group of neurons in a specific brain region malfunctions, it can impede in the proper functioning of the mind, just like when a huge number of people in an entire state or district stop working, it can affect the functioning of the entire nation. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I feel like every day of my life is a funny wardrobe malfunction! ~ Nikki Reed

Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse. ~ Barbara Tuchman

It is an irony of medical history that even as Freud's later work would make him the progenitor of modern psychodynamic psychotherapy, which is generally premised on the idea that mental illness arises from unconscious psychological conflicts, his papers on cocaine make him one of the fathers of biological psychiatry, which is governed by the notion that mental distress is partly caused by a physical or chemical malfunction that can be treated with drugs. ~ Scott Stossel

What a time to have a brain-to-mouth filter malfunction. ~ E.L. James

Service disruptions have to be avoided or at least resolved as quickly as possible. When the Internet goes down, consumers don't notice the difference between a technical malfunction, an act of sabotage by hackers or a military attack. ~ Thomas De Maiziere

Could a man decide, 'I am right, and everyone else is wrong?'
No evidence of a malfunction, he thought. I am not a coward. Neither am I insane.
His heart cried, 'I am disgusted with this purposeless war. I shall quit fighting it. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

history n. Discipline that, in reminding us that the world existed before we did, creates identity malfunction and is therefore banned from schools along with foreign languages, the province of obstinate and eccentric foreigners.
Those who worry that, if we do not study history, we are doomed to repeat it need not be concerned. Everyone, whether or not he studies history, is doomed to repeat history.
hobby ~ Rhoda Koenig

It is not surprising that prayer malfunctions when we try to make it a domestic intercom to call upstairs for more comforts in the den. ~ John Piper

I have a computer screen near my seat where I monitor the overall health of the vehicle and pick up any problems that might be occurring early on or once we see any kind of a malfunction or anything unusual that's happening, we can look at the data and figure out what that is. ~ Laurel Clark

She looked at Word. "You asked about X-it. He's sleeping. There are no intruders in his consciousness. I've done a sweep. Several installations, their A-I and Super-Recognizers have all been rendered inoperable, but others will quickly pick up the slack. Some will malfunction. All are on high alert. They know contact has been made, that you are still alive, and a global search has begun. No A-I or human Super-Recognizer can penetrate the room that you were in and in which X-it is now sleeping. But he cannot come out of the room until we are ready to return to the second in time when Death saved you. ~ Denny Taylor

But insensate Time is nothing if not cruel and heartless. It corrodes then destroys, so that the man you literally and figuratively looked up to with your chubby face, who scooped you up to cross the street and patted you on the head to laughter, will later look through you from a crooked hospital bed then blindly up at you while wearing makeup in a bargain casket. The people who now surround you generating warmth will disappear leaving only an empty chill; the body you own and the brain it houses will malfunction. And sometimes, especially in Boxing, a twenty four year old can become a man overnight. ~ Sergio De La Pava

Personally, I've gotten so that I now use a kind of two-track analysis. First, what are the factors that really govern the interests involved, rationally considered? And second, what are the subconscious influences where the brain at a subconscious level is automatically conclusions in various ways - which, by and large, are useful - but which often malfunction? One approach is rationality ... And the other is to evaluate the psychological factors that cause subconscious conclusions - many of which are wrong. ~ Charlie Munger

Yes, in a moment of pure brain-to-mouth filter malfunction, the question did slip. I'm not proud ~ Jodi Ellen Malpas

It signified nothing that the raw, male magnetism that emanated from him probably made compasses malfunction in his presence. ~ Gaelen Foley

Hypertension is only a symptom of some other malfunction in your body. It's possible that the elevated blood pressure is a protective effect, enabling the heart to get blood to all the tissues in spite of the disease, whatever that might be. But since we still haven't figured out what that reason is, most physicians just throw drugs at the symptom and consider the problem solved when the high blood pressure goes down. ~ Jordan S. Rubin

I was living in a small town in Indiana working as a telemarketer and a vacuum salesman. I was really bad: the vacuums seemed to always be falling apart. Every time I did a demonstration, I'd say, 'This is the material the astronauts used on Apollo 13.' And no sooner had that come out of my mouth, something would malfunction. ~ Adam Driver

Like the time gunmen stormed our hotel in Cairo. I heard shots coming from the lobby and ran downstairs to check on my dad. By the time I got there, he was just calmly zipping up his workbag while three unconscious gunmen hung by their feet from the chandelier, their robes falling over their heads so you could see their boxer shorts. Dad claimed not to have witnessed anything, and in the end the police blamed a freak chandelier malfunction. ~ Rick Riordan

We all malfunction at times. And it does seem that the timing is never right. ~ Melanie Karsak

Exposure to nature - cold, heat, water - is the most dehumanizing way to die. Violence is passionate and real - the final moments as you struggle for your life, firing a gun or wrestling a mugger or screaming for help, your heart pumps loudly and your body tingles with energy; you are alert and awake and, for that brief moment, more alive and human than you've ever been before. Not so with nature.
At the mercy of the elements the opposite happens: your body slows, your thoughts grow sluggish, and you realize just how mechanical you really are. Your body is a machine, full of tubes and valves and motors, of electrical signals and hydraulic pumps, and they function properly only within a certain range of conditions. As temperatures drop, your machine breaks down. Cells begin to freeze and shatter; muscles use more energy to do less; blood flows too slowly, and to the wrong places. Your sense fade, your core temperature plummets, and your brain fires random signals that your body is too weak to interpret or follow. In that stat you are no longer a human being, you are a malfunction - an engine without oil, grinding itself to pieces in its last futile effort to complete its last meaningless task. ~ Dan Wells

What is your major malfunction? ~ R. Lee Ermey

But Tudor mansions on manicured grounds didn't look right with their grand front doors wide open to the night. It was like a debutante flashing her bra thanks to a wardrobe malfunction. ~ J.R. Ward

Why should a change of paradigm be called a revolution? In the face of the vast and essential differences between political and scientific development, what parallelism can justify the metaphor that finds revolutions in both?

One aspect of the parallelism must already be apparent. Political revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the political community, that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created. In much the same way, scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way. In both political and scientific development the sense of malfunction that can lead to crisis is prerequisite to revolution. ~ Thomas S. Kuhn

We underestimate the power of science, and overestimate the power of personal observation. A peer-reviewed, journal-published, replicated report is worth far more than what you see with your own eyes. Our own eyes can deceive us. People can fool themselves, hallucinate, and even go insane. The controls on publication in major journals are more trustworthy than the very fabric of your brain. If you see with your own eyes that the sky is blue, and Science says it is green, then sir, I advise that you trust in Science.
This is not what most scientists will tell you, of course; but I think it is pragmatically true. Because in real life, what happens is that your eyes have a little malfunction and decide that the sky is green, and science will tell you that the sky is blue. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

Especially with four insanely angry, sword-carrying pirates bearing down on you, followed closely by an alien with a genetic malfunction that posed like Elvis Presley and looked slightly like a cross between a koala and a cuddly dog. ~ Ridley Pearson

Malfunctions are inevitable. It's important to push through them during practice - versus stopping to fix and restart - so that you're prepared for one mid-competition. ~ Amanda Beard

If one writing contributed more than any other to the framework in which this work Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions developed, it would be an essay entitled 'The Use of Knowledge in Society,' published in the American Economic Review of September 1945, and written by F. A. Hayek . In this plain and apparently simple essay was a deeply penetrating insight into the way societies function and malfunction, and clues as to why they are so often and so profoundly misunderstood. ~ Thomas Sowell

Just keep it simple. When you over-think what you're wearing, that's when wardrobe malfunctions tend to happen. ~ Guy Berryman

I think I might have a disorder where your emotions frequently malfunction and a lot of the time you're sitting there feeling something inappropriate. It should be called Emotional Moron Disorder ~ Jesse Andrews

The Machinery are a bunch of fuckwits who believe that the human body is best conceptualised as a machine, and that if behaviour is stripped down to only what is functional, a higher form of humanity will emerge. This means actions that lead to the fulfilment of their basic needs only. Disease is a malfunction. You can see where this goes. They're boring as hell, they only speak to convey information and they are more inflexible than actual machines. They are said to be good spouses and accountants. The one beside me has a distinct self-image, fully identified as a machine. He repeats to himself mentally, 'You are a machine, you are a machine. ~ Tade Thompson

The addict's reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. The dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making; the internal shutdown of vulnerability. Vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens our ability to function. The automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpful child's prime defence mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness. ~ Gabor Mate

The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it. ~ John Perry Barlow

Some call them doomsday ships. These lightspeed ships have no destination at all. They turn their curvature engines to maximum and accelerate like crazy, infinitely approaching the speed of light. Their goal is to leap across time using relativity until they reach the heat death of the universe. By their calculations, ten years within their frame of reference would equal fifty billion years in ours. As a matter of fact, you don't even need to plan for it. If some malfunction occurs after a ship has accelerated to lightspeed, preventing the ship from decelerating, then you'd also reach the end of the universe within your lifetime. ~ Liu Cixin

How was it even possible to know if your brain was malfunctioning, because the very thing you need to think it all through is the very thing that might be playing up in the first place ~ Mike A. Lancaster

Consciousness is simply the brain's neural response to its surrounding environmental stimuli. Hence when the neural circuits malfunction, Consciousness tends to malfunction as well. ~ Abhijit Naskar

A level three asking a level one for advice? What happened? Did your whip malfunction?"
"Stop it, I'm laughing so hard." Rio set down his ale glass, licking the spicy ale from his lips. "Here's the thing. I'm sexy as hell, I have women crawling at my feet, begging for me. I can make them orgasm by looking at them and telling them they want to. What I don't know how to do is . . . touch them."
"What are you talking about? You touch women all the time."
Rio shook his head. "No, I fuck them. I tease them. I spank them. I don't touch them."
"Ah, I think I see what you mean. Who's the woman?"
"A gorgeous, redheaded virgin." Rio broke off. "I don't know why, but she's made me more turned on than I've ever been in my life." No, he did know why. She was beautiful, sweet, lickable and he wanted to fuck her and fuck her until he couldn't take any more.
"Uh-oh," Aiden said.
"What uh-oh? And wipe that grin off your face. ~ Allyson James

Many traumatized individuals are too hypervigilant to enjoy the ordinary pleasures that life has to offer, while other are too numb to absorb new experiences – or to be alert to signs of real danger. When the smoke detectors of the brain malfunction, people no longer run when they should be trying to escape or fight back when they should be defending themselves. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

To be honest, it's probably better if I don't talk. Cute guys make me nervous. Like tongued-tied total-brain-malfunction nervous. All my filters shut off and suddenly I'm telling them about the time I peed my pants in the third grade during a field trip to the maple syrup factory, or how I'm scared of puppets and have mild OCD that could possibly drive me to tidy up your room the moment you turn your head. ~ Elle Kennedy

Life is not a malfunction. It's beautiful. But if you do not see it that way, it's simply because your room needs cleaning. ~ Frederick Lenz

I set out to be a cross between Lenny Bruce and Robert the Bruce - my main thrust was the body and its functions and malfunctions - the absurdity of the thing. ~ Billy Connolly

A new laboratory technique, positron emission tomography, uses radioactively labeled oxygen or glucose that essentially lights up specific and different areas of the brain being activated when a person speaks words or sees words or hears words, revealing the organic location for areas of behavioral malfunction. ~ Floyd Skloot

brain-to-mouth filter malfunction. ~ E.L. James

You realize that running is something I only do on the treadmill while wearing my sneaks and running gear, correct?" She trots next to me, trying to keep up on feet that are clad in expensive suede boots with a heel as tall as my hand.

I walk even faster. "Can't hear you. Embarrassment is short-circuiting my nervous system."

"If embarrassment is causing your malfunction now, I'd love to know what it was that caused you to run across the quad."

As if she doesn't know. Before I can respond, though, Tucker shows up on my right.

"Where's the fire?" he drawls.

Hope grinds to a halt. "Thank God you caught up with us." She runs a hand across her forehead in an exaggerated motion. "I'm not cut out for outdoor exertions. ~ Elle Kennedy

A year ago, she'd been on the verge of appearing on American Idol, but the producers said they were over their quota for brunettes. X Factor wanted her until they found out she'd almost made it onto American Idol. Then there was The Voice. Who would have thought one small wardrobe malfunction would cost her the chance of a lifetime? ~ Katie Graykowski

What's with her?" says the painter.
"She's mad because she's a woman," Jon says. This is something I haven't heard for years, not since high school. Once it was a shaming thing to say, and crushing to have it said about you, by a man. It implied oddness, deformity, sexual malfunction.
I go to the living room doorway. "I'm not mad because I'm a woman," I say. "I'm mad because you're an asshole. ~ Margaret Atwood