Mique Tube Quotes

You were just a boy on a bed in a room, like a kaleidoscope is a tube full of bits of broken glass. But the way I saw you was pieces refracting the light, shifting into an infinite universe of flowers and rainbows and insects and planets, magical dividing cells, pictures no one else knew ... ~ Francesca Lia Block

The dead man's companions at the counter started to their feet, but halted as Voynod with great aplomb turned to face them. "Take care, you dunghill cocks! Notice the fate of your fellow! He died by the power of my magic blade, which is of inexorable metal and cuts rock and steel like butter. Behold!" And Voynod struck out at a pillar. The blade, striking an iron bracket, broke into a dozen pieces. Voynod stood non-plussed, but the bravo's companions surged forward.

"What then of your magic blade? Our blades are ordinary steel but bite deep!" And in a moment Voynod was cut to bits. The bravos now turned upon Cugel. "What of you? Do you wish to share the fate of your comrade?"
"By no means!" stated Cugel. "This man was but my servant, carrying my pouch. I am a magician; observe this tube! I will project blue concentrate at the first man to threaten me!" The bravos shrugged and turned away. Cugel secured Voynod's pouch, then gestured to the landlord. "Be so good as to remove these corpses; then bring a further mug of spiced wine. ~ Jack Vance

I have moments, like a guy saying to me on the tube, "You know, you look a lot like Jessie Ware." ~ Jessie Ware

No test tube can breed love and affection. No frozen packet of semen ever read a story to a sleepy child. ~ Shirley Williams

A cell phone rang from the end table to my right and Kristen bolted up straight. She put her beer on the coffee table and dove across my lap for her phone, sprawling over me.

My eyes flew wide. I'd never been that close to her before. I'd only ever touched her hand.

If I pushed her down across my knees, I could spank her ass.

She grabbed her phone and whirled off my lap. "It's Sloan. I've been waiting for this call all day." She put a finger to her lips for me to be quiet, hit the Talk button, and put her on speaker. "Hey, Sloan, what's up?"

"Did you send me a potato?"

Kristen covered her mouth with her hand and I had to stifle a snort. "Why? Did you get an anonymous potato in the mail?"

"Something is seriously wrong with you," Sloan said. "Congratulations, he put a ring on it. PotatoParcel.com." She seemed to be reading a message. "You found a company that mails potatoes with messages on them? Where do you find this stuff?"

Kristen's eyes danced. "I don't know what you're talking about. Do you have the other thing though?"

"Yeeeess. The note says to call you before I open it. Why am I afraid?"

Kristen giggled. "Open it now. Is Brandon with you?"

"Yes, he's with me. He's shaking his head."

I could picture his face, that easy smile on his lips.

"Okay, I'm opening it. It looks like a paper towel tube. There's tape on the - AHHHHHH! Are you kidding ~ Abby Jimenez

watched the coffee bubble up through the center tube and perforated basket into the small pale globe. A marvelous and sad invention, so roundabout, ingenious, human. It was like a philosophical argument rendered in terms of the things of the world - water, metal, brown beans. I had never looked at coffee before. ~ Don DeLillo

Like the 'test tube babies' born of in vitro fertilization, cloned children need not be identifiable, much less freaks or outcasts. ~ Virginia Postrel

Power
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power. ~ Adrienne Rich

I have a print - you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum - of a photograph of the village street of Thetford, taken in 1868, in which William Smith is not. The street is empty. There is a grocer's shop and a blacksmith's and a stationary cart and a great spreading tree, but not a single human figure. In fact William Smith - or someone, or several people, dogs too, geese, a man on a horse - passed beneath the tree, went into the grocer's shop, loitered for a moment talking to a friend while the photograph was taken but he is invisible, all of them are invisible. The exposure of the photograph - sixty minutes - was so long that William Smith and everyone else passed through it and away leaving no trace. Not even so much of a mark as those primordial worms that passed through the Cambrian mud of northern Scotland and left the empty tube of their passage in the rock.

I like that. I like that very much. A neat image for the relation of man to the physical world. Gone, passed through and away. ~ Penelope Lively

Here, too, I recognized-easily, from firsthand experience, since this kind of thing happened at my age-the heat of the moment, the very instant you knew you should be feeling something but, for various reasons, partly due to inexperience, partly to a desynchronized, muddled teenage constitution, this emotion, however hard you tried to express it, stayed uncomfortably stuck in your heart, only half there and only half felt, just like my love for that girl across the street, the feeling I was trying to coax out of myself the way you might squeeze a toothpaste tube you'd decided to roll from the bottom up but that, distracted, and in a rush, you finally ended up pressing any which way. ~ Jean-Christophe Valtat

I've never quite mastered the art of holding my liquor," she replied. He watched her root around in her purse a moment, before pulling out a tube of lip balm.
As Jonas watched her apply it, he nearly got distracted from her answer. Leaning forward, Jonas murmured, "Can't hold your liquor, huh?"
She replaced the cap and dropped it back into her purse. "Not so much. I tend to get a bit too happy."
His eyebrows shot up and his cock came to full-alert status. Happy--he liked the sound of that. "And that's a bad thing?"
To his utter shock, Deanna blushed. "In my case it is."
Curiosity got the better of him. "Care to explain?"
The waiter returned with the check, forcing Jonas to drop the conversation while he fished out his credit card. Once they were alone again, Jonas waited, hoping Deanna would go into more detail. She didn't disappoint him. "All my inhibitions disappear. It's not a comfortable feeling for me."
She was killing him. An immediate picture of a carefree Deanna sprang to mind. He liked it a hell of a lot. "Most people enjoy letting it all hang out every once in a while. Taking life too seriously leads to an early grave."
"Maybe, but if I suddenly develop the urge, I'd rather be coherent."
"You don't like to give up control," he surmised.
She cocked her head to the side, as if unsure how to respond at first. "It's not that," she said. "I guess if I'm in the mood to go romping naked through a forest, for example, then ~ Anne Rainey

Pasteur himself was absolutely fearless. Anxious to secure a sample of saliva straight from the jaws of a rabid dog, I once saw him with the glass tube held between his lips draw a few drops of the deadly saliva from the mouth of a rabid bull-dog, held on the table by two assistants, their hands protected by leather gloves. ~ Axel Munthe

It is all very wonderful and mysterious, as all life is apt to be if you go a little below the crust, and are not content just to read newspapers and go by the Tube Railway, and buy your clothes ready-made, and think nothing can be true unless it is uninteresting. ~ E. Nesbit

Once, as I passed by a cottage, there came out a lovely fairy child, with two wondrous toys, one in each hand. The one was the tube through which the fairy-gifted poet looks when he beholds the same thing everywhere; the other that through which he looks when he combines into new forms of loveliness those images of beauty which his own choice has gathered from all regions wherein he has travelled. Round the child's head was an aureole of emanating rays. As I looked at him in wonder and delight, round crept from behind me the something dark, and the child stood in my shadow. Straightway he was a commonplace boy, with a rough broad-brimmed straw hat, through which brim the sun shone from behind. The toys he carried were a multiplying-glass and a kaleidoscope. I sighed and departed. ~ George MacDonald

This was what the universities were turning out nowadays. The science-is-a-sacred-cow boys. People who believe you could pour mankind into a test-tube and titrate it, and come up with all the answers to the problems of the human race. ~ Frank M. Robinson

Personally I'm hoping to spend the last years of my life plugged into a real life MMORPG simulation that makes me think and feel like I'm 18 again while my 90 year old body lies in a tube somewhere getting fed thru an IV. Be a great way to finish up a life. ~ Drew Curtis

The two events were probably unrelated, but both jolted Dave the way a sudden air pocket reminds nervous passengers that they're soaring above the clouds in a pressurized metal tube. ~ Dan Sofer

You Don't Know What Love Is
But you know how to raise it in me
like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to
wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.
How to start clean. This love even sits up
and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.
Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want
to get into the fast car, one low to the ground, and drive
to some cinderblock shithole in the desert
where she can drink and get sick and then
dance in nothing but her underwear. You know
where she's headed, you know she'll wake up
with an ache she can't locate and no money
and a terrible thirst. So to hell
with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt
and your tongue down my throat
like an oxygen tube. Cover me
in black plastic. Let the mourners through. ~ Kim Addonizio

Young man, nature is not frightening, it's people who are frightening! You just need to get to know nature and it will become friendly. This creature known as man is of course highly intelligent, he's capable of manufacturing almost anything from rumours to test-tube babies and yet he destroys two to three species every day. This is the absurdity of man. ~ Gao Xingjian

If we were going to determine what was broken in the radios, we needed a power source. With no electricity, this meant batteries. [ ... ] we'd walk to the trading center and look for used cells that had been tossed in the waste bins. [ ... ]
First we'd test the battery to see if any juice was left in it. We'd attach two wires to the positive and negative ends and connect them to a torch bulb. The brighter the bulb, the stronger the battery. Next we'd flatten the Shake Shake carton and roll it into a tube, then stack the batteries inside, making sure the positives and negatives faced in the same direction. Then we'd run wires from each end of the stack to the positive and negative heads inside the radio, where the batteries normally go. Together, this stack of dead batteries usually contained enough juice to power a radio. ~ William Kamkwamba

As soon as the train pulled into the station, the red guards would pour out of doors and windows like toothpaste squirting endlessly from a tube. ~ Yu Hua

You may think that's funny Osama but you never can squeeze every last bit of pride out of a human being. It's like a tube of toothpaste. You can twist it and you can crush it but there's always a tiny bit left isn't there? ~ Chris Cleave

It's only young people who make giant, life-altering decisions based on what other people might think, and it's because they don't see their own death looming. Their fear is, "Will my family, friends and lovers admire me?" whereas an older person's fear is that vision of themselves lying in a hospital bed, a breathing tube up their nose and the thought running through their heads, "Why didn't I at least try to do what I wanted to do, while I had the chance? ~ PatriciaV. Davis

The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Permission Granted"

You do not have to choose the bruised peach
or misshapen pepper others pass over.
You don't have to bury
your grandmother's keys underneath
her camellia bush as the will states.

You don't need to write a poem about
your grandfather coughing up his lung
into that plastic tube - the machine's wheezing
almost masking the kvetching sisters
in their Brooklyn kitchen.

You can let the crows amaze your son
without your translation of their cries.
You can lie so long under this
summer shower your imprint
will be left when you rise.

You can be stupid and simple as a heifer.
Cook plum and apple turnovers in the nude.
Revel in the flight of birds without
dreaming of flight. Remember the taste of
raw dough in your mouth as you edged a pie.

Feel the skin on things vibrate. Attune
yourself. Close your eyes. Hum.
Each beat of the world's pulse demands
only that you feel it. No thoughts.
Just the single syllable: Yes ...

See the homeless woman following
the tunings of a dead composer?
She closes her eyes and sways
with the subways. Follow her down,
inside, where the singing resides. ~ David Allen Sullivan

There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor
both black and white
through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Danny and the Memories was the band at the root of Crazy Horse. They were a vocal group with Danny Whitten, Ralphie, Billy, and a guy named Ben Rocco. When I recently saw their old video of "Land of a Thousand Dances" on You-Tube, I realized that is is truly the shit. You know, I looked at it maybe twenty times in a row. Even though Danny was amazing and he held the Horse together in the early days, I did not know how great Danny was until I saw this! The moves! What an amazing dancer he was. His presence on that performance is elevating! He is gone, and no one can change that. We will never see and hear where he was going. I am telling you, the world missed one of the greatest when Danny and the Memories did not have a NUMBER ONE smash record back in the day. They were so musical, with great harmonies, and Danny was a total knockout! I am so moved by this that it could make me cry at any time. This is one of those many times when words can't describe the music.

Danny and the Memories eventually transformed into the Rockets; they were playing in this old house in Laurel Canyon, and I somehow connected with them while Buffalo Springfield was at the Whiskey. We had a lot of pots jams in the house. Later on I saw Danny and the guys at somebody's house in Topanga. After that I asked if Danny, Billy, and Ralphie would play on a record with me. We did one day, practicing in my Topanga house, and it sounded great. I named the band Crazy Horse and away we went. The Rockets ~ Neil Young

No one can ever use his heart to listen or touch or feel or see or smell. It's just a lump of muscle pumping mechanically inside your ribs. It has no will and no ability to do anything but go on pumping until it gives up and withers away or is choked by some disease. Your spinal cord, on the other hand, feels. The central nervous system pours out from the spinal cord, and with it one feels pain. Pain is the most trustworthy sensation a human being can know because it teaches us what hurts. With the spinal cord, one can hear what will hurt, smell the sting of suffering, taste it, feel it, and see the world with new eyes. I learned a long time ago not to follow my heart, the hunk of meat flexing in the chest. I trust the tube locked up in a column of bone, the tube that shows me what pain is. ~ Joshua S. Porter

In one department of his [Joseph Black's] lecture he exceeded any I have ever known, the neatness and unvarying success with which all the manipulations of his experiments were performed. His correct eye and steady hand contributed to the one; his admirable precautions, foreseeing and providing for every emergency, secured the other. I have seen him pour boiling water or boiling acid from a vessel that had no spout into a tube, holding it at such a distance as made the stream's diameter small, and so vertical that not a drop was spilt. While he poured he would mention this adaptation of the height to the diameter as a necessary condition of success. I have seen him mix two substances in a receiver into which a gas, as chlorine, had been introduced, the effect of the combustion being perhaps to produce a compound inflammable in its nascent state, and the mixture being effected by drawing some string or wire working through the receiver's sides in an air-tight socket. The long table on which the different processes had been carried on was as clean at the end of the lecture as it had been before the apparatus was planted upon it. Not a drop of liquid, not a grain of dust remained. ~ Henry Peter Brougham

Every single person I've cared for who did not have a feeding tube and became dehydrated has died more comfortably than every single person I've cared for with a feeding tube that remained in use until their death. ~ Heidi Telpner

So while you're getting ripped apart head to toe as you fall into a black hole, you will also extrude through the fabric of space and time, like toothpaste squeezed through a tube. To all the words in the English language that describe ways to die (e.g., homicide, suicide, electrocution, suffocation, starvation) we add the term spaghettification. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Tell me, are you still hung up on that boy?' 'Excuse me?' Schuyler asked, holding a test tube. 'Nothing.' Kingsley shrugged innocently. 'If that's how you like to play it. ~ Melissa De La Cruz

Water splashed over my jeans, and I yelped as something burned my skin.
We examined my leg. Tiny holes marred my jeans where the drops had hit, the material seared away, the skin underneath red and burned. It throbbed as if I'd jabbed needles into my flesh.
"What the heck?" I muttered, glaring into the storm. It looked like ordinary rain - gray, misty, somewhat depressing. Almost compulsively, I stuck my hand toward the opening, where water dripped over the edge of the tube.
Ash grabbed my wrist, snatching it back. "Yes, it will burn your hand as well as your leg," he said in a bland voice. "And here I thought you learned your lesson with the chains."
Embarrassed, I dropped my hand and scooted farther into the tube, away from the rim and the acid rain dripping from it. "Guess I'm staying up all night," I muttered, crossing my arms. "Wouldn't want to doze off and find half my face melted off when I wake up. ~ Julie Kagawa

Forget scientists. The next space launch we should send up painters, poets and musicians. I'd be more interested in what they discover than anything that takes place in a test tube. ~ James Rozoff

The second thing that happened is, DNA analysis is much more sophisticated. All you have to do now is spit in a test tube and you find out all kind of things in six weeks - where they are from in Africa or Europe. You can prove or disprove the fundamental African-American myth that you descended from a Cherokee great, great grandmother. ~ Henry Louis Gates

The Behaviorist cannot find consciousness in the test-tube of his science. ~ John B. Watson

And he just sat back and stared at the tube, almost interested in what was happening, trying to find the ability to believe in that lie so he could believe the one within. ~ Hubert Selby, Jr.

People in this town saw only what they'd all agreed to see, they believed what was on the tube or in the morning papers half of them read while they were driving to work on the freeway, and it was all their dream about being wised up, about the truth setting them free. ~ Thomas Pynchon

The most popular form of atheism is a philosophy called naturalism. Naturalism is the view that science and science alone determines what exists. What exists is what our best scientific theories of the world require. If something is not required by our best scientific theories of the world, then it does not exist. But this is devastating for ethics because moral values are not required by science. Science is morally neutral. You cannot find moral values in a test tube. So it follows immediately, from the perspective of naturalism, that moral values do not really exist. They are just subjective illusions of human beings. ~ William Lane Craig

I lay in bed last night and thought of G.P. I thought of being in bed with him. I wanted to be in bed with him. I wanted the marvellous, the fantastic ordinariness of him. His promiscuity is creative. Vital. Even though it hurts. He creates love and life and excitement around him; he lives; the people he loves always remember him.
I've always felt like it sometimes. Promiscuous. Anyone I see, even just some boy in the Tube, some man, I think what he would be like in bed. I look at their mouths and their hands, put on a prim expression and think about them having me in bed.
Even Toinette, getting into bed with anyone. I used to think it was messy. But love is beautiful, any love. Even just sex. ~ John Fowles

What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour - landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ... ~ Virginia Woolf

Typically, only about 2 percent of the American populace tunes in to PBS's 'Nova' series - the most successful science show on the tube. 'Survivor' and 'X Factor' get twice the ratings. ~ Seth Shostak

And so to read is, in truth, to be in the constant act of creation. The old lady on the bus with her Orwell, the businessman on the Tube with Patricia Cornwell, the teenager roaring through Capote -- they are not engaged in idle pleasure. Their heads are on fire. Their hearts are flooding. With a book, you are the landscape, the sets, the snow, the hero, the kiss -- you are the mathematical calculation the plots the trajectory of the blazing, crashing zeppelin. You -- pale, punchable reader -- are terraforming whole worlds in your head, which will remain with you until the day you die. These books are as much a part of you as your guts and your bone. And when your guts fail and your bones break, Narnia, or Jamaica Inn, or Gormenghast will still be there; as pin-sharp and bright as the day you first imagined them -- hiding under the bedclothes, sitting on the bus. Exhausted, on a rainy day, weeping over the death of someone you never met, and who was nothing more than words until you transformed them with your time, and your love, and the imagination you constantly dismiss as "just being a bit of a bookworm. ~ Caitlin Moran

Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can't short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can't patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action. ~ Anne Lamott

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them. ~ Robin McKinley