Silverlock Aluminum Quotes

We're so self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I'm tired of this shit. I'm tired of f-ing Earth Day. I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn't going anywhere. WE are!

We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styro ~ George Carlin

She stared at the faded tile floor before her feet, but knew his every step around her small kitchen. When Martin touched the coffee cup patterned curtains he must assume she'd made, her fingers throbbed. When his eyes slid across the flowery aluminum water bottle at the table, her throat cracked with thirst.
The radio clicked off.
The silence of the room soaked up her raspy breaths, her pounding heart, her ache, and stirred them around the one man she ever longed for in a way that changes how you taste the world.
Her desire swirled in a pulsing, betraying, blurry hook, and encouraged him to move closer.
Martin obeyed. ~ Kim Bongiorno

I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism - of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow. ~ Joseph Epstein

Plaster holo screens against a mountain a full kilometer high, covering it until it glitters with a half million dancing images. Each holo used a quarter of a million pixels to shape its image, so the array musters immense representational power. Now compress those screens on a sheet of aluminum foil a millimeter thick. Crumple it. Stuff it into a grapefruit. That is the brain, a hundred billion neurons firing at varying intensities. Nature had accomplished that miracle, ~ Gregory Benford

I watch people throw aluminum cans in the trash, and I think of all the stories I've heard about the over-mining of aluminum, the erosion that happens, and the trees that fall down. ~ Dar Williams

In the middle of the cavernous cargo hold was a simple, aluminum coffin with a small American flag draped over it. We were bringing another American soldier, just killed, home to his family and final resting place. The starkness of his coffin in the center of the hold, the silence except for the din of the engines, was a real time cold reminder of the consequences of decisions for which we Senators share responsibility. ~ John F. Kerry

MINDY TRUDGED to her computer. Today's shift began at 2:10 p.m. Her schedule matched Watney's every day. She slept when he slept. Watney simply slept at night on Mars, while Mindy had to drift forty minutes forward every day, taping aluminum foil to her windows to get any sleep at all. ~ Andy Weir

And the camera position, the organization, looking for repeating forms, shapes, trying to set up a visual rhythm seemed to come very natural. All of a sudden I was in a forest of aluminum and steel rather than a forest that we might think of in a traditional sense. ~ John Sexton

My dad worked for 40 years in an aluminum plant. I don't think he ever got aluminum block. ~ Jess Walter

Meat!" he said scornfully. "I'm a vegetarian."
You eat cheese enchiladas and aluminum cans," I reminded him.
Those are vegetables. ~ Rick Riordan

The information glut has become a ruling cliche. As all resources - from energy to information - become more abundant, the presure of economic scarcity falls ever more heavily on one key residual, and that single shortage looms ever more stringent and controlling. The governing scarcity of the information economy is time: the shards of a second, the hours in a day, the years in a life, the latency of memory, the delay in aluminum wires, the time to market, the time to metastasis, the time to retirement. ~ George Gilder

Stuart and Jenna exchanged rings-platinum band for Stuart, and platinum with diamonds for Jenna, but they could have been aluminum or plastic. Expensive rings did not guarantee a happy life together. ~ Elin Hilderbrand

I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them. ~ Sylvia Plath

When fluoridated water was first introduced as a potential prevention against tooth decay, it was a natural product: calcium fluoride, to be exact. Now if there's fluoride in our water, it is sodium fluoride, which is literally a toxic waste product of the aluminum industry. ~ Amy Myers

This got us thinking, since autistic individuals have been shown to have abnormal amygdalae, perhaps there is also aluminum on the amygdala in children with autism. ~ James Morcan

A friend of mine who spent years in India with a great teacher from the ancient forest tradition tells a moving story... Years after his beloved teacher had died, he was back in India staying at the home of his guru's most devoted Indian disciple.

"I must show you something," the disciple said to my friend one day. "This is what he left for me." My friend was excited, of course. Any trace of his teacher was nectar to him. He watched as the elderly man opened the creaking doors of an ancient wooden wardrobe and took something from the back of the bottom shelf. It was wrapped in an old, dirty cloth.

"Do you see?" he asked my friend.

"No. See what?"

The disciple unwrapped the object, revealing an old, beat-up aluminum pot, the kind of ordinary pot one sees in every Indian kitchen. Looking deeply into my friend's eyes, he told him, "He left this for me when he went away. Do you see? Do you see?"

"No, Dada," he replied. "I don't see."

According to my friend, Dada looked at him even more intensely, this time with a mad glint in his eyes.

"You don't have to shine," he said. "You don't have to shine." He rewrapped the pot and put it back on the bottom shelf of the wardrobe.

My friend had received the most important teaching... He did not have to transform himself in the way he imagined: He just had to learn to be kind to himself. If he could hold himself with the care Dada showed while clutching t ~ Epstein Mark

No one would suggest that we can adequately investigate what makes something an acid, or what makes something aluminum, by bringing our pretheoretical intuitions about these things into reflective equilibrium by way of armchair theorising. ~ Hilary Kornblith

You're from where?"
"Lay'en. It's near Salt Lake City."
"Spell that for me."
"Um, that would be S-A-L-T-"
"No, the other one. The city you're from."
"Oh. L-A-Y-T-O-N."
"Ah-Lay-ton."
That's what I said."
"No you didn't. You just said, 'Lay'en.'"
"So I did. But just go ahead and pronounce 'aluminum' for me, Mr. British Man. How are you going to defend that piece of insanity? Why don't you spell it and count syllables and see if your al-um-in-ium makes sense whatsoever?"
He bowed his head. "Touché... ~ Shannon Hale

The stupid line was so long that aluminum could have rusted in the time it took them to reach the halfway point. ~ Brandon Sanderson

It's been years since I tried to count the stars. I spent a lot of long teenage nights staring up there trying to count them. I needed to know their number. I remember waiting until the whole house was quiet, until my parents' soft voices in the room next to mine had stopped. I remember sneaking out the window in my nightie, no slippers on my feel, and lying down in the middle of the lawn. It was cold but I didn't care. I would stare at the sky, but the fucking things move. I tried to imagine the sky as a grid, drawing lines from objects on the ground. I tried scanning it with an aluminum-foil tube. I tried everything. Nothing works. ~ Toni Jordan

Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley - for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, "planned" communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird's talons, taking your breath away. 'The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,' Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth. ("Family") ~ Joyce Carol Oates

It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table - how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years ago. Men have cut the isthmus of Panama and joined the two oceans; they have bored tunnels that run below rivers; built aluminum planes that fly from Frisco to Manila; sent music over the air and photographs over wires; but never, when the heartbeat of their own kind has once stopped, never when the spark of life has fled, have they been able to reanimate the mortal clay with that commonest yet most mysterious of all processes; the vital force. And this man thinks he can - this man alone, out of all the world's teeming billions! ("Jane Brown's Body") ~ Cornell Woolrich

I have made some headway in addressing these questions, however, and succeeded in explaining how it is that the category of knowledge might play an important role in empirical theories. To the extent that talk of knowledge can be shown to play an explanatory role in such theories, the analogy I wish to make with paradigm natural kinds such as acids and aluminum starts to make a good deal of sense. This is, of course, connected with the issue of the role of intuitions in philosophy. ~ Hilary Kornblith

Entrepreneurs in the United States and Europe finally figured out how to separate aluminum from minerals cheaply and also how to produce it on an industrial scale. ~ Sam Kean

Aluminum is the most common metal in the earth's crust, almost twice as abundant as iron. And one common class of aluminum minerals, collectively called alum, has been in use since at least Greek and Roman times. ~ Sam Kean

Mr. Smith yelled at the doctor, What have you done to my boy? He's not flesh and blood, he's aluminum alloy! The doctor said gently, What I'm going to say will sound pretty wild. But you're not the father of this strange looking child. You see, there still is some question about the child's gender, but we think that its father is a microwave blender. ~ Tim Burton

I am constantly mystified by what John ends up remembering… I just don't understand why he's able to hang on to information like that, while so many other more important memories evaporate.
Then again, I suppose so much of what stays with us is often insignificant. The memories we take to the ends of our lives have no real rhyme or reason, especially when you think of the endless things that you do over the course of a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. All the cups of coffee, hand-washings, changes of clothes, lunches, goings to the bathroom, headaches, naps, walks to school, trips to the grocery store, conversations about the weather - all the things so unimportant they should be immediately forgotten.
Yet they aren't. I often think of the Chinese red bathrobe I had when I was twenty-seven years old; the sound of our first cat Charlie's feet on the linoleum of our old house; the hot rarefied air around aluminum pot the moment before the kernels of popcorn burst open. I think of these things as often as I think about getting married or giving birth or the end of the Second World War.
What is truly amazing is that before you know it, sixty years go by and you can remember maybe eight or nine important events, along with a thousand meaningless ones. How can that be?
You want to think there's a pattern to it all because it makes you feel better, gives you some sense of a reason why we're here, but there really isn't any. People look for God in thes ~ Michael Zadoorian

I followed this one pig with number '05049,' all the way up until the end and to what products it's made of. And in these years, I met all kinds people like, for instance, farmers and butchers, which seems logical. But I also met aluminum mold makers, ammunition producers and all kinds of people. ~ Christien Meindertsma

Camped somewhere deep in an impenetrable crag of the immense Powder River Country during the late autumn of 1856, more than likely in the shadow of the sacred Black Hills, one imagines the thirty-five-year-old Red Cloud stepping from his tepee to listen to the bugle of a bull elk in its seasonal rut. Around him women haul water from a crystalline stream as cottonwood smoke rises from scores of cook fires and coils toward a sky the color of brushed aluminum. The wind sighs, and a smile creases his face as he observes a pack of mounted teenagers collect wagers in preparation for the Moccasin Game, or perhaps a rough round of Shinny. His gaze follows the grace and dexterity of one boy in particular, a slender sixteen-year-old with lupine eyes. The boy is Crazy Horse, and the war leader of the Bad Faces makes a mental not to keep tabs on this one. ~ Bob Drury

No surprise, China leads the world in the consumption of steel, copper, aluminum, lead, stainless steel, gold, silver, palladium, zinc, platinum, rare earth compounds, and pretty much anything else labeled "metal." But China is desperately short of metal resources of its own. For example, in 2012 China produced 5.6 million tons of copper, of which 2.75 million tons was made from scrap. Of that scrap copper, 70 percent was imported, with most coming from the United States. In other words, just under half of China's copper supply is imported as scrap metal. That's not a trivial matter: copper, more than any other metal, is essential to modern life. It is the means by which we transmit power and information. ~ Adam Minter

When a couple turns domestic, for the first while having to talk about the need for aluminum eaves troughing and other matters only gets in the way of the relationship. Then, magically, these negotiations take the place of the relationship. ~ Marni Jackson

The discordant principals' duet is like the nocturnal emission of a cancerous horse tethered in its dolorous slumber to a barbed aluminum fence during an electrical storm. ~ Sophie McManus

walked down the hill and stuck out my thumb, standing in the same spot where I had stood when I hitchhiked to high school. My clothes and gear were in my official Boy Scout backpack, a big old thing on an aluminum rack, with my sleeping bag and pup tent lashed to it. I'd been a serious Boy Scout - I joined at 12, after my failed Little League career, and took to it immediately, racking up merit badges and making it all the way to Eagle Scout. I knew first aid, how to start a fire in the rain, how to make a mean camp stew, and lots of other useful stuff. And I didn't mind sleeping outside, which was a good thing, since there was no way I could afford motels. My official Boy Scout sheath knife, a serious piece of business with a leather-wrapped handle and a five-inch blade, was also in the pack; I'd move it into my boot by the end of the first day. ~ David Noonan

I thought again of the mountain climbers we had met as we traveled. They were young and wore brightly colored clothing so as to be easily spotted should they become lost in the snow. They knew the right path to follow to the peaks. The heights were already festooned with aluminum pins; all they had to do was attach their lines to them, and they could climb safely. They were there for a holiday adventure, and on Monday they would return to their jobs with the feeling that they had challenged nature and won. But this wasn't really true. The adventurous ones were those who had climbed there first, the ones who had found the routes to the top. ~ Paulo Coelho

I grew up on comic books. 'X-Men' was my favorite team; Wolverine was my guy. At 8 years old, I dressed up as Wolverine with Adamantium claws that I made out of aluminum! ~ Brian Tee