Sonic Screwdriver Quotes

[The Doctor] pulled the thing out of Prince Boris's mouth, waving it around. 'Oh. Blimey. This is not a spatula. What is it?'
I [Amy] stared at the stubby thing. It looked like the world's chunkiest novelty gift pen ... I coughed. 'That, Doctor, is the sonic screwdriver.'
'Ah,' Dr Smith boggled. 'Right. Is it? Oh dear.' Another pause. 'What does it do?'
'Well ... it screws things ... sonically. On a good day, we fight off monsters with it.'
'Monsters, eh?' Dr Smith nodded gravely and ... pointed it at the doorway like a gun and said, hopefully, 'Pew! Pew! Pew!' He turned back to me. 'Like that?'
'Other way up,' I said gently. ~ James Goss

Real spies don't have all the cool gadgets you see in the movies," Dak said, watching Sera struggle with the lock. "Though I sure wish we had a sonic screwdriver right about now. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

I wanted to say, "I'm the Doctor and this is my companion," but I doubted Sophie was a fan of the long-running BBC series. Forget the TARDIS and the sonic screwdriver, the Doctor's best gadget was the psychic paper. I can't tell you how many times I wished I had some. ~ Kevin Hearne

The sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who might have worked, having been canonically established as being ineffective on wood, but nobody had ever figured out how to use the controls on the blasted thing. ~ Jim C. Hines

Dalek Sec: The Doctor will open the Ark!
The Doctor: Ha ha, the Doctor will not.
Dalek Sec: You have no way of resisting!
The Doctor: Mm, you got me there. [withdrawing the sonic screwdriver] Although, there is always this.
Dalek Sec: A sonic probe?
The Doctor: [with jocular bravado] That's screwdriver.
Dalek Sec: It is harmless.
The Doctor: Ohh, yes. Harmless is just the word: that's why I like it! Doesn't kill, doesn't wound, doesn't maim. But I'll tell you what it does do: It is very good at opening doors. [He pushes the switch and the doors explode inwards; Jake's squad and some Cybermen run in and open fire.] ~ Russell T. Davies

Dropped in from a possible future via a Timeslip, and was currently trying to mend his left leg with a pair of pliers and a sonic screwdriver someone had left behind in the bar. I ~ Simon R. Green

I know as soon as we hit the sweet spot, an intangible instant when the music gains control of fluttering wings to take real flight - soaring, swooping, diving and rising in the small studio. No single one of us is in control. The wall of sound is its own thing - lifted, weight shared, by five pairs of hands. I shake hair from closed eyes just because I need to move. If I let the pressure build and build and keep it in my hands, in the guitar, I'll explode. We carve out places for the verses, the chorus repetitions, and the coda. We line the edges of sonic space with rhythm and melody and stand Scope's sharp samples at each corner. ~ Emma Trevayne

I'm pretty good with a screwdriver. I don't mean the drink, though actually, now I come to think of it ... ~ Justin Richards

The music defied classification. If I had been writing a
review of the show, I would have labeled it progressive,
guitar-driven rock 'n' roll. But the guitars made sounds guitars
didn't always make. Symphonic sounds. Sacred sounds.
The music dug in so deep you didn't hear it so much as feel
it, reminding me of a dream I used to have when I was a kid,
where I would be standing on a street corner, I would jump
into the air, flap my arms, and soar up into the sky.
That's the only way I could describe the music.
It was the sonic equivalent of flight. ~ Tiffanie DeBartolo

I've been trying to challenge myself to be more explicit. I've always liked punk rock and Sonic Youth. I make that music privately, but I've never released it. ~ Sufjan Stevens

I've been into Sonic Youth since junior high school. I think I kind of have ADD, so it's good music for ADD because it just throws you in different directions all the time. I really like Kim Gordon's voice and Thurston Moore's voice, and I like the guitars going off on tangents. ~ Norman Reedus

The sonic world of the foyer and vestibule comes at him distorted and from a distance, as if someone's moving furniture underwater. ~ Dominic Smith

At 18, I moved to L.A. with my heavy metal band Avant Garde, which was very much influenced by Metallica. At 19, I got a job at Tower Records, and everything started to change very quickly. I started listening to the Velvet Underground, Pixies, early Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and also earlier music like the Beatles. ~ Rivers Cuomo

Years have passed since that day
And I have long since forgotten
the crush I had on that one
beautiful, young
flaming woman.

I guess it goes to show that we can't
get what we please
if we always did
Well then
where would we be? (Fiery Princess, A Short Sonic Poem) ~ Logan Pethtel

I'm not really much of an actor, so when I started on 'The Daily Show,' I was just trying to adopt the faux authority of a newsperson. Having a British accent definitely gave me a sonic leg up on that because there is a faux authority to the British accent in and of itself. ~ John Oliver

I never sleep before 4 A.M. and usually play 'Sonic the Hedgehog' computer games before bed. I like Sonic - he reminds me of Happy, my hamster that died. I used to stay up and watch Happy. ~ Martin Millar

Men believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time. Bobby Shaftoe learned most of his practical knowledge – how to fix a car, butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip – from the latter type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can see the desperation spread over such a man's face as he listens to himself speak. ~ Neal Stephenson

The entire island of Martha's Vineyard has gone Obama crazy. There's even a cocktail that they've named after Barack Obama. It's called the Obamarita. Not to be confused with a cocktail inspired by John McCain, the Cosmopoligrip. And then there was one a couple of years ago inspired by George W. Bush, the Mojidiot. Of course, there was the Bill Clinton Screwdriver. ~ David Letterman

Sonic the hedgehog is a beautiful statement on capitalism. You spend your whole life collecting yellow rings and then hit one spike and lose them all. And there is a fat man who wants to kill you. ~ Thom Yorke

That you freed a possible criminal by trading away your brother to a warlock who looks like a gay sonic the Hedgehog and dresses like the childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. ~ Cassandra Clare

I'm a little left of center, for sure, with Angels & Airwaves. But even when I get really weird, it's not that weird. It's not like some obscure Sonic Youth record or something. We don't take it quite that far. But what we do like are crescendos, and we do like when a song catches you off guard and it gives you the chills up and down your arms. ~ Tom DeLonge

Essentially a joke is creating an idea, whether sonic or visual, whether it's something musical or a traditional joke. ~ Reggie Watts

Working in theoretical systems can take away the juice. It can also be very beautiful, but when you're trying to satisfy a theoretical principle rather than a sonic reality, then it can become dry. ~ Pauline Oliveros

First Blood Rambo knife by Jimmy Lile. It features a saw, a guard with straight and Philips screwdriver heads, holes in the guard for a wrist lanyard, ~ David Morrell

To me, the grotesque is like a sonic manifestation of reality. I don't know how you could look out onto our world and see only beauty. And I like beautiful things. I like the aesthetically harmonious. But I am much more attracted to something that is off-kilter. It is a truer reflection of not only nature, but the human spirit - the state of the world. I just think everything feels a little off. ~ Carrie Brownstein

He had already decided that X rays, sonic probes, neutron beams, and all other nondestructive means of investigation would be brought into play before he called up the heavy artillery of the laser. It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but perhaps men were barbarians, beside the creatures who had made this thing. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

Diversity is its most consistent characteristic ... The characteristics of freely improvised music are established only by the sonic-musical identity of the person or persons playing it. ~ Derek Bailey

Each member does whatever they want with the song and it totally changes it from whatever idea I hear around it. It turns it into a Sonic Youth song and completely away from it being a solo song. ~ Thurston Moore

The way I figured, I was just a kid, and if I could take it apart, they surely could put it back together. Then my mom would walk in the kitchen and see me standing on a chair at the counter, holding a screwdriver with disassembled components all over the place. 'What the heck's going on?' 'I'm intrigued how the blender works. ~ Tim Dorsey

With headphones on, you can hear and appreciate extreme detail and subtlety, and the lack of uncontrollable reverb inherent in hearing music in a live room means that rhythmic material survives beautifully and completely intact; it doesn't get blurred or turned into sonic mush as it often does in a concert hall. ~ David Byrne

Mandelbrot changed the way ibm's engineers thought about the cause of noise. bursts of errors had always sent the engineers looking for a man sticking a screwdriver somewhere. ~ James Gleick

I remember how the book talked about the pressure to please and be perfect that every woman falls into and then projects onto her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough. No woman can ever outrun what she has to do. No one can be all things - a mother, a good partner, a lover, as well as a competitor in the workplace. ~ Kim Gordon

Something strange and chemical was happening to the Gray Man. Once, he'd been stabbed with a screwdriver - Phillips head, bright blue handle - and falling in love with Maura Sargent was exactly the same. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Tool," William said, ... "As in a device to perform or facilitate mechanical or manual labor?"
"That's right Encyclopedia Britannica. Or in layman's terms: screwdriver, hammer - "
"How about a wrench," William interrupted,"
"You've got a quick learner on your hands, Bryn," Paul said ... "Sure, wrench works just fine as well," ... "Whatever blows your skirt up buddy." ...
"Well a wrench would come in handy right now," William mused. "Because you definitely have a couple screws loose. ~ Nicole Williams

It was the best kind of class to have in the afternoon, an exercise in almost pure language, demanding nothing more than fractional consciousness since there wasn't the slightest hope of understanding what those poems were all about, and we drowsed and smiled, happy in our own little angel-infancy, snug in our Thamesian punt, and when the sonic belch of experimental jets went ripping across the desert we came close to applauding the symbolism; but a trembling applause it would have been, for we knew that it signaled the death of our drowsy England and the beginning of a new mortality, just months away now, the start of job, mate, child, desk, drink, sit, squat, quiver, die. ~ Don DeLillo

You have to love writing a song and architecture. You have to give it a form. It is my job to create a sonic landscape. I like to create ambiance and atmosphere. The writing is the intimate part of it. It is a sketch. The production is the whole painting. ~ Keren Ann

Linguistic and musical sound systems illustrate a common theme in the study of music-language relations. On the surface, the two domains are dramatically different. Music uses pitch in ways that speech does not, and speech organizes timbre to a degree seldom seen in music. Yet beneath these differences lie deep connections in terms of cognitive and neural processing. Most notably, in both domains the mind interacts with one particular aspect of sound (pitch in music, and timbre in speech) to create a perceptually discretized system. Importantly, this perceptual discretization is not an automatic byproduct of human auditory perception. For example, linguistic and musical sequences present the ear with continuous variations in amplitude, yet loudness is not perceived in terms of discrete categories. Instead, the perceptual discretization of musical pitch and linguistic timbre reflects the activity of a powerful cognitive system, built to separate within-category sonic variation from differences that indicate a change in sound category. Although music and speech differ in the primary acoustic feature used for sound category formation, it appears that the mechanisms that create and maintain learned sound categories in the two domains may have a substantial degree of overlap. Such overlap has implications for both practical and theoretical issues surrounding human communicative development.

In the 20th century, relations between spoken and musical sound systems were la ~ Aniruddh D. Patel

In sound we are born, in sound we are healed ~ Mehtab Benton

A very tall bearded guy was standing in a doorway, smoking a cigarette. "Hey", he said.
"Hi," I said. "Excuse me, do you rehearse here?"
"Yeah," he said, extending his hand and saying, almost formally, "Gibby Haynes. I'm in the Butthole Surfers."
I shook his hand. "Moby," I said. "I just moved upstairs."
"Are you an artist?"
"No, a musician."
"Oh, cool. Welcome to the building."
"Do you know who else has spaces here?" I asked.
"Well, there's us and Iggy and Sonic Youth and Helmet and Sean Lennon and the Beastie Boys and some other people," he said as someone behind him started making a wall of feedback. ~ Moby

Sensitivity isn't being wimpy. It's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom. ~ Jeff Buckley

My heartbeat is a pulse, and it pumps out sonic vibrations that resonate with her mind as she lays her head on my chest. Listen silently and you can hear the frequency of love. ~ Jarod Kintz

I was a rapper and a DJ, and if you wanted to be involved in hip-hop, you had to be involved in the sonic, the kinetic and the visual aspects. The visual was graffiti. ~ Adam Mansbach

Have we ever considered that Godly morals might be the precision-crafted keys that effortlessly turn the tumblers of life? And have we considered that anything else is something like a rough screwdriver trying to force a lock open? ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Isabelle looked dubious. "Mom and Dad won't be pleased if they find out."
"That you freed a possible criminal by trading away your brother to a warlock who looks like a gay Sonic the Hedgehog and dresses like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Band? Simon inquired. "No, probably not. ~ Cassandra Clare

Inflation hasn't ruined everything. A dime can still be used as a screwdriver. ~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

There's only so many small shows you can do. A lot of the smaller things are more side project things. Not everything is appropriate for Sonic Youth to do. ~ Kim Gordon

I can appreciate that," says Henry. He's adding to the list. I look over his shoulder. Sex Pistols, the Clash, Gang of Four, Buzzcocks, Dead Kennedys, X, the Mekons, the Raincoats, the Dead Boys, New Order, the Smiths, Lora Logic, the Au Pairs, Big Black, Pil, the Pixies, the Breeders, Sonic Youth ...
Henry, they're not going to be able to get any of that up here." He nods, and jots the phone number and address for Vintage Vinyl at the bottom of the sheet. "You do have a record player, right?"
My parents have one," Bobby says. Henry winces.
What do you really like?" I ask Jodie. I feel as though she's fallen out of the conversation during the male bonding ritual Henry and Bobby are conducting.
Prince," she admits. Henry and I let out a big Whoo! And I start singing "1999" as loud as I can, and Henry jumps up and we're doing a bump and grind across the kitchen. Laura hears us and runs off to put the actual record on and just like that, it's a dance party. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

He'd discovered the tables now and was staring at the pile. It looked like the work of a miniaturist beaver: a heap of objects that was illegible yet clearly not random. To Sasha's eye, it almost shook under its load of embarrassments and close shaves and little triumphs and moments of pure exhilaration. It contained years of her life compressed. The screwdriver was at the outer edge. Sasha moved closer to Alex, drawn to the sight of him taking everything in. ~ Jennifer Egan

When the Bolide Fragmentation Rate shot up through a certain level on Day 701, marking the formal beginning of the White Sky, a number of cultural organizations launched programs that they had been planning since around the time of the Crater Lake announcement. Many of these were broadcast on shortwave radio, and so Ivy had her pick of programs from Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Tiananmen Square, the Potala Palace, the Great Pyramids, the Wailing Wall.

After sampling all of them she locked her radio dial on Notre Dame, where they were holding the Vigil for the End of the World and would continue doing so until the cathedral fell down in ruins upon the performers' heads and extinguished all life in the remains of the building. She couldn't watch it, since video bandwidth was scarce, but she could imagine it well: the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, its ranks swollen by the most prestigious musicians of the Francophone world, all dressed in white tie and tails, ball gowns and tiaras, performing in shifts around the clock, playing a few secular classics but emphasizing the sacred repertoire: masses and requiems. The music was marred by the occasional thud, which she took to be the sonic booms of incoming bolides. In most cases the musicians played right through. Sometimes a singer would skip a beat. An especially big boom produced screams and howls of dismay from the audience, blended with the clank an ~ Neal Stephenson

I'm quite handy with a screwdriver. I like making and fixing things. ~ Raza Jaffrey