Speeding Cars Quotes

*One clue that there's something not quite real about sequential time the way you experience it is the various paradoxes of time supposedly passing and of a so-called 'present' that's always unrolling into the future and creating more and more past behind it. As if the present were this car - nice car by the way - and the past is the road we've just gone over, and the future is the headlit road up ahead we haven't yet gotten to, and time is the car's forward movement, and the precise present is the car's front bumper as it cuts through the fog of the future, so that it's now and then a tiny bit later a whole different now, etc. Except if time is really passing, how fast does it go? At what rate does the present change? See? Meaning if we use time to measure motion or rate - which we do, it's the only way you can - 95 miles per hour, 70 heartbeats a minute, etc. - how are you supposed to measure the rate at which time moves? One second per second? It makes no sense. You can't even talk about time flowing or moving without hitting up against paradox right away. So think for a second: What if there's really no movement at all? What if this is all unfolding in the one flash you call
the present, this first, infinitely tiny split-second of impact when the speeding car's front bumper's just starting to touch the abutment, just before the bumper crumples and displaces the front end and you go violently forward and the steering column comes back at your chest as if shot out of s ~ David Foster Wallace

A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel. ~ Hilary Mantel

It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper. And now that I can take it . . . now that I can finally do it . . . I'm really raring to go.

I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed.

"Freedom is an illusion," Bennett would have said and, in a way, I too would have agreed. Sanity, moderation, hard work, stability . . . I believed in them too. But what was that other voice inside of me which kept urging me on toward zipless fucks, and speeding cars and endless wet kisses and guts full of danger? What was that other voice which kept calling me coward! and egging me on to burn my bridges, to swallow the poison in one gulp instead of drop by drop, to go down into the bottom of my fear and see if I could pull myself up? Was it a voice? Or was it a thump? Something even more primitive than speech. A kind of pounding in my gut ~ Erica Jong

Back in 1998, the days were so much more spacious. When she woke up in the morning, the day rolled out in front of her like a long hallway for her to meander down, free to linger over the best parts. Days were so stingy now. Mean slivers of time. They flew by like speeding cars. Whoosh! When she was pulling back the blankets to hop into bed each night, it felt as if only seconds ago she'd been throwing them off to get up. ~ Liane Moriarty

Like all kids who want to be in action movies, I want to jump out of a speeding car, shoot guns, slide out the side in slow motion like a John Woo movie. ~ Dallas Roberts

If one day speed kills me, do not cry because I was smiling ~ Paul Walker

It should also be born in mind that the research on 'movement' and the dynamic outlook on the world, which were the basis of Futurist theory, in no way required one to paint nothing but speeding cars or ballerinas in action; for a person who is seated, or an inanimate object, though apparently static, could be considered dynamically and suggest dynamic forms. I may mention as an example the 'Portrait of Madame S.' (1912) and the 'Seated Woman' (1914). ~ Gino Severini

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too - leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been. ~ Margaret Atwood

A speeding bullet from a speeding car could not penetrate his heart ~ Gregory C. Warner

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. The Turks and Haredim, the showy Greek and Russian processions -- everyone seemed to be in costume, reenacting the miraculous past. ~ Stewart O'Nan

How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

It's strange - there's a public persona of me that does nothing for me: the side of me where it's 'US Weekly,' where 12 cars sit outside my house because of who I married. That side never shuts off. I would like that to shut off sometimes, yes. ~ Pete Wentz

The rush is there and my body tingles. Sounds funny but it's true. It's better than shafting a bird. Better than speeding. Mark's head is a mess but the bleeding has stopped. My knuckles are bruised and Rod's eyes have gone a bit mental looking. We join the crush trying to get into the ground and we can hear the constant chant of CHELSEA. This is what life's all about. Tottenham away. Love it. ~ John King

To me, the Seventies were very inspirational and very influential ... With my whole persona as Snoop Dogg, as a person, as a rapper. I just love the Seventies style, the way all the players dressed nice, you know, kept their hair looking good, drove sharp cars and they talked real slick. ~ Snoop Dogg

Normally death came at night, taking a person in their sleep, stopping their heart or tickling them awake, leading them to the bathroom with a splitting headache before pouncing and flooding their brain with blood. It waits in alleys and metro stops. After the sun goes down plugs are pulled by white-clad guardians and death is invited into an antiseptic room.
But in the country death comes, uninvited, during the day. It takes fishermen in their longboats. It grabs children by the ankles as they swim. In winter it calls them down a slope too steep for their budding skills, and crosses their skies at the tips. It waits along the shore where snow met ice not long ago but now, unseen by sparkling eyes, a little water touches the shore, and the skater makes a circle slightly larger than intended. Death stands in the woods with a bow and arrow at dawn and dusk. And it tugs cars off the road in broad daylight, the tires spinning furiously on ice or snow, or bright autumn leaves. ~ Louise Penny

I'm sure there was some bloated-ego thing happening that I wasn't able to recognize, but I didn't feel like it would last for long. The weird thing is that long before we ever had success on a commercial level, I had already developed a sense of entitlement. I had an unnecessary, unwarranted, unfounded, self-centered sense of entitlement from childhood. In elementary school, I always felt like I should be the president of the school and that I was somehow above the law of the school and I could break the rules. When I moved in with my father, he was arrogant and full of himself, and that carried on to me, so I always had this sense of entitlement and a semi-false sense of self. I would steal because I had that sense, whether it was houses or cars or furniture or cactuses, whatever I understand how people can be cold and ruthless criminals, because I remember at that point in my life, I did not think of the consequences for anybody else involved except me. And the consequences for me were that I got what I wanted. ~ Anthony Kiedis

The world, with all its impossible variegation and the basic miracle of its existence, draws most mourners out of their grief and back into itself. The homosexual forsythia blooms; the young Irish dancers in Killarney dance, their arms as rigid as shovel handles; secret deals are done involving weapons or office space or crude oil or used cars or drugs; new lovers, believing they will never really have to get up, lie down together; the Large Hadron Collider smashes the Higgs boson into view; snow drapes its white stoles on the bare limbs of winter; the crack of the bat swung by a hefty Dominican pulls a crowd to its feet in Boston; bricks for the new hospital in Phnom Penh are laid in true courses; the single-engine Cessna lands safely in an Ohio alfalfa field during a storm. How can you resist? The true loss in only to the dying, and even the won't feel it when the dying's done. ~ Daniel Menaker

Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world. ~ Diane Ackerman

I'm not good at happy, lightweight kind of music. I'm not really good at pop music. 'Cars' is probably the only true pop song I ever wrote. I wish I could write more, but I'm not very good at it. ~ Gary Numan

I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor. Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment's high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple's ranch, the freeway sniper who feels "real bad" about picking off the family of five, the hustlers, the insane, the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations, the sullen lurkers in doorways, the lost children, all the ignorant armies jostling in the night. Acquaintances read The New York Times, and try to tell me the news of the world. I listen to call-in shows. ~ Joan Didion

I have one of those real old American built cars. The kind that just PUNCHES through accidents. ~ Kevin Rooney

She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear topless - an interesting logic was at work there. ~ J.G. Ballard

They were still out on the sidewalk of West Eighty-sixth Street, the taxi pulling way, when Louise put down her travel bag, raised both arms and declared herself in love with New York City. 'It's exactly as I imagined it!' She let her arms fall and looked out at the street, at the honking, halting parade of cars, headlights bright in the dusking air. She turned to Cora with glistening eyes. 'I've always known it, my whole life. This is where I'm meant to be. ~ Laura Moriarty

Positively, the delinquent behavior seems to speak clearly enough. It asks for what we can't give, but it is in this direction we must go. It asks for manly opportunities to work, make a little money, and have self-esteem; to have some space to bang around in, that is not always somebody's property; to have better schools to open for them horizons of interest; to have more and better sex without fear or shame; to share somehow in the symbolic goods (like the cars) that are made so much of; to have a community and a country to be loyal to; to claim attention and have a voice. These are not outlandish demands. Certainly they cannot be satisfied directly in our present system; they are baffling. That is why the problem is baffling, and the final recourse is to a curfew, to ordinances against carrying knives, to threatening the parents, to reformatories with newfangled names, and to 1,100 more police on the street. ~ Paul Goodman

He stopped at an intersection, panting, rubbing at the twinge in his hamstrings, looking around, though he knew no cars were coming in either direction.
Dropping forward at the waist Martin admitted that he was fucking himself up. Dr Leonowsky told him: hurting yourself is an articulation of self-disgust. It helps no one, prevents nothing. This wasn't a glorious loss of control, he was fooling himself, it was self-harm. ~ Denise Mina

Then, a historic event changed everything for my family: Henry Ford created the Model T. Others soon followed suit, inventing their own automobiles. The people who had been buying and renting carts started buying trucks or small cars instead. Despite my family's expertise in their craft, nobody wanted a car with wooden wheels. Very quickly, within the space of 10 years, their business started to collapse. ~ Simon Dudley

How we get power, how cars are powered, when the technology and resources to have something that is infinitely better, we still use old-school technology. We're still using that same exact structure. ~ Dana Brunetti

Hey, Zee," I said. "I take it that you can fix it, but it'll be miserable, and you'd rather haul it to the dump and start from scratch."
"Piece of junk," groused Zee. "What's not rusted to pieces is bent. If you took all the good parts and put them in a pile, you could carry them out in your pocket." There was a little pause. "Even if you only had a small pocket."
I patted the car. "Don't you listen to him," I whispered to it. "You'll be out of here and back on the road in no time."
Zee propelled himself all the way under the car so his head stuck out by my feet. "Don't you promise something you can't deliver," he snarled.
I raised my eyebrows, and said in dulcet tones, "Are you telling me you can't fix it? I'm sorry. I distinctly remember you saying that there is nothing you can't fix. I must have been mistaken, and it was someone else wearing your mouth."
He gave a growl that would have done Sam credit, and pushed himself back under again, muttering,"Deine Mutter war ein Cola-Automat!"
"Her mama might have been a pop machine," I said, responding to one of the remarks I understood even at full Zee-speed. "Your mama . . ." sounds the same in a number of languages.
"But she was a beauty in her day." I grinned at Gabriel. "We women have to stick together. ~ Patricia Briggs

The first time I walked alone, thirteen, I was terrified. A twig snapped under my shoe; my heart revved wildly. I'd walked these sidewalks a thousand times with my mom, yet I was scared by all her fears. Don't talk to strangers, walk quickly past parked cars, look both ways, all ways, always. Be alert. There was so damn much to remember to stay safe. ~ Aspen Matis

The announcement yesterday follows Obama's 2011 agreement with automakers to build cars that average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. But as important as fuel efficiency in automobiles may be, power plants are the largest concentrated source of carbon dioxide emissions. The EPA's new power-plant rules will reduce overall emissions by at least 80 times more metric tons of carbon than the regulations for cars. Almost all credible reports suggest the world is passing the point where it can reverse, or eliminate, global warming. But that only means it's more urgent than ever to push for historic carbon reductions. Nonetheless, many politicians - including the usual global-warming deniers and those from both parties in fossil-fuel-producing states - rushed to claim the new rules would cause steep economic damage. ~ Anonymous

Two things that are not long for this world: dogs that chase cars and professional golfers who putt for pars. ~ Lee Trevino

We ran three cars last year. Unfortunately, as time went on, we did have to let a few people go, which we regretted, but just because of the situation. ~ Bobby Rahal

When the time comes, & I hope it comes soon, to bury this era of moral rot & the defiling of our communal, social, & democratic norms, the perfect epitaph for the gravestone of this age of unreason should be Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's already infamous quote:
"I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing... as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it's on booze or women or movies."
Grassley's vision of America, quite frankly, is one I do not recognize. I thought the heart of this great nation was not limited to the ranks of the plutocrats who are whisked through life in chauffeured cars & private jets, whose often inherited riches are passed along to children, many of whom no sacrifice or service is asked. I do not begrudge wealth, but it must come with a humility that money never is completely free of luck. And more importantly, wealth can never be a measure of worth.
I have seen the waitress working the overnight shift at a diner to give her children a better life, & yes maybe even take them to a movie once in awhile - and in her, I see America.
I have seen the public school teachers spending extra time with students who need help & who get no extra pay for their efforts, & in them I see America.
I have seen parents sitting around kitchen tables with stacks of pressing bills & wondering if they can afford a Christmas gift for their children, & i ~ Dan Rather

First machine kicked man's ass physically, then machine started taking over the left-brain when Deep Blue bested Kasparov in chess, and then finally the machine fully took over the left-brain when Watson beat the great Ken Jennings on Jeopardy. And now these terminators are coming after right-brained activities too - the creative and emotional side of the brain. Pretty soon we'll all be driving cars with bumper stickers that say, "Robots make better lovers. ~ Jarod Kintz

People ask for this life, but they don't really understand what comes with it. People just see the outside and that looks good - big houses, cars, girls, but you never see how the person is feeling deep down inside. Me personally, being a man, I'm going to feel better displaying all of this and pouring my heart out on each record. ~ Bow Wow

I know a lot about cars, man. I can look at any car's headlights and tell you exactly which way it's coming. ~ Mitch Hedberg

It's all based around the idea that basically VW cars are space age. They're the worst cars to use in action movie, because all the things you want to traditionally do in an action movie they won't allow you to do, because they make you drive safely if you want to or not. ~ Paul W. S. Anderson

A tremendous amount of my brain was fitted with noticing new things out where nothing was familiar: buildings, types of cars, types of people, accents, plants, packaged-food items. Before I left my brain never had to register my bedroom, my husband, mailbox, apple core, alarm clock, walls. My brain just said " - , - , - , - , - , - , - , - ," to these things, because a brain lets you keep going, keep not seeing the same walls, underwear, husband, doorknobs, ceiling, husband, husband. A brain can be merciful in this way: sparing you the monotony of those monotonies, their pitiful cozy. A brain lets all the borefilled days shrink like drying sponges until they're hard and ungiving ~ Catherine Lacey

My commitment to stand behind Datsun gained the trust of dealers and sold cars. My motto was: Dealers make money first, and then we make money. ~ Yutaka Katayama

Now I'm having to live with sales of around 50,000 per album - but I'm pretty content with my place in the general scheme of things, even if it's meant I don't drive a fancy car and can't afford grand vacations. ~ David Knopfler

Consider how many times you've seen either a crashed plane or a crashed car. It's entirely possible you've seen roughly as many of each - yet many of those cars were on the road next to you, whereas the planes were probably on another continent, transmitted to you via the Internet or television. In the United States, for instance, the total number of people who have lost their lives in commercial plane crashes since the year 2000 would not be enough to fill Carnegie Hall even half full. In contrast, the number of people in the United States killed in car accidents over that same time is greater than the entire population of Wyoming. Simply ~ Brian Christian

I look at the car park and myself and Dave Watson come in with our old cars, and these young lads come in with their new Porches. I think that society has changed, there seems to be a lack of respect nowadays. ~ Richard Gough

Flight is many things. Something clean and swift, like a bird skimming across the sky. Or something filthy and crawling; a series of crablike movements through figurative and literal slime, a process of creeping ahead, jumping sideways, running backward.
It is sleeping in fields and river bottoms. It is bellying for miles along an irrigation ditch. It is back roads, spur railroad lines, the tailgate of a wildcat truck, a stolen car and a dead couple in lovers' lane. It is food pilfered from freight cars, garments taken from clotheslines; robbery and murder, sweat and blood. The complex made simple by the alchemy of necessity ~ Jim Thompson

And at night the river flows, it bears pale stars on the holy water, some sink like veils, some show like fish, the great moon that once was rose now high like a blazing milk flails its white reflection vertical and deep in the dark surgey mass wall river's grinding bed push. As in a sad dream, under the streetlamp, by pocky unpaved holes in dirt, the father James Cassidy comes home with lunchpail and lantern, limping, redfaced, and turns in for supper and sleep.

Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliaged sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, aureating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of Lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river's cunning unseen lips, murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky.

'Mag-gie!' the kids are calling under the railroad bridge where they've been swimming. The freight train still rumbles over a hundred cars long, the engine threw the flare on little white bathers, little Picasso horses of the night as dense and tragic in the gloom comes my soul looking for what was there that disappeared and le ~ Jack Kerouac

In our youth, we may have ridiculed the cost-of-living-index family, with their house, two cars, and two kids, but today we are pro-family. We have seen the damage done by the previous generation and have doubled our efforts when it comes to caring for our families. Our children come first. ~ Gudjon Bergmann