Spinovisual Reflexes Quotes

I literally felt gutted, as if someone had hollowed me out, removed my core. Patients in the final stage of dementia revert to an almost neonatal state, their brains so atrophied they can only breathe and digest, suck and pout. That was how I felt. I continued to function, but only at the most basic level, my existence little more than a collection of primitive reflexes. ~ Kylie Ladd

What did that word mean to me? Earth? I thought of the great bustling cities where I would wander and lose myself, and I thought of them as I had thought of the ocean on the second or third night, when I had wanted to throw myself upon the dark waves. I shall immerse myself among men. I shall be silent and attentive, an appreciative companion. There will be many acquaintances, friends, women - and perhaps even a wife. For a while, I shall have to make a conscious effort to smile, nod, stand and perform the thousands of little gestures which constitute life on Earth, and then those gestures will become reflexes again. I shall find new interests and occupations; and I shall not give myself completely to them, as I shall never again give myself completely to anything or anybody. Perhaps at night I shall stare up at the dark nebula that cuts off the light of the twin suns, and remember everything, even what I am thinking now. With a condescending, slightly rueful smile I shall remember my follies and my hopes. ~ Stanisław Lem

Gathering her bags, Alani started around the side of her house to the front door.
She drew up short at the sight of Jackson sprawled on her porch steps, a cowboy hat on his head, mirrored sunglasses hiding his eyes.
He didn't move, and neither did she.
He had an utterly relaxed look about him. But then, Jackson had perfected a deceptively indolent pose that hid razor-sharp reflexes and phenomenal speed.
Last night, all night, he'd been far from indolent.
Breathing fast, Alani studied him. His continued stillness suggested sleep. Even when she inched closer, he didn't move.
He was now clean-shaven. A white T-shirt was pulled across his wide chest and shoulders, and hung looser around his taut abs.
Awareness stiffened her knees.
Memories of touching his body, tasting hit hot flesh, sent a tide of sensation through her veins. She swallowed audibly - and stared some more.
He sat with his long legs loose, one foot braced on a step, the other stretched out, his elbows back, his breathing deep and even.
Alani licked her lips and started to slowly, silently retreat.
"Don't make me chase you, darlin'."
Shock snapped her shoulders back. The big faker! He'd been watching her watch him. Teeth set, Alani asked, "What are you doing here?"
He gave a slow smile. "Whatever it takes . . . ~ Lori Foster

Kade caught the condom with a quick flick of his hand. Yeah, great reflexes for a drunk, right? He arched his eyebrows up at me.
"It's a condom, Kade, because if you're going to act like a dick, you might as well dress like one," I explained, smiling so wide my cheeks actually hurt. ~ Christine Zolendz

To design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap ~ Alain De Botton

The Staging

In the weeks after my mother's death, I sleep
Four or five hours a night, often interrupted
By dreams, and take two or three naps a day.

It seems like enough. I can survive if I keep
This sleep schedule as it has been constructed
For me. But if it seems my reflexes are delayed,

Or if I sway when I walk, or weep or do not weep,
Please don't worry. I'm not under destruction.
My grief has cast me in a lethargic cabaret.

So pay the cover charge and take your seat.
This mourning has become a relentless production
And I've got seventy-eight roles to play. ~ Sherman Alexie

Caring is a reflex ... You live, you help. ~ Ram Dass

Babies are equipped at birth with a number of instinctive reflexes and behavior patterns that cause them to spend their first several years trying to kill themselves. If your home contains a sharp, toxic object, your baby will locate it; if your home contains no such object, your baby will try to obtain one via mail order. ~ Dave Barry

This scene came from the writing I did with Bill in New York, working out of an office in the Director's Guild building. I generally came in early and worked for a couple of hours before Bill arrived. He would then spend about an hour puttering around the office and smoking cheroots, then would eventually settle in next to me at the desk, read what I had written, and begin offering suggestions and improvements. Sometimes I would print out a scene and then mark it up - as with the scene above - as Bill tried out Phil's dialogue, and we tweaked lines accordingly. Our afternoons were often spent walking around New York running Bill's errands while talking about general script issues. He was a warm and wonderful host to me during my New York visit. There was an afternoon where he and Tom Davis paired up against me and Dan Aykroyd in a spontaneous basketball game, the four of us sneakerless and slipping around in our socks. I made my bones with Bill that day when he hurled a basketball at my head and I managed to duck. "Good reflexes," he said. I think of these two weeks with Bill as one of the more surreal and memorable experiences of my writer's life. ~ Danny Rubin

Rather than trust her reflexes, she programmed for auto. And hoped the jokers down in Maintenance hadn't played any pranks with the mechanism. Still, she was too tired to care if she ended up in Hoboken. ~ J.D. Robb

It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else. ~ Noam Chomsky

I just put the reflexes in the proper direction. ~ Angelo Dundee

For me chivalry isn't dead; it's an involuntary reflex. ~ Jim Butcher

First your legs go. Then you lose your reflexes. Then you lose your friends ~ Willie Pep

He stared down at her for a moment, wanting to heal every
cut on her soft skin. But he couldn't, not yet. He needed to get her,
and her car, far from this place so neither he nor Kate would be
implicated in any way with the gruesome murder site.
It also meant he would have to drive.
In all his years, he had never driven an automobile. The closest he
had come was watching various assistants through the years as they
chauffeured him. He wasn't sure he could even remember how to
start the car, but right now he had no choice.
Grudgingly, he got into the driver's seat, and finding the lever
underneath, he pushed it back so he sat comfortably behind the
wheel. After trying three different keys, he found one that slipped into
the ignition.
From what he had seen over the past hundred years, driving was
not a complex operation, and he was an immortal with reflexes far
more keen than a human man.
How difficult could it be?
He turned the key and nearly jerked the wheel off the steering
column when the car surprised him by lurching forward. The car went
silent. The engine wasn't running. What was he doing wrong?
He stared at the gearshift, wondering if he should move it. His
frustration reared up, but his agitation would not make the car drive
itself. He had to keep a cool head.
Not knowing what else to try, he pushed one of the pedals at his
feet to the floor and turne ~ Lisa Kessler

The golden rule is work fast. As for framing, composition, focus-this is no time to start asking yourself questions: you just have to trust your intuition and the sharpness of your reflexes. ~ Jacques-Henri Lartigue

You speak of being afraid. Yet fear is something you generate in yourself, from your mind's lack of control; and you will learn to look at it and discover for yourself when you choose to be afraid. The first thing you must do is acknowledge that the fear is yours, and you can bid it come and go at will. Begin with this; whenever you feel fear that prevents choice say to yourself: 'What has made me feel fear? Why have I chosen to feel this fear preventing my choice, instead of feeling the freedom to choose?' Fear is a way of not allowing yourself to choose freely what you will do next; a way of letting your body's reflexes, not the needs of your mind, choose for you ... [Y]ou have chosen to do nothing, so that none of the things you fear will come upon you; so your choices are not made by you but by your fear ... I cannot promise to free you of your fear, only that a time will come when you are the master, and fear will not paralyze you. ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley

Tisiphone stood silent and helpless in Alicia's mind. It was all she could do to keep Alicia's blind savagery from dragging Megaira under and clouding the lightning-fast reflexes which kept them both alive.
She'd never guessed what she was creating, never imagined the monster she'd spawned. She'd seen the power of Alicia DeVries's mind without recognizing the controls which kept that power in check, and only now had she begun to understand fully what she had done.
She had shattered those controls. The compassion and mercy she'd feared no longer existed, only the red, ravening hunger. Yet terrible as that might be, there was worse. She'd found the hole Alicia had gnawed through the wall about her inner rage, and she couldn't close it. Somehow, without even realizing it was possible, Alicia had reached beyond herself. She'd followed Tisiphone's connection to the Fury's own rage, her own destruction, and made that incalculable power hers as well.
For the first time in millennia, Tisiphone faced another as powerful as herself, a mortal mind which had stolen the power of the Furies themselves, and that power had driven it mad. ~ David Weber

Some say that everything that is called a psychical law is nothing but the psychological reflex of physical combinations, which is made up of sensations joined to certain central cerebral processes ... It is contradicted by the fact of consciousness itself, which cannot possibly be derived from any physical qualities of material molecules or atoms. ~ Wilhelm Wundt

Taken together, it's almost a sure sign. The letters float off the page when you read, right? That's because your mind is hardwired for ancient Greek. And the ADHD-you're impulsive, can't sit still in the classroom. That's your battlefield reflexes. In a real fight, they'd keep you alive. As for the attention problems, that's because you see too much, Percy, not too little. Your senses are better than a regular mortal's. ~ Rick Riordan

Now he had chanced on one of he standard hard-on sessions of the shower, as on both sides of him and across the room three queens sported horizontal members which they turned around from time to time to conceal or display, barely exchanging looks as they resolved. The old men took no interest in this activity, knowing perhaps from long experience that it rarely meant anything or led anywhere, was a brief and helpless surrender to the forcing-house of the shower. In a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the room to the other with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine. ~ Alan Hollinghurst

I don't think I've gotten any smarter, but your reflexes slow down before you do something stupid when you're older. ~ Kris Kristofferson

You can map out a light plan or a life plan, but when the action starts, it may not go the way you planned, and you're down to the reflexes you developed in training. That's where roadwork shows - the training you did in the dark of the mornin' will show when you're under the bright lights. ~ Joe Frazier

The racing driver's mind has to have the ability to have amazing anticipation, coordination, and reflex. Because of the speed the car goes. ~ Emerson Fittipaldi

Of the primary emotions, fear is the one that bears most directly on survival. Children show fear. Adults try not to, maybe because it's shameful, or, in some circumstances, dangerous. The fear response is automatic, though, and your body runs through its reflexes whether you want it to or not. ~ Sebastian Junger

Indeed ... but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there's no sound except wind. Screw
it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes.

But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right ... and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it ... howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica ... letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge ... The Edge ... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others -- the living -- are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.

But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcy ~ Hunter S. Thompson

In a moment of crisis we don't act out of reasoned judgment but on our conditioned reflexes. We may be able to send men to the moon, but we'd better remember we're still closely related to Pavlov's dog. Think about driving a car: only the beginning driver thinks as he performs each action; the seasoned driver's body works kinesthetically ... A driver prevents an accident because of his conditioned reflexes; hands and feet respond more quickly than thought. I'm convinced the same thing is true in all other kinds of crisis, too. We react to our conditioning built up of every single decision we've made all our lives; who we have used as our mirrors, as our points of reference. If our slow and reasoned decisions are generally wise, those which have to be made quickly are apt to be wise, too. If our reasoned decisions are foolish, so will be those of the sudden situation. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Find one thing. One thing that's beautiful. Anything. Anything that shows you you're not one of them."

His eyes were back on me studying my face silently. Panic raced through me. It wasn't working. I couldn't do this. We were going to have to get out of here, regardless of whatever state he was in. I knew he'd leave, too. If i had learned anything, it was that Dimitri's warrior instincts were still working. If I said danger was coming, he would respond instantly, no matter the self-torment he felt. I didn't want him to leave in despair. I wanted him to leave here one step closer to being the man I knew he could be. I wanted him to have one less nightmare.

It was beyond my abilities, though. I was no therapist. I was about to tell him we had to get out of there, about to make his soldier reflexes kick in, when he suddenly spoke. His voice was barley a whisper. "Your hair."

"What?" for a second, I wondered if it was on fire or somthing. I touched a stray lock. No, nothing was wrong exept that it was a mess. I'd bound it up for battle to prevent the strgoi from using it as a handhold, like Angeline had. Much of it had come undone in the struggle, though.

"Your hair," repeated Dimitri. His eyes were wide, almost awestruck. "your hair is beautiful. ~ Richelle Mead

Ideally, our muscles should obey our will. Reasonably, our will should not be dominated by the reflex actions of our muscles. ~ Joseph Pilates

Today's news consists of aggregates of fragments. Anyone who has taken part in any event that has subsequently appeared in the news is aware of the gross disparity between the actual and the reported events. We also learn frequently of prefabricated and prevaricated evens of a complex nature purportedly undertaken for the purposes wither of suppressing or rigging the news, which in turn perverts humanity's tactical information resources. All history becomes suspect. Probably our most polluted resource is the tactical information to which humanity spontaneously reflexes. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

I have bad reflexes. I was once run over by a car being pushed by two guys. ~ Woody Allen

The experience of sexual love is therefore no longer to be sought as the repetition of a familiar ecstasy, prejudiced by the expectation of what we already know. It will be the exploration of our relationship with an ever-changing, ever unknown, partner, unknown because he or she is not in truth the abstract role or person, the set of conditioned reflexes which society has imposed, the stereotyped male or female which education has led us to expect. ~ Alan W. Watts

The male is just a bundle of conditioned reflexes, is incapable of a mentally free response, is tied to his early conditioning, is determined completely by his past experiences. His earliest experiences are with his mother, and he is throughout his life tied to her. It never becomes completely clear to the male that he is not part of his mother, that he is him and she is her. ~ Valerie Solanas

I resented the reference to my super ninja moves as "sneaking around." "Displaying superior stealth" or "using viper-like reflexes" would have been much better ~ Emma Raveling

My eyesight's gone, my reflexes are shot, and I can't stay awake, but thank God I can still drive. ~ Robert Breault

At high school I was never comfortable for a minute. I did not know about Lonnie. Before an exam, she got icy hands and palpitations, but I was close to despair at all times. When I was asked a question in class, any simple little question at all, my voice was apt to come out squeaky, or else hoarse and trembling. When I had to go to the blackboard I was sure - even at a time of the month when this could not be true - that I had blood on my skirt. My hands became slippery with sweat when they were required to work the blackboard compass. I could not hit the ball in volleyball; being called upon to perform an action in front of others made all my reflexes come undone. I hated Business Practice because you had to rule pages for an account book, using a straight pen, and when the teacher looked over my shoulder all the delicate lines wobbled and ran together. I hated Science; we perched on stools under harsh lights behind tables of unfamiliar, fragile equipment, and were taught by the principal of the school, a man with a cold, self-relishing voice - he read the Scriptures every morning - and a great talent for inflicting humiliation. I hated English because the boys played bingo at the back of the room while the teacher, a stout, gentle girl, slightly cross-eyed, read Wordsworth at the front. She threatened them, she begged them, her face red and her voice as unreliable as mine. They offered burlesqued apologies and when she started to read again they took up rapt postures, mad ~ Alice Munro

I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one's skin caused in other people…That year in New Jersey lives in my mind as though it were the year during which, having an unsuspected predilection for it, I first contracted some dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptom of which is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels…There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood–one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die. ~ James Baldwin

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Prayer is the way that all the things we believe in and that Christ has won for us actually become our strength. Prayer is the way that truth is worked into your heart to create new instincts, reflexes, and dispositions. ~ Timothy Keller

My reflexes were now quicker than my emotion, and it was only after I had pinned her that I felt some dark, primordial excitement pulse through me. I made eye contact with her, and whatever she saw in them made her flinch. I could feel my anger growing, feeding on itself. "You're right Doris." I spoke low so only she could hear me. "I am a freak. But I'm also a predator, and you, Doris, are most definitely prey. Just remember that next time you want to pick a fight. ~ Laura Thalassa

Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Locke drew in a rasping breath to spew some more damn fool craziness. Jean, with the reflexes that kept him alive when blades were drawn, clamped a hand over Locke's mouth before he could speak and pushed his head back down against his pillow. "I can't agree to anything on Locke's behalf, but I want us to hear your proposal. Tell us what the job is." "It's political," said Patience. "Mmmmph mmph," said Locke, struggling in vain against Jean's arm. "Mmmph fckhnnng fmmmph!" "He wants to hear more," said Jean. "He says he's very excited to hear the whole thing. ~ Scott Lynch

The mental act of sensation which issues in reflex movement is so simple as to defy analysis. ~ Samuel Alexander

Magic is life,' and that's not quite right. You think that the study of magic, the understanding of it, gives you some sort of better grasp of life. Unfortunately, even I worked out that this isn't quite true; it's a bit skewed, see? We understand this. Magic is not life. Life is magic. Even the boring, plodding, painful, cold, cruel parts, even the mundane automatic reflexes, heart pumping, lungs breathing, stomach digesting, even the uninteresting dull processes of walking, swinging the knees and seeing with eyes, this is magic. This is what makes magic. ~ Kate Griffin

We often disguise our reflexes as deliberate actions. ~ Mason Cooley

Thought reflexes get conditioned very strongly, and they are very hard to change. And the also interfere. A reflex may connect to the endorphins and produce an impulse to hold that whole pattern forther. In other words, it produces a defensive reflex. Not merely is it stuck because it's chemically so well built up, but also there is a defensive reflex which defends against evidence which might weaken it. Thus it all happens, one reflex after another after another. It's just a vast system of reflexes. And they form a 'structure' as they get more rigid. ~ David Bohm

The growth of the nervous system from beginning to end is dominated by 'a totally integrated matrix, and not a progressive integration of primarily individuated units'. The organism is not a sum of its reflexes, but on the contrary 'the mechanism of the total pattern is an essential component of the performance of the part, i.e. the reflex'. The stimulus-response scheme cannot explain even embryonic behaviour, because movements appear long before the motor neurons of the reflex arc are connected with the sensory neurons. This centrifugal mode of development means that the individual acts on its environment before it reacts to its environment. ~ Arthur Koestler

Where true Love burns Desire is Love's pure flame;
It is the reflex of our earthly frame,
That takes its meaning from the nobler part,
And but translates the language of the heart. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge