Time Machine Key Quotes

I've got a running machine which I try and use, but it's just finding the time. Don't get me wrong, I love cake and ice cream; I'm the kind of girl that, if I want something, I'll have it. ~ Rebecca Ferguson

I always thought the time machine is the device that's missed most. Without even saying it out loud, that's the thing people want the most: The ability to take whatever it is that went wrong and fix it. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I go to the movies whenever I get the chance, because the movie theater is like the woods. It's another place that's like a time machine. ~ Carol Rifka Brunt

I'll leave you guys to get acquainted. Somebody show Leo to dinner when it's time?"
"I got it," one of the girls said. Nyssa, Leo remembered. She wore camo pants, a tank top that showed off her buff arms, and a red bandanna over her mop of dark hair. Except for the smiley-face Band-Aid on her chin, she looked like one of those female action heroes, like any second she was going to grab a machine gun and start mowing down evil aliens.
"Cool," Leo said. "I always wanted a sister who could beat me up. ~ Rick Riordan

I remember the beginnings of the Kurzweil reading machine. I was one of the first to meet Ray Kurzweil and purchase the reading machine in Boston. To think that the machine was at least two and a half large suitcases at the time, and now you have a camera and it takes a picture and you have sound. ~ Stevie Wonder

For to him, and nearly all the educated youth of that epoch, the stars were cruel things; though they glowed in the great dome every night, they were an enormous and ugly secret; they uncovered the nakedness of nature; they were a glimpse of the iron wheels and pulleys behind the scenes. For the young men of that sad time thought that the god always came from the machine. They did not know that in reality the machine only comes from the god. In short, they were all pessimists, and starlight was atrocious to them--atrocious because it was true. All their universe was black with white spots. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Inspired by the punched railway tickets of the time, an inventor by the name of Herman Hollerith devised a system of punched manila cards to store information, and a machine, which he called the Hollerith Machine, to count and sort them. Hollerith was awarded a patent in 1889, and the government adopted the Hollerith Machine for the 1890 census. No one had ever seen anything like it. Wrote one awestruck observer, "The apparatus works as unerringly as the mills of the Gods, but beats them hollow as to speed." Another, however, reasoned that the invention was of limited use: "As no one will ever use it but governments, the inventor will not likely get very rich." This prediction, which Hollerith clipped and saved, would not prove entirely correct. Hollerith's firm merged with several others in 1911 to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. A few years later it was renamed - to International Business Machines, or IBM. ~ Brian Christian

The thing is, you make choices. You do some things and you don't do others and in the end there's not much point in asking what different choices might have gained you, and lost you, unless you have a time machine. You become those choices, you embody them ...
I'd known I couldn't stay, just as I'd known years before I couldn't be with him, even as I'd gone on pretending I had a choice. I was who I was, and I wanted what I already had. ~ Leah Stewart

The nose can't help catchin' what the ears get sick with. Yessir, rock bands just sweat evil. Evil's been around for a long time, ever since rocks started getting real hot and making a lot of noise as they exploded out o' the ground and evil spirits wisped out of hell. If a band ever uses a fog machine, hold your breath so you don't become possessed by one. ~ M.C. Humphreys

Programs to demonstrate Darwinian evolution are akin to a pinball machine. The steel ball bounces around differently every time but eventually falls down the little hole behind the flippers. ~ Robert J. Marks II

If mind belongs to humans alone, then stones, trees, and streams become mere objects of human tinkering. We can plunder the earth's resources with impunity, treating creeks and mountaintops in Kentucky or rivers in India or forests in northwest America as if they existed only for economic development. Systems of land and river become inert chunks of lifeless mud or mechanical runs of H2O rather than the living, breathing bodies upon which we and all other creatures depend for our very lives.

Not to mention what 'nature as machine' has done to our emotional and spiritual well-being. When we regard nature as churning its way forward mindlessly through time, we turn our backs on mystery, shunning the complexity as well as the delights of relationship. We isolate ourselves from the rest of the creatures with whom we share this world. We imagine ourselves the apex of creation -- a lonely spot indeed. Human minds become the measure of creation and human thoughts become the only ones that count. The result is a concept of mind shorn of its wild connections, in which feelings become irrelevant, daydreams are mere distractions, and nighttime dreams -- if we attend to them at all -- are but the cast-offs of yesterday's overactive brain. Mind is cut off from matter, untouched by exingencies of mud or leaf, shaped by whispers or gales of wind, as if we were not, like rocks, made of soil.

And then we wonder at our sadness and depression, not realizing that our own vi ~ Priscilla Stuckey

I needed a time machine. I needed to run around the past and gather up all the old, unbroken parts of me and try to Frankenstein myself back together again. My healthy body, my unjaded sixteen-year-old heart, my baby brain. I may not make such a pretty monster, but at least I'd feel like myself again. ~ Anne Clendening

There's one black-and-white who stands out because he's taller than the rest.
The Street protocol states that your avatar can't be any taller than you are.
This is to prevent people from walking around a mile high. Besides, if this
guy's using a pay terminal -- which he must be, to judge from the image quality
-- it can't jazz up his avatar. It just shows him the way he is, except not as
well. Talking to a black-and-white on the Street is like talking to a person
who has his face stuck in a xerox machine, repeatedly pounding the copy button,
while you stand by the output tray pulling the sheets out one at a time and
looking at them. ~ Neal Stephenson

To be lazy is stupid, to be a muscle machine is a crazy thing... and how far we go or father we all the time can find disadvantages and it's own consequences. ~ Deyth Banger

CALVIN:
When I grow up I want to be an inventor. First I will invent a time machine. Then I'll come back to yesterday and take myself to tomorrow and skip this dumb assignment. ~ Bill Watterson

I would drive through the desert, and there's this one spot in the desert that, every time I drove through it, I would get crazy ideas. I would either sing into the cell phone recorder or I would sing into a DAT machine. ~ Tim Rutili

I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life. Like now, it's night, not yet time for bed but too late to be outside, and the two of them reading reading reading with their eyes moving like the lights inside a copy machine. When I was helping put the dishes in the washer tonight, I broke a plate. I said sorry Ma it slipped. But it didn't slip, that's how I am sometimes, and I want to be worse. ~ Victor Lodato

I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I'd have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank. ~ Jeff Mangum

What am I in this instant? I'm a typewriter making the dry echo in the dark, humid dawn. I haven't been human for a long time. They wanted me to be an object. I am an object. An object dirty with blood. An object that creates other objects and the machine creates us all. It makes demands. Mechanisms make endless demands on my life. But I don't totally obey: if I have to be an object, let me be an object that screams. There's something inside of me that hurts. Oh, how it hurts and how it screams for help. But tears aren't there in the machine that is me. I'm an object without a destiny. I'm an object in whose hands? such is my human destiny. What saves me is the scream. I protest in the name of what's inside the object behind the behind of the thought-feeling. I'm an urgent object. ~ Clarice Lispector

No morn ever dawned more favorable than ours did; and no day was every more clouded than the present! Wisdom, and good examples are necessary at this time to rescue the political machine from the impending storm. ~ George Washington

Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine. ~ Charles Yu

Suddenly the air got colder, and a black cloud appeared - the black cloud that you saw before, since Snodrog was, at bottom, a cheapskate. Only this time the cloud looked like an overdone hamburger, and it hovered low over the Shuffly's head. Then Snodrog's devious machine spread under the Shuffly's unsuspecting feet a glistening patina of Generalizations, and the immobilized hulk slid the hill into the valley below, ricocheting off trees with a sound like wet sponges being slapped on kitchen sinks. ~ John Bellairs

And all that time, Franca contained in her breast a storm of anguish and violence so terrible that she had at times, when she was alone and longing to 'break down', to clutch her breast with a fierce answering force to keep the black horror from spurting forth. Her face was calm and benign, always in company, and usually alone too, for she was aware that to play such a part properly allowed of no rest periods, no weak moments of unmasking. She must continue, in her deceit, whole, like the spy who, in order to go on, has to become what he seems. She was, daily, amazed at herself, at her self-control; and at the terrible demons which fed upon her, and in doing so, she realised, fed her. She had begun to need her rage and her hate, even of late her fierce cruel fantasies. She could not, and did not try to, riddle out, rationally order, explain, least of all banish, these horrible consolations, As it seemed, if she were not to die of her love she had to poison it; and even, over its death agonies, to exult. As the days went by, Franca cherished and nourished and developed her suffering, unable to envisage any change or any plan - any machine into which so much relentless force might be fed. Indeed she was afraid to plan or picture a different future of any kind. So long as she stayed silent she had a secret weapon. If she spoke, if once there were the least word, the least crack or fissure, upon which tears and screams could follow, she would have lost her one advantage, her so ~ Iris Murdoch

We are still strangers as we sleep,
You and I,
And all our intimacies
Those hours ago
Make it only more so.'

It is an old cry, I suppose
Knowing
We have shared bodies
Wondering
Have we shared minds,
And right now I feel more close
To those of my own sex
Who too have lain and wondered so
Than I do,
Lady,
To you.
And I feel I am no longer me
But a man, with
A girl
(Dichotomy; should I call me a boy
Or you a woman?)
And wonder, perhaps uneasily,
Had you woken first,
What later thoughts
My sleep
Might have raised in you.
You sleep, oblivious.
– Probably the wiser course.

Another age might have caused some pious
Guilt in one of us at least,
Yet prisoners of one time though we may be
I feel this closer, now, to all other ages,
And all this sexuality.
Our nearly love,
Only
A time machine

... Yet it remains, remains yet,
And still I wonder
Do we share thoughts?
Have we shared thoughts?
And if we do,
And if we have,
Was the only one,
This? ~ Iain Banks

I think the closest thing to a time machine that I've ever found is the Children's section of a library. ~ AnnaMarie Ralph

From the time I was 7, when I purchased my first calculator, I was fascinated by the idea of a machine that could compute things. ~ Michael Dell

She had known it all the time: I'm so enormously exhausted, so utterly, basically tired, and in fibre of myself, that to know I haven't got to go through with living is like a reprieve. How extraordinary! And every one of these people, with the possible exception of this exuberant young man, is terrified that the machine is going to crash, and yet we all trooped obediently into it. So perhaps we all feel the same way? ~ Doris Lessing

Be a Flea, not a Bull or a Bear. Don't delay, retire anyway. Trading is NOT a four letter word. Buy carefully, sell aggressively. Don't mark duds while drinking. When your plan fails, change it. Don't be slow, don't be greedy. Don't be obtuse with a machine gun pointed at you. There's still time to build wealth and retire well.

The Stock Market Flea: Lessons from the Front ~ James J. Houts

At my house I have a full-size time machine that I've built over a couple of years. I love looking at people's faces when they walk into my office. They're literally astounded. ~ Gregory Nicotero

I am the washing machine of love. And if you have no idea what I mean, maybe it's time to let some laundry into your life. ~ Jarod Kintz

The people of Sydney who can speak of my work [on flying-machine models] without a smile are very scarce; it is doubtless the same with American workers. I know that success is dead sure to come, and therefore do not waste time and words in trying to convince unbelievers. ~ Lawrence Hargrave

I never have free time, I don't know about you. You ever go to the cash machine, there's two people in line in front of you and you get kinda flustered, you're like "Forget it! I'm not standing here for 40 seconds. I got things to do, okay?" ~ Jim Gaffigan

The coolest thing, and I have it at home, is a huge Hulk Hogan, normal-sized pinball machine. When people come over they play it for hours. When you hit the bumpers and the bells ring it goes, 'Oh yeah!' The whole time you're playing this machine it's yelling and screaming at you, 'What you gonna do, brother?!' I think that's the coolest. ~ Hulk Hogan

The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines. ~ Carl Sagan

She sits and listens with crossed legs under the batik house-wrap she wears, with her heavy three-way-piled hair and cigarette at her mouth and refuses me - for the time being, anyway - the most important things I ask of her.

It's really kind of tremendous how it all takes place. You'd never guess how much labor goes into it. Only some time ago it occurred to me how great an amount. She came back from the studio and went to take a bath, and from the bath she called out to me, "Darling, please bring me a towel." I took one of those towel robes that I had bought at the Bon Marche' department store and came along with it. The little bathroom was in twilight. In the auffe-eua machine, the brass box with teeth of gas
burning, the green metal dropped crumbs inside from the thousand-candle blaze. Her body with its warm woman's smell was covered with water starting in a calm line over her breasts. The glass of the medicine chest shone (like a deep blue place in the wall, as if a window to the evening sea and not the ashy fog of Paris. I sat down with the robe over my; shoulder and felt very much at peace. For a change the apartment seemed clean and was warm; the abominations were gone into the background, the stoves drew well and they shone. Jacqueline was cooking dinner and it smelled of gravy. I felt settled and easy, my chest free and my fingers comfortable and open. And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has bee ~ Saul Bellow

Every time something tries to create respect with a machine it crumbles! ~ Chuck D

The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. ~ Henry David Thoreau

It's wrong because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he's all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern? ~ Thomas Pynchon