Vacuum Quotes

I often feel I'm working in a vacuum, or in a country where few readers can hear the sounds. ~ James Laughlin

It is not yet a feeling that points her in a direction. It is just the feeling of a vacuum, a void waiting to be filled. ~ Eleanor Catton

My father was a ham radio geek, and I remember the glow of the vacuum tubes from a Hammarlund receiver that became a hand-me-down to me. ~ Bre Pettis

I adore a vacuum ... a place to rest. ~ Marty Rubin

As long as you remain in your private vacuum, you can pretend you are in harmony with the One. But the moment you pick up the clay, electronic or otherwise, you become a demiurge, and he who embarks on the creation of worlds is already tainted with corruption and evil. ~ Umberto Eco

The evangelical with his "minority complex" often forgets that he is part of a massive historical movement much larger than his own kind of church. Catholic and Protestant thought of various sorts, and Eastern Orthodoxy, can all be of help, for they share with him the basics of Biblical theism. The evangelical tends to see himself today standing alone, he supposes that nobody ever faced such issues as he now faces, and he therefore thinks in a vacuum. ~ Arthur F. Holmes

I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul. ~ Lee Atwater

He thought of Hilary's tantrums, of her vacuum-cleaner kisses, her sharp teeth and scraping hands. ~ Jilly Cooper

No writer worthy of being read, and expecting to be read, writes in a vacuum, however. We write with the anticipation of a reading audience, no matter what that number of unsuspecting souls may be. ~ Brandon L. Rucker

Why? So you can still qualify for assistance? Your family is gaming the system?"

"No." Diana had always hated when people said this about her family. The bosses who made her dad list a payroll company as his employer, they gamed the system. The assholes who convinced her parents to take out both a second mortgage and a HELOC in 2006 gamed the system. The employers who would never give Edith enough hours for benefits gamed the system. But ask a lot of people, and they'd tell you it's people like her grandma who game the system. They'd tell you that an old woman who's worked hard every day of her life and still struggles to get by is a malignant vacuum for their personal tax dollars, and a blight on their lives as free Americans. "We're just trying to live. ~ J. Ryan Stradal

A Frenchman who arrives in London, will find philosophy, like everything else, very much changed there. He had left the world a plenum, and he now finds it a vacuum. ~ Voltaire

Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam - ~ Marisha Pessl

My mental boundaries expanded when I viewed the Earth against a black and uninviting vacuum, yet my country's rich traditions had conditioned me to look beyond man-made boundaries and prejudices. One does not have to undertake a space flight to come by this feeling. ~ Rakesh Sharma

I stare at my freakish eyeball, gaze into the distorted pupil until it expands and fills the mirror, fills my brain and I'm rushing through vacuum. Wide awake and so far at such speed I flatten into a subatomic contrail. That grand cosmic maw, that eater of galaxies, possesses sufficient gravitational force to rend the fabric of space and time, to obliterate reality, and in I go, bursting into trillions of minute particles, quadrillions of whining fleas, consumed. Nanoseconds later, I understand everything there is to understand. Reduced to my "essential saltes" as it were, I'm the prime mover seed that gets sown after the heat death of the universe when the Ouroboros swallows itself and the cycle begins anew with a big bang. ~ Laird Barron

Cells became molecules - countless and complex and varied. The demarcation of one thing and another failed. There was only a community of molecules, shifting in a vast dance. And then the atoms that made the molecules gave up their space, and she was a breath. A mist. A tiny play of fields and interactions in a vacuum as perfect as space. She was a vibration in nothingness. ~ James S.A. Corey

The air in my home is heavy with my mom's unhappiness. And her exhaustion. And her sheer dissatisfaction with her life. And I hate it. I can be up in my room when she's in the kitchen below and I feel her despair seeping up through the floorboards. You can hear her banging pots and pans or cursing the vacuum cleaner ~ Laura Buzo

At the centre of every human being is a God-shaped vacuum which can only be filled by Jesus Christ. ~ Blaise Pascal

Something was in her mouth. Sami's tongue slid along the edges of something plastic. Flat, low ridges, holes-an adjustable strap. A baseball cap?

Another taste. Hair spray. Gross.

Someone had stuffed her baseball cap in her mouth, and from the feel of it they had taped it in place. Her arms were tied behind her and she lay face down on the floor-of what? Her car. The carpeting scraped her cheek every time they hit a bump.

Panic flooded Sami's senses. She came instantly awake. Inhaling deeply through her nose, she willed herself to calm down. Her working motto flashed through her brain, panic never accomplished anything. Of course she had never been kidnapped and tied up before.

In the dim light of passing cars, she glimpsed things-paper gum wrappers, an old straw, one whopper wrapper, a CD cover.

That's where Sting went. Been looking for that for days. Man did she need to vacuum this car out.

A metallic scent hit her nose. She'd recognize that smell until the day she died. Blood. And by the odor, someone had lost a great deal of it. ~ Suzanne Ferrell

The great thing about having a serialized drama (like 'Sons of Anarchy') is that I'm allowed to bring up events and circumstances that have happened in the past in other episodes to show that this kind of violence doesn't happen in a vacuum. It has ramifications. It has repercussions. Whether it's a week from now or five years from now, you know it will play out. Nothing is ever tied up into a perfect knot. ~ Kurt Sutter

There are some things which happen to us which the intelligence and the senses refuse just as the stomach sometimes refuses what the palate has accepted but which digestion cannot compass _occurences which stop us dead as though by some impalpable intervention, like a sheet of glass through which we watch all subsequent events transpire as though in a soundless vacuum, and fade, vanish; are gone, leaving us immobile, impotent, helpless; fixed, until we can die. ~ William Faulkner

He was really trying to be my friend, without all the emotional baggage we both carried - mine still with me, but carefully folded in vacuum bags so they'd occupy as little room as possible and his, hangin on his shoulders like lead armor, making him slouch sometimes. And yet, as pinned down as he was, he was the one comforting me, supporting not only his weight but mine, too. It wasn't fair. ~ Diana T. Scott

Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation; they will fill the vacuum by creating a new focus of meaning. The idols of fundamentalism are not good substitutes for God; if we are to create a vibrant new faith for the twenty-first century, we should, perhaps, ponder the history of God for some lessons and warnings. ~ Karen Armstrong

Artificial glamor-false eyelashes, that sort of thing-usually is put on to hide a vacuum. The most beautiful face can only look vacuous if it masks an empty head. ~ Peter Ustinov

In Europe, where climate change absolutism is at its strongest, the quasi-religion of greenery in general and the climate change issue in particular have filled the vacuum of organised religion, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as a form of blasphemy. ~ Nigel Lawson

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

Then we were quiet. Quiet isn't easy. Especially with virtual strangers. They say that nature hates a vacuum, and so it's kind of natural to want to fill up a human silence with words - any kind of lame words. But there was such a feeling of space around us that my first self-conscious word died long before I ever felt it on my tongue. ~ Kristen D. Randle

There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus. ~ Blaise Pascal

What does it feel like?"
"It feels like ... " I begin hesitantly, " ... falling from the sky."
As I suspected, confusion registers on Kaelen's face.
"Thrilling and terrifying at the same time," I add.
Kaelen ponders for a while. "Falling from the sky equals death."
I bite my lip to keep from laughing. "Only if there's a ground underneath you," I counter.
"There is."
I shrug. "But what if there wasn't? What if you simply fell forever? Never knowing if there was a ground beneath you or not."
"It's not possible," Kaelen rationalizes. "Unless you were falling in a vacuum."
I smile. "So maybe that's what love is. Falling in a vacuum. ~ Jessica Brody

TIME THERE SEEMED TO PASS DIFFERENTLY. WHEN YOU ARE shut off from the world, every day is exactly the same as the one before. This sameness has a way of wearing down your soul until you become nothing but a breathing, toiling, consuming thing that awakes to the sun and sleeps at the dawning of the dark. The emptiness runs deep, deeper with each slowing day, and you become increasingly invisible and inconsequential. That's how I felt at times, a tiny insect circling itself, only to continue, and continue. There, in that relentless vacuum, nothing moved. No news came in or out. No phone calls to or from anyone. ~ Suki Kim

Life
luscious wet life bereft of
death, loss of empty shell
minus absent of nothing
exploding star cell
amoeba sweet algae
oxygen,
hydrogen flowering
in the vacuum of
space and magnetic motion. ~ H. Raven Rose

I have found that so many directors and producers in the room say nothing, and this can be deadly. It's very difficult to audition for comedy in the vacuum of a small room, but it's the only way most do it. ~ Allison Jones

I will be very careful the next time I fall in love, she told herself. Also, she had made a promise to herself that she intended on keeping. She was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they could be. They weren't worth it in the long run. They were emotionally too expensive and the upkeep was complicated. They were like having a vacuum cleaner around the house that broke all the time and only Einstein could fix it. She wanted her next lover to be a broom. ~ Richard Brautigan

It took hours, but all of a sudden as she was drawing the plug-in for a vacuum pump that felt as if it was radiating cold, although she didn't know how, Claire saw . . . something. It was like a flash of intuition, one of those moments that came to her sometimes when she thoughtabout higher-order physics problems. Not calculation, exactly, not logic. Instinct.She saw what he was doing, and for that one second, it was beautiful.Crazy, but in a beautiful kind of way. Like everything Myrnin did, it twisted the basicrules of physics, bent them and reshaped them until they became . . . something else. He's agenius, she thought. She'd always known that, but this . . . this was something else. Something beyond all his usual tinkering and weirdness.
"It's going to work," she said. Her voice sounded odd. She carefully set the vacuum pumpin its place on the meticulously labeled canvas sheet. Myrnin, who was sitting in his armchair with his feet comfortably on a hassock, looked up. He was reading a book through tiny little square spectacles that might have once belonged to Benjamin Franklin.
"Well, of course it's going to work," he said. "What did you expect? I do know what I'm doing."
This from a man wearing clothing from the OMG No store, and his battered vampire-bunny slippers. He'd crossed his feet at the ankles on top of a footstool, and both the bunnies' red mouths were flapping open to reveal their sharp, pointy teeth.
Claire grinned, suddenly full of enthusi ~ Rachel Caine

People don't do theology in a vacuum but in a community with other theological thinkers, where there's jealousy, vanity, hurt pride, all those things. ~ Frederica Mathewes-Green

The forest is really a gigantic carbon dioxide vacuum that constantly filters out and stores this component of the air. ~ Peter Wohlleben

No one leaves his or her world without being transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in time and misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence, possibly now forgotten by the one who said it. A word for so long a time attempted and never spoken, always stifled in inhibition, in the fear of being rejected- which as it implies a lack of confidence in ourselves, also means refusal to risk. ~ Paulo Freire

Think of yourself as a container for wealth. If your container is small and your money is big, what's going to happen? You will lose it. Your container will overflow and the excess money will spill out all over the place. You simply cannot have more money than the container. Therefore you must grow to be a big container so you cannot only hold more wealth but also attract more wealth. The universe abhors a vacuum and if you have a very large money container, it will rush in to fill the space. ~ T. Harv Eker

Today's enterprise IT architecture is about integrating systems to meet business needs. Consequently, IT architects can't - and don't - live in a vacuum. To address that reality, Catalyst Conference 2006 will delve into strategic infrastructure technologies with the depth to which our clients have grown accustomed. With the larger number of Cross-Cutting Concerns sessions, we'll also clearly illustrate how these technologies relate to each other, and how roles, geographies, and business processes intersect within an enterprise. ~ Jamie Lewis

There is no time in prison, unless you create it for yourself. People on the outside seem to believe time passes slowly in prison, but it doesn't. The truth is that time doesn't pass at all. It's an eternal vacuum, and each moment is meaningless because it has no context. Tomorrow may as well be yesterday. That's why there's so much stagnation inherent in prison life - because there is no momentum of any sort. ~ Damien Echols

When a vacuum forms, something has to come along to fill it ~ Haruki Murakami

Theoretical and experimental physicists are now studying nothing at all-the vacuum. But that nothingness contains all of being. ~ Heinz Pagels

[...] we must recognize that in our own experience of emptiness, that even though one feels "empty", one must have a self in order to feel this emptiness; a loss cannot be felt unless what is missed is really a lost part of the self. Unwholeness is a feeling which belongs only to a being born whole and somehow denied access to this whole self. A being born "unwhole" would be whole in that partiality, happy with that cavernous state, and feel no emptiness, miss nothing, feel at home in a vacuum of identity. It is precisely because we have selves that we mourn. ~ Susan Griffin

If you've got severe anxiety, it may have created a goals vacuum in your life. It may seem like your anxiety problems have been so all-consuming that you haven't focused much on anything else. This is understandable. Since overcoming anxiety involves moving toward something, not just moving away from anxiety, it'll involve rediscovering what your goals are. You need to uncover the goals that genuinely light your fire, where pursuing them is worth tolerating the anxiety that they create. ~ Alice Boyes

We welcome into our homes the machines that vacuum the thoughts out of our heads and pump in someone else's. John Berger in Ways of Seeing said that television advertisers succeeded by persuading viewers to envy themselves as they would be if they bought the product. These programmes do something similar, by persuading the viewer to envy himself as he would be if his life were that little bit more exciting and melodramatic than it actually is. They can make things seem normal that are not. ~ Peter Hitchens

The average Christian is so cold and so contented with His wretched condition that there is no vacuum of desire into which the blessed Spirit can rush in satisfying fullness. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

For years she had lived in a vacuum of emotions, and now emotions boiled in her: love, fear, hope, shame, self-pity, pride; each struggled for supremacy, ruling only briefly, before surrendering to a contender that was sometimes darker and sometimes lighter, but always different. ~ Stephen Lloyd Jones

He had used drugs and nanonic supplements to compensate at first, then supplements became replacements, with bones exchanged for carbon-fibre struts. Electrical consumption supplanted food intake. The final transition was his skin, replacing the eczema-ridden epidermis with a smooth ochre silicon membrane. Warlow didn't need a spacesuit to work in the vacuum, he could survive for over three weeks without a power and oxygen recharge. His facial features had become purely cosmetic, a crude mannequin-like caricature of human physiognomy, although there was an inlet valve at the back of his throat for fluid intake. There was no hair, and he certainly didn't bother with clothes. Sex was something he lost in his fifties. ~ Peter F. Hamilton

An aching vacuum inside her sucking the air from her lungs. She hung her head and wept fiercely, the emptiness inside her growing larger not smaller; she felt as though it would grow so large it would suffocate her just as surely as the sea would have ~ Alan Brennert

The German poet Goethe once said that "he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth." I don't want you to end up in such a sad state. I will do what I can to acquaint you with your historical roots. It is the only way to become a human being. It is the only way to become more than a naked ape. It is the only way to avoid floating in a vacuum. ~ Jostein Gaarder

Like many in the intelligence field, Rockford had heard of the Program during his time as Director of the CIA. No matter how
deep you tried to bury a special missions unit, there was no such thing as a vacuum. Eventually bits and pieces of the unit
made their way out of the shadows. The Program was no different. Once Rockford was sworn in as Vice President he was granted
access to the Program, but most of what he knew about Eric Steele came directly from President Cole.


Rockford knew that the Program did their own recruitment and assessment of the men and women they wanted. The recruiters had
watched Steele for seven months, and while he was everything the Program was looking for, it was originally determined that
after only ten years in Special Forces he was still too untested for consideration ~ Sean Parnell

It has been said that idleness is the parent of mischief, which is very true; but mischief itself is merely an attempt to escape from the dreary vacuum of idleness. ~ George Borrow

Whatever is being investigated, created or produced now, in movies or TV, needs to consider the context in which it is being distributed. It's not a vacuum. There are certain universal themes of love, conflict, loyalty or family that are everlasting and that need to be presented in a way that makes it feel relevant, even if it's a period piece. You need to consider what context that film, that story and those characters are being seen in. ~ J.J. Abrams

The constant steaming in of thoughts of others must suppress and confine our own and indeed in the long run paralyze the power of thought ... The inclination of most scholars is a kind of fuga vacui ( latin for vacuum suction )from the poverty of their own mind , which forcibly draws in the thoughts of others ... It is dangerous to read about a subject before we have thought about it ourselves ... When we read, another person thinks for us; merely repeat his mental process. So it comes about that if anybody spends almost the whole day in reading, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking. Experience of the world may be looked upon as a kind of text, to which reflection and knowledge form the commentary. Where there is a great deal of reflection and intellectual knowledge and very little experience , the result is like those books which have on each page two lines of text to forty lines of commentary ~ Will Durant

Environmental protection doesn't happen in a vacuum. You can't separate the impact on the environment from the impact on our families and communities. ~ Jim Clyburn

Like a picture out of focus, I'm starting to think that I don't even know who I am anymore. And that feeling – like being sucked out into the vacuum of space without a suit – is the most terrifying of all. ~ Brian McBride

Benjamin Franklin, said: "Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one. ~ David Suzuki

Of course, you're not making records in a vacuum. I'm not making them for myself. It would be nice if I could get more people to hear them. But if I have to sell my soul to the devil to do it, I won't. ~ Pat Benatar

Leadership doesn't occur in a vacuum, it manifests in a context. These contexts are as dynamic as the personalities, stakes, culture and information available. ~ Michael M. Rose

I've laid out a plan for how we keep people safe here at home, and I've laid out a plan of how we wage war and win by denying ISIS territory overseas. We must deny them their territory because the territory that they've conquered because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama declared victory in Iraq and against every generals advice withdrew all of our troops, leaving a vacuum, weaponry, territory for ISIS to conquer, that territory, their caliphate, is that from which they draw legitimacy, potency, credibility. We have to deny them that territory. ~ Carly Fiorina

It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible.
[Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.] ~ William Shockley

When indeed you positively press your face, so to speak, against the crystalline window of your eyes, your mind is apt to become a perfect vacuum.
("Out Of The Deep") ~ Walter De La Mare

It was really great to also see the response that people were having to 'Treme' 'cause you're in a vacuum when you're on a TV show. You see the response online, you read about it and all of that, but actually to be live and have that many thousands of fans come out, it's really wonderful. ~ Wendell Pierce

Vacuum stands and remains a mathematical space. A cube placed in a vacuum would not displace anything, as it would displace air or water in a space already containing those fluids. ~ Roger Bacon

Amazing. You were so attached to it, and it still disappeared for you."
"Attached! I was whocking that cloud with everything I had! Fireballs, laser beams, vacuum cleaner a block high ... "
"Negative attachments, Richard. If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That's all there is to it. ~ Richard Bach

What has changed in modern times, however, is that the media, the so-called fourth estate made up of America's best and brightest journalists, are no longer trusted.
Sadly that leaves the American people with no one to rely on: not the politicians; not the media.
Nature may abhor a vacuum, but political systems abhor a vacuum of trust even more. If we don't find someone to fill it, someone who can unify the country behind the truth, then that vacuum will be filled for us. ~ Glenn Beck

The reason people turn to supernatural explanations is that the mind abhors a vacuum of explanation. Because we do not yet have a fully natural explanation for mind and consciousness, people turn to supernatural explanations to fill the void. ~ Michael Shermer

The receiver has to expend energy to measure the electromagnetic waves in the vacuum disturbed by the long-gone photon. ~ Anonymous

Fascism is the result of the collapse of Europe's spiritual and social order catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and
tenets as unalterable natural laws. They suddenly exposed the vacuum behind the facade of society. ~ Peter Drucker

What did everyone think robot vacuuming was going to be? Well, they think Rosie the Robot from 'The Jetsons,' a human robot that pushed a vacuum. That was never going to happen. ~ Colin Angle

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. ~ Cormac McCarthy

There's no path to being a writer that's applicable to everyone. Some young writers have the fortitude to work in a vacuum. For me, it was important to have some sense that my failures weren't unique. ~ Jonathan Dee

In a city you thought of all life as human life. You had to live in the heart of the woods to realize that humanity was a slight ripple on the surface of a flood of life that seeped into every vacant crack, flowed into every biological vacuum the moment it occurred. ~ Helen McCloy

After the 11 September attack," March editorializes one morning, "amid all that chaos and confusion, a hole quietly opened up in American history, a vacuum of accountability, into which assets human and financial begin to vanish. Back in the days of hippie simplicity, people liked to blame 'the CIA' or 'a secret rogue operation.' But this is a new enemy, unnamable, locatable on no organization chart or budget line
who knows, maybe even the CIA's scared of them. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Many first-time founders fail to understand the difference between the potential of the Total Addressable Market (TAM) and the very finite subsection they can hope to capture. No company ever captures the entire market they pioneer. Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum, and others will jump in from the moment you've identified the potential. ~ Jay Samit

Where both reason and experience fall short, there occurs a vacuum that can be filled by faith. ~ Jostein Gaarder

He'd only been gone two seconds, but the room got brighter when they were together, as if they were two elements that became brilliant in proximity. At Sam's clumsy efforts to carry the vacuum, Grace smiled a new smile that I thought only he ever got, and he shot her a withering look full of the sort of subtext you could only get from a lot of conversations whispered after dark.
It made me think of Isabel, back at her house. We didn't have what Sam and Grace had. We weren't even close to having it. I didn't think what we had could get to this, even if you gave it a thousand years. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

The humorist who invented trial by jury played a colossal practical joke upon the world, but since we have the system we ought to try and respect it. A thing which is not thoroughly easy to do, when we reflect that by command of the law a criminal juror must be an intellectual vacuum, attached to a melting heart and perfectly macaronian bowels of compassion. ~ Mark Twain

Teenagers who are never required to vacuum are living in one. ~ Fred G. Gosman

I like weather better than climate. The dry season is a gold vacuum; but the rainy season has change, which is weather. And while climate may create a race, weather creates the temper and sensibility of the individual. ~ Gertrude Diamant

Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election. ~ George Will

Robots already perform many functions, from making cars to defusing bombs - or, more menacingly, firing missiles. Children and adults play with toy robots, while vacuum-cleaning robots are sucking up dirt in a growing number of homes and - as evidenced by YouTube videos - entertaining cats. ~ Peter Singer

nature hates a vacuum and strange things are drawn into empty places; sometimes oddities survive where nothing else can. ~ Craig Johnson

Change does not take place in a vacuum. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

She said the words, and then she had a strange moment of seeing them, hanging there over her head.
"You're going to vacuum up that squirrel!"
There is just no predicting what kind of sentences you might say, thought Flora. For instance, who would ever think you would shout, "You're going to vacuum up that squirrel!"? ~ Kate DiCamillo

As in nature, politics abhors a vacuum. Without a strong voice for more moderate leadership, the Tea Party is filling that vacuum. ~ Mark McKinnon

The vacuum left by the departing visitor seemed to echo along the hallway and into the walls. It was at those times, when her aloneness took on a darker hue, that she almost wished there would be no more guess, for then there would be no chasm of emptiness for her to negotiate when they were gone. ~ Jacqueline Winspear

I am not ashamed that I was once a vacuum-cleaner salesman, only that I was a *good* vacuum-cleaner salesman. ~ Robert Morley

I had entered the Green [of Glasgow] by the gate at the foot of Charlotte Street - had passed the old washing-house. I was thinking upon the engine at the time, and had gone as far as the herd's house, when the idea came into my mind that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication were made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel it would rush into it, and might be there condensed without cooling the cylinder. I then saw that I must get rid of the condensed steam and injection water if I used a jet, as in Newcomen's engine. Two ways of doing this occurred to me. First, the water might be run off by a descending pipe, if an outlet could be got at the depth of 35 or 36 feet, and any air might be extracted by a small pump. The second was to make the pump large enough to extract both water and air. ... I had not walked further than the Golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.

{In Robert Hart's words, a recollection of the description of Watt's moment of inspiration, in May 1765, for improving Thomas Newcomen's steam engine.} ~ James Watt

We were empty nesters, our last-born child having departed for Duke. Meredith decided we needed a dog to fill the vacuum. She heard about a litter in Colorado sired by Chopper, the legendary avalanche dog at the top of Aspen Mountain. ~ Tom Brokaw

Writing, I reminded them, can't be taught or learned in a vacuum. We must say to students in every area of knowledge: "This is how other people have written about this subject. Read it; study it; think about it. You can do it too." In many subjects, students don't even know that a literature exists - that mathematics, for instance, consists of more than right and wrong answers, that physics consists of more than right or wrong lab reports. I ~ William Zinsser

Back in the 1940s, when we started firing off atomic bombs to test them, this pulse wave was first noticed. Not much back then with those primitive weapons, but it was there. And here's the key thing: there were no solid-state electronics back in the 1940s, everything was still vacuum tubes, so it was rare for the small pulses set off by those first bombs to damage anything. ~ William R. Forstchen

We want to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. Our soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact. ~ Hjalmar Soderberg

But just as nature abhors a vacuum
so does the human heart. ~ Jojo Moyes

If all astronomical processes cease, how will the passage of time manifest itself? It is doubtful if vacuum fluctuations can provide a clock for the recording of time. Will time itself come to a stop? Is this a meaningful question? Such questions are difficult to answer. ~ Jamal Nazrul Islam

If there is no deep yearning for a life that is well pleasing to Him, if there is no
stimulating desire to know Him and His Word, church membership is just like
a young man falling in love with a furnished apartment and marrying an electric
stove, a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, a garbage disposal, and a wet mop!
That is just about all it amounts to. Let's stop playing church today and start
loving Christ and living for Him! ~ J. Vernon McGee

Kill us in the clear light on the Moon, where the sky is black and soft, where the stars shine brightly, where the cleanliness and purity of vacuum make all things sharp.

- Not in this low-clinging, fuzzy blue. ~ Isaac Asimov

While it is clear that our food choices are a matter of personal responsibility, it is important to recognize that we do not make our choices in a vacuum. We select our foods in an environment toxic with government policies that encourage cheap prices for foods with low nutrient value, and in which billions of dollars have been spent to convince us to distrust ourselves, to overeat, and to eat foods laced with ingredients that raise our setpoints and damage our health. ~ Linda Bacon

Zero dwells at the juxtaposition of quantum mechanics and relativity; zero lives where the two theories meet, and zero causes the two theories to clash. A black hole is a zero in the equations of general relativity; the energy of the vacuum is a zero in the mathematics of quantum theory. The big bang, the most puzzling event in the history of the universe, is a zero in both theories. The universe came from nothing-and both theories break down when they try to explain the origin of the cosmos. ~ Charles Seife

Because of social pressure, individualism is rejected by most people in favor of conformity. Thus the individual relies mainly upon the actions of others and neglects the meaning of his own personal life. Hence he sees his own life as meaningless and falls into the "existential vacuum" feeling inner void. Progressive automation causes increasing alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and suicide. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

No man is an island, no
woman lives in a vacuum,
and as much as we'd like
to compartmentalize, our
actions and decisions
affect those around us ... even if that's not our
intention. ~ Peter Adejimi