Voltage Quotes

being water
i am the voltage of rocks ~ Will Alexander

All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark - a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers. ~ Emile M. Cioran

My recovery from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) was based around radiation detoxification, restoring the DC voltage of the body and removing the clots. ~ Steven Magee

The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

What does it take to break a person?
Torturers and interrogators would be able to provide statistics. This many nights without sleep, this many needles, this much water, this voltage of current on this many occasions.
But there is considerable variation in people's ability to withstand torture. Sometimes one can achieve the desired result simply by showing the instruments and explaining what is to be done with them. Sometimes it takes weeks; one may be forced to restart a heart which has given out from the pain, and even then one may not manage to break the subject down.
However, it is presumably possible to discern some kind of average. This many needles, this many blows to the soles of the feet, before most people are sufficiently destroyed to give up what they once held most dear.
But in everyday life? ~ John Ajvide Lindqvist

I'm convinced that a controlled disrespect for authority is essential to a scientist. All the good experimental physicists I have known have had an intense curiosity that no Keep Out sign could mute. Physicists do, of course, show a healthy respect for High Voltage, Radiation, and Liquid Hydrogen signs. They are not reckless. I can think of only six who have been killed on the job. ~ Luis Walter Alvarez

The thermodynamic properties of electrolyte solutions can be determined from the measurements of the voltage between electrodes reversible to both ions. ~ Lars Onsager

At fourteen, I'd vowed, one day, I'd be the woman making him laugh, making joy blaze from his face, so tangible it seemed I might catch it in my hands. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Love is funny. Even though you don't have that person anymore, you still have the feeling. You didn't lose your LOVE. You lost the tangible, tactile, sense-sational ability to experience the person or animal you lost. ~ Karen Marie Moning

If AC voltage drops below 105-volts or goes above 130-volts you should turn electronic equipment and appliances off until the power is restored. ~ Mark Polk

All knowledge that takes special training to acquire is the province of the Magician energy. Whether you are an apprentice training to become a master electrician and unraveling the mysteries of high voltage; or a medical student, grinding away night and day, studying the secrets of the human body and using available technologies to help your patients; or a would-be stockbroker or a student of high finance; or a trainee in one of the psychoanalytic schools, you are in exactly the same position as the apprentice shaman or witch doctor in tribal societies. You are spending large amounts of time, energy, and money in order to be initiated into rarefied realms of secret power. You are undergoing an ordeal testing your capacities to become a master of this power. And, as is true in all initiations, there is no guarantee of success. [Magician energy] ~ Robert Moore

I adore storms. I love the raw power of the spectacle: Hydraulics! Voltage! Percussion! Mother Nature has dominion and everyone awaits her whim. ~ Kathy Reichs

So ... It's just that I have a problem with voltage. I don't know how to explain it ... I often get the feeling I've got a button missing, you know, some knob for adjusting the volume. I always go too far to one extreme or the other. I can never find the right balance and whatever I take a fancy to - well, it always ends badly." She was surprised at herself. Why was she confiding in him like this? Slightly tipsy, maybe? "When I drink, I drink too much, when I smoke, I fuck myself up, when I love, I go out of my mind and when I work, it's into the ground. Dead. I don't know how to do things normally, quietly, I - ~ Anna Gavalda

I watch the confusion of friends all numb with love moving like stray dogs to the anthem of night long conversations of pulsing rhythms and random voltage voices in spite of themselves graceful as these raindrops creeping spermlike across the car window. ~ Bruce Cockburn

But before any of the small appliances who may be listening to this tale should begin to think that they might do the same thing, let them be warned: ELECTRICITY IS VERY DANGEROUS. Never play with old batteries! Never put your plug in a strange socket! And if you are in any doubt about the voltage of the current where you are living, ask a major appliance. ~ Thomas M. Disch

Maybe memory is just electricity passing through us. Old voltage in the joints. ~ Dominic Smith

Voltage crossed the distance between Sheila and Webster. A current composed of anger and remorse and something else-the last flicker of attraction ~ Anita Shreve

A little of him leaned to the muscularity of the homosexual. He would never practice, of course. The physical buttock act repelled him. Though sometimes he experienced a jolting warmth when Tom, one of his friends, bear-hugged him. Or gave him a bristled kiss on a bristled cheek. Certainly there was masculine voltage there. But it was safe. It was the rose border to the act. And like a voyeur, he could peer into the tropical garden from the safety of the rose border. He could experience male pillage of his sex mentally. Yes, it was safe. He would never step from the rose to the man-eating orchid. English rain and misty sun, yes. The hints, yes. But he would never take his machete into the jungle. ~ David Pinner

They are in contact on a high-voltage wavelength of hate ... ~ Ken Kesey

Your master will bestow that experience shortly. Your body is not tuned just yet. As a small lamp cannot withstand excessive electrical voltage, so your nerves are unready for the cosmic current. If I gave you the infinite ecstasy right now, you would burn as if every cell were on fire. ~ Yogananda Paramhansa

I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the Virgin. This death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner, it has a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellent. Et cetera.

Man is a child wandering lost - to cite Baudelaire`s poem again - in the "forests of symbols."

(The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time.) ~ Milan Kundera

Bernard Williams has been a distinctive presence on the intellectual scene for more than three decades ... His writings do not offer the dubious exhilaration of grand philosophical theory, in which messy reality is tamed and caged, but the thrill of seeing pretension punctured by a kind of high-voltage common sense (backed up by impressive erudition) ... There is no one in philosophy quite like him. ~ Colin McGinn

Hardy Cates," I said, coming into the room, "you behave, or I'll step on your tube."
The nurse seemed taken aback by my unsympathetic bedside manner. But Hardy's gaze met mine in a moment of bright, hot voltage, and he relaxed, reassured in a way that cooing sympathy could never have done.
"That only works if it's a breathing tube," he told me. ~ Lisa Kleypas

If you know exactly what's going to happen tomorrow, the voltage of that experience is immediately mitigated. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.'

'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position.

'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what ~ David J. Schow

But you don't come right out there and let somebody hear you say you think they're OK. When it's a girl you're just trying to X it's a different thing, straightforwarder; but like for instance where do you look with your eyes when you tell somebody you like them and mean what you say? You can't look right at them, because then what if their eyes look at you as your eyes look at them and you lock eyes as you're saying it, and then there'd be some awful like voltage or energy there, hanging between you. But you can't look away like you're nervous, like some nervous kid asking for a date or something. You can't go around giving that kind of thing of yourself away. Plus the knowing that the whole fucking thing's not worth this kind of wince and stress: the whole thing's enraging. ~ David Foster Wallace

And then, with a shock like high-voltage coursing through me, the phone beside me started pealing thinly.

I just stood there and stared at it, blood draining from my face. A call to a tollbooth? It must, it must be a wrong number, somebody wanted the Information Booth or-! It must have been audible outside, with all I had the slide partly closed. One of the redcaps passing by turned, looked over, then started coming across toward where I was. To get rid of him I picked up the receiver, put it to my ear.

'You'd better come out now, time's up,' a flat, deadly voice said. 'They're calling your train, but you're not getting on that one - or any other.'

'Wh-where are talking from?'

'The next booth to yours,' the voice jeered. 'You forgot the glass inserts only reach halfway down.'

The connection broke and a man's looming figure was shadowing the glass in front of my eyes, before I could even get the receiver back on the hook. I dropped it full-length, tensed my right arm to pound it through his face as soon as I shoved the glass aside. He had a revolver-bore for a top vest-button, trained on me. Two more had shown up behind him, from which direction I hadn't noticed. It was very dark in the booth now, their collective silhouettes shut out all the daylight. The station and all its friendly bustle was blotted out, had receded into the far background, a thousand miles away for all the help it could give me. I slapped the glass ~ Cornell Woolrich

Pandora's dress was disheveled, her bodice askew, and her gloves were missing. A few raised red scratches marred the surface of her shoulder. The pins had been pulled from her ruined coiffure during the carriage ride, allowing a profusion of heavy black-coffee locks to fall to her waist in waves and ripples. Her coltish form quivered like a wild creature held in restraints. She gave off a kind of... energy, of... there didn't seem to be a word for it, but Gabriel could feel the irresistible voltage eating up the space between them. Every hair on his body individuated as he was flooded with the hot, humming awareness of her.
Holy hell. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Somewhere in the center of my soul, a rusty chain began to unwind. It freed itself, link by link, from where it had rested, unobserved, waiting for him. My hands, which had been balled up and pressed against his chest, unfurled with it. The chain continued to drop, to an unfathomable depth where there was nothing but darkness and Matthew. At last it snapped to its full length, anchoring me to a vampire. Despite the manuscript, despite the fact that my hands contained enough voltage to run a microwave, and despite the photograph, as long as I was connected to him, I was safe. ~ Deborah Harkness

So you sit and smile,
pretending like it's not
even fazing you,
not touching you at all.

So he looks you
in the eye, trying
to measure you,
find a hint of reaction.

And he says,
Tell me how you feel.

So you can't stand
it one more second,
and you close your eyes,
daring him to kiss you.

So he does, and it's
electric, high voltage,
stun-gun strength desire
jolting sinew and bone. ~ Ellen Hopkins

I refilled the wineglass and took it with me for a nice long bubble bath, where I settled in with Ambrose's guide for low-voltage outdoor lighting.
It wasn't thrilling bubble-bath reading material, but I was impressed by his imagination. You wouldn't know from the writing that he'd never actually seen a low-voltage lighting system in someone's yard, much less installed one himself. His descriptions were clear, colorful, and written with authority. The inscription wasn't bad either: To Natalie, You're a high-voltage system as far as I am concerned. ~ Lee Goldberg

I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph. ~ Berenice Abbott

Neon signs don't consume much power, but they look like they do. A cousin of fluorescent lighting, neon is actually quite energy efficient. A neon tube glows coolly when high-voltage, low-amperage electrical power excites the gas within it. ~ Virginia Postrel

And that's how we measure out our real respect for people - by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate - and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you. ~ Ted Hughes

A flock of sheep near the airport or a high voltage generator beside the orchard: these combinations open up my life like a wound, but they also heal it. That's why my feelings always come in twos. ~ Yehuda Amichai

It would be of course a low voltage spiritual life in which prayer was chiefly undertaken as a discipline, rather than as a way of co-labouring with God to accomplish good things and advancing his Kingdom purposes. ~ Dallas Willard

Something in her chest came to life where her heart should have been; something made of living metal and current. Voltage coursed through her body. Frantic branches of lightning jumped out of her, scorching the walls. Tabitha was paralysed; ~ Andrew Hall

Once, the Dream's parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder no just the bodies of humans but the body of Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Evil is the voltage of good; the urge to goodness, without the potential of evil, is trivial. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

The Wild Man doesn't come to full life through being "natural," going with the flow, smoking weed, reading nothing, and being generally groovy. Ecstasy amounts to living within reach of the high voltage of the golden gifts. The ecstasy comes after thought, after discipline imposed on ourselves, after grief. ~ Robert Bly

If I wasn't an actor, I think I'd have gone mad. You have to have extra voltage, some extra temperament to reach certain heights. ~ Laurence Olivier

I have always been aware that human life is dream-like because most human beings exist passively. Their consciousness is little more than a reflection of their environment. In the sexual orgasm, the voltage power of their minds surges, and they become momentarily aware that they are not forty-watt bulbs, but two hundred and fifty, five hundred, a thousand ... Then the voltage drops, and they sink back to forty watts without a protest. They are like empty-headed fools who cannot remember anything for more than a few seconds. Human beings are so mediocre that they can scarcely be said to possess minds in any real sense. In a flash, I understood the absurd and obvious truth: nothing is worth possessing except intensity of consciousness. This is the truth we glimpse in the orgasm. ~ Colin Wilson

I can only wonder what would have happened to my long term health had I not discovered that the atmospheric DC voltage had gone missing and used the human body DC battery charging techniques to replace it. ~ Steven Magee

He'd have to turn on his high-voltage charm with these people. Should work. They were only used to 12V battery power after all-he'd dazzle them. ~ Josephine Myles

Without discipline in spiritual pursuits, the central nervous system doesn't have a chance to adjust and grow with the increased demand. It would be like putting a high voltage into a small bulb - it is bound to explode. ~ Sivananda Radha Saraswati

...most days, a keen, gray energy (this deadened sort of voltage--something of the faux-sophistication, low-grade restlessness, and, in that she often had the urge to stop walking and curl against a building and sleep there and freeze to death, a passive-aggressive sort of suicidal despair) would move through her (though some afternoons around her, uncertainly, like she might be in the way, and then she'd just feel indistinct and hungry). ~ Tao Lin

I think you ought to write, in bed, and make use of your unhappiness. I do it. Many do. One should cook and eat one's misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs. ~ Saul Bellow

He stood and slipped into his jeans, leaving the waist unsnapped as he made his way to the plane in that loose, lanky stride that had her mouth watering. She loved the look of him, like a cowboy in some Madison Avenue ad. Except that he was the real thing, with big,work-roughened hands and scuffed boots and a high-voltage smile that could reduce her to puddles when it was directed her way. ~ R.C. Ryan

If someone is counting on children to bring them peace of mind, self-confidence, or a steady sense of happiness, they are in for a bad shock. What children do is complicate, implicate, give plot lines to the story, color to the picture, darken everything, bring fear as never before, suggest the holy, explain the ferocity of the human mind, undo or redo some of the past while casting shadows into the future. There is no boredom with children in the home. The risks are high. The voltage crackling. - Anne Roiphe, Married ~ Esther Perel

We've a bit of a problem, Kat. Have you someone to watch the wee lass?"

His second use of the word "lass" finally penetrated a brain of concrete. Kat blinked, as slow comprehension dawned. "Christian?" she exploded softly. "Is that YOU?"

His lips drew back in a silent snarl. Then "Och, Christ, tell you didn't think I was Cruce! Do I look that bad?"

She nodded vehemently, "Yes."

"Bloody hell," he growled. ~ Karen Marie Moning