Volume Shock Quotes

Camels can go many weeks without drinking anything at all. The notion that they cache water in their humps is pure myth - their humps are made of fat, and water is stored in their body tissues. While other mammals draw water from bloodstreams when faced with dehydration, leading to death by volume shock, camels tap the water in their tissues, keeping their blood volume stable. Though this reduces the camel's bulk, they can lose up to a third of their body weight with no ill effects, which they can replace astonishingly quickly, as they are able to drink up to forty gallons in a single watering. (pp.69-70) ~ Michael Benanav

It still would be years before I understood the seriousness of my change of view. Much later, I recognized it in "Revolution," the essay of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who describes the moment when a man on the edge of a crowd looks back defiantly at a policeman - and when that policeman senses a sudden refusal to accept his defining gaze - as the imperceptible moment in which rebellion is born. "All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people," Kapuscinski writes. "They should begin with a psychological chapter - one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process - sometimes accomplished in an instant, like a shock - demands to be illustrated. Man gets rid of fear and feel free. Without that, there would be no revolution. ~ Gloria Steinem

I'm persuaded today that the only way you can get into another country with a different culture from your own is to find a local partner who knows the market. Discovering this felt like small children discovering that if you put a bobby pin into an electric plug you get a shock! ~ Roberto Civita

He looks at you like you're the only person in the room. Like he's trapped underwater and you're an oxygen tank. Like he's in anaphylactic shock and you're an EpiPen. ~ Autumn Doughton

Almost invariably people expected that if you were a good person you shouldn't meet a bad end, that only the deserving are killed and certainly only the deserving are murdered. However well hidden and subtle, there was a sense that a murdered person had somehow asked for it. That's why the shock when someone they knew to be kind and good was a victim. There was a feeling that surely there had been a mistake. ~ Louise Penny

Sebastian left the bed and went to the washstand on unsteady legs. He felt dazed, uncertain, as if he were the one who had just lost his virginity instead of Evangeline. He had long thought that there was nothing new for him to experience. He had been wrong. For a man whose lovemaking was a practiced blend of technique and choreography, it had been a shock to find himself at the spontaneous mercy of his own passions. He had meant to withdraw at the last moment, but he had been so mindless with desire that he'd been unable to control his body. Damn. That had never happened before. Fumbling with the clean linen towel at the washstand, he made a project of dampening it with fresh water. By now his breathing had returned to normal, but he wasn't at all calm. After what had just happened, he should have been satiated for hours. But it hadn't been enough. He had experienced the longest, hardest, most wrenching climax of his life…and yet the need to have her again, open her, bury himself inside her, had not faded. It was madness. But why? Why with her? ~ Lisa Kleypas

But when you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you're talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRAs and retire to the Hamptons well out of range of the eventual blast radius. There are some interesting parallels between postmodern crank-turners and what's happened since post-structural theory took off here in the U.S., why there's such a big backlash against post-structuralism going on now. It's the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing's become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion. Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They're like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull ~ David Foster Wallace

Must have been quite the culture shock, going there."
"Yes it was." Idris doesn't say that the real culture shock has been in coming back. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I have been fortunate to work in places where people have a passion for their work. At HHS the passion sort of exceeds passion - it's a vocation ... I obviously knew that there were certainly some challenges that I would be taking on both with the work and the politics. [But] I probably did not have the right expectation level with regard to the number and volume of crises that would occur. ~ Sylvia Mathews Burwell

I gazed at Nina and Theodore standing now before the window about to say their vows, or as Nina had phrased it, whatever words their hearts gave them at the moment, and I thought it just as well Mother was not here. She would've expected Nina to be in ivory lace, perhaps blue linen, carrying roses or lilies, but Nina had dismissed all of that as unoriginal and embarked on a wedding designed to shock the masses. She was wearing a brown dress made from free-labor cotton with a broad white sash and white gloves, and she'd matched up Theodore in a brown coat, a white vest, and beige pantaloons. She clutched a handful of white rhododendrons cut fresh from the backyard, and I noticed she'd tucked a sprig in the button hole of Theodore's coat. Mother wouldn't have made it past the brown dress, much less the opening prayer, which had been delivered by a Negro minister. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

Screaming Meemies: This is partly onomatopoeic, partly rhyming in origin. The term is first recorded in 1927 with the meaning drunkenness, but sources suggest it dates from World War I, when it referred to a certain kind of German artillery shell that made a screaming sound, approximating meem or meemie. Soldiers, hearing too many of those artillery shells, experienced shell shock, and were said to have the screaming meemies. The term later evolved to refer to drunkenness, becoming synonymous with delirium tremens (the DTs or acute alcohol withdrawal). ~ Shannon Power

I'm lucky to come from a very musical family. If you put a record on and turn the volume up, there's a pretty good chance you'll have a lot of people dancing very quickly. ~ Imelda May

How different this world to the one about which I used to read, and in which I used to live! This is one peopled by demons, phantoms, vampires, ghouls, boggarts, and nixies. Names of things of which I knew nothing are now so familiar that the creatures themselves appear to have real existence. The Arabian Nights are not more fantastic than our gospels; and Lempriere would have found ours a more marvelous world to catalog than the classical mythical to which he devoted his learning. Ours is a world of luprachaun and clurichaune, deev and cloolie, and through the maze of mystery I have to thread my painful way, now learning how to distinguish oufe from pooka, and nis from pixy; study long screeds upon the doings of effreets and dwergers, or decipher the dwaul of delirious monks who have made homunculi from refuse. Waking or sleeping, the image of some uncouth form is always present to me. What would I not give for a volume by the once despised 'A. L. O. E' or prosy Emma Worboise? Talk of the troubles of Winifred Bertram or Jane Eyre, what are they to mine? Talented authoresses do not seem to know that however terrible it may be to have as a neighbour a mad woman in a tower, it is much worse to have to live in a kitchen with a crocodile. This elementary fact has escaped the notice of writers of fiction; the re-statement of it has induced me to reconsider my decision as to the most longed-for book; my choice now is the Swiss Family Robinson. In it I have no doubt I should find ho ~ Wirt Gerrare

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It's the silence, sure, but it's also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It's the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion. ~ Deb Caletti

A bit more than that, I expect." For the first time, the young man took his eyes off Roger, shifting his glance to one side. Following the direction of his gaze, Roger felt a jolt like an electric shock. He hadn't seen the man at the edge of the clearing, though he must have been there all the time, standing motionless. He wore a faded hunting kilt whose browns and greens blended into the grass and brush, as his flaming hair blended with the brilliant leaves. He looked as if he'd grown out of the forest. Beyond ~ Diana Gabaldon

Death was a constant fact of life. The reaper struck with fire and drowning; typhus, malaria, yellow fever, and a host of other diseases; accidents that ranged from the swift shock of a horse's kick to a slow-spreading infection from a cut finger; and suicide and murder. More than one-fifth of the children born died before their first birthday; at birth the average life expectancy for an adult was little more than forty.6 Medicine at best could offer a patient little help and at worst was lethal, an excruciating matter of bleeding, blistering, and purging with potions such as laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol. ~ Barbara Weisberg

Temptation gains power where we see it prevail in others we know and we express neither shock or hatred of them and their ways nor pity and prayer for their deliverance. ~ John Owen

A bright light filled the plane. The first shock-wave hit us. We were eleven and a half miles slant range from the atomic explosion but the whole airplane cracked and crinkled from the blast ... We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud ... mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall. ~ Paul Tibbets

No one who has ever known what it is to lose faith in a fellow-man whom he has profoundly loved and reverenced, will lightly say that the shock can leave the faith in the Invisible Goodness unshaken. With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled. ~ George Eliot

I looked up its history, and, surprisingly, it has quite a history. You know how in Europe they make you study a lot of stuff about the old alchemists and all that kind of stuff, to give you an historical grounding.'

'Yes?'

Kemp laughed. 'You haven't got a witch around your place by any chance?'

'Eh!' The exclamation almost burned Marson's lips. He fought hard to hide the tremendousness of that shock.

Kemp laughed again. 'According to 'Die Geschichte der Zauberinnen' by the Austrian, Karl Gloeck, Hydrodendon Barelia is the modem name for the sinister witch's weed of antiquity. I'm not talking about the special witches of our Christian lore, with their childish attributes, but the old tribe of devil's creatures that came out of prehistory, regular full-blooded sea witches. It seems when each successive body gets old, they choose a young woman's body, attune themselves to it by living with the victim, and take possession any time after midnight of the first full moon period following the 21st of June. Witch's weed is supposed to make the entry easier. Gloeck says... why, what's the matter, sir?'

His impulse, his wild and terrible impulse, was to babble the whole story to Kemp. With a gigantic effort, he stopped himself; for Kemp, though he might talk easily of witches, was a scientist to the depths of his soul.

("The Witch") ~ A.E. Van Vogt

Woman with known intent
intending to explore
Woman with her senses on the edge
edging for some more..."

From my poem, "Known Intent" - The Poetic Art of Seduction - Volume 1

©Clarissa O. Clemens ~ Clarissa Clemens

I do like Manny,
crank up the inside volume,
listen to my dreams
as I walk through the school halls,
I choose what words to let in. ~ Nikki Grimes

Clearly anyone who wants to dismiss Eichmann's testimonies on the grounds of their demonstrated unreliability and shameless self-serving lies can easily do so, and many of my colleagues have done precisely this. But what if our default position is not to dismiss everything Eichmann said and wrote just because he was lying most of the time, but rather to ask what among this mass of lies might nonetheless be of help to the historian, given his unique vantage point and the sheer volume of his testimony?

-- Collected Memories: Holocaust and Postwar Testimony, page 11 ~ Christopher R. Browning

61I am prepared to ... assert that inspiration has something in common with a convulsion, and that every sublime thought is accompanied by a more or less violent nervous shock which has its repercussions in the very core of the brain. ~ Walter Benjamin

If anyone should doubt whether the electrical matter passes through the substance of bodies, or only over along their surfaces, a shock from an electrified large glass jar, taken through his own body, will probably convince him. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Miss Marple believes in justice and has very high standards. There is nothing you could say or do that would shock her. ~ Joan Hickson

I'm ... pretty sure I'm in love with Travis,"
My eyes still focused on the pavement, I handed Travis his phone, and then reluctantly peered up at his expression. A combination of confusion, shock, and adoration scrolled across his face.
He scanned my face with careful hope in his eyes. "You love me?"
"It's the tattoos," I shrugged.
A wide smile stretched across his face, making his dimple sink into his cheek. "Come home with me," he said, enveloping me in his arms.
My eyebrows shot up. "You said all that to get me in bed? I must have made quite an impression."
"The only thing I'm thinking about right now is holding you in my arms all night."
"Let's go," I smiled. ~ Jamie McGuire

Initial euphoria would give way to shock, shock to horror, and then, as the killing dragged on with no end in sight, horror to a kind of benumbed despair. ~ Scott Anderson

Increasing the volume does not improve the quality of a bad song. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

...The same folks who believe this fantasy also believe that the sole motivation for modern man's practice of science is to disprove their beliefs. How despicably arrogant of them to circumvent their burden of proof! It is plainly there for all to see that science wishes to discover and prove the answers to the very same questions that religion claims to already have answers for, whether or not they disprove former assumptions by our ancestors. The religionists should be happy that that their claims might have the chance to be proven wrong, but instead they would rather fear them disproven. I don't know about you, but I smell a guilty conscience. If they were one-hundred percent certain that their claims were of truth, they wouldn't need "faith" in them, nor would they have to dread possible invalidation. ~ John M. Penkal

Volume - as long as you anticipated, as we did in 1972, a world of continuous inflation. ~ Warren Buffett

Oh God," I muttered as Toby and I made a frantic effort to untangle ourselves. He scrambled off my bed and grabbed his shirt off the floor, his face glowing scarlet. I reached down and picked up my T-shirt. "Wesley, how did you get in here?" I demanded.
"The door was unlocked," he said. "You didn't answer when I knocked… Now I can see why." His dark gray eyes were big with what I could only guess was shock, dissolving quickly into disgust, and they stared directly at Toby.
"But what are you doing here?" I asked, feeling a sudden surge of anger rush through my veins. I yanked my T-shirt over my head and stood up.
"You weren't answering your phone," Wesley muttered. "I was worried, but it looks like you're just fine." He glared at Toby for a moment before looking back at me. "My mistake. ~ Kody Keplinger

Reality is frigid; I have to dip one toe at a time and grow accustomed to the shock before wading in further. ~ Jodi Picoult

The thing is, being lonely is like walking in the cold without a coat. It's uncomfortable, but eventually you go numb. Once you get used to not being lonely, though, the shock of going back is like having your down comforter yanked off at six o'clock on a Minnesota December morning. ~ Maggie Hall

Seeee, I told you so!"
"Be quiet. Don't talk to me."
"Now you should understand
No matter where you go ...
you'll always be alone."
"Shut up ...
Intention of the abyss ... !!"
"Say ...
why are you Alice?
...
... Why ... is Alice you ... ?
'cos ...
... your name is ...
... The Bloody Black Rabbit Isn't It? ~ Jun Mochizuki

Wow, Meghan!" Kimi bounced in place, clapping her hands. "You look awesome! I love what you did with your hair."
"PRINCESS." Ironhorse looked me up and down, nodding in approval.
"TRULY, YOU ARE A VISION."
I glanced at Puck, who was staring at me in a daze. "Um ... " he stammered, while I nearly went into shock with the novelty of actually rendering Puck speechless. "You look ... nice," he muttered at last.
I blushed, suddenly self-conscious. ~ Julie Kagawa

She got off the train, and John-Paul lifted a hand and smiled. Janie waved back, and as she walked down the railway platform toward him, it came to her with a tiny, bitter shock of self-revelation that it wasn't that she liked Connor more than John-Paul, it was that she liked John-Paul far too much. It was a strain being with someone so good-looking and smart and funny and nice. She was dazzled by John-Paul. Connor was dazzled by her. And it was more fun doing the dazzling. Girls were meant to do the dazzling. John-Paul's interest ~ Liane Moriarty