Chrome: her pretty childface smooth as steel, with eyes that would have been at home at the bottom of some deep Atlantic trench, c...old gray eyes that lived under terrible pressure. They say she cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her, rococo custom variations that took years to kill you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the Gernsback p...ulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car--no wings for it--and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why do our bodies wear out? Why can't we just go on and on and on, accumulating a potentially infinite number of Frequent Flyer mi...leage points? These are the kinds of questions that philosophers have been asking ever since they realized that being a philosopher did not involve any heavy lifting. And yet the answer is really very simple. Our bodies are mechanical devices, they break down. Some devices, such as battery-operated toys costing $39.95, break down almost instantly upon exposure to the Earth's atmosphere. Other devices, such as stereo systems owned by your next-door neighbor's 13-year-old son who likes to listen to bands with names like "Nerve Damage," at a volume capable of disintegrating limestone, will continue to function perfectly for many years, even if you hit them with an ax. But the fundamental law of physics is that sooner or later every mechanism ceases to function for one reason or another, and it is never covered under the warranty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For beautiful variety no crop can be compared with this. Here is not merely the plain yellow of the grains, but nearly all the col...ors that we know, the brightest blue not excepted: the early blushing maple, the poison sumach blazing its sins as scarlet, the mulberry ash, the rich chrome yellow of the poplars, the brilliant red huckleberry, with which the hills' backs are painted, like those of sheep. The frost touches them, and, with the slightest breath of returning day or jarring of earth's axle, see in what showers they come floating down! The ground is all parti-colored with them. But they still live in the soil, whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that spring from it. They stoop to rise, to mount higher in coming years, by subtle chemistry, climbing by the sap in the trees; and the sapling's first fruits thus shed, transmuted at last, may adorn its crown, when, in after years, it has become the monarch of the forest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A pragmatic race, the Japanese appear to have decided long ago that the only reason for drinking alcohol is to become intoxicated ...and therefore drink only when they wish to be drunk. So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bobby read his future in women; his girls were omens, changes in the weather, and he'd sit all night in the Gentleman Loser waitin...g for the season to lay a new face down in front of him like a card.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You could see his sunglasses scanning those faces as they passed, and he must have decided that Rikki's was the one he was waiting... for, the wild card and the luck changer. The new one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'd been in Burbank for three days, trying to suffuse a really dull-looking rocker with charisma.... It is possible to photograph ...what isn't there; it's damned hard to do, and consequently a very marketable talent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They're semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Ve...rne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »