Air Surface Tension

Famous quotes containing the words surface tension, air, surface and/or tension:

    “Night City was like a deranged experiment in Social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone ... though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.”
    —William Gibson (b. 1948)

    “Liberty is the air that we Americans breathe. Our Government is based on the belief that a people can be both strong and free. That civilized men need no restraint but that imposed by themselves against the abuse of freedom.”
    —Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)

    “And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.”
    —Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)

    “The tension to mother the “right” way can leave a peculiar silence within mother daughter relationships—the silence of a mother’s own truth and experience. Within this silence, a daughter’s authentic voice can also fall silent. This is the silence of perfection. This silence of perfection prevents mothers from listening and learning from their daughters.”
    —Elizabeth Debold (20th century)