Inspirational quotes with smog.
Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi.I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs.My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.
As melancholia replaced the jarring of my invention, I sat.Unable to breathe in the smog I had created, unable to stand on my betraying legs, unable to howl at the heavens over my sordid soul.In this inferno, I became paroxysmic, my self-hatred, superparamount, numbness dulling the agony of such a devilish act,An iron curtain fell upon the surrounding world, or at least what I had left of it to be owned by the laconic eclipse.All the angels fled, disowning my prayers, the lurid world backed away, leaving me forsaken and detached,I could no longer hear the bombings, hear them fall, my own fabrication, only the dead air that came after, the intense silence.Cynical and paralyzed, I realized I had purloined a portion of Hell and given it to the unwilling Earth,Punishing those I had no right to punish, judging those I had no reason to condemn, destroying cities I had never set foot in.This is how I became Death, the destroyer of Worlds.
Woven words are little conviction when I present myself as a man of fiction. And you a woman of lies and deceit, stumbling forward on two left feet. You are an exquisite figurine of an incomprehensible place, While I, a soldier of my cause, my race. A single sip of you would satiate thirst, hunger and empty. Yet, you stand unmoved, comfortable knowing you could stave desires plenty. To my heart, you are known as 'shatter.' Between saint and sin, you are the latter. End, not even my finest words will matter. The still, the silence, even then, you are famine to my soul. My chest lacks certain weight now; I simply wish to be whole. Now, I stand before you broken, humbled and so bare, Only to see your infinite eyes brimming with no care. Your heart is a cauldron that burns darkest fuel. And I a remnant of smog, the overly-bitter fool. The man of fiction stumbles forward on two left feet, The woman of lies weaves words of conviction and deceit.
With all control look for the hole, your mind gets weak, unless it’s truth you seek. Swirled and twirled into another world, into the smog, a doorway within the fog.” Deetkatu, The Little People Journey into the Mystic Sea
Some molecules - ammonia, carbon dioxide, water - show up everywhere in the universe, whether life is present or not. But others pop up especially in the presence of life itself. Among the biomarkers in Earth's atmosphere are ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons from aerosol sprays, vapor from mineral solvents, escaped coolants from refrigerators and air conditioners, and smog from the burning of fossil fuels. No other way to read that list: sure signs of the absence of intelligence.
By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, crowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to be barely remarked upon. Meanwhile, in the literally gilded towers above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepeneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept coktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.
He never went to war, yet he emerged from the smog and shadows victorious.
Dear Natasha,It's the middle of the night. I can't sleep. Thoughts are creeping through my head like darkness slips around the bodies of sky scrapers in every city we've ever been to. From the bottom up, suffocating the life on the street first and then raising to the head and the brain, circling into smog and clouds until the black stretches up so high that nobody can even remember what the stars used to look like.This is how I feel when I lie awake and think of you. I miss you.
And then, like most of the times she went down that road of thought, things started lighting up. Rays filtered through the smog like tentacles – and a quite intangible hope infected the darkness with its resolution. She never knew where these urges to 'move forward' came from. Their source eluded her – but she knew they were there somewhere, just as mysterious and uncontrollable as the darkness. Treacles of light had unwittingly penetrated these dark alleyways in her thinking. Illumination came slowly, but it was undeniable.
A lot of people who read my novel 'Smog City' ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it's because I've given them life. Not literally of course, but since I spent so much time developing and creating my characters, they've ended up with complex personalities, in fact they're almost sentient in a way, and to write them off as dead would be like killing a close friend to me.
There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it… this place, she decided, was called Smog City.
Mandy loved the smell of a sunny day after a night of rain. The sun hit the orange puddles, the overgrown, soft, green grass on her lawn, and it beamed down through the orange steel mill smog, sending otherworldly, bizarre shadows across the concrete sidewalk.
The place was a truck stop town. Large 18 wheelers lined the sidewalks and cafes. Giant diesel motors roaring their exhaust into the cloudy night skies. Wearied looking truckers climbed into the cabs like captains of gigantic steel ships. She could not imagine anyone trying to maneuver such large metallic beasts all over the roads of the nation. While the idea of being behind the wheel with nothing but the comfort of the radio, and the isolation were appealing. The thought of fighting all the congested traffic in smog infested industrial waters of choking vapors killed any pleasant dreams of the occupation.
Language is a piss poor attempt at telepathy is what it is. We try to put our thoughts into each other's heads through language...But half the intended meaning gets lost in the transmission, and the other half is filtered through existing assumptions. Everything is a half truth!That's the whole problem! You can't understand me through the smog of your presumptions and prejudices. Multiply that six billion times and you'll begin to understand the desperation of our global situation
Yeah, you’re right about having entire rooms full of film and photos… in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage… I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides… I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that’s happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs,” Alecto responded. “People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines… The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I’ve been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to.
Silence hung around the corners, draped like spider webs across all surfaces and hanging like smog in the air.
The glow lasted through the night, beyond the bar's closing, when there were no cabs on the street. And so Mathilde and Lotto decided to walk home, her arm in his, chatting about nothing, about everything, the unpleasant, hot breath of the subway belching up from the grates. 'Chthonic', he said, booze letting loose the pretension at his core, which she still found sweet, an allowance from the glory. It was so late, there were few other people out, and it felt, just for this moment, that they had the city to themselves.She thought of all the life just underfoot, the teem of it that they were passing over, unknowing. She said, 'Did you know that the total weight of all the ants on Earth is the same as the total weight of all the humans on Earth.' She, who drank to excess, was a little bit drunk, it was true, there was so much relief in the evening.When the curtains closed against the backdrop, an enormous bolder blocking their future had rolled away.'They'll still be here when we're gone,' he said. He was drinking from a flask. By the time they were home, he'd be sozzeled. 'The ants and the jellyfish and the cockroaches, they will be the kings of the Earth.'...'They deserve this place more than we do,' she said. 'We've been reckless with our gifts.' He smiled and looked up. There were no stars, there was too much smog for them.'Did you know,' he said, 'they just found out just a while ago that there are billions of worlds that can support life in our galaxy alone.'...She felt a sting behind here eyes, but couldn't say why this thought touched her.He saw clear through and understood. He knew her. The things he didn't know about her would sink an ocean liner. He knew her.'We're lonely down here,' he said, 'it's true, but we're not alone.'In the hazy space after he died, when she lived in a sort of timeless underground grief, she saw on the internet a video about what would happen to our galaxy in billions of years. We are in an immensely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped like spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they draw near, casting off blue sparks, new stars until they spin past each other, and then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined, never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss, and then at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.
This was my first time in Govan. You could smell and taste the thick smog in the air. The Blue Triangle was a new high-tech building, and it didn’t look right standing there in front of older and more historical buildings. The Blue Triangle may have looked great from the outside, but once inside, to my horror, it was full of young teenage boys and girls full of deep and dark depression
The city reeked of death, and the savages that resided within its imposing starkness existed in fear of their lives. They had been shocked by the recent bloody Whitechapel murders, as if starvation, disease, moral degradation, and perpetual smog drowning all color in gray wasn’t enough to bring home the pathetic reality of their miserable existence. The police were no nearer to capturing the monster that lurked in the crevices, and London seemed stiller in the dark, the streets devoid of hope.
Our thoughts are not the problem. Our thoughts do not create the psychological smog. It is the way we respond to our thoughts that creates the smog.
The prints shop manager, a balding man of about thirty years old, dressed in a plaid work shirt and faded jeans, looked very shocked when he saw the headline text. “Sydney Tar Ponds, Is It As Dangerous As People Say? Well,” he exclaimed, glancing at the front photo, which featured the Sydney Steel Corporation, along with its plumes of orange smog. “You know, most people your age are really against that mill, as if it’s a disease. We have university students protesting every few weeks or so… strangely enough, the ones who have parents who rely on that steel mill to pay the bills.”“What about the pollution?” Wendy questioned, almost accusingly, as if it was his fault. “What if dangerous chemicals are in the environment?”“Hey kid, I don’t even work at the mill, never have, but my father, my uncle, their father, cousins, all worked there,” the prints shop man argued, placing the newspapers in a cardboard box and taping it shut. “When it comes down to all that ‘go green’ crap, you have to ask yourself, is it worth risking a person’s income, their job, their family… their life? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but these newspapers might have a point.
We tend to be unaware that stars rise and set at all. This is not entirelydue to our living in cities ablaze with electric lights which reflect back at us from our fumes, smoke, and artificial haze. When I discussed the stars with a well-known naturalist, I was surprised to learn that even a man such as he, who has spent his entire lifetime observing wildlife and nature, was totally unaware of the movements of the stars. And he is no prisoner of smog-bound cities. He had no inkling, for instance, that the Little Bear could serve as a reliable night clock as it revolves in tight circles around the Pole Star (and acts as a celestial hour-hand at half speed - that is, it takes 24 hours rather than 12 for a single revolution).I wondered what could be wrong. Our modern civilization does not ignorethe stars only because most of us can no longer see them. There are definitely deeper reasons. For even if we leave the sulphurous vapours of our Gomorrahs to venture into a natural landscape, the stars do not enter into any of our back-to-nature schemes. They simply have no place in our outlook any more. We look at them, our heads flung back in awe and wonder that they can existin such profusion. But that is as far as it goes, except for the poets. This is simply a 'gee whiz' reaction. The rise in interest in astrology today does not result in much actual star-gazing. And as for the space programme's impact on our view of the sky, many people will attentively follow the motions of a visible satellite against a backdrop of stars whose positions are absolutely meaningless to them. The ancient mythological figures sketched in the sky were taught us as children to be quaint 'shepherds' fantasies' unworthy of the attention of adult minds. We are interested in the satellite because we made it, but the stars are alien and untouched by human hands - therefore vapid. To such a level has our technological mania, like a bacterial solution in which we have been stewed from birth, reduced us.It is only the integral part of the landscape which can relate to the stars.Man has ceased to be that. He inhabits a world which is more and more his own fantasy. Farmers relate to the skies, as well as sailors, camel caravans,and aerial navigators. For theirs are all integral functions involving the fundamental principle - now all but forgotten - of orientation. But in analmost totally secular and artificial world, orientation is thought to be un- necessary. And the numbers of people in insane asylums or living at home doped on tranquilizers testifies to our aimless, drifting metaphysic. And to our having forgotten orientation either to seasons (except to turn on the air- conditioning if we sweat or the heating system if we shiver) or to direction (our one token acceptance of cosmic direction being the wearing of sun-glasses because the sun is 'over there').We have debased what was once the integral nature of life channelled by cosmic orientations - a wholeness - to the ennervated tepidity of skin sensations and retinal discomfort. Our interior body clocks, known as circadian rhythms, continue to operate inside us, but find no contact with the outside world.They therefore become ingrown and frustrated cycles which never interlock with our environment. We are causing ourselves to become meaningless body machines programmed to what looks, in its isolation, to be an arbitrary set of cycles. But by tearing ourselves from our context, like the still-beating heart ripped out of the body of an Aztec victim, we inevitably do violence to our psyches. I would call the new disease, with its side effect of 'alienation of the young', dementia temporalis.
She glanced outside at the sky, filled with clouds and smog. All the pollution, all that hell—even the stars didn’t stand a chance.
Twenty-three stories up and all I could see out the windows was grey smog. They could call it the City of the Angels if they wanted to, but if there were angels out there, they had to be flying blind.
The smog curled between the streetlamps and the spokes of the wrought iron framework. It seemed through your body and into your bones.
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