Quotes About Condensation

“If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most importent challenge of our times.”

— Wade Davis

“Here's the conundrum: We want to tell our stories! But if condensation is the language of wishes-especially the most verboten and destructive ones-the more you spell the story out, the less aesthetically charged it becomes. The question is whether untransformed experience can ever be aesthetically powerful, or whether it's simply interesting. Literary language is one solution, with its habits of duality-metaphor, irony-and other techniques for saying opposing things at once. For haunting the reader with ghosts of buried meanings.
Your story may be interesting, but what if, paradoxically, it's what you can't say that makes it lasting?”

— Laura Kipnis

“They can keep men in here, under lock and key, deep in the dungeon until the final moments of their lives, so that men like York and me will never taste the rain. But they cannot keep us from passing our condensation on to the sky. They cannot keep us from raining down in China.”

— Rene Denfeld

“On the terrace of the Pepiniere, the 150 pupils of the Institut Chemique talk chemistry as they leave the auditoria and the laboratory. The echoes of the magnificent public garden of the city of Nancy make the words reverberate; coupling, condensation, grignardization. Moreover, their clothes stay impregnated with strong and characteristic odours; we follow the initiates of Hermes by their scent. In such an environment, how is it possible not to be productive?”

— Victor Grignard

“It's a strange feeling, praying into your hands, filling the air between them with words. We think of divinity as something infinitely big, but it is also infinitely small - the condensation of your breath on your palms, the ridges in your fingertips, the warm space between your shoulder and the shoulder next to you.”

— G. Willow Wilson

“She sat there admiring the beauty of the light amber fluid in the clear bottle, the way the condensation on the Miller bottle ran down the black and gold label, like it was a fine piece of art. That was the problem with alcohol. It was so beautiful to look at, how could you resist it? And what kind of place could be more inviting and seductive than a truly elegant cocktail bar?”

— Fannie Flagg

“When we gaze at the magnificence of an ancient monument and ascribe its achievement to one man, we are guilty of spiritual embezzlement. We forget the army of craftsmen, unknown and unsung, who preceded him in the darkness of the ages, who toiled humbly - all heroism is humble - each contributing his small share to the common treasure of his time. A great building is not the private invention of some genius or other. It is merely a condensation of the spirit of a people.”

— Ayn Rand

“Dream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two foremen in charge of the dream-work, and we may put the shaping of our dreams down mainly to their activity.”

— Sigmund Freud

“The first thing the investigator comes to understand in comparing the dream-content with the dream-thoughts is that work of condensation has been carried out here on a grand scale.”

— Sigmund Freud

“The way in which these factors-displacement, condensation, and over-determination-interact in the process of dream-formation, and the question of which becomes dominant and which secondary, are things we shall set aside for later inquiries.”

— Sigmund Freud

“The same diversity in their ways of formation and the same rules for its solution hold good also for the innumerable medley of dream contents, examples of which I need scarcely adduce. Their strangeness quite disappears when we resolve not to place them on a level with the objects of perception as known to us when awake, but to remember that they represent the art of dream condensation by an exclusion of unnecessary detail.”

— Sigmund Freud

“The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary.”

— Herman Melville

“Inspector Hewitt flicked on the defroster to evaporate the condensation our words were forming on the windscreen.”

— Alan Bradley

“I was beginning to appreciate that the central feature of life on the Appalachian Trail is deprivation, that the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the conveniences of everyday life that the most ordinary things
processed cheese, a can of pop gorgeously beaded with condensation
fill you with wonder and gratitude.”

— Bill Bryson

“In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

“"You're thinking too much, as usual," I said.
A dismissive snort as he got to his feet. He tried running again, and didn't fall, but did more lurching than loping, his legs threatening to tangle at every step.
"Apparently this could take a while, so how about you practice and I'll head back to the house-"
He darted past me and veered to block my path.
I smiled. "I knew that'd work. So as I right? It's better when you act, not think?"
A sigh whistled out of his nostrils, condensation hanging in the frigid air.
"You hate that, don't you? We should keep a scorecard, see who's right more often: me or you."
He rolled his eyes.
"Not a chance, huh? You'd never live it down if I beat you. But I am right this time. Your body knows how to move as a wolf. You just need to shut your brain off and let your muscles do their thing."”

— Kelley Armstrong

“Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.”

— Walter Mosley

“Bose-Einstein condensation is one of the most intriguing phenomena predicted by quantum statistical mechanics.”

— Wolfgang Ketterle

“The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.”

— Arthur Miller

“She gave anyone who saw her a sensation of April and of dawn. There was dew in her eyes. Cosette was a condensation of auroral light in womanly form.”

— Victor Hugo

“Isn't it funny," she said, stroking with an inky finger the beads of condensation on her glass of white wine, "that year was such an unhappy one, for me. Remember poor Reza? And Skandar away so much-and that weather. Do you remember, Nora? I've never had a harder time." (Except, she said "time-e.") "I guess I didn't realize it was”

— Claire Messud

“Once, Lila Zacharov was in love with a boy with hair as black as spilled ink and eyes as dark as coffee. She would trace his name on her skin, over and over, write it in the condensation of her breath on panes of glass, scrawl it on the bottoms of her feet with the tip of her nail, like she was casting a spell.”

— Holly Black

“In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length.”

— Milan Kundera

“High overhead, in the reflected glare of arc lamps, one of the unfinished Fuller domes shut out two thirds of the salmon-pink evening sky, its ragged edge like broken gray honeycomb. The Sprawl's patchwork of domes tended to generate inadvertent microclimates; there were areas of a few city blocks where a fine drizzle of condensation fell continually from the soot-stained geodesics, and sections of high dome famous for displays of static-discharge, a peculiarly urban variety of lightning.”

— William Gibson

“My love of storytelling comes from oral tradition, the stories from my grandmother and conversations with [my] mother. The world is full of discussions of condensation, drifts, misunderstanding, repetition. These are the materials I work with. My debt is to these women.”

— Lucrecia Martel

“The final condensation.”

— DeWitt Wallace

“There is no natural phenomenon that is comparable with the sudden and apparently accidentally timed development of science, except perhaps the condensation of a super-saturated gas or the explosion of some unpredictable explosives.”

— Eugene Wigner

“Always try to innovate. If you lose your old fitness, you lose out to Bose-Einstein condensation. I am sure that companies that go under would feel better if they knew that they were victims of Bose-Einstein condensation.”

— Jennifer Tour Chayes

“The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.”

— Antonin Artaud

“My master's visualizations were so powerful their condensation into matter was mere signature. Donald Walters, formerly Kriyananda, author of The Path about his guru Yogananda.”

— Goswami Kriyananda

“What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy.”

— Joseph Pulitzer

“Doth not this Æthereal Medium in passing out of Water, Glass, Crystal, and other compact and dense Bodies into empty Spaces, grow denser and denser by degrees, and by that means refract the Rays of Light not in a point, but by bending them gradually in curve Lines? And doth not the gradual condensation of this Medium extend to some distance from the Bodies, and thereby cause the Inflexions of the Rays of Light, which pass by the edges of dense Bodies, at some distance from the Bodies?”

— Isaac Newton

“I want to be the condensation on the glass. I want to be that phenomenon that takes place between hot and cold.”

— Terrence Howard

“As water by cooling and condensation becomes ice, so thought by condensation assumes physical form. Everything in the universe is thought in material form.”

— Paramahansa Yogananda

“Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction. The source of Greek and Roman classicism - clarity, order, proportion, balance - is in Egypt.”

— Camille Paglia

“Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Great country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture.”

— Henri Matisse