Quotes About Elasticity

The thing is that as you grow through life, the pursuit of art and the pursuit of new ideas, all these things keeps your mind elastic.

Reality can be elastic, and I want to see how elastic it can be, you know?

My spirits rose as I went deeper; into the forest; but I could not regain my former elasticity of mind. I found cheerfulness to be like life itself--not to be created by any argument. Pg. 108

There are machines that can get rid of your cellulite, so I want to do that. And my friend has just had a machine that has worked on her neck and tightened the elasticity of the skin. You just need a day off work afterwards, so I'm thinking, why not?

Maybe the trouble is that the shape of life is elastic, that it can feel and be full at variable levels of fullness. Or maybe we're poor judges of our own lives' fullness. Or maybe the concepts of emptiness and fullness are poor metaphors for happiness, if in fact happiness is what we're talking about. ?

But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.

A spring never free from the pressure of some foreign body at last loses its elasticity; and so does the mind if other people's thoughts are constantly forced upon it.

The result is that much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment. The practice of doing this is the reason erudition makes most men duller and sillier than they are by nature and robs their writings of all effectiveness: they are in Pope's words: For ever reading, never to be read.

The result is that much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment.

Hence much reading deprives the mind of all elasticity, as a weight continually pressing upon it does a spring, and the most certain means of never having any original thoughts is to take a book in hand at once, at every spare moment. This practice is the reason why scholarship makes most men more unintelligent and stupid than they are by nature, and deprives their writings of all success; they are, as Pope says— 'For ever reading, never to be read'.

How is it that time can be elastic? Sometimes years seem to go by while you're looking the other way, and sometimes-when you most long for it to pass-life-times can stretch from a few hours

I could almost feel the miles between us shrinking, as if we were at two ends of some invisible elastic thread.

El amor es una goma elástica que los humanos, a fuerza de tirar, consiguen que se alargue. Pero, al cabo, uno de los que tiraban se cansa y suelta su extremo y la goma le da un porrazo en las narices al que todavía seguía tirando…

We'd like to keep things flexible;

We might say blessed are the flexible for they won't get bent out of shape.

HOOKE'S LAW (1676)

Whatever is flexible and living will tend to grow; whatever is rigid and blocked will wither and die.

The soul can shrivel from am excess of critical distance, and if I don't want to remain in arid internal exile for the rest of my life, I have to find a way to lose alienation without losing my self. But how does one bend toward another culture without falling over, how does one strike an elastic balance between rigidity and self-effacement?

Time does not run in a straight line, like the markings on a wooden ruler. It stretches and shrinks, as if the ruler were made of balloon rubber. This is true in daily life: We perk up during high drama, nod off when bored. Markets do the same.

I try not to break the rules, but merely to test their elasticity.

I think noir is an immensely powerful - and elastic - lens through which to look at narrative and character. It seems to access something dark and true in us that other modes of fiction are often a bit prissy about touching. But the key to making it work as time and culture moves on is to use the elasticity, not just the power.

that, she thought, was the quiet crime of these times: if you made your conscience elastic enough, you could learn to tolerate anything and still find joy in the blossoming of flowers.

As Herman Melville wrote: "see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them.

In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.