Torque Quotes

“Torque was the greatest thing in the world, as far as Lina was concerned.”

“Saylor and Beau worked together not like a piston head turned by a camshaft, but like the torque created from such synchronicity.”

“Don't get pissy with me leech." With a glare, Carrow pressed her print to his torque. "Even tapped out, I can still do a love spell to make you fall in love--with the sun.”

“The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.”

“Before We BeginIs Your Bug A nice clean original car that looks almost like itleft the showroom yesterday?P.S. All work should be carried out in consultation with a reliable workshop manual with regard to torque settings, gaps, procedures, sequences disassembly, reassembly, where to hide the leftover parts, etc. I will accept no responsibility for anything resulting fromyou or anybody else trying anything as described in this document whatsoever – but if it works or you end up with some amusing stories to tell someone else’s grandchildren, please feel free to drop me a line. (No death threats please.)Sincerely,Christina Engela”

“Biological databases impose particular limitations on how biological objects can be related to one another. In other words, the structure of a database predetermines the sorts of biological relationships that can be 'discovered'. To use the language of Bowker and Star, the database 'torques,' or twists, objects into particular conformations with respect to one another. The creation of a database generates a particular and rigid structure of relationships between biological objects, and these relationships guide biologists in thinking about how living systems work. The evolution of GenBank from flat-file to relational to federated database paralleled biologists' moves from gene-centric to alignment-centric to multielement views of biological action.”

“Like the original concept, the stormrider had rectangular blades, sixteen of them radiating out from the hub, each one a flat lattice of struts twenty-five kilometers long, made from the toughest steelsilicon fibers the Commonwealth knew how to manufacture. Twenty-three kilometers of them were covered by an ultra-thin silvered foil, giving a total surface area of over one thousand eight hundred square kilometers for the solar wind to impact on. Even in an ordinary solar system environment that would have produced a considerable torque. In the Half Way system the stormrider was positioned at the Lagrange point between the red star and its neutron companion, right in the middle of the plasma current, where the ion density was orders of magnitude thicker than any normal solar wind. The power the stormrider produced when it was in the thick of the flow was enough to operate the wormhole generator. But it couldn’t simply sit at the Lagrange point producing electricity continuously; that would have been too much like perpetual motion. As the waves of plasma pushed against it, they exerted an unremitting pressure on the blades that blew the stormrider away from the Lagrange point out toward the neutron star. So for five hours the two sets of blades would turn in opposite directions, generating electricity for the Port Evergreen wormhole that was delivered via a zero-width wormhole. The stormrider also stored some of the power, so that at the end of the five hours when it was out of alignment, it had enough of a reserve to fire its onboard thrusters, moving itself even farther out of the main plasma stream where the pressure was reduced. From there it chased a simple fifteen-hour loop back around through open space to the Lagrange point, where the cycle would begin again.”

“I am emotional about engines, if you hurt my car, you hurt my heart.”

“I am so obsessed with the cars that sometimes I feel like my heart is not a muscle, it's an engine.”

“Among all the machines, motorcar is my favorite machine.”