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1 " Punk had picked the locks, sluiced out into the grid. "
― Garth Risk Hallberg
2 " I remember, in no particular order:—a shiny inner wrist;—steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;—gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;—a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;—another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;—bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door.This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.We live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing—until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.I’m not very interested in my schooldays, and don’t feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage. "
― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending
3 " An example of such emergent phenomena is the origin of life from non-living chemical compounds in the oldest, lifeless oceans of the earth. Here, aided by the radiation energy received from the sun, countless chemical materials were synthesized and accumulated in such a way that they constituted, as it were, a primeval “soup.” In this primeval soup, by infinite variations of lifeless growth and decay of substances during some billions of years, the way of life was ultimately reached, with its metabolism characterized by selective assimilation and dissimilation as end stations of a sluiced and canalized flow of free chemical energy. "
― R.W. van Bemmelen
4 " Emerald slopes became so tall they touched the clouds, and showers painted diamond waterfalls that sluiced down cliff sides. "
― Victoria Kahler , Capturing the Sunset
5 " In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs. "
― Ross Macdonald , The Chill