Tobias Zaharis

“On an air-cooled engine like this, extreme overheating can cause a “seizure”. This machine has had one...in fact, three of them. I took this machine into a shop because I thought it wasn’t important enough to justify getting into myself, having to learn all the complicated details.

The shop was a different scene from the ones I remembered. The mechanics, who had once all seemed like ancient veterans, now looked like children. A radio was going full blast and they were clowning around and talking and seemed not to notice me. They sat down to do a job and they performed it like chimpanzees. Nothing personal in it.

The radio was a clue. You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time.

But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing—and uninvolved. They were like spectators.

I found the cause of the seizures a few weeks later, waiting to happen again. It was a little twenty-five-cent pin in the internal oil-delivery system that had been sheared and was preventing oil from reaching the head at high speeds.

On this trip I think we should notice it, explore it a little, to see if in that strange separation of what man is from what man does we may have some clues as to what the hell has gone wrong in this twentieth century. I don’t want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else.”
― Pirsig, Robert M.

“Killers don't have to make sense.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“Someone's parents have been singing entirely the wrong sort of songs.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“Scott could feel the contents of his stomach flip over and over on themselves. He turned to the side and retched, frothy yellow bile spilled out onto the newspaper covered floor, filling the room with the putrid stench of previously ingested alcohol.

'Look's like someone can't hold their drink,' McBlane said, and Dominic and Shugg laughed.

Scott was still staring at the steam rising from his evacuated stomach contents as he heard the hammer fall. The dull crack of bone splintering under its weight.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree