Seam Quotes
Spade's thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate care, sifting a measured quantity of tan flakes down into curved paper, spreading the flakes so that they lay equal at the ends with a slight depression in the middle, thumbs rolling the paper's inner edge down and up under the outer edge as forefingers pressed it over, thumbs and fingers sliding to the paper cylinder's ends to hold it even while tongue licked the flap, left forefinger and thumb pinching their ends while right forefinger and thumb smoothed the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb twisting their end and lifting the other to Spade's mouth.
Dashiell Hammett
Winter lay among the Outer Hebrides. Day was a sullen glimmer between two darknesses, often smothered in snow. When it did not fling itself upon the rocks and burst in freezing spume, the North Atlantic rolled in heavy and gnawing. There was no real horizon; leaden waves met leaden sky and misty leaden light hid the seam.
Poul Anderson
It's like being home again, when they bring in the hopelessly mangled person from the mine explosion, or the woman in her third day of labor, or the famished child struggling against pneumonia and my mother and Prim, they wear that same look on their faces. Now is the times to run away tho the woods, to hide in the trees until the patient is long gone and in another part of the Seam the hammers make the coffin. But I'm held here both by the hovercraft walls and the same force that holds the loved ones of the dying. How often I've seen them, ringed around our kitchen table and I thought, Why don't they leave? Why do they stay to watch?
And now I know. It's because you have no choice.
Suzanne Collins
This is continuity, you travel, perhaps in your mind, a paper world real, God reeling up and down landscapes and buildings, knocks down, opens new roads, doesn't like it, changes again, but there isn't a seam, His world is onefold, and you perceive neither seam nor contradiction, continuity only.
Dimitris Lyacos
My father was a coal hewer from Goldthorpe, a coal-mining village in South Yorkshire. He played for the Yorkshire second team as an opening fast bowler - to me he was a gorgeously heroic man. He helped form a union and closed down the Barnsley seam because it was seeping gas, and saved many, many lives.
Brian Blessed
Fellows were encouraged to revisit their former industries and make a report on any new perceptions they might have. One of these Fellows, Ken Bamforth, returned with news of an innovation in work practice and organization which had occurred in a new seam in the colliery where he used to work in the South Yorkshire coalfield. The seam, the Haighmoor, had become possible to mine "shortwall" because of improved roof control.
Eric Trist
The work organization of the new seam was, to us, a novel phenomenon consisting of relatively autonomous groups interchanging roles and shifts and regulating their affairs with a minimum of supervision. Cooperation between task groups was everywhere in evidence, personal commitment obvious, absenteeism low, accidents infrequent, productivity high. The contrast was large between the atmosphere and arrangements on these faces and those in the conventional areas of the pit, where the negative features characteristic of the industry were glaringly apparent. The men told us that in order to adapt with best advantage to the technical conditions in the new seam, they had evolved a form of work organization based on practices common in the unmechanized days when small groups, who took responsibility for the entire cycle, had worked autonomously.
Eric Trist
I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. He said, "You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it." And I said, "But, Daddy, no one's going to see it!" And he said, "Yeah, but I know it's there." So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work.
Toni Morrison
What happened in the Haighmoor seam gave to Bamforth and myself a first glimpse of the "emergence of a new paradigm of work" (Emery, 1978) in which the best match would be sought between the requirements of the social and technical systems. Some of the principles involved were as follows:.
Eric Trist
A small but significant number of angry and historically minded women comprehend the women's revolution in the visionary sense of an end to the catastrophic brotherhood and a return to the former glory and wise equanimity of the matriarchies. We don't know how this will take place exactly, nor the resultant nature of the new social forms, we know that it will take place, and in fact that the process of its development is now irreversibly underway. Of supreme importance in this process is the recovery by modern woman of her mythology as models for theory, consciousness, and action.... The Swiss patrician Jacob Bachofen was one of the first to discover "the female era at the lower seam of history, with its sacerdotal, political, and economic female dominion." .... The fruits of this research were until recently unavailable except to a few initiates and they now form a cornerstone of the second wave in the feminist revolution....
Jill Johnston
