Rabih Alameddine Quotes

In theory, cars are fairly simple. If they don't start, it's either the fuel system or the electrical system. Teach yourself about the path of each in your engine and tracing it is fairly straightforward. But at the beginning, mastering each new system seems like an unreachable shore. The car is effectively a black box.

I enjoy working on anything mechanical.

I loved to take things apart and put them back together. I loved the way things work.

I think Isambard Kingdom Brunel would be a good chap to have supper with. Anyone who builds a railway and then builds a steamship when he gets to Bristol and can't go any further must be a good chap.

I've always had an inquisitive mind about everything from flowers to television sets to motor cars. Always pulled them apart - couldn't put 'em back, but always extremely interested in how things work.

I happen to love engineering. I love figuring things out in a spatial sense, that whole realm of working with mechanical parts, and the relationship of the parts, and things like ratios and the speeds of particular objects.

From a very young age, I liked to take apart things. All of my Christmas gifts would wind up in a million pieces. I actually recall taking apart my dad's lawnmower three times to understand how combustible engines work.

Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems.

Tinkering is something we need to know how to do in order to keep something like the space station running. I am a tinkerer by nature.

At its heart, engineering is about using science to find creative, practical solutions. It is a noble profession.

I remember disassembling and putting an old analog alarm clock together. It was a lot of fun figuring out why it still worked with that one spring missing.

Beyond basic mathematical aptitude, the difference between good programmers and great programmers is verbal ability.

As an engineer I'm constantly spotting problems and plotting how to solve them.

I'm the kid that tried to take Latin in school because I felt if I could understand the root of everything, then I could understand why it worked. That was what took me into engineering. And the reason I stayed is, engineering teaches you to solve problems. It teaches you to think.

I'm an engineer by trade, and what engineers do is they go and build, and they don't think a lot about storytelling.

As a kid, I had my head under the hood of a car, either an old Ford or a Chevrolet, just learning about it so if anything happened, I could repair it.

I've always, since I was a kid, been interested in how things work.

I've always had good connections with cars and always knew how to fix them, so I didn't have trouble with breakdowns.

I like talking to engineers best. They built bridges, they're very precise, very disciplined, yet I find they have roving minds.

Engineering is the application of scientific principles toward practical ends. If the engineering isn't practical, it's bad engineering.

The mechanic, when a wheel refuses to turn, never thinks of dropping on his knees and asking the assistance of some divine power. He knows there is a reason. He knows that something is too large or too small; that there is something wrong with his machine; and he goes to work and he makes it larger or smaller, here or there, until the wheel will turn.

To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope.

The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.

Bolts are the murder of the impossible.

The [engineer] should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of learning, for it is by his judgement that all work done by the other arts is put to test. This knowledge is the child of practice and theory.