It is a wrench when you have to go back to work after maternity leave, whether you've had two months or over a year.

I remember taking a space walk on the ISS. There I was, wrench in hand, tightening bolts on a new module. It was such a mundane task. But when I looked in one direction, there was Earth floating in vivid blues and greens. In the other direction, I could see the blackest black conceivable, punctured by unwavering pinpoints of starshine.

It used to be that if your automobile broke, the teenager down the street with the wrench could fix it. Now you have to have sophisticated equipment that can deal with microchips. We're entering a world in which the complexity of the devices and the system of interconnecting devices is beyond our capability to easily understand.

Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you're writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one.

Once when I was standing at the base, they started rotating the set and a big, heavy wrench fell down from the 12 o'clock position of the set, and got buried in the ground a few feet from me. I could have been killed!

I did not enjoy Cambridge. But I shouldn't blame Cambridge alone. I wasn't ready for university or for the wrench of leaving home. It was a big cultural shock.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

I spent four years at Manchester City and won three trophies. It was a big wrench to leave.

My roots are in music. But Eileen Ford saw my high school graduation picture, and next thing I knew I was on a plane to New York. That's what threw a monkey wrench in it. The modeling.

My first toy was an adjustable wrench I called 'my wrencher.'

I did have pushback in the beginning of my career because my parents weren't really sure what I was going to do with my life going in the route of makeup. I was planning on medical school, so when I threw the makeup wrench at them, they were not expecting that.

I feel like reality TV has thrown a difficult wrench in the system - on the programming and making side, and on the curating side - which is that we now have a higher threshold for the salacious. We have a higher threshold, unprecedented, for fast, cheap, and out of control.

My first novel was rejected by some of the most eminent publishers in the world. Starting again was a real wrench.

Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.

In my deepest troubles, I frequently would wrench myself from the persons around me and retire to some secluded part of our noble forests.

A baby! I hated babies. I, who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe, felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. I would be a bystander, a museum mammoth.

Whether your father, husband, son, or brother has been on the front lines, driving a computer or programming a tank, wielding a gun or a wrench, they are a team. No one moves, no one wins without everyone doing their job.

In January of 1995, my family and I moved to Seattle. Pearl Jam did the first of their live radio broadcasts, Monkey Wrench Radio, along with many other Seattle musicians.

A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.