Downhill Quotes

I think it's a terrible system, but money in politics is like water running downhill
it finds its way. ~ Jonathan Alter

This modern craze for putting the young in positions of authority - headmasters in their thirties, bishops without a gray hair on their heads, generals who scarcely need to use a razor - ever since it took hold the world's gone steadily downhill. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

Uphill, downhill, I like that. ~ Peter Sagan

He's got his cigarette going. He offers her one; this time she takes it. Brief match-flare insider their cupped hands. Red finger-ends.
She thinks, Any more flame and we'd see the bones. It's like X-rays. We're just a kind of haze, just coloured water. Water does what it likes. It always goes downhill. ~ Margaret Atwood

At the point where he, today's Ivan Ilyich, began to emerge, all the pleasures that had seemed so real melted away now before his eyes and turned into something trivial and often disgusting.
And the further he was from childhood, the nearer he got to the present day, the more trivial and dubious his pleasures appeared. It started with law school. That had retained a little something that was really good: there was fun, there was friendship, there was hope. But in the last years the good times had become more exceptional. Then, at the beginning of his service with the governor, some good times came again: memories of making love to a woman. Then it became all confused, and the good times were not so many. After that there were fewer still; the further he went the fewer there were.
Marriage. . .an accident and such a disappointment, and his wife's bad breath, and all that sensuality and hypocrisy! And the deadlines of his working life, and those money worries, going on for a year, two years, ten, twenty - always the same old story. And the longer it went on the deadlier it became.
'It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me...And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die! ~ Leo Tolstoy

If the going is getting too easy, maybe you're going downhill! ~ Max Frisch

The recreational golfer who gives it careful thought will conclude that the favorite golf hole in his life played downhill, gradually or severely, and normally was downwind as well. ~ Dan Jenkins

The more importance we place on avoiding unpleasant feelings in life, the more our life tends to go downhill. ~ Russ Harris

Some people put more effort and money into the wedding day than they do into the marriage itself, then it's all downhill from there. I was happy for a simple start; things could only get better. ~ Sam Torode

Cordelia looked at Edric. "Which way will lead to our respite, think you?"
"I don't know, my lady," he admitted.
There was a pause.
"This way," Tania decided, heading off to the left and pulling him with her.
"Why?"
"It's downhill. ~ Allan Frewin Jones

Climax: It's all downhill from here. ~ Buffy Andrews

Shit rolls downhill. Bureaucracy rolls faster. ~ David Wellington

About as much business as a cat owner has selling dog food. Or an Olympic swimmer has advertising for downhill ski equipment. Or a nun writing hard core erotica.
Abso-fucking-none. ~ Laurel Ulen Curtis

I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain. ~ Janet Fitch

I've tucked and tried to roll after that first spread-eagle spin but soon discovered the universal truth that bowling-ball-shaped objects bounce downhill much faster than do mannequin-shaped objects. In my current predicament, speed, obviously, was not my friend. ~ Stephen White

I had no schedule, no plan for today or the next, or the week after. Everything in my life just seemed to kind of roll together, collect speed and go thundering downhill. ~ Shannon Olson

To me, writing an ongoing series feels like driving a freight train downhill. All you can do is steer and pray. ~ G. Willow Wilson

Sometimes it's hard to start, but once it gets going, once you reach the tipping point - usually between chapter seven and nine - then it's like hanging onto a large snowball as it hurtles downhill. ~ Kerry Greenwood

But [Sunday] as you saw, it was obviously [the media] took some more than initiative to try to get me to kind of go down the wrong path. I know the last two teams that I've been on, I felt like I left those teams prematurely due to media interviews that I've done and things kind of taken out of context and they created sort of a media whirlwind in the locker room and things kind of went downhill from there. I'm just trying to do the best job I can do as far as answering the questions and trying to be a better teammate and not try to throw people under the bus. ~ Terrell Owens

Let me digress a moment to talk about beginnings. How much simpler life would be if we were wise enough to stop at the first blush of romance, the start of a business transaction or a casual friendship. If we knew enough to pause and think: this is as good as it gets. Everything will go downhill from this moment on. So once again our instincts are the opposite of what they should be, propelling us forward exactly when they should be holding us back. ~ Francine Prose

You know he will take the credit for your good ideas, and you the blame for his bad ones? When fortune turns against you, you will feel her lash: you always, he never.
One day, when you are still adjusting your harness, you will look up and see him thundering downhill.
pg. 495 ~ Hilary Mantel

Nevertheless, it is the Christian theory that it is only a regard for this Being -- partly a trembling fear and partly a kind of conciliation represented to be love -- that keeps the human race from roaring downhill to villainy and disaster. Nor are theologians daunted by the obvious fact that many open and even ribald skeptics are not going that way, but, on the contrary, show a considerably higher degree of virtue than the Christian average. Their answer ... is that the moral sense of every such blameless candidate for Hell 'is a kind of parasitic growth upon the otherworldliness of the society in which he lives.' ... Even men who should know better indulge in this confusion between the religious impulse and common decency. ... But this is surely going beyond the plain facts. A man may be truly religious without imagining God as good at all, and he may be good without believing that there is any moral order in the universe or even that God exists. Religion does not necessarily make men better citizens, whether of their neighborhoods or of the world. ~ H.L. Mencken

The giant deer took a leap to the downhill side, and then high-stepped around and past me, walking, not running, as if having known all along what decision I would make during this most perfect of days in one of the most perfect seasons, and situated perfectly and halfway between who I used to be and who I was on my way to becoming. ~ Anthony Licata

The MS really started going downhill in 1990. ~ Richard Pryor

Its all downhill from here on up! ~ Grant W. Fletcher

I'm not a real smart guy. But I've got enough brains to realize that when I'm 60 years old and play a sport, that it's downhill. ~ Lee Trevino

The house had a private walk down to a private spit of beach, and in the mornings the four of them would troop downhill and swim - even he did, in his pants and undershirt and an old oxford shirt, which no one bothered him about - and then lie on the sand baking, the wet clothes ungluing themselves from his body as they dried. Sometimes Harold would come and watch them, or swim as well. In the afternoons, Malcolm and JB would pedal off through the dunes on bicycles, and he and Willem would follow on foot, picking up bits of shaley shells and the sad carapaces of long-nibbled-away hermit crabs as they went, Willem slowing his pace to match his own. In the evenings, when the air was soft, JB and Malcolm sketched and he and Willem read. He felt doped, on sun and food and salt and contentment, and at night he fell asleep quickly and early, and in the mornings he woke before the others so he could stand on the back porch alone looking over the sea. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Church history has repeatedly and clearly proven one thing: Once the highest view of Scripture is abandoned by any theologian, group, denomination, or church, the downhill slide in both its theology and practice is inevitable. ~ James R. White

So, explain this," Avery said, "You just, what, hang around the Academy all day? Are you trying to redo your high school experience?"
"Nothing to redo," said Adrian loftily. "I totally ruled my high school. I was worshiped and adored - not that that should come as a shock." Beside him, Christian nearly choked on his food.
"So. . .You're trying to relive your glory days. It's all gone downhill since then, huh?"
"No way," said Adrian. "I'm like a fine wine. I get better with age. The best is yet to come."
"Seems like it'd get old after a while," said Avery, "I'm certainly bored, and I even spend part of the day helping my dad."
"Adrian sleeps most of the day," noted Lissa, "So he doesn't actually have to worry about finding things to do."
"Hey, I spend a good portion of my time helping you unravel the mysteries of spirit," Adrian reminded her. "And," he added, "I can visit people in their dreams."
Christian held up a hand. "Stop. I can feel there's a comment coming on about how women already dream about you. I just ate, you know."
"I wasn't going to go there," said Adrian. But he kind of looked like he wished he'd thought of the joke first. ~ Richelle Mead

The ride back to Kathmandu was comfortable and relaxing. There were more overturned trucks (the gas-powered ones seem to tip the most often, I'm surprised there weren't more explosions), goats being herded across the highway by ancient women, children playing games in traffic, private cars and buses alike pulling over in the most inconvenient places for a picnic or public bath, and best of all the suicidal overtaking maneuvers (or what we would call 'passing') by our bus and others while going downhill at incredible speeds or around hairpin turns uphill with absolutely no power left to actually get around the other vehicle. ~ Jennifer S. Alderson

A better-constituted boy would certainly have profited under my intelligent tutors, with their scientific apparatus; and would, doubtless, have found the phenomena of electricity and magnetism as fascinating as I was, every Thursday, assured they were. As it was, I could have paired off, for ignorance of whatever was taught me, with the worst Latin scholar that was ever turned out of a classical academy. I read Plutarch, and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly, and supplied myself in that way with wandering thoughts, while my tutor was assuring me that "an improved man, as distinguished from an ignorant one, was a man who knew the reason why water ran downhill." I had no desire to be this improved man; I was glad of the running water; I could watch it and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles and bathing the bright green water-plants, by the hour together. I did not want to know why it ran; I had perfect confidence that there were good reasons for what was so very beautiful. ("The Lifted Veil") ~ George Eliot

Don't be preoccupied with something that drags your mind downhill. Be someone who could be destined to shine and can have the ability reach ultimate goals for the future. ~ Saaif Alam

Coffee is the highlight of my day. After coffee everything is downhill. ~ Bill Simmons

I'm not writing a book of Western history,' I tell him. 'I've written enough history books to know this isn't one. I'm writing about something else. A marriage, I guess. Deadwood was just a blank space in the marriage. Why waste time on it?'
Rodman is surprised. So am I, actually - I have never formulated precisely what it is I have been doing, but the minute I say it I know I have said it right. What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any. ~ Wallace Stegner

So, as middle-class families have been tumbling downhill, working-class families have been tumbling into poverty. And ~ Amy Goldstein

I was born ready. It's all been downhill from there. ~ Bill Barnes & Gene Ambaum

It used to be thought that you stopped making new neural connections in your youth and from then on your brain was fixed and it was downhill all the way. But in fact as we know from our own experience we can keep on learning and learning means changing our brain on a physical level. ~ Philippa Perry

You've climbed the highest mountain in the world. What's left ? It's all downhill from there. You've got to set your sights on something higher than Everest. ~ Willi Unsoeld

Downhill track sports like luge are technology battles, as exciting as a NASCAR qualifying day. ~ Alex Berenson

I sit watching until dusk, hypnotized. I think of the sea as continually sloshing back and forth, repetitive, but my psyche goes with the river- always loping downhill, purposeful, listening only to gravity. ~ Ann Zwinger

Sometimes I look like I was under interrogation. Some people just don't look good in clothes. In New York, Armani and all those clothing people used to call me up and tried to pay me not to wear their clothes. This is as good as it's going to get ... and then it's all downhill. I'll be fine. I never feel as bad as I look. ~ Jeff Van Gundy

Every time it starts to get cool, I mean in the middle of autim, I start gettin nutty ideas like I was thinkin about what was forein and diffrent, like for exsample how I'd like to turn into a swallow and get away and fly to countrys where it gets hot, or be an ant so's I could get deep into a cave and eat the stuff I stored away durin the summer or be a snake like what they got in the zoO, the ones they keep lockt up in glass cages thats heated so's they don't get stiff from the cold, which is what happens to poor human beans who cant buy no close cause the price is to high, and cant keep warm cause theys no keroseen, no coal, no wood, no fule oil and besides theys no loot, cause when you go around with bocoo bread you can go into any bar and get some sneaky pete that can be real warmin, even tho it aint good to overdo it cause if you overdos it it gets to be a bad habbit and bad habbits is bad for your body just like they is for youre selfrespeck, and when you start goin downhill cause your actin bad in everythin, they aint nobody or nothin can stop you from endin up a stinkin piece of human garbidge and they never gone give you a hand to haul you up outen the dirty muck you rollin around in, not even if you was a eaglE when you was young and could fly up and over the highest hills, but when you get old you like a highflyin bomber thats lost its moral engines and fall down outen the sky. I jes hope what I been writin down hear do somebody some good so he take a good look at ~ Julio Cortazar

It had actually been a year since I'd finally broken up with Glen. I'd moved in with him after two dates (I would have made a great lesbian) and things had gone downhill quickly. How well I remembered our last morning together. He'd woken me early one morning by hitting me in the face with his cock and demanding a before-work blowjob. Since he'd been out all night without me and the dick he'd just assaulted me with smelled of eau de lubricant, I'd refused to open my mouth. I'd given his balls a twist I hoped he was still feeling and headed back to Gran's. ~ Nick Pageant

You have more zeal than good taste, Martín. The disease afflicting you has a name, and that is Grand Guignol: it does to drama what syphilis does to your privates. Getting it might be pleasurable, but from then on it's all downhill. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Never get satisfied. The minute you stop trying, you go downhill. ~ Jack LaLanne

I recently forced myself to read a book on quantum physics, just to try and learn something new. I was confused by the middle of the first sentence and it all went downhill from there. The only thing I can remember learning is that a parallel universe can theoretically be contained on the head of a needle. I don't really know what that means, but I am now more careful handling needles. ~ Stephan Pastis

I loved my childhood. They had the coolest toys back then. Star Wars, Transformers, laser-tag gun sets. Toy companies have really gone downhill. ~ Jon Heder

I've gotten rid of the yips four times but they hang in there. You know those two-foot downhill putts with a break? I'd rather see a rattlesnake. ~ Sam Snead

I think Hitchcock had a thing about hills: think of the house on the hill in 'Psycho.' Then, in 'Vertigo,' Scottie is forever traversing the city, going downhill all the time as he goes deeper and deeper into himself. It's as if Hitchcock is using San Francisco as a psychological map. ~ Allen Coulter

So we are nearing the end. The right-hand, still untasted part of the novel, which, during our delectable reading, we would lightly feel, mechanically testing whether there was still plenty left (and our fingers were always gladdened by the placid, faithful thickness) has suddenly, for no reason at all, become quite meager: a few minutes of quick reading, already downhill, and–O horrible! The heap of cherries, whose mass had seemed to us such a ruddy and glossy black, had suddenly become discrete drupes: the one over there with the scar is a little rotten, and this one has shriveled and dried up around its stone (and the very last one is inevitably hard and unripe) O horrible! ~ Vladimir Nabokov

When I was very young every grownup was a hero. It's been all downhill since then, and I have only two left. ~ Peter S. Beagle

Yeah, after each of my downhill putts. ~ Homero Blancas

Well, Samantha ... you were introduced to this guy. It went downhill from there. That might make it justifiable homicide. From time to time, I've wanted to kill people I knew even less well ... strangers in supermarkets.
Am I on my roof with a psychopath? ~ Huntley Fitzpatrick

And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path – the one, natural, trodden way. ~ Aspen Matis

It is no coincidence that precisely when things started going downhill with the gods, politics gained its bliss-making character. There would be no reason for objecting to this, since the gods, too were not exactly fair. But at least people saw temples instead of termite architecture. Bliss is drawing closer; it is no longer in the afterlife, it will come, though not momentarily, sooner or later in the here and now - in time.
The anarch thinks more primitively; he refuses to give up any of his happiness. "Make thyself happy" is his basic law. It his response to the "Know thyself" at the temple of Apollo in Delphi. These two maxims complement each other; we must know our happiness and our measure. ~ Ernst Junger

They say that your powers of memory are at their peak when you're 26, and it's all downhill after that. ~ Lisa Jewell

In my experience, Fox News isn't something you can tune out, like a game show or a cable movie you've seen a dozen times. The colors, the moving logos, the giant fonts, the . . . well . . . the things they actually say. It's like the television equivalent of one of those cymbal-banging monkey toys being duct-taped to your forehead. So this is how it'd go. I'd hear something ridiculous, and I'd scoff or make some smart-ass comment, and then it'd be straight downhill from there. ~ Matthew Norman

It is a fact that we are an ancient civilization and that up to the medieval times we were among the most advanced civilizations. The putrefaction of our civilization perhaps set in a good thousand years ago, from which time our contribution to the world went steadily downhill. But then, a glorious past can hardly be a consolation for a sorry present. That the Indus Valley civilization at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa had glorious town planning over 2000 years ago is cold consolation for our wretched present-day cities, towns and villages. While other civilizations have gone on to build upon their past, we are merely living off it and, what is more, we have been doing it for over a thousand years! ~ V. Raghunathan

Which is the main reason I refuse to let Isaac drag me out tonight for another one of his disastrous fix-ups.
There's another reason I don't like to date - but I'm trying not to think about her.
"Come on, man," Isaac whines. It's the third time he's called me in twenty minutes. "I promise it won't be like last time."
By "last time" he means when he hooked me up with Stacey Perkins. Apparently she's a vegan - which is cool. Her choice. But nobody told me until after I brought her to Outback Steakhouse. Then she asked the waitress if they had any "cruelty free" items on the menu.
Things only went downhill from there. Especially when I still ordered a steak. There are few things worse than an irritated vegan. ~ Shannon Messenger

It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me ... And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die!"
"So what's it all about? What's it for? It's not possible. It's not possible that life could have been as senseless and sickening as this. And if it has really been as sickening and senseless as this why do I have to die, and die in agony? There's something wrong. Maybe I didn't live as I should have done?" came the sudden thought. "But how can that be when I did everything properly?" he wondered, instantly dismissing as a total impossibility the one and only solution to the mystery of life and death. ~ Leo Tolstoy

...for a piece of famous fluffiness that doesn't just pretend about what real lives can be like, but moves on into one of the world's least convincing pretences about what people themselves are like, consider the teased and coiffed nylon monument that is 'Imagine': surely the My Little Pony of philosophical statements. John and Yoko all in white, John at the white piano, John drifting through the white rooms of a white mansion, and all the while the sweet drivel flowing. Imagine there's no heaven. Imagine there's no hell. Imagine all the people, living life in - hello? Excuse me? Take religion out of the picture, and everybody spontaneously starts living life in peace? I don't know about you, but in my experience peace is not the default state of human beings, any more than having an apartment the size of Joey and Chandler's is. Peace is not the state of being we return to, like water running downhill, whenever there's nothing external to perturb us. Peace between people is an achievement, a state of affairs we put together effortfully in the face of competing interests, and primate dominance dynamics, and our evolved tendency to cease our sympathies at the boundaries of our tribe. ~ Francis Spufford

He'd always known that shit rolled downhill, but he never knew tears did the same thing. ~ Amy Lane

Reading is like skiing. When done well, when done by an expert, both reading and skiing are graceful, harmonious, activities. When done by a beginner, both are awkward, frustrating, and slow.
Learning to ski is one of the most humiliating experiences an adult can undergo (that is one reason to start young). After all, an adult has been walking for a long time; he knows where his feet are; he knows how to put one foot in front of the other in order to get somewhere. But as soon as he puts skis on his feet, it is as though he had to learn to walk all over again. He slips and slides, falls down, has trouble getting up, gets his skis crossed, tumbles again, and generally looks- and feels- like a fool.
Even the best instructor seems at first to be of no help. The ease with which the instructor performs actions that he says are simple but that the student secretly believes are impossible is almost insulting. How can you remember everything the instructors says you have to remember? Bend your knees. Look down the hill Keep your weight on the downhill ski. Keep your back straight, but nevertheless lean forward. The admonitions seem endless-how can you think about all that and still ski?
The point about skiing, of course, is that you should not be thinking about the separate acts that, together, make a smooth turn or series of linked turns- instead, you should merely be looking ahead of you down the hill, anticipating bumps and other skiers, enjoying the feel of th ~ Mortimer J. Adler

Whos love do you cherrish more? Hers or theirs? when you deside that, it's all downhill from there. ~ Jerry Spinelli

There is frequently another way to look at things and we are encouraged to do exactly that if we want to grow as a nation, however when we mess with the principles of what made our country great we are in danger of upsetting the apple cart. Many civilized countries that did, lost their freedom in a rapid downhill spiral. Nero fiddled as Rome burned. Cubans lost out by electing Fidel Castro and the Germans and Italians, wanting a better life, voted for Mussolini and Hitler. ~ Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater One"

Most of the stories I have go downhill quickly. In all honesty most of the good stories I have, no one else would think is funny. ~ JD Era

When you give up in your mind, your mind gives up on you. Once this happens, the rest is downhill. ~ Timi Nadela

Grace runs downhill and now all his time is being redeemed. ~ Geoffrey Wood

The uphill climb is slow,but the downhill road is fast. ~ John Wooden

For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones. ~ Diane Ackerman

I should have known it was going to go downhill from there.
"Now, I understand you're looking to be dominated," Sir said.
Justin squeaked.
"Uhh," I said. "I don't think that's quite what I - "
"Did I say you could speak, boy?" Sir asked sharply.
"No, Sir. Sorry, Sir."
He waited a beat, as if making sure I wouldn't step out of line again. I didn't, because I didn't want to get fisted or have something shoved up my pee hole.
"Now. We should probably discuss hard limits," Sir said. "I'm okay with most things, even the… fluids… some others might have problems with. Even the more solid ones."
"So unbelievably gross," I breathed in awe. ~ T.J. Klune

Never back the Praesi in a corner, son. That's when the devil-summoning starts, and it's all downhill from there."
-King Jehan of Callow, addressing the future King Pater the Unheeding ~ ErraticErrata

You may have noticed that society is rapidly going downhill. Inflation, lack of fuel and even war cast deep shadows over the world. And the most serious part of this is that drugs, both medical and street drugs, have disabled a majority of those who could have handled it, including the political leaders, and have even paralyzed the coming generations. ~ L. Ron Hubbard

Why not eliminate schooling between age 12-16? It's biologically + psychologically too turbulent a time to be cooped up inside, made to sit all the time. During these years, kids would live communally – doing some work, anyway being physically active, in the countryside(...)

This simple change in the age specificity of schooling would a) reduce adolescent discontent, anomie, boredom, neurosis; b) radically modify the almost inevitable process by which people at 50 are psychologically and intellectually ossified (...)

After all, since most people from now on are going to live to be 70, 75, 80, why should all their schooling be bunched together in the first 1/3 or 1/4 of their lives – so that it's downhill all the way ~ Susan Sontag

They looked so familiar that for a moment Claude feared he had doubled back to Mrs. Merritt's city, until a sudden wave of water blinded his wipers and drove him along with everyone else to the curb, where the crackling radio reported an old man had just now been swept from his backyard by a cloudburst, the latest in a series deluging Tulsa. Clinging there to the side of the hill, no hand brake, Claude rode out the storm, stuffing blankets into the cracks under the doors, watching overhead drips as best he could with the babyseat. When the car next in front crept away from the curb, Claude followed as far as a gas station. There he wondered aloud what lay ahead, but the attendant couldn't say, having swum to work just five minutes ago. Now as Claude pulled away the rain suddenly ceased, it seemed from exhaustion, and for the next hundred miles he spun his dial to catch the latest reports: that old man was still missing, he had last been seen floating downhill toward the river, he had been found, he was dead, he was dying, he was still missing... Claude turned off the radio, for he was beyond range of Tulsa, and Joplin had not heard the news yet. He raced in silence toward the night which he knew already had begun not far ahead. ~ Douglas Woolf

You have to be a little crazy to be a downhill skier. ~ Lindsey Vonn

I was lucky to start working when German cinema was having an interesting moment. Now the quality is going downhill again because they're insisting on doing comedies. We should know by now that we make good cars but we're not the funniest people. ~ Daniel Bruhl

Could anything top the promise and potential of a blank page? What could be more satisfying? Never mind that it would soon be crammed with awkward penmanship, that my handwriting inevitably sloped downhill to the right-hand corner, that I blotted my ink, that my drawings never came out the way I saw them in my head. Never mind all that. What counted was possibility. You could live on possibility, at least for a while. ~ Jacqueline Kelly

I just think age is meaningless. It's a system we've all agreed to that supposedly signals when we should develop, reach our peak and go downhill, as they say. It interferes with our natural growth. ~ Peter Horton

In women's destiny everything goes downhill except for thought, whose immortal nature it is to keep constantly rising. ~ Madame De Stael

The God that can only love something like this man. And from then on it was all downhill. ~ Todd Rundgren

We know about bad guys, what they do, and often, who they are. The politicians have chosen to send us into battle, and that's our trade. We do what's necessary. And in my view, once those politicians have elected to send us out to do what 99.9 percent of the country would be terrified to undertake, they should get the hell out of the way and stay there.

This entire business of modern war crimes, as identified by the liberal wings of politics and the media, began in Iraq and has been running downhill ever since. Everyone's got to have his little hands in it, blathering on about the public's right to know.

Well, the view of most Navy SEALs, the public does not have that right to know, not if it means placing our lives in unnecessary peril because someone in Washington is driving himself mad worrying about the human rights of some cold-hearted terrorist fanatic who would kill us as soon as look at us, as well as any other American at whom he could point that wonky old AK of his. ~ Marcus Luttrell

I hold the world speed record downhill, in a Rover. I think it was 17 kilometers per hour, downhill. ~ Eugene Cernan

Just because the years are passing doesn't mean that the quality of our lives must automatically go downhill. ~ Louise Hay

The minute I get a big head and start acting like the big man on campus, it's all downhill from there. ~ Scotty McCreery

Once I had learnt my twelve times table (at the age of three) it was downhill all the way. ~ Fred Hoyle

Now, he thought, since all these most easily perishing things have slipped from me again, now I'm standing here under the sun again just as I have been standing here a little child, nothing is mine, I have no abilities, there is nothing I could bring about, I have learned nothing. How wondrous is this! Now, that I'm no longer young, that my hair is already half gray, that my strength is fading, now I'm starting again at the beginning and as a child! Again, he had to smile. Yes, his fate had been strange! Things were going downhill with him, and now he was again facing the world void and naked and stupid. But he could not feel sad about this, no, he even felt a great urge to laugh, to laugh about himself, to laugh about this strange, foolish world. ~ Hermann Hesse

Love is an uphill climb, but once you know yourself and like yourself just as you are, it's all downhill from there. ~ Valerie Frankel

At any rate, that's how I started running. Thirty three - that's how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist. ~ Haruki Murakami

Kate short-circuits my brain. In my head we always have these clear coherent exchanges, but once we meet, what comes out it is, "Kate, do what I say or I'll kill you." Her default reply is, "Fuck you!" and we go downhill from there. ~ Ilona Andrews

Don't duck the most difficult problems. That just ensures that the hardest part will be left when you are most tired. Get the big one done - it's downhill from then on. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

After you stop believing in santa claus, the whole world just goes downhill ~ Tom Clancy

Because come to think of it, I think those were great choices we made too, even though all those people worried that you and Sophia would be permanently damaged psychologically. And you know, the more i think about it, the madder I am getting. All these Western parents with the same party line about what's good for children and what's not-I am not sure that they are making choices at all. They just do what every one else does. They are not questioning anything either, which is what Westerners are supposed to be so good at doing. They just keep repeating things like "You have to give your children the freedom to pursue their passion" when it is obvious that the "passion" is just going to be Facebook for ten hours which is a total waste of time and eating all that disgusting junk food - I am telling you this country is going to go straight downhill. ~ Amy Chua

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values--that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others--that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human--that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay--that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live--that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road--that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader pres ~ Ayn Rand

The way to paradise is an uphill climb whereas hell is downhill. Hence, there is a struggle to get to paradise and not to hell. ~ Al-Ghazali

Water always flows downhill. So does my love. Are you prepared for a flood? You'd better build an ark. ~ Jarod Kintz

Very rarely do people make big compromises with their integrity. Almost every compromise is a small one that is easily justified. The downhill slide is usually a result of many little compromises. ~ Dennis Prager

I have a free wheeling mind with dodgy brakes. Once I start going downhill I find it hard to stop and usually end up going over the handlebars. ~ Gillibran Brown

When your life is going downhill, it doesn't get better just because you want it to. Nor can you will it to be better. Your life will only get better when you get better. ~ Iyanla Vanzant

It's time, Perry. He let her go. She took a step back, taking in his face one last time. His green eyes. The bend in his nose and the scars on his cheek. All the tiny inperfections that made him beautiful. Without a word, she turned and made her way downhill. ~ Veronica Rossi