Undefined Slope Quotes

Whether

Whether anger quickens a lagging stride,

and periodic burn-offs in the forest

revitalize exhausted soil and flora - .

Whether we should take pleasure in the wildcat


jubilation of a lightning bolt

that whips its silver vein of genesis

through the night sky, flash-photo of a white

birch upended, the root-system buckled


to swollen thunderheads - . And whether naming

an offense amounts to sour grapes and common

bitterness, or even the conceited nonsense

of unwashed yahoo multitudes, a yawping


insult to civilized behavior - . Whether

a July rainstorm, even when it drenches

the unprepared pedestrian and befuddles

traffic, might be extravagant, a joy,


like the whoops and escalating bop glissandos

of Gillespie's upraised horn, cascading pitches

a countersong to meteoric chalk marks

Perseids burn across the House of Leo - .


And whether peaceful ecstasy might float

up from a fifteen-second avalanche

reflected in the skier's goggles, his jacket

a spark of scarlet on the topmost slope,


waiting for the homeward track to clear. ~ Alfred Corn

In the past, I often found that when I reached out for a fast cure it led me down a slippery slope of more medications, hopeful dependence on the next prescription and ultimately a much longer drawn-out illness. ~ Carre Otis

The sound of the car. When he's waiting he can never quite recall it. I've forgotten, he tells himself. But then it comes back to him, often in pauses between the waiting, after he's stopped thinking about it. And then she comes, and he recognizes the sound in an instant; he hears it with his tummy, it's my tummy that remembers the sound, not me, he thinks to himself. And no sooner has he heard the car than he sees it too, from the corner of the window, her blue car coming round the bend behind the banks of snow, and she turns in at the house and drives up the little slope to the front door. ~ Hanne Ørstavik

The day waned, and dusk was twined about the boles of the trees. At last the hobbits saw, rising dimly before them, a steep dark land: they had come to the feet of the mountains, and to the green roots of tall Methedras. Down the hillside the young Entwash, leaping from its springs high above, ran noisily from step to step to meet them. On the right of the stream there was a long slope, clad with grass, now grey in the twilight. No trees grew there and it was open to the sky; stars were shining already in lakes between shores of cloud. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

There," he said, pointing. "We'll camp on the westward slope. No fires, and it would be greatly appreciated, Baron, if your men refrained from excessive noise." "I'll do what I can, my lord. But they're not peasants, y'know. Can't just flog them like your lot." "Maybe you should, milord," Dentos suggested. "Remind 'em they bleed the same colour as us peasants. ~ Anthony Ryan

She started shaping the face, using a wire loop to gently carve the slope of the strong forehead and brow, then the nose and the lean angle of the cheekbones. In little time, her fingers were moving on automatic pilot, her mind disengaged and gone into its own flow, her subconscious directly commanding her hands into action.
She didn't know how long she'd been working, but when the hard rap sounded on her apartment door some time later, Tess nearly jumped out of her skin. Sleeping next to her feet on the rug, Harvard woke up with a grunt.
"You expecting someone?" she asked quietly as she got up from her stool.
God, she must have been really zoned out while she was sculpting, because she'd seriously messed up around the mouth area of the piece. The lips were curled back in some kind of snarl, and the teeth . . .
The knock sounded again, followed by a deep voice that went through her like a bolt of electricity.
"Tess? Are you there?"
Dante.
Tess's eyes flew wide, then squeezed into a wince as she did a quick mental inventory of her appearance. Hair flung up into a careless knot on top of her head, braless in her white thermal Henley and faded red sweats that had more than one dried clay smudge on them. Not exactly fit for company.
"Dante?" she asked, stalling for time and just wanting to be sure her ears weren't playing tricks on her. "Is that you?"
"Yeah. Can I come in?"
"Um, sure. Just a sec," she called out, trying to sound c ~ Lara Adrian

This is a slippery slope. In addition to that at what point are we going to be okay marrying inanimate objects? Can I marry this table or this, you know, clock? Can we marry dogs? This is ridiculous. And biblically, again, I'm going to go right back to my fundamental Christian beliefs marriage is between one man and one woman. ~ Rebecca Kleefisch

Byron had drawn his pistol, and was looking closely at the leaves and dirt around him, as if he'd dropped something. "It's
do keep calm now
it's right over your head. I suppose you could look, if you can do it slowly."
Crawford felt drops of sweat run down his ribs under his shirt as he slowly forced the muscles of his neck to tilt his head up; he saw the upper slope, bristling with trees that obstructed a view of the road, and then he saw the outer branches of the tree he was braced against, and finally he gathered his tattered courage and looked straight up.
And it took all of his self-control not to recoil or scream, and he was distantly resentful that he couldn't just die in this instant. ~ Tim Powers

The night was clear and frosty, all ebony of shadow and silver of snowy slope; big stars were shining over the silent fields; here and there the dark pointed firs stood up with snow powdering their branches and the wind whistling through them. ~ Lucy Maud Montgomery

Meditation expands our inner being. The inner being is like a small, individual river flowering towards the Ocean.
In meditation, I feel how my inner being expands into an inner ocean, which is part of everything, which is one with Existence.
Through the inner being, we come in contact with the inner ocean, the undefined and boundless within ourselves, where we are one with life. We realize that God is part of life. We realize that God is not a person, but the consciousness that is part of everything. We find God in a flower, in a tree, in the eyes of a child or in a playful dog.
Through discovering our inner being, we discover that we are also part of the flower, the child or the dog. We realize that God is everywhere. ~ Swami Dhyan Giten

Our journey starts, on this long, long steep slope. ~ Tomoya Okazaki

from "The Unquarried Blue of Those Depths Is All But Blinding,"

There are some things we just don't talk about -
Not even in the morning, when we're waking,
When your calloused fingers tentatively walk
The slope of my waist:
How love's a rust-worn boat,
Abandoned at the dock - and who could doubt
Waves lick their teeth, eyeing its hull? We're taking
Our wreckage as a promise, so we don't talk.
We wet the tired oars, tide drawing us out. ~ Ashley Anna McHugh

Once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries. ~ Leon Kass

What demon is our god? What name subsumes That act external to our sleeping selves? Not pleasure it is much too broad and narrow , Not sex, not for the moment love, but pride, And not in prowess, but pride undefined, Autonomous in its unthought demands, A bit of vanity, but mostly pride. ~ J.V. Cunningham

They had expected to see the grey, heathery slope of the moor going up and up to join the dull autumn sky. Instead, a blaze of sunshine met them. It poured through the doorway as the light of a June day pours into a garage when you open the door. It made the drops of water on the grass glitter like beads and showed up the dirtiness of Jill's tear-stained face. And the sunlight was coming from what certainly did look like a different world- what they could see it. They saw smooth turf, smoother and brighter than Jill had ever seen before, and blue sky and, darting to and fro, things so bright that they might have been jewels or huge butterflies. ~ C.S. Lewis

I am Itzapoca. Long ago the Mayans worshiped me as a god. Today I am forgotten, a stone head half-buried in the jungle. Yet I have endured for ages, far longer than any puny modern structure built from steel and concrete. Long before the era of hydraulic cranes, my followers lifted me to the top of this lush green slope where I sit looking down on the shining blue waters of the bay. ~ Carol Storm

There's a slippery slope in regard to authority. If you say that the history in Genesis is not true, then you can just take man's ideas as true. When you go outside of Scripture, why shouldn't you just reinterpret what marriage means? So our emphasis is on the slippery slope regarding authority. ~ Ken Ham

To learn every details of woman behavior is like an endless journey on a bumpy road that has a starting but limits are infinite, rather undefined. ~ Mosiur Rehman

The separation of church and state can sometimes be frustrating for women and men of religious faith. They may be tempted to misuse government in order to impose a value which they cannot persuade others to accept. But once we succumb to that temptation, we step onto a slippery slope where everyone's freedom is at risk. ~ Edward Kennedy

We walk up the sandy slope toward the dining terrace. I see Troy sitting at a table with some people I know. I look at Scottie to see if she sees him, and she is giving him the middle finger. The dining terrace gasps, but I realize it's because of the sunset and the green flash. We missed it. The flash flashed. The sun is gone, and the sky is pink. I reach to grab the offending hand, but instead, I correct her gesture.
"Here, Scottie. Don't let that finger stand by itself like that. Bring up the other fingers just a little bit. There you go. That's the cool way to do it."
Troy stares at us and smiles a bit. He's completely confused.
"All right, that's enough." I suddenly feel sorry for Troy. He must feel awful. ~ Kaui Hart Hemmings

In the irresistible logic of guilt, one evil leads to another, one sin is developed out of another. There is nothing abrupt, nothing casual in the process. The road to sin is smooth, because an army of transgressions has passed over it. When such a development takes place, the community is filled with consternation. Men meet each other and say, "Have you heard what has happened? Mr. A. has turned out a defaulter. Mr. B. has been robbing his bank. How could he have done it?" Alas! he did it long ago, when he took the first step, when he diverged a very little way from the path of right. After that, every other step was easy, natural, and logical. ~ James Clarke

Breathe. Pause. Move. Pause. Breathe. Pause. Move. Pause.
It is unending.
I heave myself over the final lip and strain to pull myself clear of the edge.
I clear the deep powder snow from in front of my face. I lie there hyperventilating.
Then I clear my mask of the ice that my breath has formed in the freezing air.
I unclip off the rope while still crouching. The line is now clear for Neil to follow up.
I get to my feet and start staggering onward.
I can see this distant cluster of prayer flags semisubmerged in the snow. Gently flapping in the wind, I know that these flags mark the true summit--the place of dreams.
I feel this sudden surge of energy beginning to rise within me.
It is adrenaline coursing around my veins and muscles.
I have never felt so strong--and yet so weak--all at the same time.
Intermittent waves of adrenaline and fatigue come and go as my body struggles to sustain the intensity of these final moments.
I find it strangely ironic that the very last part of this immense climb is so gentle a slope.
A sweeping curve--curling along the crest of the ridge toward the summit.
Thank God.
It feels like the mountain is beckoning me up. For the first time, willing me to climb up onto the roof of the world.
I try to count the steps as I move, but my counting becomes confused.
I am now breathing and gasping like a wild animal in an attempt to devour the oxygen that seeps into my mask.< ~ Bear Grylls

Ashamed, shrugging a little, and then shivering, he took his bags and went out. The cold of the air seemed to lift him bodily. The moon was in the sky.
On the slope he began to run, he could not help it. Just as he reached the road, where his car seemed to sit in the moonlight like a boat, his heart began to give off tremendous explosions like a rifle, bang bang bang.
He sank in fright onto the road, his bags falling about him. He felt as if all this had happened before. He covered his heart with both hands to keep anyone from hearing the noise it made.
But nobody heard it.
(Death of a Traveling Salesman ~ Eudora Welty

Every day of his life he had a long sitting at the Memorial, which never made the least progress, however hard he laboured, for King Charles the First always strayed into it, sooner or later, and then it was thrown aside, and another one begun. The patience and hope with which he bore these perpetual disappointments, the mild perception he had that there was something wrong about King Charles the First, the feeble efforts he made to keep him out, and the certainty with which he came in, and tumbled the Memorial out of all shape, made a deep impression on me....It was quite an affecting sight, I used to think, to see him with the kite when it was up a great height in the air. What he had told me, in his room, about his belief in its disseminating the statements pasted on it, which were nothing but old leaves of abortive Memorials, might have been a fancy with him sometimes; but not when he was out, looking up at the kite in the sky, and feeling it pull and tug at his hand. He never looked so serene as he did then. I used to fancy, as I sat by him of an evening, on a green slope, and saw him watch the kite high up in the quiet air, that it lifted his mind out of its confusion, and bore it (such was my boyish thought) into the skies. As he wound the string in, and it came lower and lower down out of the beautiful light, until it fluttered to the ground, and lay there like a dead thing, he seemed to wake gradually out of a dream; and I remember to have seen him take it up, and lo ~ Charles Dickens

I believe there's been a slippery slope of new companies that have formed in the name of on-demand services ... that maybe aren't having as much of a focus as they should on the worker. ~ Leah Busque

Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary - of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn't have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool? ~ Jonathan Franzen

Life is most delightful on the downward slope. ~ Seneca The Younger

Magic was merely the unknown, a wild thing undefined by logic or reason. ~ J.D. Lakey

This is because I define myself in part by my color. And I know it is the proverbial slippery slope: That there are associations with red hair that I utterly reject and others I wear proudly means nothing to anyone else, since I don't get to choose how the observer sorts those same traits. Grazing through the stereotypes, I am on the delicatessen plan, winding a way over the menu offerings, picking, choosing and rejecting; adhering to some, dismissing others. Having adopted a method of personal vigilance that allows me to be on the lookout for associations that suffuse my color with preferred associations and to reject those I choose not to adopt, I enhance my self-image. But to other people my red hair is more a take-it-or-leave-it experience: Red-haired, to them, I may also be a certain type of person, complete with temperament. ~ Marion Roach

One reason I continue to oppose efforts to criminalize abortion is that I do not believe any government should have the power to dictate, through law or police action, a woman's most personal decisions."

"I consider that a slippery slope to state control of reproduction, and I'd witnessed the consequences of such control in China and Communist Romania. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

Maybe at the very bottom of it ... I really don't like God. You know, it's silly to say I don't like God because I don't believe in God, but in the same sense that I don't like Iago, or the Reverend Slope or any of the other villains of literature, the god of traditional Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to me a terrible character. He's a god who will ... who obsessed the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don't worship him in the right way. Now I realise that many people don't believe in that any more who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians, but that is the traditional God and he's a terrible character. I don't like him. ~ Steven Weinberg

I skied on Astroturf and PVC pipe on the slope in my backyard. ~ Nick Goepper

I think the classical music is on a dangerous downward slope, because it's not seeking strong enough resonance with its society. ~ Laurence Equilbey

It was a sunny day, I was carrying a child in a white dress to be christened. The path to the church led up a steep slope, but I held the child in my arms firmly and without faltering. Then suddenly my footing gave way ... I had enough time to put the child down before plunging into the abyss. The child is our idea. In spite of all obstacles it will prevail. ~ Sophie Scholl

Big and little they went on together to Molalla, to Tuska, to Roswell, Guthrie, Kaycee, to Baker and Bend. After a few weeks Pake said that if Diamond wanted a permanent traveling partner he was up for it. Diamond said yeah, although only a few states still allowed steer roping and Pake had to cover long, empty ground, his main territory in the livestock country of Oklahoma, Wyoming, Oregon and New Mexico. Their schedules did not fit into the same box without patient adjustment. But Pake knew a hundred dirt road shortcuts, steering them through scabland and slope country, in and out of the tiger shits, over the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts, into early darkness and the first storm laying down black ice, hard orange-dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road, band of horses in morning fog, two redheaded cowboys moving a house that filled the roadway and Pake busting around and into the ditch to get past, leaving junkyards and Mexican cafes behind, turning into midnight motel entrances with RING OFFICE BELL signs or steering onto the black prairie for a stunned hour of sleep. ~ Annie Proulx

an attachment to his culture is, for the European, the beginning of the slippery slope. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

she runs for her life because to slip up is to begin descending the slippery slope to giving in to failure, to inertia, to feeling sorry for herself about that moment in her life which still creeps to the front of her memory when she least expects it ~ Bernardine Evaristo

On movies like Star Trek and Star Wars, you have so much that will be created or extended digitally, and it's a slippery slope where you can get lost in a world of synthetic. ~ J.J. Abrams

His men had begun gathering the wounded or stunned into a small group some distance back up the slope. Here and there an animal or human stirred, but not many. There were few cries of pain or fear now. Mostly, it was eerily quiet. Even the insects had ceased their music. ~ Derek Donais

I took a slice of melon and perched on the edge of a couch, watching them both, patently uncomfortable with the undefined nature of my role here. ~ Jacqueline Carey

Legalizing homosexuality is not the first step on a slippery slope to legalizing everything. ~ Jonathan Haidt