Winding Down Quotes

But it must be seen that the term 'catastrophe' has this 'catastrophic' meaning of the end and annihilation only in a linear vision of accumulation and productive finality that the system imposes on us. Etymologically, the term only signifies the curvature, the winding down to the bottom of a cycle leading to what can be called the 'horizon of the event,' to the horizon of meaning, beyond which we cannot go. Beyond it, nothing takes place that has meaning for us - but it suffices to exceed this ultimatum of meaning in order that catastrophe itself no longer appear as the last, nihilistic day of reckoning, such as it functions in our current collective fantasy. ~ Jean Baudrillard

The day drew on, was swallowed in dusk. No bird called, no insect. Life in abeyance, the world itself grinding to a halt, who knew what would follow. Light through the glass grew dim but he read on as if the passage of day into night was of no moment. The world was winding down, and young Bloodworth wound down with it. ~ William Gay

About 1960, it became clear that it was best for me to bring the experimental part of my research program to a close - there was too much to do on the theoretical aspects - and I began the process of winding down the experiments. ~ Rudolph A. Marcus

I have lived, I have traveled the world, and now, like a worn-out clock, my life is winding down, the hands slowing, stepping out of the flow of time. If one steps out of time what does one have? Why, the past of course, gradually being worn away by the years as a pebble halted on a riverbed is eroded by the passage of water. ~ Tan Twan Eng

With the winding down of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States now has an opportunity to implement real defense reforms without having a serious impact on immediate battlefield needs. ~ Pete Hegseth

Embodied in objects was a partial sense of sharing. They didn't lift their eyes from their respective sets. But noises bound them, a cyclist kick-starting, the plane that came winding down the five miles from its transatlantic apex, rippling the pictures on their screens. Objects were memory inert. Desk, the bed, et cetera. Objects would survive the one who died first and remind the other of how easily halved a life can become. Death, perhaps, was not the point so much as separation. Chairs, tables, dressers, envelopes. Everything was a common experience, binding them despite their indirections, the slanted apparatus of their agreeing. That they did agree was not in doubt. Faithlessness and desire. It wasn't necessary to tell them apart. His body, hers. Sex, love, monotony, contempt. The spell that had to be entered was out there among the unmemorized faces and uniform cubes of being. This, their sweet and mercenary space, was self-enchantment, the near common dream they'd countenanced for years. Only absences were fully shared. ~ Don DeLillo

Now that the war is winding down, I want to say I do appreciate you fellows hanging around here - just for me. ~ Bob Hope

His heart slowed, winding down like a music box, a season at its end.
The last air left Holland's lungs.
And then, at last, the world breathed in. ~ V.E Schwab

For a short time we lived quietly. But this could not last. White men had found gold in the mountains around the land of winding water. ~ Chief Joseph

ingenue whose career was winding down ~ David Halberstam

I've never enjoyed sleep as much until I got the 'Today' job. There is something about early sleep that's much better than late sleep. I feel myself going to sleep; I don't just plonk my head on the pillow. It's a sort of winding-down thing. ~ Evan Davis

She sobbed into her hands, tears winding down her arms and dripping onto her knees. We all stared uncomfortably at our shoes, the ground, anything except Avani.
I felt someone should say something, so I said gingerly, You probably shouldn't cry. You need to conserve your water. ~ Jessica Khoury

History presents the pleasantest features of poetry and fiction,
the majesty of the epic, the moving accidents of the drama, the surprises and moral of the romance. Wallace is a ruder Hector; Robinson Crusoe is not stranger that Croesus; the Knights of Ashby never burnish the page of Scott with richer lights of lance and armor than the Carthaginians, winding down the Alps, cast upon Livy. ~ Robert Aris Willmott

The world is a clock winding down.
I hear it in the wind's icy fingers scratching against the window. I smell it in the mildewed carpeting and the rotting wallpaper of the old hotel. And I feel it in Teacup's chest as she sleeps. The hammering of her heart, the rhythm of her breath, warm in the freezing air, the clock winding down. ~ Rick Yancey

I'm not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down. ~ David Byrne

The winding down of summer puts me in a heavy philosophical mood. ~ Robert Fulghum

You can speed up your life if you want to - that's easy. Winding down is what's hard. ~ Jennifer James

The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps. ~ Havelock Ellis

Beerlight was a blown circuit, where to kill a man was less a murder than a mannerism. Every major landmark was a pincushion of snipers. Cop tanks navigated a graffiti-rashed riot of needle bars, oil-scabbed neon and diced rubble. Fragile laws were shattered without effort or intent and the cops considered false arrest a moral duty. Integrity was no more than a fierce dream. Crime was the new and only art form. The authorities portrayed shock and outrage but never described what it was they had been expecting. Anyone trying to adapt was persecuted. One woman had given birth to a bulletproof child. Other denizens were bomb zombies, pocketing grenades and wandering gaunt and vacant for days before winding down and pulling the pin on themselves. There was no beach under the sidewalk. Yet in dealing with this environment the one strategy common to all was the assumption that it could be dealt with. ~ Steve Aylett

But by the time I was 40, everything was winding down. It started after the war. On the plus side, there was more more products and technology. But for me the nightlife was winding down, the glamour, the fun. ~ Cesar Romero

You can always tell when Obama's negotiations with the Republicans are winding down, because he's missing his watch and his lunch money. ~ Bill Maher

I also liked the ocean, and I found staring at it had a calming effect. The air was so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

But the world is winding down, and you take what you're given. ~ M.R. Carey

Publishing a protocol under the name Atom that tries to capture all of the prior art in this stage and might provide a good basis for winding down the syndication wars. ~ Tim Bray

LEO: We're the last to leave.

BARKEEP: Ahuhrumhuh...koff, koff, humn...

LEO: Do you think he wants us to leave?

KAREN: No, no, probably just a bit of sarcasm gone down the wrong way. ~ Dave McKean

When I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State after Grinnell, I joined the moribund remnants of the Actor's Workshop, until I saw Kay Hayward and Sandy Archer in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and drove down that day to audition. The rest is history. ~ Peter Coyote

A grass blade believes that men build palaces for it to grow in. Grass wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble and it brings them down. This power of feeble life which can creep in anywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their cannons. ~ Honore De Balzac

(..) for he was in one of those crises in which the whole soul shows indistinctly what it contains, like the ocean, which, in the storm, opens itself from the seaweeds on its shores down to the sands of its abysses. ~ Gustave Flaubert

But, sir, they have written me down upon the history of the country as worthy of expulsion, and in no unkindness I must tell them that for all future time my self-respect requires that I shall pass them as strangers. ~ Preston Brooks

Mom, you have to leave Dad," I said. She stopped doing her toe touches. "I can't believe you would say that," she said. "I can't believe that you, of all people, would turn on your father." I was Dad's last defender, she continued, the only one who pretended to believe all his excuses and tales, and to have faith in his plans for the future. "He loves you so much," Mom said. "How can you do this to him?" "I don't blame Dad," I said. And I didn't. But Dad seemed hell-bent on destroying himself, and I was afraid he was going to pull us all down with him. "We've got to get away. ~ Jeannette Walls

Sometimes I'll be channel surfing or something, and I'll see a glimpse of something, and I'll quickly turn the sound down, and then what I look at, that's an interesting movie. But it's not me who made it. It's whoever that guy I was 10 years ago who made it. ~ Andrew Niccol

I wondered about going down to the creek, but I had no reason to suppose that the creek would even be there, since I never visited it on Tuesday mornings. ~ Shirley Jackson

I'm a power guy. Good fastball. A knuckle curve, which I can throw for strikes. A changeup which sinks down and away from lefties and I can also throw for strikes. ~ Justin Verlander

In a journey through the wastes, I found a god kneeling as it pushed its hands into the sand again and again, each time lifting them up to watch the lifeless grains stream down.

Dismounting from my weary horse, I walked to stand before this apparition and its dusty hands and watched for a time the cycles of their motion when at last up it looked, eyes beseeching.

'Where,' asked this god, 'are my children? ~ Steven Erikson

In spite of conflicting signals - and in spite of a popular culture that sometimes puts down their innocence - most of our kids are good kids. Large numbers do volunteer work. Nearly all believe in God, and most practice their faith. Teen pregnancy and violence are actually going down. Across America, under a program called True Love Waits, nearly a million teens have pledged themselves to abstain from sex until marriage. ~ George W. Bush

She's a pot-of-tea-before-I-say-boo-to-you woman. There's always a pile of warm teabags in the sink when I come down, like what a horse would leave behind. ~ Roddy Doyle

Many a man gets weary of clamping down on his rough impulses, which if given occasional release would encourage the living of life with salt in it, in place of dust. ~ Henry S. Haskins

Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. (pause) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause.) I can't go on! (Pause.) What have I said? ~ Samuel Beckett

As a kid, I was taught that if you opened the Bible in the middle you'd probably land on the book of Psalms. And near the middle is everyone's favorite, the 23rd, there is this line: "You prepare a table before in the presence of my enemies." I don't know how many times I've read or recited this Psalm without pondering what that line actually means, but here is my take on it. When things are a bit tense, when life is not going at its best, when the potential for disaster is just around the corner, when your enemies are all around you - and even staring you down! - that's when God lays out the red-checkered picnic cloth and says, "Oooo, this is a nice place. Let's hang out here together for a while...just you and me. ~ David Brazzeal

I don't want any money."
I put the wallet away.
She said: "What are you going to do about last night?"
"What should I do?"
"Kill that son of a bitch."
"And fry?"
"You're too smart to fry."
"Maybe," I said. "But, lady, I've been drawing the line at murder lately."
She lay against the pillow, watching me. Her skin was dead white and it made the black eyes look big. She wasn't young, but she was still good-looking. Her shoulders were round and firm. As far as I could tell she was naked under the sheet. I sat down on a rocking-chair. It creaked under my weight.
"But you want to get him, don't you?" she asked.
"I wouldn't mind."
"Neither would I," she said.
"He's pretty tough for a gal to tackle."
"He knocked out my teeth."
The way she said it, it sounded like a good reason for bumping off a man. Maybe it was, at that. A girl likes to hold on to her teeth. ~ Jonathan Latimer

I'm pretty good at remaining calm during an emergency. My house burned down when I was 12, which made me really pragmatic about what needed to be done. But I can be bad in that I compartmentalize a lot of emotions and push them away to deal with them at a later date. ~ Anne Hathaway

For 'Way Down Low', I was particularly inspired by a breakup I was going through and a transition I was making from Austin to New York. ~ Kat Edmonson

Saturday, December 12, 8 p.m., the Loft
I WILL PASS ALGEBRA THIS SEMESTER, and NOTHING IS GOING TO DISTRACT ME FROM STUDYING FOR THE FINAL!!!!!!!!!!!
Saturday, December 12, 9 p.m., the Loft
I just had to go out and see the part where Bruce Willis throws the explosives down the elevator shaft, but now I am back to work. ~ Meg Cabot

Dad's oil dehydrator was a contained electrostatic field, one electrode down the center, the other the container's inner wall. Principal problem was finding a dielectric to separate the two. Refuse oil poured in came out as oil of the highest grade, dry chemicals, and drinking water. Petroleum Rectifying Company successfully prohibited its use. ~ John Cage

Unfortunately, there are designers and marketing people who intentionally look down on the consumer with the notion that vulgarity has a definite appeal to the masses, and therefore they supply the market with a continuos flow of crude and vulgar design. I consider this action criminal since it is producing visual pollution that is degrading our environment just like all other types of pollution. ~ Massimo Vignelli

Well-meaning, decent people will condemn the behavior of a Ted Bundy, while they're walking past a magazine rack full of the very kinds of things that send young kids down the road to be Ted Bundys. ~ Ted Bundy

I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down. ~ Henry Adams

History breaks down into images, not into stories. ~ Walter Benjamin

All canines could interbreed, even back to the original wolves, so that must mean that, deep down inside, every dog was a wolf. You could make a dog out of a wolf, but you couldn't take the wolf out of a dog. ~ Terry Pratchett

Over To Candleford
Chapter XXVIII: Growing Pains
"This accumulated depression of months slid from her at last in a moment. She had
run out into the fields one day in a pet and was standing on a small stone bridge looking down on brown running water flecked with cream-coloured foam. It was a dull November day with grey sky and mist. The little brook was scarcely more than a trench to drain the fields; but overhanging it were thorn bushes with a lacework of leafless twigs; ivy had sent trails down the steep banks to dip in the stream, and from every thorn on the leafless twigs and from every point of the ivy leaves water hung in bright drops, like beads.

A flock of starlings had whirred up from the bushes at her approach and the clip, clop of a cart-horse's hoofs could be heard on the nearest road, but these were the only sounds. Of the hamlet, only a few hundred yards away, she could hear no sound, or see as much as a chimney-pot, walled in as she was by the mist.
Laura looked and looked again. The small scene, so commonplace and yet so lovely, delighted her."
It was so near the homes
men and yet so far removed from their thoughts. The fresh green moss, the glistening ivy, and the reddish twigs with their sparkling drops seemed to have been made for her alone and the hurrying, foam-flecked water seemed to have some message for her. She felt suddenly uplifted. The things which had troubled her troubled her no more. She did not reason. ~ Flora Thompson

It's like a cockroach working up a plan to defeat the shoe on its way down to crush it. ~ Rick Yancey

The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul: "Why art thou cast down" - what business have you to be disquieted? You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: "Hope thou in God" - instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way. And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people [who discourage you], and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: "I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance, who is [also] the health of my countenance, and my God. ~ Jim Berg

Thus hath it been sent down from the heaven of the Will of your Lord, the Lord of Revelation. ~ Bahaullah

She turned to put the basket of bread on the table and saw Brian, and the clutch of mums and zinnias he held in his hand.
"It seemed to call for them," he said.
She stared at the cheerful fall bloossoms, then up into his face. "You picked me flowers."
The sheer disbelief in her voice had him moving his shoulders restlessly. "Well,you made me dinner, with wine and candles and the whole of it. Bedsides, they're your flowers anyway."
"No,they're not." Drowning in love she set the basket down, waited. "Until you give them to me."
"I'll never understand why women are so sensitive over posies." He held them out.
"Thank you." She closed her eyes, buried her face in them. She wanted to remember the exact fragrance, the exact texture. Then lowering them again, she lifted her mouth to his for a kiss. Rubbed her cheek against his.
His arms came around her so suddenly, so tightly, she gasped. "Brian? What is it?"
That gesture,the simple and sweet gesture of cheek against cheek nearly destroyed him. "It's nothing. I just like the way you feel against me when I hold you."
"Hold me any tighter,I'll be through you. ~ Nora Roberts

That's the way it is. If you believe in something your very belief renders you unqualified to do it. Your earnestness will come across. Your passion will show. Your enthusiasm will make everyone nervous. And your naivety will irritate. Which means that you will become suspect. Which means you will be prone to disillusionment. Which means that you will not be able to sustain your belief in the face of all the piranha fish which nibble away at your idea and your faith, 'till only the skeleton of your dream is left. Which means that you have to become a fanatic, a fool, a joke, an embarrassment. The world - which is to say the powers that be - would listen to your ardent ideas with a stiff smile on its face, then put up impossible obstacles, watch you finally give up your cherished idea, having mangled it beyond recognition, and after you slope away in profound discouragement it will take up your idea, dust it down, give it a new spin, and hand it over to someone who doesn't believe in it at all. ~ Ben Okri