Crumbling Quotes - Page 3

• Even this nation (the US) will be on the very verge of crumbling to pieces and tumbling to the ground, and when the Constitution is upon the brink of ruin, this people will be the staff upon which the nation shall lean, and they shall bear the Constitution away from the very verge of destruction.

  Joseph Smith, Jr.

  Freedom, People, Tumbling

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• This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Moving, Men, Garden

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Book House (2016). “F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Complete Novels (Book House)”, p.393, Book House

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• I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Wall, Winter, Past

  Khaled Hosseini (2004). “The Kite Runner”, p.14, Penguin

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• There are few ways in which good people do more harm to those who take them seriously than to defend the gospel with arguments that won't hold water. Many of the difficulties encountered by young people going to college would be avoided if parents and teachers were more careful to distinguish between what they know to be true and what they think may be true. Impetuous youth, upon finding the authority it trusts crumbling, even on unimportant details, is apt to lump everything together and throw the baby out with the bath.

  Henry B. Eyring

  Baby, Teacher, College

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• We have great cities to visit: New York and Washington, Paris and London; and further east, and older than any of these, the legendary city of Samarkand, whose crumbling palaces and mosques still welcome travelers on the Silk road. Weary of cities? Then we’ll take to the wilds. To the islands of Hawaii and the mountains of Japan, to forests where Civil War dead still lie, and stretches of sea no mariner ever crossed. They all have their poetry: the glittering cities and the ruined, the watery wastes and the dusty; I want to show you them all. I want to show you everything.

  Clive Barker

  New York, War, Lying

  "Galilee". Book by Clive Barker, February 3, 1999.

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• The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

  Don DeLillo

  Dream, Thinking, Energy

  Don DeLillo (2011). “White Noise”, p.114, Pan Macmillan

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• 'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992, an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling, money was scarce, and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings, performance art, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile, a new art world was coming into being.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Ethos, Machines

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• Who knows what crumbling infrastructure lies beneath our sleeping children? Actually, many people do - they pay surveyors to take a look.

  Christine Pelosi

  Children, Lying, Sleep

  "Deadly Priorities: Why Did PG&E Spend Millions on Politics, Instead of Pipelines?" by Christine Pelosi, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 12, 2010.

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• High-speed trains in Japan can now reach 375 mph - twice as fast as any public transit train in the United States. America's railroads were once the envy of the world. Today they are in disrepair and we are falling further and further behind the rest of the world. We need to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, including rail. When we do that we not only make our country more productive and efficient, we create millions of new jobs.

  Bernie Sanders

  Country, Jobs, Fall

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• I think that political parties are fuelling this fear in order to create divisions. The more we bring up fear, the more we neglect real political issues. Political debate in France is crumbling since every single issue is brought to Islam now.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Real, Party, Thinking

  Source: themuslimtimes.info

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• In an election like this one [in 2016], not only are voters dissatisfied, but where the foundations of our economy, our democracy, our ecosystem, and international war and peace are really crumbling and are really at grave risk for failing in many ways, we need desperately to have an honest public conversation about both the track record of where we've been, what are the critical problems we are facing and what it will take to solve them.

  Jill Stein

  War, Ecosystems, Track

  Source: www.justicenewsnetwork.com

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• Any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets
  loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today
  the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the
  techno-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.

  Alvin Toffler

  Loneliness, Being Alone, People

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• You know that thing when you're not asleep but you're not awake, and you can't move your body? I had that kind of nightmare, and I felt like all my teeth were crumbling in my mouth. Now I have this fear of all my teeth being knocked out of my mouth somehow!

  Nicholas D'Agosto

  Moving, Teeth, Mouths

  "Hot Guy to Know: Nicholas D'Agosto". Interview with Kara McGrath, www.seventeen.com. August 8, 2011.

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• I'm not trying to imply I can keep up this silent, isolated facade all the time. Sometimes the wall I've erected around me comes crumbling down. It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes, before I even realize what's going on, there I am--naked and defenseless and totally confused. At times like that I always feel an omen calling out to me, like a dark, omnipresent pool of water. ~page 10

  Haruki Murakami

  Wall, Confused, Dark

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• Historically the first philosopher to enquire deeply into the nature of corruption in society was Ibn Khaldun (1322-1406), whose wandering life was largely spent in the northern littoral of Africa at a time when kingdoms and sultanates were crumbling.

  Robert Payne

  Firsts, Kingdoms, Philosopher

  "The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America". Book by Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (Ibn Khaldun and Machiavelli, p. 139), 1975.

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• Between the probable and proved there yawns A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd, Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse, Our very standpoint crumbling. Desperate dawns Our only hope: to leap into the Word That opens up the shuttered universe.

  Sheldon Vanauken

  Faith, Inspiration, Dawn

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• Why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct? All our lives want a suitable background. They should at least, like the life of the anchorite, be as impressive to behold as objects in a desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Broken, Solitude

  Henry David Thoreau, Jeffrey S. Cramer (2007). “I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau”, p.17, Yale University Press

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• a connotation of infinity sharpens the temporal splendor of this night when souls which have forgot frivolity in lowliness,noting the fatal flight of worlds whereto this earth’s a hurled dream down eager avenues of lifelessness consider for how much themselves shall gleam, in the poised radiance of perpetualness. When what’s in velvet beyond doomed thought is like a woman amorous to be known; and man,whose here is alway worse than naught, feels the tremendous yonder for his own— on such a night the sea through her blind miles of crumbling silence seriously smiles

  e. e. cummings

  Dream, Night, Men

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• It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: it has been complicated, and therefore perfected, by what time had done to it

  Julie Orringer

  Like Love, Done, Complicated

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• They had picked up Julie's scent hit wolfsbane lost her and found her trail again at the crumbling Highway 23 except it was two hours old and mixed with horse scents. She was hitchhiking. Great. Awesome. At least she always carried a knife with her. When I relayed this to Curran he shrugged and said, "If she kills anybody we'll make it go away.

  Ilona Andrews

  Horse, Knives, Two

  Ilona Andrews (2011). “Magic Slays”, p.88, Penguin

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• They were viewed very much like castles, I suppose: as crumbling, obsolete relics, with no real modern function other than as tourist attractions. But when the skies darkened and the nation called, both reawoke to the meaning of their existence. One shielded our bodies, the other, our souls.

  Max Brooks

  Real, Sky, Soul

  Max Brooks (2006). “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War”, p.194, Broadway Books

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• Investing in [children] is not a national luxury or a national choice. It's a national necessity. If the foundation of your house is crumbling, you don't say you can't afford to fix it while you're building astronomically expensive fences to protect it from outside enemies. The issue is not are we going to pay - it's are we going to pay now, up front, or are we going to pay a whole lot more later on.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Children, Luxury, Issues

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• I did not break up the Beatles. You can't have it both ways. If you're going to blame me for breaking the Beatles up, you should be thankful that I made them into myth rather than a crumbling group.

  Yoko Ono

  Being Thankful, Groups, Way

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• I'm an insomniac lately. It's one of the many prizes you find in the Cracker Jack box of a crumbling [relationship].

  Kristin Hannah

  Crackers, Boxes, Insomniac

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• The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Journey, Expectations, Shifting

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