Decline Quotes - Page 21

• The first sign on a declining civilization is a decline in the arts.

  Diana Palmer

  Art, Civilization, Firsts

  Diana Palmer (2011). “The Case of the Missing Secretary”, p.109, Harlequin

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• Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.

  Wallace Stegner

  Agreement, Civilization, Names

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• Sometimes I would get invited to a party or to go out to dinner by one of them and I would decline. Part of me wanted to go, but those kind of outings always made me feel even more alienated than usual. Hearing them talk made me feel lonely and hateful at the same time. Lonely because I didn't fit in, never did. When I was reminded, it hurt. And hateful because it reaffirmed what I already knew, that I was alone and on the outside.

  Henry Rollins

  Lonely, Hurt, Party

  Henry Rollins (2009). “The Portable Henry Rollins”, p.33, Villard

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• A cherry pie is . . . ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life.

  Nick Harkaway

  Pie, Hot, Ephemeral

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• Sara held up a hand. 'How exactly did you "decline" his offer?' 'By slitting his throat.

  Nalini Singh

  Hands, Throat, Offers

  Nalini Singh (2009). “Angels' Blood”, p.85, Penguin

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• Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core. Rome'll decline and fall again, Cortés'll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian'll be blown to pieces again, you and I'll sleep under the Corsican stars again, I'll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you'll read this letter again, the sun'll grow cold again. Nietzsche's gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.

  David Mitchell

  Stars, Fall, School

  David Mitchell (2008). “Cloud Atlas: A Novel”, p.471, Random House

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• The terrible predicament of a beautiful girl is that only an experienced womanizer, someone cynical and without scruple, feels up to the challenge. More often than not, she will lose her virginity to some filthy lowlife in what proves to be the first step in an irrevocable decline.

  Michel Houellebecq

  Beautiful, Girl, Cynical

  Michel Houellebecq (2001). “The Elementary Particles”, p.61, Vintage

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• What makes us leave what we love best? What is it inside us that keeps erasing itself When we need it most, That sends us into uncertainty for its own sake And holds us flush there until we begin to love it And have to begin again? What is it within our own lives we decline to live Whenever we find it, making our days unendurable, And nights almost visionless? I still don't know yet, but I do it.

  Charles Wright

  Night, Needs, Sake

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• The state of our civilization manifests itself both in the non-problems that terrify us beyond all reason - rising sea levels - and in the real problems we pay no heed to [population decline]...In reality, much of the planet will be uninhabited long before it's uninhabitable

  Mark Steyn

  Real, Sea, Civilization

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• I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.

  Walter Isaacson

  Running, Jobs, Moving

  Walter Isaacson (2011). “Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein”, p.692, Simon and Schuster

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• Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.

  David Foster Wallace

  Lonely, Loneliness, Psychics

  David Foster Wallace (2012). “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again”, p.21, Hachette UK

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• Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you're told that you're "in your head too much", a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral. Or maybe there's another word for such people: thinkers.

  Susan Cain

  Book, People, Guilt

  Susan Cain (2012). “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking”, p.7, Broadway Books

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• Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Lying, Tired, Blessing

  "The Everlasting Man". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, VIII: The End of the World, 1925.

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• The first ten million years were the worst," said Marvin, "and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.

  Douglas Adams

  Years, Firsts, Said

  Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980) ch. 18

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• The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within...could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Inspiration, Greatness, Wind

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• For no one, in our long decline, So dusty, spiteful and divided, Had quite such pleasant friends as mine, Or loved them half as much as I did.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Long, Half, Spiteful

  Hilaire Belloc (1954). “The Verse of Hilaire Belloc”

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• Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Men, Careers, Interesting

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• History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

  John Updike

  Empires, Too Much, Littles

  John Updike (2010). “Rabbit Is Rich”, p.260, Random House

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• The line between the public life and the private life has been erased, due to the rapid decline of manners and courtesy. There is a certain crudeness and crassness that has suddenly become accepted behavior, even desirable.

  Fannie Flagg

  Lines, Behavior, Courtesy

  Fannie Flagg (1999). “Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!”, Random House LLC

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• Such days of autumnal decline hold a strange mystery which adds to the gravity of all our moods.

  Charles Nodier

  Fall, Add, Strange

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• What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

  Theodor Adorno

  Culture, West, Utopia

  Theodor W. Adorno (1982). “Prisms”, p.72, MIT Press

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• Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Love, Men, Should

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.402, Simon and Schuster

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• We musn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about. We musn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty.

  Muriel Barbery

  Thinking, Next Day, People

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• It takes constant vigilance not to slip into negativity or simple apathy. It takes courage to believe over any given period of time that we are getting better and not sliding into decline.

  Julia Cameron

  Believe, Simple, Negativity

  Julia Cameron (2009). “Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance”, p.116, Penguin

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• A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many. It changes not only in growing light toward zenith and decline again, but in texture and mood, in tone and meaning, warped by a thousand factors of season, of heat or cold, of still or multi winds, torqued by odors, tastes, and the fabrics of ice or grass, of bud or leaf or black-drawn naked limbs. And as a day changes so do its subjects, bugs and birds, cates, dogs, butterflies and people.

  John Steinbeck

  Dog, Butterfly, Light

  John Steinbeck (2008). “The Winter of Our Discontent”, p.39, Penguin

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