Slipping Away Quotes

• Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.

  A. A. Milne

  Life, Meaningful, Native American

  65 Copy quote

• Just sitting around waiting for my life to begin, while it was all just slipping away.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Philosophy, Waiting, Sitting

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• No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.

  Buenaventura Durruti

  Fighting, Government, Hands

  The Toronto Daily Star, August 5, 1936.

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• Some people drift through their entire life. They do it one day at a time, one week at a time, one month at a time. It happens so gradually they are unaware of how their lives are slipping away until it's too late.

  Mary Kay Ash

  Life, Sadness, People

  19 Copy quote

• but it's not safe and I can feel him slipping away, so I just get out one more sentence. "Stay with me." As the tendrils of sleep syrup pull me down, I hear him whisper a word back but I don't catch it.

  Suzanne Collins

  Sleep, Safe, Slipping

  Suzanne Collins (2010). “Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games)”, p.159, Scholastic Inc.

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• A word of kindness is seldom spoken in vain, while witty saying are as easily lost as the pearls slipping from a broken string.

  George D. Prentice

  Witty, Kindness, Broken

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• Here and gone. That’s what it is to be human, I think—to be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, our place of origins, our family and affectional ties) and to feel that solid set of ties also capable of dissolution, slipping away, as we become moments of attention.

  Mark Doty

  Thinking, Names, Ties

  Mark Doty (2001). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon”, Beacon Press (MA)

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• I take his hand, holding on tightly, preparing for the cameras, and dreading the moment when I will finally have to let go.

  Suzanne Collins

  Letting Go, Games, Katniss

  Suzanne Collins (2011). “The Hunger Games Trilogy”, p.483, Scholastic Inc.

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• My eyesight is not nearly as good. My hearing is probably going away. My memory is slipping too. But I'm still around.

  John Wooden

  Memories, Going Away, Hearing

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• He was only twenty-five.He was young enough to miss his youth just as it was slipping away. The worst kind of loss-the one that is happening as you feel it.

  Emma Forrest

  Loss, Missing, Slipping

  Emma Forrest (2007). “Thin Skin”, p.45, Simon and Schuster

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• I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Pain, Night, Gathering

  Khaled Hosseini (2004). “The Kite Runner”, p.261, Penguin

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• You BECOME 21, you TURN 30, then you're PUSHING 40. Whoa! Put on the brakes, it's all slipping away. Before you know it, you REACH 50 and your dreams are gone.

  George Carlin

  Dream, Gone, Pushing

  4 Copy quote

• ...You can have this whole entire life, with all your opinions, your loves, your fears. Eventually those parts of you disappear. And then the people who could remember those parts of you disappear, and before long, all that's left is your name in some ledger. This...person -- she had a favorite food. She had friends and people she disliked. We don't even know how she died...I guess that's why I like preservation better than history. In preservation I feel like I can keep some of it from slipping away.

  Katherine Howe

  Names, Long, People

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• People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away.

  Raoul Vaneigem

  Believe, People, Slipping

  Guy Debord, Ivan Chtcheglov, Asger Jorn, Raoul Vaneigem, Mustapha Khayati (2014). “Situationism: A Compendium”, p.213, Bread and Circuses Publishing

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• Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.

  John Green

  Notebook, Dream, Memories

  John Green (2015). “Looking For Alaska Special 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.149, Penguin

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• . . . [T]o live not with hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it, but . . . to live with the hands stretched out both to give and receive with gladness.

  Frederick Buechner

  Peace, Hands, Giving

  7 Copy quote

• I realized at a very young age that health is precious, and too many people don't realize it until it's slipping away, or worse yet, it's gone.

  Sean Swarner

  People, Age, Gone

  Sean Swarner (2007). “Keep Climbing: How I Beat Cancer and Reached the Top of the World”, p.73, Simon and Schuster

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• Freedom of the press and also of speech, assembly, and worship can persist as social forms and legal guarantees, while at the same time their functional realities can be gradually slipping away.

  Marshall Field

  Reality, Guarantees, Speech

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• The green prehuman earth is the mystery we were chosen to solve, a guide to the birthplace of our spirit, but it is slipping away. The way back seems harder every year. If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding, through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations. And thus humanity closes the door on its past.

  E. O. Wilson

  Beautiful, Men, Past

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• William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

  Tennessee Williams

  Writing, Heart, Loss

  Tennessee Williams (1945). “The Glass Menagerie”, p.105, New Directions Publishing

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• I think movie making can sometimes make you lazy in your approach. Occasionally you'll be shooting a scene and it's not even your coverage but you'll catch yourself slipping away and you'll see your mind going somewhere else. But you just can't afford to do that on stage.

  Jamie Bell

  Thinking, Somewhere Else, Lazy

  Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Reality, Letters, Slipping

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• Although things seem to be sometimes going up and sometimes descending, sometimes slipping away, nevertheless there is a reality, the same today as in the past. It does not change, for nothing can affect it. Could we not say it is one great harmony? So why shouldn't we ask about it.

  Zhuangzi

  Past, Reality, Doe

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• This is America. We're proud. We're not afraid of a bunch of terrorists. But this government is all about terror alerts and scaring us at airports. We're changing the Constitution out of fear. We spend all our time looking up each other's dresses. Fear's the only issue the Republican Party has. Vote for them, or the terrorists will win. That's not what Reagan was about. I hate to think about our soldiers over in Iraq fighting for a country that's slipping away.

  Merle Haggard

  Country, Hate, Party

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• There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress. It doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress I the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-ending retrieving what it lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.

  Graham Swift

  Humble, Land, Progress

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