declining QUOTES

1 " When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon.

It’s a typewriter,’ I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security. "

― David Sedaris

2 " He emerged out of the lake, the declining sun drenching him with aureate light, the droplets on his body iridescent in their beams. He walked confidently toward her, almost every inch of his sculptured body exposed in his black swimsuit. Each sharp contour of muscle glistened, each limb unfolded with lithe grace as he approached, his eyes riveted on her. Coral watched spellbound, a yearning surging up within her, eager and expectant. The air around them trembled with infinite anticipation. "

― Hannah Fielding

3 " My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares,
And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest,
Where can we finde two better hemispheares
Without sharpe North, without declining West?
What ever dyes, was not mixt equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die. "

― John Donne , The Complete English Poems

4 " The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica. "

― Stephen Leacock , Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

5 " Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on. "

― Jayne Anne Phillips , Lark & Termite

6 " You will be interested to hear, Hilary, that it [the drug] had a most remarkable effect — even on Selena after a very modest quantity. She cast off all conventional restraints and devoted herself without shame to the pleasure of the moment." I asked for particulars of this uncharacteristic conduct. " She took from her handbag a paperback edition of Pride and Prejudice and sat on the sofa reading it, declining all offers of conversation. "

7 " The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself. "

― Plato , The Republic

8 " It is arguable that when Humanists, " Shook off," as people say, " the trammels of religion," and discovered things of this world as objects of veneration in their own right... they began to lose the finer appreciation of even the world itself. Thus to the Christian centuries, the flesh was holy (or sacer at least in one sense or the other), and they veiled its awful majesty; to the Humanist centuries it was divine in its own right, and they exhibited it. Now it is the commonplace of the magazine cover. It has lost its numen. So too with the cult of knowledge for its own sake declining from the Revival of Learning to the Brains Trust. "

9 " I cannot, of course, prove that there is no supervising deity who invigilates my every moment
and who will pursue me even after I am dead. (I can only be happy that there is no evidence for
such a ghastly idea, which would resemble a celestial North Korea in which liberty was not just
impossible but inconceivable.) But nor has any theologian ever demonstrated the contrary. This
would perhaps make the believer and the doubter equal—except that the believer claims to know,
not just that God exists, but that his most detailed wishes are not merely knowable but actually
known. Since religion drew its first breath when the species lived in utter ignorance and
considerable fear, I hope I may be forgiven for declining to believe that another human being can
tell me what to do, in the most intimate details of my life and mind, and to further dictate these
terms as if acting as proxy for a supernatural entity. This tyrannical idea is very much older than
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Christianity, of course, but I do sometimes think that Christians have less excuse for believing, let
alone wishing, that such a horrible thing could be true. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Is Christianity Good for the World?

10 " the believer claims to know, not just that God exists, but that his most detailed wishes are not merely knowable but actually known. Since religion drew its first breath when the species lived in utter ignorance and considerable fear, I hope I may be forgiven for declining to believe that another human being can tell me what to do, in the most intimate details of my life and mind, and to further dictate these terms as if acting as proxy for a supernatural entity. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Is Christianity Good for the World?

11 " Tyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward in a twist of green lips. “Martin, Martin, Martin,” she said, “the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg’s day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments. "

― Dan Simmons , Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)

12 " The declining of responsibility for the self can also be hidden behind a pseudo-objectivity. A patient may make astute observations about himself and give a fairly accurate report of what he dislikes in himself. On the surface it seems as though he is perceptive and honest about himself. But " he" may be merely the intelligent observer of a fellow who is inhibited, fearful, or arrogantly demanding. Hence, since he is not responsible for the fellow he observes, the hurt to his pride is cushioned—all the moreso because the flashlight of his pride is focused on his faculty for keen observations. "

13 " Everyone is special; every moment in our life is unique. However difficult or painful a situation may look at present, it soon becomes a memory and a special journey. Memories make us who we are, but it also starts declining with age. There are many ways to preserve these special moments so that we can cherish a story that's our own. "

―

14 " They thought more before nine a.m. than most people thought all month. I remember once declining cherry pie at dinner, and Rand cocked his head and said, 'Ahh! Iconoclast. Disdains the easy, symbolic patriotism.' And when I tried to laugh it off and said, well, I didn't like cherry cobbler either, Marybeth touched Rand's arm: 'Because of the divorce. All those comfort foods, the desserts a family eats together, those are just bad memories for Nick.'
It was silly but incredibly sweet, these people spending so much energy trying to figure me out. The answer: I don't like cherries. "

― Gillian Flynn , Gone Girl

15 " A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope. "

― Philip K. Dick , The Man in the High Castle

16 " Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue. "

― Angela Carter , Nights at the Circus

17 " Ancient historians tell us that one of the symptoms of a declining civilization is a desexualization of the human race, with men becoming more effeminate and women becoming more masculine, not only in physical [appearance] but in their basic characters. "

― Billy Graham , Billy Graham in Quotes

18 " It was not to flaunt feelings of superiority that the elders of the Kaisaruwatte family clung to the traditions of their patrician lineage, but for self-preservation of themseleves and their way of life, now declining in the face of social change. It was their inability to adapt to change due to the rigidity of their adherence to tradition, that was also the cause of their decline. "

― Martin Wickramasinghe

19 " Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)

’ Humbly to express
A penitential loneliness. "

― Thomas De Quincey

20 " It seems to me that the Russian prestige is declining and that America holds in its hands the immediate future of the world: as long as America knows how to develop the sense of the earth at the same time as her sense of liberty." [Written from Peking, October 1945, on the eve of departure, after having been stuck there since the war began.] "

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