A Lifeline Quotes & Sayings

We target people who understand that relationships are the lifeline of a small company. — David Rose

For so many years, Lumikki had needed to find hiding places because she was afraid. Finding secret nooks and safe havens was a lifeline. These days, it wasn't so much about fear as a desire to find some room just for her in a place that was shared by everyone. — Salla Simukka

He had the face of a floating astronaut who had lost his tether and had only one chance to grab a lifeline or forever drift away into endless black. I knew that feeling, the sense of panic that stretched time, turning seconds into years, and the deep pain that came from being hurt by not one person but many, a gang of bullies that expanded into a neighborhood and then into a community, until you questioned the whole world. — Lissa Price

Writing can be a lifeline, especially when your existence has been denied, especially when you have been left on the margins, especially when your life and process of growth have been subjected to attempts at strangulation. — Micere Githae Mugo

With the best of intentions you toss me a lifeline.
Failing to see how a piece of rope will do me any good, I ignore it and drown. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Dean coughed helpfully. Somewhere in the cough was the word "persuasion." He was throwing Mo a lifeline.
Mo preferred to go down. "I haven't actually read any Austen. I'm more into mysteries, crime fiction, courtroom stuff." This was disappointing, but not damning. On the other hand it was a failing; on the other, manfully owned up to. If only Mo had stopped there.
"I don't read much women's stuff. I like a good plot," he said.
Prudie finished her drink and set her glass down so hard you could hear it hit. "Austen can plot like a son of a bitch," she said. "Bernadette, I believe you were telling us about your first husband."
"I could start with my second. Or the one after that," Bernadette offered. Down with plot! Down with Mo! — Karen Joy Fowler

Cooking is not about convenience and it's not about shortcuts. Our hunger for the twenty-minute gourmet meal, for one-pot ease and prewashed, precut ingredients has severed our lifeline to the satisfactions of cooking. Take your time. Take a long time. Move slowly and deliberately and with great attention. — Thomas Keller

Victimless crimes are the lifeline of the RIGHT virus. And there is a growing recognition, even in official quarters, that victimless crimes should be removed from the books or subject to minimal penalties. — William S. Burroughs

Usually, when you're talking about work with other writers it's because something seriously bad is going on with your work and you've absolutely thrown out a lifeline and you're hoping that someone will help you with something. Either there's some bad feeling you have about the work, or sometimes it's not specific - just kind of solidarity. — Chang-rae Lee

There's no point in comforting words, in telling her she'll be all right. She's no fool. Her hand reaches out and I clutch it like a lifeline. As if it's me who's dying instead of Rue. — Suzanne Collins

But the real reasons why scientists promote accommodationism are more self-serving. To a large extent, American scientists depend for their support on the American public, which is largely religious, and on the U.S. Congress, which is equally religious. (It's a given that it's nearly impossible for an open atheist to be elected to Congress, and at election time candidates vie with one another to parade their religious belief.) Most researchers are supported by federal grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, whose budgets are set annually by Congress. To a working scientist, such grants are a lifeline, for research is expensive, and if you don't do it you could lose tenure, promotions, or raises. Any claim that science is somehow in conflict with religion might lead to cuts in the science budget, or so scientists believe, thus endangering their professional welfare. — Jerry A. Coyne

Reading had always been my lifeline
an escape to that imaginary world where hurts were fictional and endings happy ... — Phyllis A. Whitney

Sitting in the deserted law offices, Sanders had the feeling that he was all alone in the world, with nobody but Fernandez and the encoraching darkness. Things were happening quickly; this person he had never met before today was fast becoming a kind of lifeline for him. — Michael Crichton

Anyone who fears, as I do, that today's public schools are dangerously close to being irrelevant must read this book. The authors provide a road map-and a lifeline-showing how schools can prosper under the most difficult conditions. It is a welcome departure from all the school bashing. — John Merrow

It was a backwards memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline. — Terry Pratchett

The Persian Gulf is our lifeline ... We will respect international navigation, for us, freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf is a must. — Mohammad Javad Zarif

For those living in a dark cave ... sometimes all it takes is for someone to throw us a lifeline. — Martin R. Lemieux

Before she could think better of it, she grabbed Darling's arm as he went for Giran again. He turned around, his hand raised to strike her, too. Just as she thought he'd put her through the wall behind her, he caught himself. His breathing ragged, he stared at her and lowered his hand. The agony on his beautiful face hit her like a blow. He cupped her head in the palm of his hand, then gently pulled her into his arms. She hugged him close as his heart pounded fiercely against her breasts. He continued to cradle her head and hold on to her like she was his lifeline. Maris approached them slowly. "Are you better?" he whispered to Darling. His eyes started jerking. "No. I didn't get a chance to kill the bastard." He turned in Giran's direction. "No one insults my lady. No one." Nykyrian — Sherrilyn Kenyon

No matter what happens, we'll find each other again. You're my lifeline. You always will be. — A.G. Howard

Befriending provides a valuable lifeline to many people who feel isolated in their communities often as a result of ill health or poverty. I would like to thank all those who volunteer as befrienders and I hope that your numbers will increase in coming years. Your kindness and hard work is, I know, very much appreciated by those you help. — Charles Kennedy

Millions of nerdy kids who grew up in the 1980s could only find the components they needed at local Radio Shacks, and the stores were like a lifeline to a better world where everybody understood computers. — Annalee Newitz

Soil is a resource, a living, breathing entity that, if treated properly, will maintain itself. It's our lifeline for survival. When it has finally been depleted, the human population will disappear ... Project you imagination into the soil below you next time you go into the garden. Think with compassion of the life that exists there. Think, the drama, the sexuality, the harvesting, the work that carries on ceaselessly. Think about the meaning of being a steward for the earth. — Marjorie Harris

The umbilical cord is a precious lifeline that began in my primal mother and has come down to me. — Ilchi Lee

His hand touched my leg and I grabbed it. I held it with both of mine, like he was a lifeline and I needed saving. Or maybe I was the lifeline and he needed saving.
Was it possible we could save each other? — Molly O'Keefe

I think, with music in general, people just inevitably connect with feeling. The opportunity to hear expressed feeling. That's what has always drawn me towards music. It's something where, by connecting to someone else's voice, I feel less lonely. I feel more alive. I feel more connected to the world and to the rest of humanity. Sometimes a voice can be like a lifeline. — Antony Hegarty

The spine is the lifeline. A lot of people should go to a chiropractor but they don't know it. — Jack LaLanne

There's no way to help a man who doesn't want to be saved. In the end, it was me who needed the lifeline. Seeing — Corinne Michaels

There's a lot that can be said about holding hands. Such a simple gesture, and yet it yells things. This person is mine, it says. It anchors two people together and keeps them rooted. Hands tell complicated stories, and by holding hands, the stories are combined. Lifeline to lifeline. — R.K. Ryals

It was a fossilized path: the will which had cut this gash out of these solitary places so that the blood and sap would flow there was long since dead - and dead too were the circumstances which had guided this will. A whitish and indurated scar remained, gradually gnawed away by the earth like a flesh that heals itself, yet its direction was still vaguely cut into the horizon; a language and crepuscular sign rather than a way forward - a worn-out lifeline which still vegetated through the fallow land as it does on the palm of a hand. It was so old that, since it had been constructed, the very configuration of the land must have changed imperceptibly. — Julien Gracq

The idea was women on boats. Lifeline Cruises pitched itself to women seeking adventure, whether a daylong adventure in the waters of the San Francisco Bay or a twelve-day adventure from San Francisco to Alaska and back. Passengers did not have to be survivors of breast cancer or domestic abuse, nor was any of the profit of Lifeline Cruises given to such causes, but the language of its radio ads, slippery and clear, managed to convey that this might be so. 'Empowerment' was one of the words. It's daylong cruise boat was named The Wild Lady, from a poem by Emily Dickinson that Lifeline Cruises had made up. Tote bags sold on board broadcast the words of the ad
The wild lady may seem
adrift to those who cannot dream
but within her uncharted wand'ring eyes
a heart beats healthy, strong and wise!
- and below this were the words 'Emily Dickinson. — Daniel Handler

When you fell into my life, I was shattered beyond repair. But as the shining angel of redemption, you didn't seem to care. While the tempest swirled around me, you led me to solid ground. You're the purest, deepest love a man like me has ever found. There is a fire that burns within me that only you can ignite. You're the light that fills my soul in the darkest, bleakest night. You're the balm that cures the wound; the lifeline in the storm. You are the song of my heart, the music of my soul. — Katie Ashley

I was learning, even in my brief time in England, that a cup of tea almost always helped. I didn't know whether it was the caffeine, the warmth, or the simple fact of having someone else do something kind, but a soothing cup of tea in Harriet Dalrymple's cottage was fast becoming my lifeline to sanity. — Beth Pattillo

The cord, a familiar voice said. Remember your lifeline, dummy!
Suddenly there was a tug in my lower back. The current pulled at me, but it wasn't carrying me away anymore. I imagined the string in my back keeping me tied to the shore.
"Hold on, Seaweed Brain." It was Annabeth's voice, much clearer now. "You're not getting away from me that easily."
The cord strengthened.
I could see Annabeth now- standing barefoot above me on the canoe lake pier. I'd fallen out of my canoe. That was it. She was reaching out her hand to haul me up, and she was trying not to laugh. She wore her orange camp T-shirt and jeans. Her hair was tucked up in her Yankees cap, which was strange because that should have made her invisible.
"You are such an idiot sometimes." She smiled. "Come on. Take my hand."
Memories came flooding back to me- sharper and more colorful. I stopped dissolving. My name was Percy Jackson. I reached up and took Annabeth's hand. — Rick Riordan

Befriending the life in others is sometimes a complex matter. There are times when we offer our strength and protection, but these are usually only temporary measures. The greatest blessing we offer others may be the belief we have in their struggle for freedom, the courage to support and accompany them as they determine for themselves the strength that will become their refuge and the foundation for their lives. I think it is especially important to believe in someone at a time when they cannot yet believe in themselves. Then your belief will become their lifeline. — Rachel Naomi Remen

The shared secret of our second lives hangs between us, not like a weight, but like a lifeline. — Victoria Schwab

A hope of something beyond our place and time. This is what books - the best books - give us: a lifeline, a reason to believe, a way to breathe more freely. — Blake Morrison

I want to be very careful about judging and how much to generalize about the use of media being pathological. For some people, it's a temptation and a pathology; for others, it's a lifeline. — Howard Rheingold

Scales lie! You lose thirty pounds of muscle and you gain thirty pounds of fat and you weigh the same, right?
Take that tape measure out. That won't lie. Your waistline is your lifeline.
It should be the same as it was when you were a young person. — Jack LaLanne

The moth batted its wings angrily at him as it twisted and spun gracelessly in the green blades. For
Consort's sake, throw us a lifeline and stop lettin' death take me hand! — C. Kennedy

If, as an actor, you allow yourself to be cocooned from the boring pin-pricks of day-to-day existence - like standing in a queue at the butcher's or any of the other dreary little events that we all have in our daily lives - you begin to lose your lifeline to what people are. And if you lose that, you eventually lose the ability to act. — Glenda Jackson

The phantom of the man-who-would-understand,
the lost brother, the twin
for him did we leave our mothers,
deny our sisters, over and over?
did we invent him, conjure him
over the charring log,
nights, late, in the snowbound cabin
did we dream or scry his face
in the liquid embers,
the man-who-would-dare-to-know-us?
It was never the rapist:
it was the brother, lost,
the comrade/twin whose palm
would bear a lifeline like our own:
decisive, arrowy,
forked-lightning of insatiate desire
It was never the crude pestle, the blind
ramrod we were after:
merely a fellow-creature
with natural resources equal to our own. — Adrienne Rich

Daniel?"
"Tell me, sunshine."
Inhaling his scent like a lifeline, she leaned in and spoke urgently against his ear. "Take me home. Make it better."
His answering groan rumbled against her chest. He sank his hands into her hair. "Oh baby, I'm going to make it so much better. — Tessa Bailey

A match for you is your lifeline. Now that you have bonded, you're sealed, with purpose. As long as you're together you'll feel the strength your seal provides. — K.J. Bell

The ... act of surrender - or devotion, as the case may be - was, to him, a kind of lifeline for those who sought a quick answer and didn't want to stick around long enough to see their doubt through to its ultimate conclusion. A conclusion, which, of itself, was a bittersweet paradox - for how could doubt simply cease to exist by any stretch of the imagination? Doubt was, nonetheless - from his own perspective - the only inclusive insight into the nature of a Truth exclusive of conditions. — Ashim Shanker

My love isn't a weapon, it's a lifeline, reach out and take hold, and don't let go! — Francine Rivers

In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear under one's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. John Dos Passos — George F. Will

All the whackjob psychologists out there will tell you that grief is a process. Some say it has five stages. Others say that grief should only last two years at the lost, otherwise it's "abnormal". Putting an expiration date of grief though is like putting out the flame on a burning candle. It might stop the candle from melting down and falling apart, but in the long run the candle goes solid, freezes in a catatonic state. Take away a person's grief and guaranteed they'll only be a frozen shell of a human being afterwards. Grief is only love, it's nothing to hide or send away with happy pills and mother's little helpers. Grief is a lifeline connecting two people who are in different realms together, and it's a sign of loyalty and hope. — Rebecca McNutt

Ariella was silent, and I reached out to take her hand, squeezing as if it were a lifeline, holding me to sanity. — Julie Kagawa

When the child does or says something that the parents don't like, they immediately become rejecting and critical of the child. Since the approval and support of the parent is like a psychological lifeline to the emotional health of the child, the child is immediately affected and pulls back from the behavior in order to regain the love and approval of the parents. — Anonymous

He sobbed no longer playing the part of her savior, but playing the part of a lover begging for another chance, a man who would claw out his heart and hand it to her if it made her understand. He held on to her as if she were his last lifeline - because in a way, she was. — Inger Iversen

My mother is my lifeline and I love her a scary amount, but sometimes when I talk to her, I can't help but feel like it's going at the pace of a Sofia Coppola movie. — Ryan O'Connell

Fields and more fields on either side of the road.From where they are it looks as if the whole world were green.But from higher up,from a hill-if there were a hill in this flat country-or from a pyramid(one of the many that two thousand years ago lined this route from Thebes to Memphis,from the Delta to the Cataract)or from an aeroplane today,you would be able to see how narrow the strip green was,how closely it clung to the winding river.The river like a lifeline thrown across the desert, the villages and the town hanging on to it, clustering together, glancing over their shoulders at the desert always behind them.Appeasing it,finally,by making it the dwelling of their head. — Ahdaf Soueif

I knew that feeling, the sense of panic that stretched time, turning seconds into years, and the deep pain that came from being hurt by not one person but many, a gang of bullies that expanded into a neighborhood and then into a community, until you questioned the whole world. And your last thought, as you stretch your arm until your fingers are inches from that lifeline, is how if you survive, you'll find a way to help fix what was broken, so you can say that yes, you want to be part of the world again. — Lissa Price

Gold is no longer an investment. Gold is no longer a portfolio item. Gold is certainly not a trading vehicle. Gold is your lifeline and I mean that literally. — Jim Sinclair

I love the 'Delilah' show. I've been listening to it for years and years. It's incredible. She's always got a song for the right occasion. Many people call in, maybe their spirit it a little down, and she lifts them up. She is really somebody special. She's a lifeline to a lot of people. — Ronnie Milsap

Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words on the other hand, were a lifeline. They left their hushed rhythm behind, a counter to the slow in and out of Emmeline's breathing. — Diane Setterfield

Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today ... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking. — John Dos Passos

Radio was my lifeline as a kid growing up in Winnipeg in the 1950s. It connected me with the wider world outside our little prairie city. — Randy Bachman

In the land of Cheerios, dirty diapers, fleeting naps and interrupted sleep, other mothers are a lifeline. — Susan Chira

He unknowingly throws me a lifeline with those words. I am not drowning in worry anymore. I am neck deep and it still washes over me in cold waves, but now I can breathe. — Ally Condie

People talk about books being an escape, but here on the tube, this one feels more like a lifeline ... The motion of the train makes her head rattle, but her eyes lock on the words the way a figure skater might choose a focal point as she spins, and just like that, she's grounded again. — Jennifer E. Smith

But that peek into his uncensored brain made it clear he too realized there was a good chance things weren't going to work out for us, that the idea of it not working out was already in his mind, and in some corner of his heart he was already preparing for it. And since I was already preparing to prepare for it too, I'm not sure why it made me so sad. But it did. It was like someone cut my lifeline. — Josh Lanyon

The laboratory routine, which involves a great deal of measurement, filing, and tabulation, is either my lifeline or my chief handicap, I hardly know which. — Charles Francis Richter

Catholicism - all the perversions of Christianity - is not a faith of love. It is a faith of fear. Obey, be good, toe the line, and heaven is yours, the first prize in the lottery of eternity. Disobey, react, cut the lifeline, and never-ceasing damnation is the booby prize. The dogma is, love the only god and you shall be safe. Fail in that love and he will not rescue you, not until you crawl and apologize and fawn before the altar. What kind of a religion demands such indignity? — Martin Booth

You know it with startling clarity in that moment - how there's only a singular cord in this knotted mess of a world worth reaching for. It's dangling right there from our impossible tangle, and it's the one hope you need to reach for this Advent. That scarlet lifeline of Christ. — Ann Voskamp

Somehow Luke understood - in a way that Lando never had, that Hand and Leia and Chewbacca had simply never grasped - just how dark a place the universe really was.
Lando guessed that was where Luke got his humility. His kindness. His gentle faith that people could change for the better. That must have been why he rarely smiled, and almost never made jokes. Because the goodness was all he rally had. It was his lifeline. The rope to which he clung, dangling over the abyss. — Matthew Woodring Stover

I prefer to unwind by DJing. I learned that from Mike D from the Beastie Boys. After a show, he would DJ. Once I saw that, I wanted to do that. And now DJing is like my lifeline. I love the power it represents. — Questlove

My 2020 Vision for India is to transform it into a developed nation. That cannot be abstract; it is a lifeline. — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

The objective world is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling along the lifeline of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time. — Hermann Weyl

Growing up, books were my lifeline, and I owe a debt to those writers that can never be repaid. They saved my sanity and gave me a world I could escape to. If I can pay that forward to another person, that's all I ask. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

His eyes drifted shut. without opening them, he murmured, "I like the sound of your laugh. It's real and genuine. A lot of girls have this fake laugh. Not you."
"I like your laugh, too." I whispered, feeling pulled in, cozy in the cacoon of his bed.
"Yeah?"
I flattened my palm over his chest, enjoying the sensation of the firm flesh, even warm as it was. He sighed, like my cool hand offered him some relief.
"I laugh more since you came around," he said quietly, his lips barely forming the words.
He did? I frowned. He must not have laughed at all before, then, because I didn't think he was particularly jovial.
I held him through the night. And he held me back, tucking my head beneath his chin. His arms surrounded me and kept me close to his overly warm body. Almost like I was some kind of lifeline. I felt the moment his fever broke around one in the morning. I finally relaxed and fell asleep. — Sophie Jordan

He had been raised on a few bedrock certainties: the Victorian spirit of duty, the personal need for responsibility, for doing what had to be done. He had demonstrated his adherence to this code by taking on his father's debts, as well as the burdens of his aging and ailing mother and of his manic-depressive sister. That same code now had him at war with himself. Happiness was within his grasp, but seizing it meant abandoning his responsibility to Mayo. If he cut her loose, he could save himself. But he would also cut her lifeline. — A.M. Sperber & Eric Lax

But once upon a time - that would be our time - a telephone cord seemed like nothing less than a lifeline.
It was your attachment to the outside world and, even more than that, your attachment to the people you loved, or wanted to love, or tried to love.
Everything about it was fitting - the way it curled in on itself, the way it got so easily tangled, the way you could pull it only so far before it kept you in place.
Twisted and knotted and essential. — David Levithan

In China, where you can be arrested and imprisoned for your faith, getting together with other Christians is a lifeline and you'll risk anything for the privilege. No one attends church in China casually, or for a social advantage - quite the opposite. — Philip Yancey

Given the ... multidisciplinary philosophy, I was surprised by the absence of alternative pain approaches - the whole spectrum of cranial-sacral massage, healing-touch therapy, and other hands-on skills that are a lifeline to many people with chronic pain. Alternative therapie are hard to evaluate, but that's no reason not to explore them. — Marni Jackson

Do you know anything about hearts, Jona? The Senta know hearts. Hearts are not one organ. Inside a mother's womb, two pulsing bags of blood seek their eternal mate."
Her hand reached out to his. She opened his palm, and traced a finger down his lifeline, then his loveline. She lifted it up to her own face. She placed it on her cheek.
"Lungs are fine apart," she said, "Hands do not need another but to clap. Brains gnarl like roots in the nothing of soul, and guts spin in knots around the nothing of hunger. But hearts are made by two complete parts merging together. Once the two pieces sense each other in the blood flow, they cross every bloody cliff inside of us. The arteries bind the halves close. The veins make love to each other in the life pulse that makes all life from love entwined. — J.M. McDermott

Every lifeline has a worth untouched - it is energy, uncolored, self-driven and supreme. — Dew Platt

Moreover, we were to each other aspects of a dream unrealized. I emblemized the excitement of freedom, a life untethered by the confines of constructs. She illustrated a sense of belonging, of ongoing laughter in the face of those constructs, a true lifeline within the walking dead. We were standing in different places, yet the same, seeing within each other a sense of truth within the lies, a radiant light that illuminated the dark. — Jackie Haze

It is a great tragedy when those who are afflicted with adversity or a source of hopelessness turn their backs on prayer. To their peril, they ignore that spiritual lifeline just at the time when their attention to it most needs to be intensified. By so doing they cut themselves of from revelation and inspiration and deprive themselves of hearing the Lord's voice. They give up the prospect of gaining the very hope and comfort for which their hearts yearn. — David S. Baxter

Put your hope in the right thing, and it would be a lifeline. Put your hope in the wrong thing, and it would be a noose. — Gena Showalter

In the 1870s it was estimated that a third of all the money in the Irish economy came from money sent by kindhearted Irish servant girls to their families. The Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in New York alone would send more than $30 million to Ireland between 1850 and 1880. Many families in Ireland owed their survival to what they gratefully called the "American Letter," a lifeline that helped them cope with brutal poverty and lack of opportunity. — Rashers Tierney

One person standing on the Rock can throw a lifeline to others drowning in the sea. He — Francine Rivers

I think of prayer as a spiritual lifeline back to where I most want to be. — Marianne Williamson

Online learning can be a lifeline to those who have obstacles, such as geographical distances or physical disabilities. — Paul Levinson

I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources. — Marilyn Hacker

lunge for the computer and pull up the only lifeline I have. Twitter. — J.A. Huss

That was enough dialogue for a few pages - he had to get into some fast, red-hot action.
There weren't any more hitches now. The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato, the roller turned with almost piston-like continuity, the pages sprang up almost like blobs of batter from a pancake skillet. The beer kept rising in the glass and, contradictorily, steadily falling lower. The cigarettes gave up their ghosts, long thin gray ghosts, in a good cause; the mortality rate was terrible.
His train of thought, the story's lifeline, beer-lubricated but no whit impeded, flashed and sputtered and coursed ahead like lightning in a topaz mist, and the loose fingers and hiccuping keys followed as fast as they could. ("The Penny-A-Worder") — Cornell Woolrich

It is human nature to constantly reach out for something to tether oneself to, but it's the fool who cannot tell what he's trying to grasp. Is it a lifeline, or a length of rope just long enough to hang oneself with? And still he reaches out, in desperation and ignorance, taking hold of it with both hands, without ever wondering what the other end is attached to. — Northern Adams

You're my lifeline, he whispers and kisses my knuckles before pressing my palm against his. With his eyes wide and full of fear, he gently tugs my hand and places it on his chest over his heart- in the forbidden zone. His breathing quickens, his heart is beating a frantic pounding tattoo beneath my fingers. He doesn't take his eyes off mine; his jaw tense, his teeth clenched.
I gasp. Oh my Fifty! He's letting me touch him. And it's like all the air in my lungs has vaporized- gone. — E.L. James

It was a backward memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline). This — Terry Pratchett

The pain was as unexpected as a thunderclap in a clear sky. Eddis's chest tightened, as something closed around her heart. A deep breath might have calmed her, but she couldn't draw one. She wondered if she was ill, and she even thought briefly that she might have been poisoned. She felt Attolia reach out and take her hand. To the court it was unexceptional, hardly noticed, but to Eddis it was an anchor, and she held on to it as if to a lifeline. Sounis was looking at her with concern. Her responding smile was artificial. — Megan Whalen Turner

Drama school was a lifeline for me, it saved me. I found it very nurturing - I just clung on. — Lily James

When the media ask George W. Bush a question, he answers, 'Can I use a lifeline?' — Robin Williams

People who won't help others in trouble "because they got into trouble through their own fault" would probably not throw a lifeline to a drowning person until they learned whether that person fell in through his or her own fault or not. — Sydney J. Harris

And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline. — Diane Setterfield

I was reading some complex books in my own youth-and no, I didnt always understand every word, let alone every concept-but I got the main thrust, which was like a lifeline in a fluctuating world. — Tanith Lee

I'd say art is with you. All around you. I'd say when there doesn't seem to be anyone else, there is art. I'd say you can love art how you wish to be loved. And I'd say art is a lifeline to the rest of us - we are out here. You are not alone. There is nothing about you that scares us. There is nothing unlovable about you, either. — Lidia Yuknavitch

No one is born a good citizen; no nation is born a democracy. Rather, both are processes that continue to evolve over a lifetime. Young people must be included from birth. A society that cuts off from its youth severs its lifeline. — Kofi Annan

He hadn't realized how much it could mean, having someone to talk to like that; he hadn't realized that it could be a kind of lifeline, and that without it, there would be nobody to save you if you started to drown. — Jennifer E. Smith

I always thought that I was a good swimmer, you know? That in a sink or swim situation I would rise to the top. But the truth is I was drowning. I was sinking fast and you threw me a lifeline. I never expected to love you. But you saved my life. How could I not? — Rachel Hayes