Avalanche Quotes & Sayings

You know, when life presents you only good things and you idealize them to your way.
And abruptly it comes up an avalanche of catastrophes and destroys all your beautiful dreams, as a war that destroys an entire country or a volcano that devastates forests.
That's how I feel and I write in this diary 'How everything should have been' in my life. — Pet Torres

When one gets beaten by somebody better, one has to know how to lose with humility. Sure, I could have served better. Sure, I could have hit my forehand harder. But the truth was this was like an avalanche, and there was no way to stop it. — Rafael Nadal

I am left with the conviction that an avalanche would be easier to dissuade than that man. — R.L. LaFevers

You feel that there is an avalanche coming when you meet the right person. — Shakira

He kissed me fiercely, with an utter abandon that I could no more put a halt to than I could stop an avalanche. — Colleen Houck

At the edge of the avalanche
At the glacier's icy rim
Grows the flower of the snowfields
Trembling in the wintry wind.
It dares to live in edges
Where naught else would ever grow.
So fragile, so unlikely
An owl slices through this blow.
She dares the katabats
Her gizzard madly quivers,
But for her dearest of friends
She vows she shall deliver.
Like the lily of the avalanche
The glacier's icy rose
Like a flower of the wind
The bright fierceness in her glows.
The bravest are the small
The weakest are the strong
The most fearful find the courage
To battle what is wrong. — Kathryn Lasky

Suddenly, as if the movement of his hand had released it, the load of her accumulated impressions of him tilted up, and down poured in a ponderous avalanche all she felt about him. — Virginia Woolf

What would happen if you did just shut a door and stop speaking? Hour after hour after hour of no words. Would you speak to yourself? Would words just stop being useful? Would you lose language altogether? Or would words mean more, would they start to mean in every direction, all somersault and assault, like a thuggery of fireworks? Would they proliferate, like untended plantlife? Would the inside of your head overgrow with every word that has ever come into it, every word that has ever silently taken seed or fallen dormant? Would your own silence make other things noisier? Would all the things you'd ever forgotten, all layered there inside you, come bouldering up and avalanche you? — Ali Smith

The avalanche of time sweeps everything before it. Every individual instant hurtles into oblivion, drowning out the obliteration of the instant immediately preceding it, and then it too disappears under the onslaught of the next and the next and the next. When the avalanche has shuddered past for a long enough time, the perception of the past evolves. Distant events grow beyond mere history and take on the weight of legend. — David Gerrold

What I do know is that with a celebrity's death comes an avalanche of media, and in that media is most often another death - it takes a life that is filled with complicated talent, hope, success and drive and reduces it to the 'story.' — James Belushi

Desire is storm, greed is whirlpool, pride is precipice, attachment is avalanche, ego is volcano. Discard desire and you are liberated. — Sathya Sai Baba

The avalanche of prefabbed, precooked, often portable food into every corner of American society represents the most dramatic nutritional shift in human history. — Melanie Warner

Gliomas appeared on the same side of the brain that the phone was predominantly held, further tightening the link. An avalanche of panic ensued in the media. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Trying to make someone love you is like trying to climb uphill during an avalanche. — Valerie J. Lewis Coleman

If you knew, then why did you stay with someone like that? When choosing partners, you must be more prudent. -- Junpei

That's impossible, because...that's what falling in love is all about. It's like a car crash, or an avalanche. First you fall head down with love, then it feels like something fell from the sky on you. Either way, there's nothing you can do about it. It's almost impossible to have control of yourself. -- Ei — Yuuri Eda

Let me tell you what is coming. After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives you may win Southern independence, but I doubt it. The North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche. — Sam Houston

Judgments are like a snowball. They stick to you. As time rolls along, the snowball becomes a boulder and then an avalanche. — John Kuypers

All words are possible, then, all names. They rain down, all these words, they disintegrate into a powdery avalanche. Belched from the volcano's mouth, they spurt in to the sky, then fall again. In the quivering air, like gelatine, the sounds trace their bubble paths. Can you imagine that? — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

I've read, Monsieur Boustouler, that if an avalanche buries you and you're lying there underneath all that snow, you can't tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own demise. That was how I felt, disoriented, suspended in confusion, stripped of my compass. — Khaled Hosseini

Not everyone was laughing. Ascribing "incapacity, stupidity, imbecility, gross ignorance and habitual venality" to the stalemated Congress, the New York Herald angrily concluded that "no remedy whatever is to be looked for from their representatives." Sounding eerily like President Buchanan in his December annual message, it blamed not Southern extremism but "republican fanaticism" for the current "avalanche of destruction. — Harold Holzer

Reader, do you know, as I do, what terror those cold people can put into the ice of their questions? How much of the fall of the avalanche is in their anger? of the breaking up of the frozen sea in their displeasure? — Charlotte Bronte

Is cooking dangerous?"
Most would answer no. But what is a gas range but a short - range flame thrower? Any number of flammable materials might lie waiting beneath the average kitchen sink. Shelves lined with pots could weaken and fall in an avalanche of iron and steel. A butcher's knife could kill as easily as a dagger.
Yet few people would consider cooking a dangerous profession, and indeed, the actual danger is remote. Anyone who has spent any time in a kitchen is familiar with the inherent risks, such as they are, and knows what can be done safely and what can't. Never throw water on an oil fire, keep the knife pointed away from your carotid artery, don't use rat poison when the recipe calls for
parmesan cheese. — Hiroshi Sakurazaka

An avalanche is just a snowflake that got pissed off. — Andi James Chamberlain

In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times. — John Muir

Regret, hurt, bereavement, loss, to permit the flow of even one tear at the upwelling of such feelings was to imperil ancient root systems and retaining walls. Mudslide and black avalanche would result and drown him. — Michael Chabon

Closing his eyes again, standing there, glass in hand, he thought for a minute with a freezing detached almost amused calm of the dreadful night inevitably awaiting him whether he drank much more or not, his room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful tumultuous sleep, interrupted by voices which were really dogs barking, or by his own name being continually repeated by imaginary parties arriving, the vicious shouting, the strumming, the slamming, the pounding, the battling with insolent archfiends, the avalanche breaking down the door, the proddings from under the bed, and always, outside, the cries, the wailing, the terrible music, the dark's spinets: he returned to the bar. — Malcolm Lowry

Romney was proving an inept candidate - incapable of connecting with voters, inspiring conservatives, or restraining himself from planting his penny loafers in his piehole - was no surprise. What troubled them more was that Mitt was winning only by burying his rivals in an avalanche of money and manure. — Anonymous

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without interruption in the bosom of a family will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician. — Marcel Proust

Franz shook his head. When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands;they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities. — Milan Kundera

Even when bad stuff goes down, the person who is just about buried under an avalanche of sad memories is made of stern stuff. And so, keeps standing. — Sakura Tsukuba

Our little pebble of poor performance helps to start, or to sustain, an avalanche. — Neal A. Maxwell

The universe had once been bright, too. For a short time after the big bang, all matter existed in the form of light, and only after the universe turned to burnt ash did heavier elements precipitate out of the darkness and form planets and life. Darkness was the mother of life and of civilization. On Earth, an avalanche of curses and abuse rolled out into space toward Blue Space and Bronze Age, but the two ships made no reply. They cut off all contact with the Solar System, for to those two worlds, the Earth was already dead. The two dark ships became one with the darkness, separated by the Solar System and drifting further apart. Carrying with them the entirety of human thoughts and memories, and embracing all of the Earth's glory and dreams, they quietly disappeared into the eternal night. — Liu Cixin

You will find it easiest to ride the avalanche in the direction it already travels. — David Gerrold

replied. "Back to that first moment I knew I loved you, the first time you beat me during our sword fighting lessons." "It was raining," she remembered. "You stood there, hair wet, water dripping everywhere, staring at me, confused and triumphant... You were an avalanche." After five years they had grown used to kissing with the cloth mask in the way. He smelled the sweat of her busy afternoon on it. "I remember those old days..." His fingers were in her hair now. "I, bored and frustrated in the countryside, and you, proud and eager, but rough around the edges..." "I — Shira Glassman

Sometimes life is very mean: a person can spend days, weeks, months and years without feeling new. Then, when a door opens - a positive avalanche pours in. One moment, you have nothing, the next, you have more than you can cope with. — Paulo Coelho

Everything that's written about me has such a negative taint. It just has a life of its own, like an avalanche, and I don't think there's anything I can do to stop it. — Roseanne Barr

So a voice in the mountain is enough to let loose an avalanche. A word too much may be followed by a caving in. If the word had not been spoken, it would not have happened. — Victor Hugo

I thought it was another avalanche. This morning it was terrible."
"What was?" asked Sniff.
"The avalanche, of course," answered the Hemulen. "Quite terrible! Rocks the size of houses bouncing about like hail-stones! My best glass jar was broken, and I myself had to move quite quickly to get out of the way."
"I'm afraid we happened to knock a few stones down as we were passing," said Snufkin. "It's so easily done walking on these tracks."
"Do you mean to say it was you who made the avalanche?" said the Hemulen.
"Well
yes
sort of," Snufkin answered.
"I never thought very much of you," said the Hemulen slowly, "and now I think even less. — Tove Jansson

When I said yes,
it implies till death,
and forever thence.

When I said love,
it connotes trust,
allied in situations tough.

And today,
when I hold your hand,
I am prepared to stand,
any trouble,
any avalanche. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning beds of library photocopiers. You should be scraping the truth onto old auto parts and throwing them off bridges so that people digging in the mud in a million years will question the world, too. You should be carving eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe soles so that your every trail speaks of thinking and faith and belief. You should be designing molecules that crystallize into poems of devotion. You should be making bar codes that print out truth, not lies. You shouldn't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has the truth stamped on it
a demand for people to reach a finer place!
... Your new life will be tinged with urgency, as though you're digging out the victims of an avalanche. If you're not spending every waking moment of your life living the truth, if you're not plotting every moment to boil the carcass of the old order, then you're wasting your day. — Douglas Coupland

As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off. — Thom Gunn

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. — George Burns

The bits which did mean anything were often so wonderfully buried that no one could ever spot them slipping past in the avalanche of nonsense. — Douglas Adams

. . . I am in my hermitage perhaps 70 to 80 percent of the time. I relish and enjoy time with others. I have been called "the sociable hermit." Ironically, lengthy solitude often invokes a verbal avalanche when I find myself with a dear and treasured friend, or at a rare social occasion. . . . Solitaries, I suppose, are not always introverts. — Barbara Erakko Taylor

Once you start turning over rocks and reaching out to help people, there's a whole avalanche coming right behind it. And it seems never-ending. But when you see the fruits of your labor, you feel like it's possible. — Madonna Ciccone

What advice I would give to anybody about anything. Life is a slow-motion avalanche, and none of us are steering. (When asked in an interview about what question he's tired of being asked.) — Donald E. Westlake

You don't understand. My brain consists of large, snowy mountains, and you just caused an avalanche. — David A. Rodriguez

It only takes one voice, at the right pitch, to start an avalanche. — Dianna Hardy

He asked questions periodically; the moon space elevator in particular drew an avalanche of questions. When I didn't have all the answers I promised I would email him a link to the NASA update page for the project. — Penny Reid

It's like I have a sensor in my head, but she works on a seven-second delay ... well-meaning, but perpetually about seven seconds too late to actually do anything to stop the horrific avalanche of shit-you-shouldn't- say-out-loud-but-I-just-did. — Jenny Lawson

Silver Avalanche coming up the driveway," calls Jeffrey from upstairs.
"What are you, security?" I call back. — Cynthia Hand

Clapping is easily the best example of self-amplification in the world. It sprouts from a single wham to a wave of sound in no time. As soon as someone clapped on hearing Tulsi's name, an avalanche of applause followed. — Pawan Mishra

In the early 1950s, during the near avalanche of discoveries, rediscoveries, and redefinitions of subcellular components made possible by electron microscopy, those prospecting in this newly opened field were faced with the problem of what to do with their newly acquired wealth. — George Emil Palade

What if I'm no better than you? What if instead of stopping you, I'm just another avalanche? — Leigh Bardugo

Even in good families a bad apple can begin an avalanche of troubles,' Dutch said as he sat back in his well-seasoned armchair, lighting his curved rustic pipe.
From Book I, In Blood There is No Honor — Judith-Victoria Douglas

The few times I said to myself anywhere: 'Now that's a nice spot for a permanent home,' I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth. — Vladimir Nabokov

I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.
I wanted to crawl into a hole at the bottom of a ravine, then be buried under an avalanche, and then die.
I wanted ... to cry. — Cora Carmack

How I Handle Chaos when you awake to find your life in disarray, crumbling apart tumbling like rocks rolling downhill into a rapid avalanche pick up your broken scattered life and put it together again The Nakedness of Arrogance — Jerry T. Johnson

TEAMWORK: A few harmless flakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction. — Justin Sewell

To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. — Maria Semple

The floating vapour is just as true an illustration of the law of gravity as the falling avalanche. — John Burroughs

It's also why we've recently seen an avalanche of new studies, books, and video games built on the myelin-centric principle that practice staves off cognitive decline. — Daniel Coyle

Nature photography ... that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear - it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves. — Robert Adams

loneliness every day, day in and day out. Eventually, I come to thick snow and need to put on my snow boots so I can drudge through these rough patches. Never, have I felt this avalanche of snowfall on my head as I have tonight. I truly have no one. I am truly am alone. — April Raynne

It seems that there is never to be any perfect rest. Even in Eden the snake rears its head among the laden boughs of the Tree of Knowledge. The silence of the dreamless night is broken by the roar of the avalanche; the hissing of sudden floods; the clanging of the engine bell marking its sweep through a sleeping American town; the clanking of distant paddles over the sea ... — Bram Stoker

Say this is what the pain made of you:
an open, open, open road,
an avalanche of feel it all. — Andrea Gibson

The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche. — Jon Ronson

Love was like an avalanche, with Sephy and I hand-in-hand racing like hell to get out of it's way-only, instead of running away from it, we kept running straight towards it. — Malorie Blackman

The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it; the last echoes died on the white slopes; the new mount glittered and lay still in the silent valley. — Evelyn Waugh

They collided, and rolled toward the precipice. Loose rocks shifted beneath them, causing a small avalanche that carried the two ragged enemies plunging off the edge towards the abyss below. — C.G. Faulkner

I aint know the police was from Babylon And I aint know Im cold just like an avalanche — Nicki Minaj

An avalanche descends onto the city. A hurricane. Teacups drift off shelves. Paintings slip off nails. In another quarter second, the sirens are inaudible. Everything is inaudible. The roar becomes loud enough to separate membranes in the middle ear. — Anthony Doerr

The principal advantages of living in your station's section house is that it is cheap, close to work and it's not your parents' flat. The disadvantages are that you're sharing your accommodation with people too weakly socialised to live with normal human beings, and who habitually wear heavy boots. The weak socialisation makes opening the fridge an exciting adventure in microbiology, and the boots mean that every shift change sounds like an avalanche. — Ben Aaronovitch

Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass - anything and everything - the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that's how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don't understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such. — Maria Semple

Once I was decapited
a black out in an avalanche
I went from human to animal
please turn me back — Pleasefindthis

Who can stop grief's avalanche once it starts to roll. — Euripides

Some people - and I am one of them - hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically. — Vladimir Nabokov

The past never quite disappeared, did it? Folks usually thought time moved forward, starting on the left and riding a right-pointing arrow into the future. Ruby didn't believe that. The future twisted uncertain, a shapeless dream, but the past - the past was set. It cast evidence behind it, photos and letters and bones, piling up in hidden places, waiting for the chance to spill out. An avalanche. A burial. The past consumed the future, always. — Brandy Heineman

Glances
Two people meet. The sky turns winter,
quells whatever they would say.
Then, a periphery glance into danger -
and an avalanche already on its way.
They have been honest all their lives;
careful, calm, never in haste;
they didn't know what it is to meet.
Now they have met: the world is waste.
They find they are riding an avalanche
feeling at rest, all danger gone.
The present looks out of their eyes; they stand
calm and still on a speeding stone. — William Stafford

There are no words big enough to describe grief. It's an incredibly lonely, empty place, a large hole that swallows your soul and threatens to destroy it. It's a dark place with no light that blinds you, deafens you, and crushes your spirit. It's a place full of memories you're afraid to lose.
I was in that place. No amount of tears washed away the loneliness. No amount of screams chased it away. There were simply memories, an avalanche of memories that I desperately needed to hold onto.
There was so much that death didn't prepare me for. It didn't prepare me for the storm that would break my will. ~Hawthorn — R.K. Ryals

See thou, whatsoever be thy name
whether Fate, Life, or Devil! I cast thee down my gauntlet, I challenge thee to battle! Men of faint heart may bow before thy mysterious power, thy face of stone may inspire them with dread, in thy unbroken silence they may discern the birth of calamity and an impending avalanche of woe. But I am daring and strong, and I challenge thee to battle! Let us draw our swords, and join our bucklers, and rain such blows upon each other's crests as shall cause the very earth to shake again! Ha! Come forth and fight with me! — Leonid Andreyev

Sometimes the most profound experiences of our lives start with an act so simple and careless that we hardly think about it - like tossing a small stone that causes a massive avalanche. — Richard Paul Evans

Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche? — Franz Wright

Look at an avalanche, and see that we are at our most powerful when we let go. Look at a flower, and see that we are at our most beautiful when we open up. — Shane Koyczan

Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People. These two ways of looking at the world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the solutions we propose to our social problems. — Theodore Dalrymple

Sometimes I feel the need of an avalanche within me. — Mark Lawrence

I sweat terror, Robyn! I'm scared every single second about every single goddamned thing. I worry obsessively about being buried under an avalanche of fear. Jesus, Robyn, I'm scared like only the truly crazy can be.'
'But that, you dope, is the definition of courage: you go on despite the fear. — Teresa Toten

Disaster was an avalanche, gathering speed with such acceleration that you worried more about getting out of its path, not finding the pebble at its center. — Jodi Picoult

I know that campaigns can seem small, and even silly. Trivial things become big distractions. Serious issues become sound bites. And the truth gets buried under an avalanche of money and advertising. If you're sick of hearing me approve this message, believe me - so am I. — Barack Obama

My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche, his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie. — Toni Morrison

Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and you're an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that's kind of relaxing. — Miriam Toews

I like to skin up ski resorts and, for me, being blind, that's nice because it's wide open, with no avalanche danger. — Erik Weihenmayer

It was the sort of noise that makes the silence that comes after it roll forward like a warm avalanche. — Terry Pratchett

It swept him forward, and though the crowd grew denser with every step - his advance was checked several yards short of the stage by a wall of spike-studded leather jackets - he was now closer than he had ever been to live music, save for at his bar mitzvah. The sheer monophonic power of this sound blew away any impression those tuxed fucks had left. It was an avalanche, hurtling downhill, snapping trees and houses like tinkertoys, taking up every sound in its path and obliterating it in a white roar. As Charlie felt himself being taken up into it, totally, unable to decide whether it was good or bad - unable, even, to care. — Garth Risk Hallberg

It's true that even though I'm a world unto myself, I've just a speck of dust in the avalanche of events. But nothing will ever force me to think like a speck of dust! — Stanislaw Lem

An avalanche doesn't look back at the damage it causes. — Marty Rubin

She would die here and not complain. She would be buried beneath this avalanche of lifelessness. — Marissa Meyer

When everybody has access to an avalanche of information, becoming a master thinker is very important in your life-long security. — Stedman Graham

He turned down the street to Emilio's, trying to remember what "the edge of chaos" meant. It was something about flipping a coin, something about the edge being the moment when the coin was in the air. The point at which the system was pure potential, about to choose a path. Or something about a pile of sand, adding sand a grain at a time, and the edge of chaos being the point at which the critical grain landed and the pile either shifted or turned into an avalanche...
...Min bit her lip and smiled at him ruefully, and without another thought, he walked across the room to her, feeling almost relieved as the avalanche began. — Jennifer Crusie

a kaleidoscopic, fragmented rush of images that exploded out of memory. They careened into her like an avalanche and swept her away, — Terry Brooks