Quotes & Sayings About Breaking Down In Life

There is magic in knocking down your most important domino day after day. All you have to do is avoid breaking the chain, one day at a time, until you generate a powerful new habit in your life. — Gary W. Keller

I began to turn my body, but he held me and laid me back onto the bed, insistently, kissing my breasts but not lingering, kissing a line down my stomach and lower. "You want me to prove to you that I want you more than I've ever wanted anything in my life, Roses. Is that true, aye? Because I just can't take this anymore."
I gasped as he licked into my sensitive flesh, wetting me with his soft strokes, speaking soft words against my skin. "If you insist on doubting me, Roses, if you absolutely insist on breaking down every defense that I have with your tears and your plush, wet, ripe beauty, then that's what I'll have to do, lass. Is that what you want from me? Proof?"
I could only sigh a soft response, already falling, burning, wanting too much. — Juliette Miller

Harmony had been working for M.P. Environmental Consulting for going on two years. It was her mom who suggested she apply (just something else for her to be right about, Harmony thought). She'd heard about an opening at M.P. Environmental Consulting through a colleague at the law firm where she worked, and thought the job would be just right for her daughter. "You'll get it without breaking a sweat," she'd said. "Enough running around in those malaria-ridden hellholes. Move to the city, settle down, get your life together. — A.L. Loire

A scratching of melody comes from the radio, chords rising open as the land that carries us, rhythm mimicking our passage down the road, harmony making this life seem it should be only that. We sing along to what songs have always been about- beginning, going on, breaking up, forgiving, We sing in missed words and broken phrases as glints of tiger moths fly at us like snow, streaking the windshield over. — Susan Froderberg

I thank Missio, (Pontifical Mission Societies), the primary instruments for cooperation in the universal Church's universal mission in the world. Through their action, the proclamation of the Gospel bears witness to Christ and is lived out in service of our neighbour through justice for the poorest, education in isolated villages, medical care in remote areas, freedom from poverty, the reintegration of the marginalised, support for the development of peoples, the breaking down of ethnic divisions and respect for life in all its stages. — Pope Benedict XVI

No, you don't know what it's like
When nothing feels all right
You don't know what it's like
To be like me
To be hurt
To feel lost
To be left out in the dark
To be kicked when you're down
To feel like you've been pushed around
To be on the edge of breaking down
And no one's there to save you
No, you don't know what it's like
Welcome to my life — Simple Plan

Community as openness ...
Communities are truly communities when they open to others, when they remain vulnerable and humble; when the members are growing in love, in compassion and in humility. Communities cease to be such when members close in upon themselves with the certitude that they alone have wisdom and truth and expect everyone to be like them and learn from them.
The fundamental attitudes of true community, where there is true belonging, are openness, welcome, and listening to God, to the universe, to each other and to other communities. Community life is inspired by the universal and is open to the universal. It is based on forgiveness and openness to those who are different, to the poor and the weak. Sects put up walls and barriers out of fear, out of a need to prove themselves and to create a false security. Community is the breaking down of barriers to welcome difference. — Jean Vanier

Or there are the non-forgiveness stories like Breaking Bad and Crime and Punishment, where there is no such thing as 'getting away with it.' I heard a real-life version of this recently. On the radio show Snap Judgment, Robert Davis, an ex-police officer in New Orleans, tells his story. A crooked cop in the late 1970s, he lists several occasions where he bartered with people to get out of their arrests. When an internal affairs charge was made against him, he was warned that there would be a sting operation, so he ran. Knowing that he could be tracked down in another city, and that any phone calls to his family would be bugged, he became a fugitive living in the woods. I distinctly remember looking at the stars and seeing a plane flying south and thinking about siblings I had left behind. — Anonymous

We do what we have to, to live. Sometimes that means breaking a rocks heart, or pushing roots down into ground that screams againest the intrusion. As for you-how else should our children climb to the star's but up our branches? We made our peace with that fact a long time ago, that we would be used and maybe forgotten. So be it. What you learn in your climbing will make all the life on this planet greater, more precious. And when it comes to that, who writes the things written in your body, your life? And who reads?-Our cases aren't that much different? — Diane Duane

One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world - your little carved-out sphere - is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart. One day you have parents; the next day you're an orphan. One day you have a place and a path. The next day you're lost in the wilderness.
And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That's when you realize that most of it - life, the relentless mechanism of existing - isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead. — Lauren Oliver

The Apple Orchard
Come let us watch the sun go down
and walk in twilight through the orchard's green.
Does it not seem as if we had for long
collected, saved and harbored within us
old memories? To find releases and seek
new hopes, remembering half-forgotten joys,
mingled with darkness coming from within,
as we randomly voice our thoughts aloud
wandering beneath these harvest-laden trees
reminiscent of Durer woodcuts, branches
which, bent under the fully ripened fruit,
wait patiently, trying to outlast, to
serve another season's hundred days of toil,
straining, uncomplaining, by not breaking
but succeeding, even though the burden
should at times seem almost past endurance.
Not to falter! Not to be found wanting!

Thus must it be, when willingly you strive
throughout a long and uncomplaining life,
committed to one goal: to give yourself!
And silently to grow and to bear fruit. — Rainer Maria Rilke

As I had once done thus in my breaking away from my Parents, so I could not be content now, but I must go and leave the happy View I had of being a rich and thriving Man in my new Plantation, only to pursue a rash and immoderate Desire of rising faster than the Nature of the Thing admitted; and thus I cast my self down again into the deepest Gulph of human Misery that ever Man fell into, or perhaps could be consistent with Life and a State of Health in the World. — Daniel Defoe

To keep the entire body in shape, tend to every part of it, every limb, every organ, every joint and system. Educate yourself about your own body. Learn what to feed it and how to fuel it. Learn what keeps it from breaking down and do those things. To not love you, is breaking one of God's three highest commandments. — Toni Sorenson

I can fairly say it was the first time in my new life that I really wished I wasn't supernatural: if I had been human the pain would have stopped because I would be dead. II can only describe it as what a person would feel if he somehow, by some terrible miracle, survived the fall off a skyscraper. It was the feeling of every single nerve, bone, sinew, and cell breaking and howling in agony at the same time. A person might have one second of conscious agony before he saw the white light, one brief insight into what the word "disintegrated" really meant. But I had to sit, blinking at her while this happened. I couldn't get up or down or scream or vomit the way a visibly injured person might. I sat there. — Candice Raquel Lee

This game still had its old ritual fascination for Pug; he was following it tensely, smoking a cigar. Once his nostalgia had been keen for the tough youthful combat on the grass, the slamming of bodies, the tricky well-drilled plays, above all for the rare moments of breaking free and sprinting down the field, dodging one man and another with the stands around him a roaring sea of voices. Nothing in his life had since been quite like it. But long ago that nostalgia had departed; those grooves of memory had worn out. To think that lads much younger than his own two sons were out on that chilly field in Philadelphia now, made Victor Henry feel that he had led a very long, multilayered existence, and was now almost a living mummy. Pug! — Herman Wouk

There's nothing that makes me laugh more than being in the situation where you're not supposed to laugh. Funerals. People crying. Breaking down. Telling you their life. I'm the worst. I'm the worst at that. — Tom Waits

This is the breaking point in a human life, right here. This is waking up on an operating table to find aliens peering down at you, this is hearing the audible voice of God telling you the date the world will end. This is seeing a family of bigfoots in the forest and being without a camera.
Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It'll be time to start a website soon. — David Wong

Those who break down the dikes will themselves be drowned in the inundation. — Confucius

I'm not leaving you. I'm just not going to sneak around with you. You have a life." She bit her lip, looking down. "I don't blame you for that. But - " "I know," I said, feeling as if my heart was breaking open in my chest. "We deserve more than that. — Mia Sheridan

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work-the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside-the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within-that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick-the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. — F Scott Fitzgerald

This is what history is: all those centuries of bodies, moving over these canals, twisting and blooming into life in these houses, these streets; all that flesh hungering, coming together, separating, continuing, accumulating, relinquishing, aging and breaking down. Bodies as tulips bent to the demands of light, colored into blossom, spent. — Mark Doty

Suddenly something came over me. It was as if I was possessed by an evil spirit. I called Amberline's name in a voice that sounded like it came from the depths of hell. As Jimmy cocked his pistol, I quickly squatted down, breaking Jedidiah's grip, going down just a fraction of a second before Jimmy pulled the trigger. The bullet left the barrel and went straight to where I was being held and plunged into Jedidiah's chest." ". From Fear and Retribution — The Prophet Of Life

So I added in all the pains I'd learned. Cooking blunders I'd had to eat anyways. Equipment and property constantly breaking down, needing repairs and attention. Tax insanity, and rushing around trying to hack a path through a jungle of numbers. Late bills. Unpleasant jobs that gave you horribly aching feet. Odd looks from people who didn't know you, when something less than utterly normal happened. The occasional night when the loneliness ached so badly that it made you weep. The occasional gathering during with you wanted to escape to your empty apartment so badly that you were willing to go out of the bathroom window. Muscle pulls and aches you never had when you were younger, the annoyance as the price of gas kept going up to some ridiculous degree, the irritation with unruly neighbors, brainless media personalities, and various politicians who all seemed to fall on a spectrum somewhere between the extremes of "crook" and "moron."
You know.
Life. — Jim Butcher

On all levels, evolution occurs in response to a crisis situation, not infrequently a life-threatening one, when the old structures, inner or outer, are breaking down or are not working anymore. On a personal level, this often means the experience of loss of one kind or another: the death of a loved one, the end of a close relationship, loss of possessions, your home, status, or a breakdown of the external structures of your life that provided a sense of security. — Eckhart Tolle

You have to change your life for yourself, and it's about the fun of getting there - sitting in the tour van, breaking down on the side of the road, you know, having a laugh with the guys in the band, making mistakes with nobody watching. — Imelda May

The road to Epidaurus is like the road to creation. One stops searching. One grows silent, stilled by the hush of mysterious beginnings. If one could speak one would become melodious. There is nothing to be seized or reassured or cornered off here: there is only a breaking down of the walls which lock the spirit in. The landscape does not recede, it installs itself in the open places of the heart j it crowds in, accumulates, dispossesses. You are no longer riding through something - call it Nature, if you will - but participating in a rout, a rout of the forces of greed, malevolence, envy, selfishness, spite, intolerance, pride, arrogance, cunning, duplicity and so on.
It is the morning of the first day of the great peace, the peace of the heart, which comes with surrender, I never knew the meaning of peace until I arrived at Epidaurus. Like everybody I had used the word all my life, without once realizing that I was using a counterfeit. — Henry Miller

It's funny: By putting up walls, you think you're protecting yourself, but you get to live less. You're depriving yourself of so much if you're trying to be too aware of what you're putting out there. If you feel someone breaking those walls down, let them. Those are the people that you need to find in life, rather than people that you're just comfortable with. — Kristen Stewart

You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you ever moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I not shown you worlds that no other living men have seen? — H.P. Lovecraft

Our culture has a tendency to pigeonhole people and to try to tear down anybody who's breaking out of our comfort zone. That's why we get into these cultural ruts that end up being destructive prejudices. But breaking out of that comfort zone is the most rewarding thing you can do, in your life. I do my best to push myself, when I can. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

She glared at him through tear-filled eyes. "You talk of your pain? You cannot even begin to understand the sacrifice I have made. I gave away a piece of myself, my soul! But I did it out of love, never think otherwise. I made the choice to live my life without her because I knew in my heart she would be better off without me and I could not bear to know that a life created out of such perfect love would be forced to live with the ugly truth of her birth. I thought," she sobbed, breaking down before him. "I thought ... I did the right thing. — Charlotte Featherstone

I guess I'm giving in to life. It's like the ocean breaking against the rocks: it simply wears me down until I given in. It was only a matter of time. — Marata Eros

I hate it, all of this," I screamed, my voice breaking. "I even hate him, even him." A huge sob came up from my chest.
And I did, right then. I hated you for everything; for making me feel so helpless everywhere I went, for making me lose control. I hated you for all the emotions in my head, for the confusion ... for the way I was suddenly doubting everything. I hated you for turning my life upside down and then smashing it into shards. I hated you for making me stand with a whirring fan in my hand, screaming at my mum.
But I hated you for something else, too. Right then, and at every moment since you'd left me, all I could think about was you. I wanted you in that apartment. I wanted your arms around me, your face close to mine. I wanted your smell. And I knew I couldn't-shouldn't-have it. That's what I hated most. The uncertainty of you. You'd kidnapped me, put my life in danger ... but I loved you, too. Or thought I did. None of it made sense. — Lucy Christopher

The dawn, even when it is cold and melancholy, never fails to shoot through my limbs as with arrows of sparkling piercing ice. I pull aside the thick curtains, and search for the first glow in the sky which shows that life is breaking through. And with my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is for ever lifting and pulling and letting fresh spaces of life in upon us. May it be mine to taste the moment before it has spread itself over the rest of the world! Let me taste the newest and the freshest. From my window I look down upon the Church yard, where so many of my ancestors are buried, and in my prayer I pity those poor dead men who toss perpetually on the old recurring waters; for I see them, circling and eddying forever upon a pale tide. Let us, then, who have the gift of the present, use it and enjoy it ... — Virginia Woolf

I war running back to the house in Mayaguez with a melting ice cone we called a piraqua running sweet and sticky down my face and arms, the sun in my eyes, breaking through clouds and glinting off the rain-soaked pavement and dripping leaves. I was running with joy, an overwhelming joy that arose simply from gratitude for the fact of being alive. Along with the image, memory carried these words from a child's mind through time: I am blessed. In this life I am truly blessed. — Sonia Sotomayor

Sitting at the table, watching the cards being dealt, I heard a man say that the difference between an amateur and a pro is that the pro doesn't have an emotional reaction to losing anymore. It's just the other side of winning. I guess I'm a farmer now, because I'm used to loss like this, to death of all kinds, and to rot. It's just the other side of life. It is your first big horse and all he meant to you, and it is also his bones and skin breaking down in the compost pile, almost ready to be spread on the fields. — Kristin Kimball

It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made up of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others. — Lisa Unger

Being strong means allowing yourself to cry over the things you can't change; laugh when things are funny; smile when you're happy. It means understanding where your breaking point is, and yet, going further and still remaining whole. Strong people push themselves to the limits of pain and joy. They fall to their knees in agony, then they lift up their faces to find the beautiful morning rays shining down on them, and they rise to their feet. Being strong means never giving up, no matter how crushed you are, and finding happiness in the smallest parts of life. — D. Nichole King

Received a gift - it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my twenty-five years of life. "Does your husband make you a better person?" Edra asked. There I was in that sky-blue pool beneath a bright blue sky, my fingers breaking apart the light on the water, and I had no idea what she was talking about. "Are you smarter, kinder, more generous, more compassionate, a better writer?" she said, running down her list. "Does he make you better?" "That's not the question," I said. "It's so much more complicated than that." "It's not more complicated than that, — Ann Patchett

May you listen to the voice within the beat even when you are tired. When you feel yourself breaking down, may you break open instead. May every experience in life be a door that opens your heart, expands your understanding, and leads you to freedom. If you are weary, may you be aroused by passion and purpose. If you are blameful and bitter, may you be sweetened by hope and humor. If you are frightened, may you be emboldened by a big consciousness far wiser than your fear. If you are lonely, may you find love, may you find friendship. If you are lost, may you understand that we are all lost, and still we are guided - by Strange Angels and Sleeping Giants, by our better and kinder natures, by the vibrant voice within the beat. May you follow that voice, for This is the way - the hero's journey, the life worth living, the reason we are here. — Elizabeth Lesser