Quotes & Sayings About Downhill

From what Natalie could observe, by middle age, every person's life had rolled some distance downhill, even if it was a very gentle slope, coming to rest at a place of disappointment. Some spheres of an individual's life might have gone spectacularly well but there would always be an obstinate slab of disappointment in another department - a stalled career, inability to have kids, a dismal marriage, whatever. — Debra Oswald

And so, finding that, for once, I was not sorry to be alone, I said to myself: I am happy. Perfectly happy, I repeated, as my eyes roamed wide over the brilliant desolate sea and the empty contours of the land. Were they, after all, searching for something that was lacking? I hardly knew. A tiny obstinate figure by the dwarf obelisk under an enormous sky, I declared for the third time: I am absolutely happy, absolutely content. And, increasingly overcome by a profound melancholy which I interpreted simply as an appetite for supper I began to walk downhill, towards my sitting room, my holiday task and my lonely bed. — Christopher Isherwood

Hearts was the pinnacle of my career. After I left, it really was downhill. Hearts is the club I always associate myself with, and I'm proud to have played for them. — Drew Busby

You should do it against the clock. Say you are going to do 30 laps in 15 minutes. Then you try to do it each day a little faster. That is putting demands on the body, and that is how you build up. You keep up your energy instead of going downhill. — Jack LaLanne

For the third time since I began, my walk has been delayed. In the beginning, I had considered these stops on my journey as interruptions
but I'm coming to understand that perhaps these detours are my journey. No matter how much I, or the rest of humanity wishes otherwise, life is not lived in smooth, downhill expressways, but in the obscure, perilous trails and rocky back roads of life where we stumble and feel our way through the fog of the unknown. — Richard Paul Evans

Today it was win or lose. But my victory yesterday and the downhill globe boosted my confidence. My record in Cortina was also a liberation. — Lindsey Vonn

When we talk of flood control, we usually think of dams and deeper river channels, to impound the waters or hurry their run-off. Yet neither is the ultimate solution, simply because floods are caused by the flow of water downhill. If the hills are wooded, that flow is checked. If there is a swamp at the foot of the hills, the swamp sponges up most of the excess water, restores some of it to the underground water supply and feeds the remainder slowly into the streams. Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years. — Hal Borland

But one way or another competing and weeding takes place ... or a race goes downhill. — Robert A. Heinlein

There are a lot of signs. One of the things that makes me most nervous is the disappearance of the frogs. They're going downhill all over the planet. Frogs are susceptible to all kinds of problems, because they require water to breed and their skin is very porous. Their condition is nerve racking. — Paul R. Ehrlich

Contours on the second half of a long putt have more impact on how the ball rolls because it's going slower. Adjust your speed if that last part is playing uphill or downhill. Don't get fooled by an early slope or break. — Ernie Els

It starts off ridiculous and goes downhill from there as we each take a turn. We dance in a way that's only possible when there are no boys around. The rule is not to take yourself seriously, but whoever gets a solo has to keep as straight a face as possible and go for it. — Melina Marchetta

But the problem with crests is that they lead downhill. From the crest I can see all the rest of my years stretched out before me. And the view doesn't please me. I see only aging, diminishment, fathering, grandfathering." "But, — Irvin D. Yalom

We can assume that most people, most of the time, are moral creatures. But imagine that this morality is like a gearshift that at times gets pushed into neutral. When that happens, morality is disengaged. If the car happens to be on an incline, car and driver move precipitously downhill. It is then the nature of the circumstances that determines outcomes, not the driver's skills or intentions. — Philip G. Zimbardo

The quality of student work has definitely gone downhill since they discontinued the use of the whipping post.
-Silk — David Eddings

When it is all too much; when the news is so bad meditation itself feels useless, and a single life feels too small a stone to offer on the altar of Peace, find a Human Sunrise. Find those people who are committed to changing our scary reality. Human sunrises are happening all over the earth, at every moment. People gathering, people working to change the intolerable, people coming in their robes and sandals or in their rags and bare feet, and they are singing, or not, and they are chanting, or not. But they are working to bring peace, light, compassion, to the infinitely frightening downhill slide of Human life. — Alice Walker

It went on like that till some guys got together and came up with the one-god thing - him being God, the Father, and male and all that - and things went downhill for girls ever after that, far as I can figure. It was always, 'Get in your dress, girl, your smock, your shift or your burnoose or your veil, but whatever it is, girl, put it on and shut the hell up,' is how I see it. — L.A. Meyer

The United States started to go downhill when it changed from a round designed to kill the enemies of our glorious republic to one designed to piss them off," Faith said, shooting a zombie five times, then walking up and shooting the still-thrashing infected in the head. "Seriously, just die, okay? — John Ringo

There are really only three things to learn in skiing: how to put on your skis, how to slide downhill, and how to walk along the hospital corridor. — Benjamin Mancroft, 3rd Baron Mancroft

But each time I seemed to be climbing into a roller coaster and finding myself coming through the downhill run with that sort of dazed feeling that we all know. — Enzo Ferrari

Most of the stories I have go downhill quickly. In all honesty most of the good stories I have, no one else would think is funny. — JD Era

Love is an uphill climb, but once you know yourself and like yourself just as you are, it's all downhill from there. — Valerie Frankel

On Chicken Parmesan: It was all downhill from there. Eventually, the boneless chicken breast replaced the chicken breast as America's favorite tasteless meat product, and then boneless skinless chicken breast, and somewhere in between the birth of my ultimate nemesis: The Chicken Patty. How things went quite so far downhill that the patty found its way into ANY Italian food is beyond me, but I can assure you this dish isn't what anyone back in Italy had in mind when they sent Vito through Ellis Island with an eggplant recipe. — Gordon Vivace

You can't climb uphill by thinking downhill thoughts. — Zig Ziglar

Downhill's the future of the sport. Cross-country's not geared for TV. Some fat guy watching it with a beer in one hand and potato chips in the other is going to say, I can do that. America likes to see people crash. — Missy Giove

Evil people relate more to the black pole. It's - this is not exact, of course, as the science of magic is as complex as the magic of electronics - it's like traveling past a mountain. The white pole is at the apex, and it is an exhilarating height, but it takes a lot of work and few missteps to ascend it. The black pole is at the nadir, and it is easy to walk downhill; sometimes you can just sit down and slide or roll and, if you fall, you can get there very fast indeed. If you don't pay attention to where you're going, you'll tend to go down, because it is the course of least resistance. Since the average person has only the vaguest notion where he is going and tends to shut out awareness of the consequence of evil, he inevitably drifts downward. There is much more space at the base of the mountain than at the peak! — Piers Anthony

When, suddenly, on an ordinary Wednesday, it seemed to Barney that the world tilted and ran downhill in all directions, he knew he was about to be haunted again. — Margaret Mahy

Shit rolls downhill. Bureaucracy rolls faster. — David Wellington

I've never worried about 'the reader' because there isn't one. There are thousands, and they all have strong opinions, from 'Magician' was the best ever,' and I've gone downhill since to 'The new book is the best ever,' so to whom to I listen? So I write for myself and hope other people like it. — Raymond E. Feist

The only way to coast is downhill. — Zig Ziglar

Taking the high road is hard work-- walking uphill requires strength and effort. Anyone can take the low road--walking downhill is easy. — Rachel St. John-Gilbert

No, not of course at all - it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the winter-time, and when the longest comes, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they begin to go downhill again, toward winter. You call that 'of course'; but if one once loses hold of the fact that it is of course, it is quite frightening, you feel like hanging on to something. It seems like a practical joke - that spring begins at the beginning of winter, and autumn at the beginning of summer. You feel you're being fooled, led about in a circle, with your eye fixed on something that turns out to be a moving point. A moving point in a circle. For the circle consists of nothing but such transitional points without any extent whatever; the curvature is incommensurable, there is no duration of motion, and eternity turns out to be not 'straight ahead' but 'merry-go-round'! — Thomas Mann

People, like water, will run downhill, seeking their lowest level unless something interdicts them. — Cal Thomas

Hiding behind such sacred terms as human rights and distributive justice, politicians and intellectuals alike have perpetrated a gargantuan ruse on humankind: they have convinced us that mass homogeneity is more essential for the betterment of society than is individual initiative, and they have adorned this dubious assumption with assurances that by leveling all distinctions between human beings, collective peace and unity will result as a matter of course, just as water runs downhill or the cart follows the ox. — Gonzalo Fernandez De La Mora

Let me digress a moment to talk about beginnings. How much simpler life would be if we were wise enough to stop at the first blush of romance, the start of a business transaction or a casual friendship. If we knew enough to pause and think: this is as good as it gets. Everything will go downhill from this moment on. So once again our instincts are the opposite of what they should be, propelling us forward exactly when they should be holding us back. — Francine Prose

It had actually been a year since I'd finally broken up with Glen. I'd moved in with him after two dates (I would have made a great lesbian) and things had gone downhill quickly. How well I remembered our last morning together. He'd woken me early one morning by hitting me in the face with his cock and demanding a before-work blowjob. Since he'd been out all night without me and the dick he'd just assaulted me with smelled of eau de lubricant, I'd refused to open my mouth. I'd given his balls a twist I hoped he was still feeling and headed back to Gran's. — Nick Pageant

Discussions of generations only go downhill. There's no point in having them. — Douglas Coupland

Don't duck the most difficult problems. That just ensures that the hardest part will be left when you are most tired. Get the big one done - it's downhill from then on. — Norman Vincent Peale

I was fine, until I was born. And it's been downhill ever since. — Peter Steele

Writing's like running downhill; can't stop if you want to. — Hilary Mantel

Weyrother evidently felt himself to be at the head of a movement that had already become unrestrainable. He was like a horse running downhill harnessed to a heavy cart. Whether he was pulling it or being pushed by it he did not know, but rushed along at headlong speed with no time to consider what this movement might lead to. — Leo Tolstoy

I had no schedule, no plan for today or the next, or the week after. Everything in my life just seemed to kind of roll together, collect speed and go thundering downhill. — Shannon Olson

Once the pathological low self-esteem goes, that's when things go downhill. — Moby

You're instantly in a bind once you arrive here on earth, of need, self-will, a body and a separate personality, even before teh crippling self-consciousness kicks in, even before the seventh grade ... you're fucked at cell division ... it's all downhill from there. After that, it's all survival, and trying to keep yourself either entertained or convinced that the things you're obsessed with are of any importance at all in the big scheme. — Anne Lamott

If you're doing what you love, then that's what matters. I am happy, and I am happy where I am. If things go downhill, then I move on to the next, and that's what makes me happy. — Lights

You know he will take the credit for your good ideas, and you the blame for his bad ones? When fortune turns against you, you will feel her lash: you always, he never.
One day, when you are still adjusting your harness, you will look up and see him thundering downhill.
pg. 495 — Hilary Mantel

Don't be preoccupied with something that drags your mind downhill. Be someone who could be destined to shine and can have the ability reach ultimate goals for the future. — Saaif Alam

If Adam and Eve were not hunter-gatherers, then they were certainly gatherers. But, then, consumer desire, or self-embitterment, or the 'itch,' as Schopenhauer called it, appeared in the shape of the serpent. This capitalistic monster awakens in Adam and Eve the possibility that things could be better. Instantly, they are cast out of the garden and condemned to a life of toil, drudgery, and pain. Wants supplanted needs, and things have been going downhill ever since. — Tom Hodgkinson

I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain. — Janet Fitch

Life is a downward journey; all concur in saying it carries us downhill. — Patrick Branwell Bronte

All the terms used in the science books, 'law,' 'necessity,' 'order,' 'tendency,' and so on, are really unintellectual ... The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, 'charm,' 'spell,' 'enchantment.' They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic. — G.K. Chesterton

Climax: It's all downhill from here. — Buffy Andrews

I am manageable. I, you know, it'll suffice I think. No, no, I feel pretty good. I trained for a long time and I got really cool, like I was doing jumps. It got like, I felt really good, but then when I got out on gravel and fake snow and - it just kind of all went downhill. But I think it's still okay. — Mary Elizabeth Winstead

In the Scotland of the early seventeenth century, an old woman living alone in Kirkcudbrightshire was accused of witchcraft and on conviction was rolled downhill in a blazing tar barrel. One of the charges against her was that she walked withershins round a well near her cottage which was used by other people. The well was afterwards known as the Witch's Well. These episodes must surely serve as cautionary tales to anyone tempted to transgress the usual custom of walking deasil round a holy well. — Colin Bord

Every time a cool rock chick or actress seems to respect themselves as a strong woman, I'm like, 'Yeah!' And I love them, and they're my girls. And then they start to go downhill and people aren't paying attention anymore. So they start stripping their clothes off, because that's all they have left. I swear to everything I've ever known, I will never do that — Amy Lee

When WOMEN got the right to vote is when it all went downhill. Because that's when votes started being cast with emotion and uh, maternal instincts that government ought to reflect ... — Rush Limbaugh

You have to be a little crazy to be a downhill skier. — Lindsey Vonn

I do uphill skiing; I don't do downhill skiing. I think that's for nerd amateurs. — Judah Friedlander

Its all downhill from here on up! — Grant W. Fletcher

The MS really started going downhill in 1990. — Richard Pryor

Ivy linked her arm through mine again and I led her toward where I left the car. As we walked, some shrieking, and yelling broke over the sounds of the party, and I glanced around for what was going on. Over on the other side of the fire, two girls were on the verge of what looked like a fight. I couldn't help but stare because I was so surprised. One of the girls reached out and yanked a handful of the other's hair. It was all downhill from there.
Beside me, Ivy laughed. "That's what she gets for trying to steal someone's man."
I tore my eyes off the fight and glanced at Ivy. "Seriously?"
"Them bitches be cray-cray," she slurred.
I didn't understand what that meant, but I laughed because it sounded ridiculous.
- Ivy & Rimmel — Cambria Hebert

It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me ... And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die!"
"So what's it all about? What's it for? It's not possible. It's not possible that life could have been as senseless and sickening as this. And if it has really been as sickening and senseless as this why do I have to die, and die in agony? There's something wrong. Maybe I didn't live as I should have done?" came the sudden thought. "But how can that be when I did everything properly?" he wondered, instantly dismissing as a total impossibility the one and only solution to the mystery of life and death. — Leo Tolstoy

I never understand when people say, 'School days are the best of your life.' So it's all downhill from 16? How depressing. — Marsha Thomason

It was really tough to race the GS a day after the downhill, but that's over now. I'm looking forward for the rest of the season which is also quite interesting. — Hermann Maier

Yeah, after each of my downhill putts. — Homero Blancas

I hold the world speed record downhill, in a Rover. I think it was 17 kilometers per hour, downhill. — Eugene Cernan

Very rarely do people make big compromises with their integrity. Almost every compromise is a small one that is easily justified. The downhill slide is usually a result of many little compromises. — Dennis Prager

...My taut heart
lurches heavily, like a sack in a cart, clattering
downhill, towards a cliff, towards an abyss!
It can't be stopped! — Vladimir Nabokov

So, as middle-class families have been tumbling downhill, working-class families have been tumbling into poverty. And — Amy Goldstein

The League of Independent Theater represents a coming together of actual artistic and theatrical forces that may yet undo the difficulty of our times in maintaining the highest artistic standards in a period of economic crisis. Who can save us from the downhill trend of our economy except the vigor of our arts? Theatre, music and education are our only hopes to lift our times beyond their despair and create a viable, prosperous culture. — Judith Malina

The railway hit Harrow on the Hill in 1880 and it's been downhill ever since, culminating in one of those formless red brick shopping centres which artfully combines a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it is built. As a result, your average shopper has only to spend ten minutes inside to be reduced to a state of quiet desperation. Primark has the right idea, being right by the entrance so that fleeing punters would grab the closest approximation to whatever it was they wanted before running screaming into the night. I'm — Ben Aaronovitch

Grace always runs downhill, meeting us at the bottom, not the top. — Tullian Tchividjian

Things are going downhill with you!' he said to himself, and laughed about it, and as he was saying it, he happened to glance at the river, and he also saw the river going downhill, always moving on downhill, and singing and being happy through it all. — Hermann Hesse

When religion stops talking about animals it will be all downhill. — C. G. Jung

Players act like the floor is slanted; they run downhill on fast breaks and jog uphill when getting back on defense — Tates Locke

It's a moment. A defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on ... it's all downhill. Some call it the climax. We call it 'Jumping the Shark.' From that moment on, the program will simply never be the same. — Jon Hein

There were times, sure, I wanted my career to go better. But once it starts to go downhill, you can never get back, or only to some degree. — Lauren Bacall

Grace runs downhill and now all his time is being redeemed. — Geoffrey Wood

I've gotten rid of the yips four times but they hang in there. You know those two-foot downhill putts with a break? I'd rather see a rattlesnake. — Sam Snead

This modern craze for putting the young in positions of authority - headmasters in their thirties, bishops without a gray hair on their heads, generals who scarcely need to use a razor - ever since it took hold the world's gone steadily downhill. — Elizabeth Goudge

Those of us in medicine don't help, for we often regard the patient on the downhill as uninteresting unless he or she has a discrete problem we can fix. — Atul Gawande

Our act started at the bottom and went downhill. — Allan Sherman

Sometimes it's hard to start, but once it gets going, once you reach the tipping point - usually between chapter seven and nine - then it's like hanging onto a large snowball as it hurtles downhill. — Kerry Greenwood

Now, he thought, since all these most easily perishing things have slipped from me again, now I'm standing here under the sun again just as I have been standing here a little child, nothing is mine, I have no abilities, there is nothing I could bring about, I have learned nothing. How wondrous is this! Now, that I'm no longer young, that my hair is already half gray, that my strength is fading, now I'm starting again at the beginning and as a child! Again, he had to smile. Yes, his fate had been strange! Things were going downhill with him, and now he was again facing the world void and naked and stupid. But he could not feel sad about this, no, he even felt a great urge to laugh, to laugh about himself, to laugh about this strange, foolish world. — Hermann Hesse

Don't go downhill just because it's easy. The view is only visible from the top. — Destiny Booze

My name is Magnus Chase. I'm sixteen years old. This is the story of how my life went downhill after I got myself killed. — Rick Riordan

Things improved a little bit in the '80s; there was kind of a revival of alternative comics, but then they went downhill in the '90s. — Harvey Pekar

Sometimes your life rolls away with you, like a big stone going downhill fast, — Dean Koontz

The house had a private walk down to a private spit of beach, and in the mornings the four of them would troop downhill and swim - even he did, in his pants and undershirt and an old oxford shirt, which no one bothered him about - and then lie on the sand baking, the wet clothes ungluing themselves from his body as they dried. Sometimes Harold would come and watch them, or swim as well. In the afternoons, Malcolm and JB would pedal off through the dunes on bicycles, and he and Willem would follow on foot, picking up bits of shaley shells and the sad carapaces of long-nibbled-away hermit crabs as they went, Willem slowing his pace to match his own. In the evenings, when the air was soft, JB and Malcolm sketched and he and Willem read. He felt doped, on sun and food and salt and contentment, and at night he fell asleep quickly and early, and in the mornings he woke before the others so he could stand on the back porch alone looking over the sea. — Hanya Yanagihara

Snow lies on my fields
though the air is so warm I want
to roll on my back and wriggle.
Sure, the dark downhill weep shows
who's winning, and the thatch of tall
grass is sticking out of the banks,
but I want to start digging and planting.
My swelling hills, my leafbrown loamy
soil interlaced with worms red as mouths,
my garden,
why don't you hurry up
and take your clothes off ? — Marge Piercy

Never get satisfied. The minute you stop trying, you go downhill. — Jack LaLanne

You have to be aware. Like, I'm not going to do any downhill skiing. It looks like a whole lot of fun, but I'm not going to risk breaking a leg. I want to be dancing the way I'm dancing now for 30 more years. — Bebe Neuwirth

In the downhill of life, when I find I'm declining, May my lot no less fortunate be Than a snug elbow-chair can afford for reclining, And a cot that o'erlooks the wide sea; With an ambling pad-pony to pace o'er the lawn, While I carol away idle sorrow, And blithe as the lark that each day hails the dawn, Look forward with hope for to-morrow. — John Churton Collins

I think Hitchcock had a thing about hills: think of the house on the hill in 'Psycho.' Then, in 'Vertigo,' Scottie is forever traversing the city, going downhill all the time as he goes deeper and deeper into himself. It's as if Hitchcock is using San Francisco as a psychological map. — Allen Coulter

Ski racing, especially downhill, is a dangerous activity and there are many accidents. It would be really too bad to lose everything because of a crash. — Hermann Maier

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

My theory about meeting people,' he said,'is that it's better not to make a really good first impression. Because it's all downhill from there. You're always having to live up to that first impression, which was just an illusion. — Lisa Kleypas

I was lucky to start working when German cinema was having an interesting moment. Now the quality is going downhill again because they're insisting on doing comedies. We should know by now that we make good cars but we're not the funniest people. — Daniel Bruhl

When I was very young every grownup was a hero. It's been all downhill since then, and I have only two left. — Peter S. Beagle

But there was no mistaking, even in the uncertain light, the hand, half crabbed, half generous, and wholly drunken, of the Consul himself, the Greek e's, flying buttresses of d's, the t's like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified an entire word, the words themselves slanting steeply downhill, though the individual characters seemed as if resisting the descent, braced, climbing the other way. — Malcolm Lowry

When you give up in your mind, your mind gives up on you. Once this happens, the rest is downhill. — Timi Nadela