Going Downhill Quotes & Sayings

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

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

That's the thing about acting - it does have the feeling of downhill skiing. When it's really all going right, you know your lines, you know what's important to your character, you pick the strongest reactions possible to elements in the story. But then you let it all go and you're in the moment and stuff happens. It surprises you and it's super strong; it's like you're living life in a slightly heightened way in the time between "action" and "cut." — Mira Sorvino

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

I think the moment you start trying to please a fan base is when you start going downhill. I'm going to always, always write about what I want, even if it doesn't necessarily cater to most of them. — Ed Sheeran

You may have noticed that society is rapidly going downhill. Inflation, lack of fuel and even war cast deep shadows over the world. And the most serious part of this is that drugs, both medical and street drugs, have disabled a majority of those who could have handled it, including the political leaders, and have even paralyzed the coming generations. — L. Ron Hubbard

Life's a ride in a car going downhill, and the car's got no steering wheel. So all you can do is try to guide it with your weight.
Sometimes you make the turns you wanna make. Sometimes, you hit the tree. — Charlie Carillo

Most of all I told this story because I wanted to say something about hope and the absence of it, and how we keep going anyway. About second chances, and how they're sometimes buried amid the dross, even when you're poised for the downhill grade. The narrative can always turn out to be a different story from what you expected. — Gail Caldwell

Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're always looking towards the top and you feel happy, but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It's slow going up and quick going down. — Guy De Maupassant

If the going is getting too easy, maybe you're going downhill! — Max Frisch

If you decide to just go with the flow, you'll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You'll end up doing what everyone else is doing. — Sean Covey

I have a free wheeling mind with dodgy brakes. Once I start going downhill I find it hard to stop and usually end up going over the handlebars. — Gillibran Brown

I don't know if you heard the news, but Wall Street now is a farmer's market. I don't want to say things are going downhill quickly, but Obama's new campaign slogan is 'Are you better off than you were four days ago?' — Bill Maher

Every once in a while I run the Olympic downhill in Japan in my head. I think of how the energy is going to flow and then I make it all work for myself. — Picabo Street

In the darkness their feet felt that they were going downhill, and each privately and perversely accused the other of taking, deliberately, a path they had followed together once before in happiness. — Shirley Jackson

As though I had been going steadily downhill, imagining that I was going uphill. So it was in fact. In public opinion I was going uphill, and steadily as I got up it, life was ebbing away from me ... And now the work's done, there's only death. — Leo Tolstoy

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

I turn my head a little. The radio's caroling "Tonight," velvety smooth and young and filled with plaintive desire. Maria's song from West Side Story. I remember one beautiful night long ago at the Winter Garden, with a beautiful someone beside me. I tilt my nose and breathe in, and I can still smell her perfume, the ghost of her perfume from long ago. But where is she now, where did she go, and what did I do with her?
Our paths ran along so close together they were almost like one, the one they were eventually going to be. Thin fear came along, fear entered into it somehow, and split them wide apart.
Fear bred anxiety to justify. Anxiety to justify bred anger. The phone calls that wouldn't be answered, the door rings that wouldn't be opened. Anger bred sudden calamity.
Now there aren't two paths anymore; there's only one, only mine. Running downhill into the ground, running downhill into its doom.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

Oh. Oh, wow. This was going downhill fast even though Rider looked like he wanted a bucket of popcorn. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection ... Natural selection ... is a non-random force, pushing towards improvement ... Every generation has its Darwinian failures but every individual is descended only from previous generations' successful minorities ... [T]here can be no going downhill - species can't get worse as a prelude to getting better ... There may be more than one peak. — Richard Dawkins

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

Man is not growing better! Man is not climbing upward. Instead of progress in man himself there is degeneracy - degeneracy of body, mind, and spirit. Man is going downhill. — Billy Graham

The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless ... From the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to affect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion. — Thomas Jefferson

It is no coincidence that precisely when things started going downhill with the gods, politics gained its bliss-making character. There would be no reason for objecting to this, since the gods, too were not exactly fair. But at least people saw temples instead of termite architecture. Bliss is drawing closer; it is no longer in the afterlife, it will come, though not momentarily, sooner or later in the here and now - in time.
The anarch thinks more primitively; he refuses to give up any of his happiness. "Make thyself happy" is his basic law. It his response to the "Know thyself" at the temple of Apollo in Delphi. These two maxims complement each other; we must know our happiness and our measure. — Ernst Junger

He's got his cigarette going. He offers her one; this time she takes it. Brief match-flare insider their cupped hands. Red finger-ends.
She thinks, Any more flame and we'd see the bones. It's like X-rays. We're just a kind of haze, just coloured water. Water does what it likes. It always goes downhill. — Margaret Atwood

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

There's always going to be comparisons, and that's unavoidable. There are people out there who feel I hit my peak with Magician and have gone downhill since. — Raymond E. Feist

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

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

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

Sometimes I look like I was under interrogation. Some people just don't look good in clothes. In New York, Armani and all those clothing people used to call me up and tried to pay me not to wear their clothes. This is as good as it's going to get ... and then it's all downhill. I'll be fine. I never feel as bad as I look. — Jeff Van Gundy

When your life is going downhill, it doesn't get better just because you want it to. Nor can you will it to be better. Your life will only get better when you get better. — Iyanla Vanzant

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

Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I'd known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger, I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, materiel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, so we're always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we're doing things we technically don't know how to do. — Ben Fountain

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 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

Maybe the problem was that we never struggled. We just coasted along. The thing about coasting is that it usually means you're going downhill. — Molly Harper

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

The ride back to Kathmandu was comfortable and relaxing. There were more overturned trucks (the gas-powered ones seem to tip the most often, I'm surprised there weren't more explosions), goats being herded across the highway by ancient women, children playing games in traffic, private cars and buses alike pulling over in the most inconvenient places for a picnic or public bath, and best of all the suicidal overtaking maneuvers (or what we would call 'passing') by our bus and others while going downhill at incredible speeds or around hairpin turns uphill with absolutely no power left to actually get around the other vehicle. — Jennifer S. Alderson

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

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