Sinkhole Quotes & Sayings

War is a sinkhole that sucks money and men into it and is never filled. — Margaret George

When I rest my head on the couch I know that it's coming, coming like something in the mail, something sent away for. We know it is coming, but are not sure when
weeks? months? She is fifty one. I am twenty-one. My sister is twenty-three. My brothers are twenty-four and seven.
We are ready. We are not ready. People know.
Our house sits on a sinkhole. Our house is the one being swept up in the tornado, the little train-set model floating helplessly, pathetically around in the howling black funnel. We're weak and tiny. We're Grenada. There are men parachuting from the sky.
We are waiting for everything to finally stop working
the organs and systems, one by one, throwing up their hands
"The jig is up," says the endocrine; "I did what I could," says the stomach, or what's left of it; "We'll get em next time," adds the heart, with a friendly punch to the shoulder. — Dave Eggers

We Americans have always considered Hollywood, at best, a sinkhole of depraved venality. And, of course, it is. It is not a protective monastery of aesthetic truth. It is a place where everything is incredibly expensive. — David Mamet

My fingers curl through the holes in the wicker, through the wet grass beneath it, trying to hold tight to the sharp blades of the present. Somewhere in my brain a sinkhole is bubbling over, and each bubble contains a scene from a tiny sunken world ... I have never been the prophet of my own past before. It makes me wonder how the healthy dreamers can bear to sleep at all, if sleep means that you have to peer into that sinkhole by yourself ... I had almost forgotten this occipital sorrow, the way you are so alone with the things you see in dreams. — Karen Russell

You will ask me, after this, why, I didn't tell you this before. It is because I know how powerful a story can be. It can change the course of history. It can save a life. But it can also be a sinkhole, a quicksand in which you become stuck, unable to write yourself free. — Jodi Picoult

And Vishous ... V was the worst of them. He stood by the door, staring into space. Icy before, he was glacial now, a sinkhole in the room.
-Phury's thoughts — J.R. Ward

I fell headfirst into a sinkhole of pretty things, and the world inside your eyelids is just as big as the one outside. — Brenna Yovanoff

I'm not a violent man."
Joshua, Jerico and Evan choked dramatically and began coughing.
Remy snorted. "And if you believe that, Saria, I've got a sinkhole I can sell you for farmland."
"You're not helping my cause," Drake complained.
"Ignore them. I always do," Saria advised. — Christine Feehan

Success is a funny thing. You can't really enjoy it when you're empty. Your heart is a bottomless sinkhole that swallows up everything and anything that it ingests and yet nothing can fill it. There's no sense of accomplishment; everything is meaningless. — Christine Brae

Everyone knows you only want to look at the sinkhole because you love a good disaster. Get back to work, Fuller. I don't pay you for your looks. — Meg Cabot

Many suburban legislators representing affluent school districts use terms such as "sinkhole" when opposing funding for Chicago's children. "We can't keep throwing money," said Governor Thompson in 1988, "into a black hole." The Chicago Tribune notes that, when this phrase is used, people hasten to explain that it is not intended as a slur against the race of many of Chicago's children. "But race," says the Tribune, "never is far from the surface ... — Jonathan Kozol

Five weeks in the hospital fled as if down a sinkhole into the middle of the earth ... Can waiting by definition slow, flash by? ... Time becomes even more elastic than usual
minutes can stretch for ages and days suddenly snap together. [p. 97] — Diane Ackerman

I lost it in the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet, I started to panic when I noticed the graveyard of empty toilet paper rolls. The brown cylinders had ostensibly been placed vertically to form a half oval on top of the flat shiny surface of the stainless steel toilet paper holder. It was like some sort of miniature-recycled Stonehenge in the women's bathroom, a monument to the bowel movements of days past. Actually, it was sometime around 2:30 p.m. when my day exited the realm of country song bad and entered the neighboring territory of Aunt Ethel's annual Christmas letter bad. Last year Aunt Ethel wrote with steady, stalwart sincerity of Uncle Joe's gout and her one - no, make that two - car accidents, the new sinkhole in their backyard, their impending eviction from the trailer park, and Cousin Serena's divorce. To be fair, Cousin Serena got divorced every year, so that didn't really count toward the calamitous computation of yearly catastrophes. I — Penny Reid

In this Puritan sinkhole of a culture, we don't teach children the uses of pleasure, and so they decide we are fools and go their own way, blindly. If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks. — Paul Monette

Am I more afraid Of taking a chance and learning I'm somebody I don't know, or of risking new territory, only to find I'm the same old me? There is comfort in the tried and true. Breaking ground might uncover a sinkhole, one impossible to climb out of. And setting sail in uncharted waters might mean capsizing into a sea monster's jaws. Easier to turn my back on these things than to try tjem and fail. And yet, a whisper insists I need to know if they are or aren't integral to me. Status quo is a swamp. And stagnation is slow death. — Ellen Hopkins

I slithered out of the sinkhole on my stomach. It was not the sexiest move I'd ever performed, but I was impressed nonetheless. — Maggie Stiefvater

Self-pity is ... a sinkhole from which no rescuing hand can drag you because you have chosen to sink. — Elisabeth Elliot

Love is not a landmine but a sinkhole. — Auliq Ice

Of all words, none more purely distills the futility of human hope, mortal dreams. Did we but know the end is foreordained and soon, who could go on making such tender plans - someday I shall run my fingers through my lover's hair - when the very next step we take shall pitch us into the sinkhole, there to be crushed to nothingness, smothered in an instant, by a thousand tonnes of earth? "Someday." Ha! — Kai Ashante Wilson

[Vestiges begins] from principles which are at variance with all sober inductive truth. The sober facts of geology shuffled, so as to play a rogue's game; phrenology (that sinkhole of human folly and prating coxcombry); spontaneous generation; transmutation of species; and I know not what; all to be swallowed, without tasting and trying, like so much horse-physic!! Gross credulity and rank infidelity joined in unlawful marriage, and breeding a deformed progeny of unnatural conclusions! — Adam Sedgwick

I'm dead, Makina said to herself when everything lurched: a man with a cane was crossing the street, a dull groan suddenly surged through the asphalt, the man stood still as if waiting for someone to repeat the question and then the earth opened up beneath his feet: it swallowed the man, and with him a car and a dog, all the oxygen around and even the screams of passers-by. I'm dead, Makina said to herself, and hardly had she said it than her whole body began to contest that verdict and she flailed her feet frantically backward, each step mere inches from the sinkhole, until the precipice settled into a perfect circle and Makina was saved. Slippery bitch of a city, she said to herself. Always about to sink back into the the cellar. — Yuri Herrera