Climbs Quotes

1. "Swamp Thing, in Hell: "Demon...How...could God...allow such a place?Etrigan: Think you God built this place, wishing man ill and not lusts uncontrolled or swords unsheathed?Not God, my friend. The truth's more hideous still: These halls were carved by men while yet they breathed.God is no parent or policeman grim dispensing treats or punishments to all.Each soul climbs or descends by its own whim. He mourns, but He cannot prevent their fall.We suffer as we choose. Nothing's amiss. All torments are deserved..."
Author: Alan Moore

2. "It's the journey toward doing these harder climbs that really gives value to the whole activity of climbing."
Author: Alex Lowe

3. "Why can't I quiet the thoughts running through my head?Put down the penand climbsnuglyinto bed?"
Author: Amanda Leigh

4. "Girl from the fifth floor, who feeds the birds every day, climbs up to the water tank and jumps off. I see her body on the road below, and feel absolutely nothing. Maybe because I expect her to get up and walk off. In a story, the birds would have joined forces in a show of gratitude and broken her fall, carried her to a faraway land of safety. As it is, they just gurgle foolishly and confer about the no-show of breakfast.I imagine myself in Pigeon girl's place - a split open bag of skin on tar."
Author: Amruta Patil

5. "Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after."
Author: Annie Dillard

6. "A poem should be palpable and muteAs a globed fruitDumbAs old medallions to the thumbSilent as the sleeve-worn stoneOf casement ledges where the moss has grown -A poem should be wordlessAs the flight of birdsA poem should be motionless in timeAs the moon climbsLeaving, as the moon releasesTwig by twig the night-entangled trees,Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,Memory by memory the mind -A poem should be motionless in timeAs the moon climbsA poem should be equal to:Not trueFor all the history of griefAn empty doorway and a maple leafFor loveThe leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -A poem should not meanBut be"
Author: Archibald MacLeish

7. "However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him up one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study in order to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, because they bear what should have bourne them."
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

8. "Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky - under each bulb - down to there, see that spark over the river which is not a star? - there are people whom you will never see and who are your masters. At the supper tables, in the drawing rooms, in their beds and in their cellars, in their studies and in their bathrooms. Speeding in the subways under your feet. Crawling up in elevators through vertical cracks around you. Jolting past you in every bus. Your masters, Gail Wynand. There is a net - longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse - there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends."
Author: Ayn Rand

9. "As one climbs up the ladders in society, one starts feeling more and more like an owner, less like a member of it."
Author: B. Barmanbek

10. "Great men must go through great painThe strongest stormsThe hardest rainThe toughest climbsThe roughest terrainGreat men must go through great pain"
Author: Calvin W. Allison

11. "While writing 'Cold Mountain,' I held maps of two geographies, two worlds, in my mind as I wrote. One was an early map of North Carolina. Overlaying it, though, was an imagined map of the landscape Jack travels in the southern Appalachian folktales. He's much the same Jack who climbs the beanstalk, vulnerable and clever and opportunistic."
Author: Charles Frazier

12. "It's different," you said. "You've made, Min, everything different for me. Everything's like coffee you made me try, better than I ever - or the places I didn't even know were right on the street, you know? I'm like this thing I saw when I was little, where a kid hears a noise under his bed and there's a ladder there that's never been there before, and he climbs down and, it's for kids I know, but this song starts playing ..." Your eyes were traveling in the treey light."
Author: Daniel Handler

13. "This mountain is so formed that it is always wearisome when one begins the ascent, but becomes easier the higher one climbs."
Author: Dante Alighieri

14. "The primitive in each of us climbs closer to the surface during the night, for the moon sings to it, and the cold void between the stars speaks its language. To that savage self, evil can look lovely in too little light."
Author: Dean Koontz

15. "A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin."
Author: Edmond De Goncourt

16. "But he [Depression] just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favorite chair, puts his feet on my table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke. Loneliness watches and sighs, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He's going to make me sleep with him again tonight, I just know it."
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

17. "Some days, moments meet you like a ton of bricks. This was one of them." - Eliza Mills, "This Girl Climbs Trees"
Author: Ellen Mulholland

18. "But some climbs you have to make alone."
Author: Ellyn Bache

19. "In answer, the news of the Gospel is that extraordinary things happen. ... Lear goes berserk on a heath but comes out of it for a few brief hours every inch a king. Zaccheus climbs up a sycamore tree a crook and climbs down a saint. Paul sets out a hatchet man for the Pharisees and comes back a fool for Christ."
Author: Frederick Buechner

20. "I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom."
Author: George S. Patton

21. "O sweet, delusive Noon, Which the morning climbs to find, O moment sped too soon, And morning left behind."
Author: Helen Hunt Jackson

22. "The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales."
Author: Herman Melville

23. "I sit up, edge over close to my window, and push it open, slipping one leg in, then the next, turning back to Jase. "Come on." His smile flashes in the gathering dark as his eyebrows lift, but he climbs carefully in as I lock my bedroom door."Be still," I tell him. "Now I'm going to learn all about you."
Author: Huntley Fitzpatrick

24. "I am going with him, if he climbs to the Moon."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

25. "The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men."
Author: Jacob Bronowski

26. "Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back."
Author: John Steinbeck

27. "No one tells us, girls who don't go on dates, that remembering can be almost as good as what actually happens. Mother climbs all the way to the third floor and stands over me in my bed, but I act like I'm still asleep. Because I just want to remember it awhile"
Author: Kathryn Stockett

28. "Lea--when a man climbs a glass mountain, it's not usually for the damn golden apple. It's for the person he gives the apple to."
Author: Laura Florand

29. "Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making."
Author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

30. "Later, the child climbs down from her mother's knee and clambers up onto Tom. He holds her wordlessly, trying to imprint everything about her: the smell of her hair, the softness of her skin, the shape of her tiny fingers, the sound of her breath as she puts her face so close to his.The island swims away from them, fading into an ever more miniature version of itself, until it is just a flash of memory, held differently, imperfectly by each passenger. Tom watches Isabel, waits for her to return his glance, longs for her to give him one of the old smiles that used to remind him of Janus Light – a fixed, reliable point in the world, which meant he was never lost. But the flame has gone out – her face seems uninhabited now."
Author: M. L. Stedman

31. "I'm just a pack mule. I've played leads and I've played character roles. Any actress in Hollywood will tell you as your age climbs, the leads thin."
Author: Marcia Gay Harden

32. "How so many of her needs have been gathering, pebble by pebble, into the mountain that Brian climbs every day."
Author: Mary Ann Rivers

33. "That's how it is: even in the throes of death, man is always on stage. And even 'the plainest' of them, the least exhibitionist, because it's not always the man himself who climbs on stage. If he doesn't do it, someone will put him there. That is his fate as a man."
Author: Milan Kundera

34. "This person mourns the fact that she has ruined her one chance to be loved by everyone; as this person climbs into bed, the weight of this tragedy seems to bear down upon this person's chest. And it is a comforting weight, almost human in heft. This person sighs. This person's eyes begin to close, this person sleeps."
Author: Miranda July

35. "For a traveler going from any place toward the north, that pole of the daily rotation gradually climbs higher, while the opposite pole drops down an equal amount."
Author: Nicolaus Copernicus

36. "Persistent, flowing through fallen shadows,excavating tunnels, drilling silences,insisting, running under my pillow,brushing past my temples, covering my eyelidswith another, intangible skin made of air,its wandering nations, its drowsy tribesmigrate through the provinces of my body,it crosses, re-crosses under the bridges of my bones,slips into my left ear, spills out from my right,climbs the nape of my neck,turns and turns in my skull,wanders across the terrace of my forehead,conjures visions, scatters them,erases my thoughts one by onewith hands of unwetting water,it evaporates them,black surge, tide of pulse-beats,murmur of water groping forwardrepeating the same meaningless syllable,I hear its sleepwalking deliriumlosing itself in serpentine galleries of echoes,it comes back, drifts off, comes back,endlessly flings itselfoff the edges of my cliffs,and I don't stop fallingand I fall"
Author: Octavio Paz

37. "The days aren't discarded or collected, they are beesthat burned with sweetness or maddenedthe sting: the struggle continues,the journeys go and come between honey and pain.No, the net of years doesn't unweave: there is no net.They don't fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.Sleep doesn't divide life into halves,or action, or silence, or honor:life is like a stone, a single motion,a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metalthat climbs or descends burning in your bones."
Author: Pablo Neruda

38. "So we forgive each other?" The crooked smile climbs up one more time. "Again?"And I look right into his eyes, right into him as far as I can see, because I want him to hear me, I want him to hear me with everything I mean and feel and say."Always," I say to him. "Every time."
Author: Patrick Ness

39. "There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we'll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life."
Author: Pema Chödrön

40. "Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us."
Author: Peter Kreeft

41. "Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane."
Author: R. D. Laing

42. "You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know."
Author: René Daumal

43. "During climbs into taller trees, I was occasionally able to look down on the backs of birds, which shine with reflected sunlight as they move through the green depths of the canopy, like schools of fish."
Author: Richard Preston

44. "A politician who climbs high over the bodies of the slain is described as vile or great according to the degree of his success."
Author: Robert Musil

45. "He who climbs a cliff may die on the cliff, so what? Always a risk-taker by nature, now I became one by intent."
Author: Ruth Park

46. "Scientists at first were skeptical that a kitten-type being could exist in the rare Martian atmosphere. As a test, two Earth kittens were put in a chamber that simulated the Martian air. The diary of this experiment is fascinating:6:00 A.M.: Kittens appear to sleep.7:02 A.M.: Kitten wakes, darts from one end of cage to another for no apparent reason.7:14 A.M.: Kitten runs up wall of cage, leaps onto other kitten for no apparent reason.7:22 A.M.: Kitten lies on back and punches other kitten for no apparent reason.7:30 A.M.: Kitten leaps, stops, darts left, abruptly stops, climbs wall, clings for two seconds, falls on head, darts right for no apparent reason.7:51 A.M.: Kitten parses first sentence of daily newspaper that is at bottom of chamber.With the exception of the parsing, all behavior is typical of Earth kitten behavior. The parsing activity, which was done with a small ball-point pen, was an anomaly."
Author: Steve Martin

47. "The WakingI wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.I learn by going where I have to go.We think by feeling. What is there to know?I hear my being dance from ear to ear.I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Of those so close beside me, which are you?God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,And learn by going where I have to go.Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Great Nature has another thing to doTo you and me, so take the lively air,And, lovely, learn by going where to go.This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.What falls away is always. And is near.I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.I learn by going where I have to go."
Author: Theodore Roethke

48. "Ambition devours gold and drinks blood and climbs so high by other men's heads, that at the length in the fall, it breaks its own neck; therefore, it is better to live in humble content than in high care and trouble."
Author: Thomas Wentworth

49. "Wait a second," Four says. I turn toward him, wondering which version of Four I'll see now-the one who scolds me, or the one who climbs Ferris wheels with me. He smiles a little, but the smile doesn't spread to his eyes, which look less tense and worried."You belong here, you know that?" he says. "You belong with us. It'll be over soon, so just hold on, okay?"He scratches behind his ear and looks away, like he's embarrassed by what he said. I stare at him. I feel my heartbeat everywhere, even in my toes. I feel like doing something bold, but I could just as easily walk away. I am not sure which option is smarter, or better. I am not sure that I care.I reach out and take his hand. His fingers slide between mine. I can't breathe. I stare up at him, and he stares down at me. For a long moment, we stay that way. Then I pull my hand away and run after Uriah and Lynn and Marlene. Maybe now he thinks I'm stupid, or strange. Maybe it was worth it."
Author: Veronica Roth

50. "He that climbs the tall tree has won right to the fruit, He that leaps the wide gulf should prevail in his suit."
Author: Walter Scott

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