Quotes about cliff
page 2

“We are on a runaway train headed over the climate cliff as we stoke the engine with more coal to increase its speed.”

John Bellamy Foster (1953) Sociology professor and Marxist writer

Interview with Left Voice (2017)

“It doesn’t take a genius to see what happens when the entitlement state outgrows the economy upon which it rests. The time of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, the rest of insolvent social-democratic Europe — and now Detroit — is the time for conservatives to raise the banner of Stein's Law and yell, ‘Stop.’ You can kick the can down the road, but at some point it disappears over a cliff.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2010s, 2013, Detroit Ran Into The Inviolable Rule Of Economics (2013)

Law, Time

“How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

"Cliff Swallows to Order" [1944]; Published in For the Health of the Land, J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle (eds.), 1999, p. 119.
1940s

Color, Housing

“Since I retired to Cold Mountain
I've lived by eating mountain fruits
What is there to worry about?
Life passes according to karma
The months pass like a flowing stream
Days and nights like sparks from flint
Heaven and earth endlessly change
While I sit happily among these cliffs”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Life, Mountain, Change, Night

“It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960)

Love, Color, Spring, Christ

“Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

On Barbara Cartland
'Wedding of the century'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

“Six days I rode, from morn to setting sun,
By horrid cliff, by bottom dark and drear;
And giddy precipice, where path was none.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Sei giorni me n'andai matina e sera
Per balze e per pendici orride e strane,
Dove non via, dove sentier non era.
Canto II, stanza 41 (tr. William Stewart Rose)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Sun

“Sappho was a worshipper of the Aphrodite cult and on the island of Lesbos there were many cliff-jumpers. They all jumped. Some may say they flew in ecstasy. If only for nine seconds -- one second for each string of the lyre.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Flying Out of This World

“Being chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee is like jumping off a cliff. The thrill is very short.”

Richard Bryan

NPR broadcast 2 November 1993

“A visible darkness grows up mountain paths;
I lodge by the river gate high in a study,
Frail cloud on a cliff edge passing the night.
The lonely moon topples amid the waves;
Steady, one after another, a line of cranes in flight.
Howling over the kill, wild dogs and wolves.
No sleep for me. I worry over battles—
I have no strength to right the universe.”

Du Fu (712–770) Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty

"Spending the Night in a Tower by the River" (trans. Stephen Owen)

Dogs, Mountain, Sleep, Study

“The higher the trail the steeper it grows
Ten thousand tiers of dangerous cliffs
The stone bridge is slippery with green moss
Cloud after cloud keeps flying by
Waterfalls hang like ribbons of silk
The moon shines down on the bright pool
I climb the highest peak once more
To wait where the lone crane flies”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Waiting, Flying

“At least some Americans are still having children. Unfortunately, many of those children spend their formative years being taught how to surrender. The emasculation of American boys is one step short of suicide. […] Schoolyards used to be filled with kids at recess playing games like "kill the guy with the ball." Nobody died. Boys played with G. I. Joes and girls played with dolls. Kids played freeze tag without a single incident of sexual harassment. […] Not too many years ago, cartoons were filled with violence. Bugs Bunny tied a gun barrel in a knot and Elmer Fudd's gun went kaboom, covering his own head in black soot. Wile E. Coyote chased the Road Runner and fell off a cliff to his destruction. We as children watched Superman cartoons, but we knew not to try and jump off the roof. Teenage boys watched Rocky and Rambo and Conan films. Then they went home without trying to kill anybody. […] We did not need liberals to tell us the difference between pretend and real life. Common sense and our parents handled that. Now schools across the country are canceling gym class. Dodgeball apparently promotes aggression […]. Even rock-paper-scissors is too violent. Rocks and scissors could be used by children to harm each other. Paper requires murdering trees. It's no wonder that Islamists produce strapping young men while America produces sensitive crybabies […]. Muslim children are taught hate in madrassas. They are taught how to kill infidels and the blasphemers. American boys are suspended from school for arranging their school lunch vegetables in the shape of a gun. […] During World War II, young boys volunteered to go overseas to save the world. […] Now American kids on college campuses retreat to their safe spaces to escape from potential microagressions. Islamists cut off heads and limbs and our young boys shriek at the drop of a microaggression. And we haven't seen the worst of it.”

Michael Savage (1942) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, and Author

Scorched Earth: Restoring the Country after Obama (2016)

Life, Men, Hate, War

“Cliff was a very smart guy, a reader, very eloquent. I just don't understand why he went, and not one of us.”

Kirk Hammett (1962) American musician

Playboy (April 2001)

Guy, Understanding

“In the morning we saw that the sea was rough, and people said there would be trouble.... Fifty men volunteered to go at once, and followed the old sailor without a word. We descended the cliffs to the beach, and there we saw a terrible sight : several vessels rushing, one after the other, at fearful speed, upon our rocks. Our men put three boats out to sea, but before they had rowed ten strokes one boat sank, another was upset by a huge breaker, while a third was thrown upon the beach.... The sea threw up hundreds of corpses, as well as quantities of cargo... Then came a fourth, fifth and sixth vessel, all of which were lost with their crew and cargo alike, upon the rocks. The tempest was furious... The next morning.... As I was passing by a hollow in the cliff, I saw a large sail spread, as I thought, over a bale of merchandise. I lifted the sail and saw a heap of corpses. I was so frightened that I ran home, and found my mother and grandmother on their knees, praying for the shipwrecked sailors.”

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) French painter

Quote c. 1870; cited by Julia Cartwright in Jean Francois Millet, his Life and Letters, Swan Sonnenschein en Co, Lim. London / The Macmillian Company, New York; second edition, September 1902, p. 22
taken from Millet's youth-memories, about the years he lived as an boy close to the wild coast of Normandy, written down on request of his friend and later biographer Alfred Sensier
1870 - 1875

Men, People, Fear, Home

“Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost fog-like, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.
Some place over there I had left my car and started walking, burying my head in the collar of my raincoat, with the night pulled in around me like a blanket. I walked and I smoked and I flipped the spent butts ahead of me and watched them arch to the pavement and fizzle out with one last wink. If there was life behind the windows of the buildings on either side of me, I didn't notice it. The street was mine, all mine. They gave it to me gladly and wondered why I wanted it so nice and all alone.
There were others like me, sharing the dark and the solitude, but they were huddled in the recessions of the doorways not wanting to share the wet and the cold. I could feel their eyes follow me briefly before they turned inward to their thoughts again.
So I followed the hard concrete footpaths of the city through the towering canyons of the buildings and never noticed when the sheer cliffs of brick and masonry diminished and disappeared altogether, and the footpath led into a ramp then on to the spidery steel skeleton that was the bridge linking two states.
I climbed to the hump in the middle and stood there leaning on the handrail with a butt in my fingers, watching the red and green lights of the boats in the river below. They winked at me and called in low, throaty notes before disappearing into the night.
Like eyes and faces. And voices.
I buried my face in my hands until everything straightened itself out again, wondering what the judge would say if he could see me now. Maybe he'd laugh because I was supposed to be so damn tough, and here I was with hands that wouldn't stand still and an empty feeling inside my chest.”

Mickey Spillane book One Lonely Night

One Lonely Night (1951)

Life, Cars, Feeling, Solitude

“One should always be desiring or hoping for something. When one can hope for that which one desires, one enjoys the greatest happiness of which our thinking apparatus is capable. To obtain what one has been desiring is the first step to the depths of sadness and even pain, from which one can never emerge. The sea still enchants me; I linger for three or four hours at a time on the jetty or at the edge of the cliffs. Impossible to tear oneself away. If I could lead such a life for a certain time, coupling it with some interesting occupation, I should enjoy excellent health.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote from his letter to Madame de Forget, Dieppe, 13 September 1852; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 68
Delacroix's quote refers to his stay at the coast at Dieppe
1831 - 1863

Life, Pain, Happiness, Health

“I challenge Destiny, yes, but I do not leap off cliffs.”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

Source: Dying Earth (1950-1984), Cugel's Saga (1983), Chapter 1, section 2, "The Inn of Blue Lamps"

“Stock markets are never better performing than during a hyperinflation. Interest rates are rock bottom, but only through artificial means. Gross Private Domestic Investment is still falling off a cliff, having already completely erased ten years of investment from the record of history. Here is a fundamental factor that suggests that terrible things are still to come our way. And I guess I'll have to put this in italics because the point seems to be lost in the shuffle: unemployment is still rising, even soaring straight to double digits!
The sociology of this intrigues me to no end. Unemployment is one of the human elements that journalists are supposed to glom onto. Oh, look at poor Bob and Jane and how they lost their jobs and have nowhere to go, etc., etc. Talk about human interest! Where are the weepy stories about the plight of people wandering around with no work? Instead, we get happy clappy stories about how things are not nearly as bad as they might be had the great and powerful Obama of Oz not appeared to save the day. There is also the remarkable spin that things are getting worse, yes, but at a slower pace than before – an observation that might be most commonly heard in Hell.”

Lew Rockwell (1944) American libertarian author and editor

6 August 2009 "Obama and the Economy" http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/obama-economy125.html <br class="br">2000s

Happiness, People, Way, History

“She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

Source: A Writer's Notebook (1946), p. 189

Way, Confidence, Sea

“He swayed in the strong wind that pressed against his back. He swayed forward, on the brink of the high cliff. And his right foot, his enormous iron right foot, lifted-up, out, into space, and the Iron Man stepped forward, off the cliff, into nothingness.”

Ted Hughes book The Iron Man

Source: The Iron Man (1968), Ch. 1 : The Coming of the Iron Man

Strong

“Richard the Lion Hearted, who became king of England in 1189, had inherited Aquitaine (western France) from his mother Eleanor and Normandy and Anjou—and England—from his father Henry. As Duke of Normandy and Anjou, Richard was a vassal of the king of France, but he controlled more land in France than did the French king. Although Richard had been an ally of Philip Augustus in the Third Crusade, in 1192 he went to war with the king over his French lands. Richard built Chateau Gaillard (he called it the “cocky castle”) on a cliff above the Seine north of Paris to defend his claims to Normandy. (…) Richard chose an excellent site, in the territory of the archbishop of Rouen, who objected strenuously until Richard paid him a handsome sum for the land. (…) Richard also raised money by selling rights of citizenship to residents of the town.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Source: Medieval castles (2005), Ch. 2 : The Castle as Fortress : The Castle and Siege Warfare

Money, War, Heart

“I'm back at my cliff
still throwing things off
I listen to the sounds they make
on their way down
I follow with my eyes 'til they crash
imagine what my body would sound like slamming against those rocks
and when it lands
will my eyes
be closed or open?”

Björk (1965) Icelandic singer-songwriter

"Hyper-Ballad", from Post (1995)
Songs

Way, Imagination

“There'll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow
Just you wait and see.
There'll be love and laughter
And peace ever after
Tomorrow
When the world is free.”

Nat Burton (1901–1945)

Song The White Cliffs of Dover

Love, World, Peace, Laughter

“The wild sea roars and lashes the granite cliffs below,
And round the misty islets the loud strong tempests blow.”

Mary Howitt (1799–1888) English poet, and author

The Sea-Fowler, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Strong, Sea

“I believe that we in the medical profession have taken the wrong course. It is as if we were simply standing by, watching millions of people march over a cliff, and then intervening in a desperate, last-minute attempt to save them once they have fallen over the edge. Instead, we should be teaching them how to avoid the chasm entirely, how to walk parallel to the precipice so that they will never fall at all. I believe that coronary artery disease is preventable, and that even after it is under way, its progress can be stopped, its insidious effects reversed. I believe, and my work over the past twenty years has demonstrated, that all this can be accomplished without expensive mechanical intervention and with minimal use of drugs. The key lies in nutrition—specifically, in abandoning the toxic American diet and maintaining cholesterol levels well below those historically recommended by health policy experts.”

Caldwell Esselstyn (1933) American physician, author and rower

Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease https://books.google.it/books?id=WDjZpJXEQwkC&pg=PT0 (New York: Penguin, 2007), ch. 1.

People, Health, Disease, Way

“Although "jumping to conclusions" is an expression, rather than an activity, it is as dangerous as jumping off a cliff, jumping in front of a moving train, and jumping for joy. If you jump off a cliff, you have a very good chance of experiencing a painful landing unless there is something below you to cushion your fall, such as a body of water or an immense pile of tissue paper. If you jump in front of a moving train, you have a very good chance of experiencing a painful voyage unless you are wearing some sort of train-proof suit. And if you jump for joy, you have a very good chance of experiencing a painful bump on the head, unless you make sure you are standing someplace with very high ceilings, which joyous people rarely do. Clearly, the solution to anything involving jumping is either to make sure you are jumping to a safe place, or not to jump at all.”

Daniel Handler book The Vile Village

Lemony Snicket
The Vile Village (2001)

Pain, People, Water, Chance

“Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one's master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto book Hagakure

Hagakure (c. 1716)

Death, Disease, Peace, Dead

“The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation. The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass. Sculpture in air is possible, where the stone contains only the hole, which is the intended and considered form. The mystery of the hole – the mysterious fascination of caves in hill sides and cliffs.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), p. 251

“O cool glad pasture; living tree, tall corn,
Great cliff, or languid sloping sand, cold sea,
Waves: river curving; you, eternal flowers,
Give me content, while I can think of you:
Give me your living breath!
Back to your rampart, Death!”

Harold Monro (1879–1932) British poet

"Living", line 36, from Alida Monro (ed.) Collected Poems (London: Duckworth, [1933] 1970) p. 13.

Death, Flowers, Thinking, Tree

“All I saw was the dame standing there in the glare of the headlights waving her arms like a huge puppet and the curse I spit out filled the car and my own ears. I wrenched the wheel over, felt the rear end start to slide, brought it out with a splash of power and almost ran up the side of a cliff as the car fishtailed. The brakes bit in, gouging a furrow in the shoulder, then jumped to the pavement and held.
Somehow I had managed a sweeping curve around the babe. For a few seconds she had been living on stolen time because instead of getting out of the way she had tried to stay in the beam of the headlights. I sat there and let myself shake. The butt that had fallen out of my mouth had burned a hole in the leg of my pants and I flipped it out the window. The stink of burned rubber and brake lining hung in the air like smoke and I was thinking of every damn thing I ever wanted to say to a hairbrained woman so I could have it ready when I got my hands on her.
That was as far as I got. She was there in the car beside me, the door slammed shut and she said, "Thanks, mister."”

Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) American writer

Kiss Me Deadly (1952)

Cars, Way, Thinking, Time

“The question is not whether to take risks, but which ones to take. The peril of being reasonable is that you will miss all the fun. It’s not enough to cautiously edge your way toward the cliff. Learn to revel in taking risks for the sake of your soul. Every choice you make gives birth instantly to certain risks as surely as your shadow follows you.”

Nicholas Lore (1944) American social scientist

The Pathfinder (1998)

Way, Soul, Birth, Question

“They stood aloof, the scars remaining,—
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder:
A dreary sea now flows between.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel

Part II
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Christabel

Sea

“Nimbly they seized and secreted their prey,
Alive and wriggling in the elastic net,
Which Nature hung beneath their grasping beaks;
Till, swoln with captures, the unwieldy burden
Clogg'd their slow flight, as heavily to land,
These mighty hunters of the deep return'd.
There on the cragged cliffs they perch'd at ease,
Gorging their hapless victims one by one;
Then full and weary, side by side, they slept,
Till evening roused them to the chase again.”

James Montgomery (1771–1854) British editor, hymn writer, and poet

Canto IV, line 141.
The Pelican Island (1827)

Secret, Nature

““War!”
The thought stood in Sim’s brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.
But why? Wasn’t life short enough without fighting and killing?”

Ray Bradbury book R Is for Rocket

Frost and Fire (1946)
R Is for Rocket (1962)

Life, Men, War, People

“After Gordon’s Bay, I was into veld, snaking towards Koeëlbaai on the R44, the prettiest road in South Africa. The way, now, was open, free of traffic, buildings, humans. My spirits lifted. On the left were towering cliffs, the fynbos was green and I rolled down the window to let in the fragrance. Far below waves crashed against granite boulders, their booming sound reaching me moments after each detonation. I was self-consciously taking it all in, relishing it, this road that would be mine for many weeks to come.”

Justin D. Fox (1967) South African author, photojournalist, lecturer and editor

The Marginal Safari: Scouting the Edge of South Africa (2010)

Way

“The most important thing that a clerk can do for a judge, I tell my clerks, is to prevent me from jumping off the cliff if I don’t want to. That is, sometimes I don’t realize there’s a cliff there at all, that the implications of what I’m doing are really totally wrong, and that sometimes it takes another person or two other people to warn me that you’re just not reading this case correctly, or you’re just not understanding the implications of what a decision in this way would be.”

Merrick Garland (1952) American judge

[Merrick Garland, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U1a8pYMJDM, March 18, 2016, Life Lessons Learned, DC Circuit Court Judge Panel, JRCLS International Law Conference, February 15, 2013, Georgetown University Law Center]; also excerpted quote in:
[March 18, 2016, The Quotable Merrick Garland: A Collection of Writings and Remarks, http://www.nationallawjournal.com/home/id=1202752327128/The-Quotable-Merrick-Garland-A-Collection-of-Writings-and-Remarks, Zoe Tillman, The National Law Journal, March 16, 2016, 0162-7325]
DC Circuit Court Judge Panel, JRCLS International Law Conference (2013)

People, Way, Understanding, Decision

“Goethe, … who lived through the struggle against Napoleon, was once asked how he had managed to exist during the days of shame, defeat, and humiliation. He replied: “I have nothing to complain of. Like one who, from the fastness of a cliff, gazes down on the raging sea, unable to help the ship-wrecked crew, but also out of the reach of the billows—according to Lucretius, a not unpleasant feeling—I have been standing in security, and have watched the fury of the storm passing by me.” …
It was not only on the political combats and storms of his emasculate fellow-countrymen that Goethe looked down with indifference; to those troubles of the heart, which Rousseau’s teaching had quickened, a philanthropic and educational enthusiasm, he was not merely apathetic; he was positively hostile. … “As of old Lutherdom, so now French ideals are forcing us away from a peaceful development of culture,” he used to say.”

Oscar Levy (1867–1946) German physician and writer

Source: The Revival of Aristocracy (1906), pp. 29-30.

Hostility, Education, Peace, Feeling

“In the Gates of the Mountains there have been many blowups. Now there are many rattlesnakes and nothing more fragile than mountain goats, themselves tougher than the mountains they disdain, although at a distance they are white wings of butterflies floating up and down and sideways across the faces of fragments of arches and cliffs, touching but never becoming attached to them.”

Norman Maclean book Young Men and Fire

Young Men and Fire (1992)

Mountain

“At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the world’s rivers, between your bones and the chalk cliffs of Dover.”

Deepak Chopra (1946) Indian-American physician, public speaker and writer

The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life (2004)

World

“Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Attributed inBright Words for Dark Days: Meditations for Women Who Get the Blues (1994) by Caroline Adams Miller, p. 10
1990s

People, Law, Study

“Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Stanza 1.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800), Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey (1798)

Mountain, Spring, Water, Winter

“When you leap from a cliff, it is too late for anything but holding to your courage. And hoping there's a haywain at the bottom to land in.”

Robert Jordan A Crown of Swords

Deira ni Ghaline t'Bashere
A Crown of Swords (15 May 1996)

Hope, Courage

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

"No Worst, There Is None", lines 9 -15
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Life, Death, Mountain, Sleep

““Sex,” Kiu said thoughtfully. “And Fear. Get that big old devil behind them with a stick, and my radiant beauty in front of them, and they’ll run right off a cliff, if I ask.”
“I’m a firm believer in Guilt, personally,” said Labienus.
“Works well on individuals,” Kiu conceded.
“Nothing like it for subtle motivation. Plant it deeply enough into a mortal’s psyche and it twists them endlessly.” Labienus sighed. “Get it in there young enough and it’ll do all your work for you. You’ll have only to prod the mortal along with a suggestion now and then.””

Kage Baker book The Children of the Company

Source: The Children of the Company (2005), Chapter 5, “The Angel of the Bottomless Deep” (p. 227)

Fear, Beauty, Sex, Motivation

“I wonder what my grandfather Björn of Brekkukot really thought what Latin was? Did he think it was the magic Sesame which opened all cliffs in Iceland? If so, I am not at all sure that he was all that far from the truth. Where fish leaves off in Iceland, Latin takes over.</b”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Truth, Thinking, Fish

“They have a tendency to get beaten up or thrown off a cliff, I know. Why does that happen with me?”

Madeleine Stowe (1958) American actress

On the roles she plays; "Stowe Away", interview in SPLICEDwire (14 June 1999)

“Hinduism is a religion of the Earth. It honors the Earth as the Divine Mother and encourages us to honor her and help her develop her creative potentials. The deities of Hinduism permeate the world of nature. For example, Shiva is the God of the mountains, while Parvati is the mountain Goddess. Shiva dwells in high and steep rocky crags and cliff faces. Parvati rules over mountain streams, waterfalls, and mountain meadows with their many flowers.”

David Frawley (1950) American Hindu teacher

How I Became A Hindu - My Discovery Of Vedic Dharma

God, World, Religion, Mountain

“Our forefathers wouldn’t recognize the political labyrinth our professional politicians have created. The very things our forefathers warned us not to do as it pertains to embracing a centralized, powerful federal government is the very cliff our professional politicians have steered the Goodship America straight off of.”

Ted Nugent (1948) American rock musician

Give Trump the Medal of Freedom (August 7, 2015)

“Translated: We are no one's, always at a boundary, always someone’s dowry. Is it a wonder then that we are poor? For centuries now we have been seeking our true selves, yet soon we will not know who we are, we will forget that we ever wanted anything; others do us the honour of calling us under their banner for we have none, they lure us when we are needed and discard us when we have outserved the purpose they gave us. We remain the saddest little district of the world, the most miserable people of the world, losing our own persona and nor being able to take on anyone else's, torn away and not accepted, alien to all and everyone, including those with whom we are most closely related, but who will not recognise us as their kin. We live on a divide between worlds, at the border between nations, always at a fault to someone and first to be struck. Waves of history strike us as a sea cliff. Crude force has worn us out and we made a virtue out of a necessity: we grew smart out of spite.”

Meša Selimović book Death and the Dervish

So what are we? Fools? Miserable wretches? The most complex people in the world. No one is such a joke of history as we are. Only yesterday we were something that we now wish to forget, yet we have become nothing else. We stopped half way through, flabbergasted. There is no place we can go to any more. We are torn off, but not accepted. As a dead-end branch that streamed away from mother river has neither flow, nor confluence it can rejoin, we are too small to be a lake, too big to be sapped by the earth. With an unclear feeling of shame about our ancestry and guilt about our renegade status, we do not want to look into the past, but there is no future to look into; we therefore try to stop the time, terrified with the prospect of whatever solution might come about. Both our brethren and the newcomers despise us, and we defend ourselves with our pride and our hatred. We wanted to preserve ourselves, and that is exactly how we lost the knowledge of our identity. The greatest misery is that we grew fond of this dead end we are mired in and do not want to abandon it. But everything has a price and so does our love for what we are stuck with.
Death and the Dervish (1966)

People, World, History, Sea

“Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Barter"
Love Songs (1917)

Life, Children, Beauty, Singing

“The plans and schemes of tyrants are broken by many things. They shatter against cliffs of heroic struggle. They rupture on reefs of open resistance. And they are slowly eroded, bit by little bit, on the very beaches where they measure triumph, by countless grains of sand. By the stubborn little decencies of humble little men.”

Eric Flint (1947) American author

In the Heart of Darkness http://www.baen.com/Library/0671878859/0671878859.htm (1998)

Men

“People who say: 'Ah, this Beuys will go back to the middle ages, or to the stone dwellers, cliff dwellers.' No, there is a misunderstanding. I have nothing against the materialistic methodology of analytics, but I think we have to enlarge this thing, not to get caught in a very restricted one-sidedness in our way of looking towards life. Because the problems of life, soul, humankind's spirit, the problems of intuition, imagination, and inspiration, the problems of birth and death, the problems of survival in a bigger shape, and to bring in the image of the meaning of man.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Source: 1970's, Interview with Louwrien Wijers, 1979, p. 249; Also cited in: Louwrien Wijers (1996). Writing as Sculpture: 1978 - 1987. p. 40

Life, Death, People, Age

“Remote remote Cold Mountain road
Cold cold ice cold cliff
Chirp chirp often many birds
Lone lone no sign people
Swish swish wind blow face
Gentle gentle snow settle head
Day day no see sun
Year year no see spring”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

People, Mountain, Spring, Bird

“It's like watching lemmings run off the cliff.”

Scott Kurtz book PvP

PvP (1998)

“A sense of social hierarchy prevented Mrs Munde from actually telling the lousy bastard to get out, so instead she began to think evil thoughts. She had once read an article on mind control, explaining that the best way to bend someone to your will was to think of a gooey mudlike substance called Cliff Richard and direct it at the object of your intent. Such were the marshmellow-suffocating properties of this image that the victim fell instantly into an undignified froth. Putty in your hands in fact. It didn't seem to work. The stranger was insensitive as well as intrusive. Mrs Munde gave it one last go till the kitchen air was thick with Cliff Richard. The stranger suddenly made a little squeaking noise and fell sideways.
'Stop it, stop it!' he cried. 'You're pulping my brain.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

'Well go away then,' sulked Mrs Munde, releasing her victim, not through generosity but because she found the image too nauseating to continue.
Page 28.
See Wikipedia on Cliff Richard.
Boating For Beginners (1985)

Way, Thinking, Sense, Evil

“Those who live in the best cliffs think they are better than us. That is always man’s attitude when he has power.”

Ray Bradbury book R Is for Rocket

Frost and Fire (1946)
R Is for Rocket (1962)

Thinking

“Reading conventional notions of class struggle and anti-colonialism into bin Laden, the Taliban, and radical Islam is not just solipsistic. It is nonsense. If poverty and destitution, colonialism and capitalism are animating radical Islam, explain this: In March, the Taliban went to the Afghan desert where stood great monuments of human culture, two massive Buddhas carved out of a cliff. At first, Taliban soldiers tried artillery. The 1,500-year-old masterpieces proved too hardy. The Taliban had to resort to dynamite. They blew the statues to bits, then slaughtered 100 cows in atonement-for having taken so long to finish the job. Buddhism is hardly a representative of the West. It is hardly a cause of poverty and destitution. It is hardly a symbol of colonialism. No. The statues represented two things: an alternative faith and a great work of civilization. To the Taliban, the presence of both was intolerable.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2000s, 2001, The Enemy is not Islam. It is Nihilism (2001)

Faith, Reading, Animals

“Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake.
My house was on a cliff. The thing could take
Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row.
Then the long pause and then the bigger shake.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.”

William Empson (1906–1984) English literary critic and poet

"Aubade" (1937), line 1; cited from John Haffenden (ed.) The Complete Poems (London: Allen Lane, 2000) p. 69.
The Complete Poems

Housing

“Awake,
Voice of sweet song! awake, my heart, awake!
Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni" (1802)
Context: Awake, my soul! not only passive praise
Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears,
Mute thanks and secret ecstasy. Awake,
Voice of sweet song! awake, my heart, awake!
Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn.

Heart

“The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows.”

Ted Hughes book The Iron Man

Source: The Iron Man (1968), Ch. 1 : The Coming of the Iron Man
Context: The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows. Taller than a house the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, at the very brink, in the darkness.

“Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs. Splash! There goes Mark Foley!”

P. J. O'Rourke (1947) American journalist

"What's That Smell?" (23 October 2006)

“Now wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Stanza 4.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800), Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey (1798)
Context: If I should be, where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence, wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; And that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came,
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love, oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Now wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake.

Forgetting

“When you think of the defence of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine. That is where our frontier lies.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1934/jul/30/armaments in the House of Commons (30 July 1934). <br class="br">1934 <br class="br">Context: Let us never forget this; since the day of the air, the old frontiers are gone. When you think of the defence of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine. That is where our frontier lies.

Thinking

“When you stand at the edge of the cliff, jump to fly, not to fall. ”

Robert Orben (1928) American magician and writer

Flying