Quotes about slip
page 2

J. Michael Straczynski photo
Pat Conroy photo
Suzanne Collins photo
Ian McEwan photo
Laurie Halse Anderson photo
Haruki Murakami photo

“I may be the type who manages to grab all the pointless things in life but lets the really important things slip away.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories

Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Stephen King photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Elizabeth Wurtzel photo
Suzanne Collins photo
Winston S. Churchill photo

“We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Quoted in Words of Wisdom: Winston Churchill, Students’ Academy, Lulu Press (2014), Section Three : ISBN 1312396598
Post-war years (1945–1955)

Sören Kierkegaard photo

“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight to avoid this?”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Variant: Don't you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?
Source: Either/Or, Part I

Libba Bray photo
James Rollins photo
Eoin Colfer photo
Anaïs Nin photo

“He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

Simone de Beauvoir photo
Jane Austen photo
Rick Riordan photo
Haruki Murakami photo
William James photo
Maggie Nelson photo
Rick Riordan photo
David Levithan photo
Madonna photo
Sue Monk Kidd photo
Cassandra Clare photo

“A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: There's Treasure Everywhere: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection

David Gilmour photo
P.G. Wodehouse photo
John Steinbeck photo

“He never fell,
never slipped back,
never flew.”

Source: East of Eden

Bob Dylan photo

“The old Rounder in the iron mask slipped me the master key, somebody had to unlock your heart, he said it was up to me.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Biograph (1985), Up to Me (recorded 1974)

Billy Joel photo
Harry Chapin photo

“But high up on the mountain
When the wind is hitting it
If you're watching very closely
The rock slips a little bit…”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

The Rock
Song lyrics, Portrait Gallery (1975)

Colin Wilson photo
John Zerzan photo
Clifford D. Simak photo
Grandmaster Flash photo
Milan Kundera photo
Toni Morrison photo
Emily Brontë photo
Walter Benjamin photo
Christopher Hitchens photo
Richard Burton photo

“You reach the top of the heap, but it's a circle, and you slip on the down side; maybe for years. You get scared. He said then he thought he was coming out of a slump.”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

In "Richard Burton, 58, is Dead; Rakish Stage and Screen Star"

Robert E. Howard photo
Walker Percy photo
Wu Jingzi photo
Buenaventura Durruti photo

“No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.”

Buenaventura Durruti (1896–1936) Spanish anarchist

As quoted in Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain (1963) by Felix Morrow
Van Paassen interview (1936)
Variant: No government in the world fights fascism to the death. When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to fascism to maintain itself.

Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd photo

“One I have loved, uneluding, dearly possessed,
Two I have wooed, by greater praise be they blessed –
Three, yea, and four, with fortune lavish of gold,
Five maidens I've won their white flesh fair to behold,
And six more bright than the sun on my city's strong walls
With never a treacherous rede to blemish delight;
Seven by heaven! though hardly won was the fight –
Yea eight of whom I have sung: but to bridle the tongue
Lest heedless a careless word slip – the teeth they are strong!”

Keueisy vun dunn diwyrnawd;
keueisy dwy, handid mwy eu molawd;
keueisy deir a pheddir a phawd;
keueisy bymp o rei gwymp eu gwyngnawd;
keueisy chwech heb odech pechawd;
gwen glaer uch gwengaer yt ym daerhawd;
keueisy sseith ac ef gweith gordygnawd;
keueisy wyth yn hal pwyth peth or wawd yr geint;
ys da deint rac tauaed.
"Gorhoffedd" (The Boast), line 75; translation from Robert Gurney Bardic Heritage (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969) p. 41.

Helen Keller photo
Alasdair Gray photo

“This slip has been inserted by mistake.”

Alasdair Gray (1934–2019) Scottish writer and artist

An erratum slip in the first edition.
Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)

P.G. Wodehouse photo
Carl Sagan photo
William Luther Pierce photo

“The people are being kept in line at the moment, because there are still lots of shiny new things for them to buy. But more and more Americans are beginning to look beyond their immediate material comfort and to worry about the long-term moral slide of their country. If the economy slips badly, there will be hell to pay. More and more people will listen to the dissidents. A big problem for the Jews is how to silence the dissidents now, how to stifle the people who are asking inconvenient questions and thinking dangerous thoughts, before these thoughts spread to other people. They've tried to do it with legislation, but the country isn't yet in a mood to be told what it can think. What the Jews need is a nice, big war. Then they can crack down on the dissidents. Then they can call us "subversives." Then they can call us "unpatriotic," because we will be against their war… That's why I am convinced that there will be a strong effort to involve America in another major war during the next four years. This effort will be disguised, of course. It will be cloaked in deceit, as such efforts always are. While the warmongers are scheming for war, they will tell us how much they want peace. They're good at that sort of thing. They've had a lot of practice. But they will be scheming for war, believe me, no matter what they say. And when that war comes, remember what you have read today.”

William Luther Pierce (1933–2002) American white nationalist

Get Set for War, 1997.
1990s, 1990

George Carlin photo
Margrethe II of Denmark photo
John Steinbeck photo
Zooey Deschanel photo
Noel Gallagher photo
Anthony Bourdain photo
Stanley Baldwin photo

“I have often thought, with reference to the late War…that it has shown the whole world how thin is the crust of civilisation on which this generation is walking. The realisation of that must have come with an appalling shock to most of us here. But more than that. There is not a man in this House who does not remember the first air raids and the first use of poisoned gas, and the cry that went up from this country. We know how, before the War ended, we were all using both those means of imposing our will upon our enemy. We realise that when men have their backs to the wall they will adopt any means for self-preservation. But there was left behind an uncomfortable feeling in the hearts of millions of men throughout Europe that, whatever had been the result of the War, we had all of us slipped down in our views of what constituted civilisation. We could not help feeling that future wars might provide, with further discoveries in science, a more rapid descent for the human race. There came a feeling, which I know is felt in all quarters of this House, that if our civilisation is to be saved, even at its present level, it behoves all people in all nations to do what they can by joining hands to save what we have, that we may use it as the vantage ground for further progress, rather than run the risk of all of us sliding in the abyss together.”

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

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1923/jul/23/military-expenditure-and-disarmament in the House of Commons (23 July 1923).
1923

Plutarch photo

“Why does pouring oil on the sea make it clear and calm? Is it for that the winds, slipping the smooth oil, have no force, nor cause any waves?”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Symposiacs, book viii. Question IX
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Nakayama Miki photo
Gordon Lightfoot photo
Homér photo
Patrick Modiano photo
Barbara Hepworth photo
Robert Silverberg photo
Thanissaro Bhikkhu photo
Homér photo
Fu Kun-chi photo
Paul Weller (singer) photo
Julio Cortázar photo

“"Hair loss and retrieval" (Translation of "Pérdida y recuperación del pelo")


To combat pragmatism and the horrible tendency to achieve useful purposes, my elder cousin proposes the procedure of pulling out a nice hair from the head, knotting it in the middle and droping it gently down the hole in the sink. If the hair gets caught in the grid that usually fills in these holes, it will just take to open the tap a little to lose sight of it.


Without wasting an instant, must start the hair recovery task. The first operation is reduced to dismantling the siphon from the sink to see if the hair has become hooked in any of the rugosities of the drain. If it is not found, it is necessary to expose the section of pipe that goes from the siphon to the main drainage pipe. It is certain that in this part will appear many hairs and we will have to count on the help of the rest of the family to examine them one by one in search of the knot. If it does not appear, the interesting problem of breaking the pipe down to the ground floor will arise, but this means a greater effort, because for eight or ten years we will have to work in a ministry or trading house to collect enough money to buy the four departments located under the one of my elder cousin, all that with the extraordinary disadvantage of what while working during those eight or ten years, the distressing feeling that the hair is no longer in the pipes anymore can not be avoided and that only by a remote chance remains hooked on some rusty spout of the drain.


The day will come when we can break the pipes of all the departments, and for months to come we will live surrounded by basins and other containers full of wet hairs, as well as of assistants and beggars whom we will generously pay to search, assort, and bring us the possible hairs in order to achieve the desired certainty. If the hair does not appear, we will enter in a much more vague and complicated stage, because the next section takes us to the city's main sewers. After buying a special outfit, we will learn to slip through the sewers at late night hours, armed with a powerful flashlight and an oxygen mask, and explore the smaller and larger galleries, assisted if possible by individuals of the underworld, with whom we will have established a relationship and to whom we will have to give much of the money that we earn in a ministry or a trading house.


Very often we will have the impression of having reached the end of the task, because we will find (or they will bring us) similar hairs of the one we seek; but since it is not known of any case where a hair has a knot in the middle without human hand intervention, we will almost always end up with the knot in question being a mere thickening of the caliber of the hair (although we do not know of any similar case) or a deposit of some silicate or any oxide produced by a long stay against a wet surface. It is probable that we will advance in this way through various sections of major and minor pipes, until we reach that place where no one will decide to penetrate: the main drain heading in the direction of the river, the torrential meeting of detritus in which no money, no boat, no bribe will allow us to continue the search.


But before that, and perhaps much earlier, for example a few centimeters from the mouth of the sink, at the height of the apartment on the second floor, or in the first underground pipe, we may happen to find the hair. It is enough to think of the joy that this would cause us, in the astonished calculation of the efforts saved by pure good luck, to choose, to demand practically a similar task, that every conscious teacher should advise to its students from the earliest childhood, instead of drying their souls with the rule of cross-multiplication or the sorrows of Cancha Rayada.”

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Garth Brooks photo

“Cause I've got friends in low places
Where the whiskey drowns
And the beer chases my blues away.
And I'll be okay.
I'm not big on social graces;
Think I'll slip on down to the oasis.
Oh, I've got friends in low places.”

Garth Brooks (1962) American country music artist

Friends in Low Places, written by DeWayne Blackwell and Earl "Bud" Lee.
Song lyrics, No Fences (1990)

Pete Doherty photo
Colin Wilson photo
Christopher Golden photo

“Instead, it had slipped into her subconscious, and worked its way beneath her skin.”

Christopher Golden (1967) American writer

Page 280 Last Breath
Body of Evidence

Theodore L. Cuyler photo
Billy Joel photo
Bel Kaufmanová photo
Edgar Lee Masters photo
Peggy Noonan photo