Avalanche Quotes

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”

— George Burns

“The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.”

— Jon Ronson

“What would happen if you did just shut a door and stop speaking? Hour after hour after hour of no words. Would you speak to yourself? Would words just stop being useful? Would you lose language altogether? Or would words mean more, would they start to mean in every direction, all somersault and assault, like a thuggery of fireworks? Would they proliferate, like untended plantlife? Would the inside of your head overgrow with every word that has ever come into it, every word that has ever silently taken seed or fallen dormant? Would your own silence make other things noisier? Would all the things you'd ever forgotten, all layered there inside you, come bouldering up and avalanche you?”

— Ali Smith

“If this was the price of benefits, it was too high. He wanted his friend back, because that was a man worth taking an avalanche for.”

— S.P. Wayne

“Her own vague red trail created a livid atmosphere. She was like an avalanche and they were her nostalgia.”

— E.J. Koh

“Even when bad stuff goes down, the person who is just about buried under an avalanche of sad memories is made of stern stuff. And so, keeps standing.”

— Sakura Tsukuba

“As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”

— John Muir

“It's like I have a sensor in my head, but she works on a seven-second delay ... well-meaning, but perpetually about seven seconds too late to actually do anything to stop the horrific avalanche of shit-you-shouldn't- say-out-loud-but-I-just-did.”

— Jenny Lawson

“She did not look like an orphan, said the wife of the Oriel don, subsequently, on the way home. The criticism was a just one ... Tall and lissom, she was sheathed from the bosom downwards in flamingo silk, and she was liberally festooned with emeralds. Her dark hair was not even strained back from her forehead and behind her ears, as an orphan's should be. Parted somewhere at the side, it fell in an avalanche of curls upon one eyebrow. From her right ear drooped heavily a black pearl, from her left a pink; and their difference gave an odd, bewildering witchery to the little face between.”

— Max Beerbohm

“Even in good families a bad apple can begin an avalanche of troubles,' Dutch said as he sat back in his well-seasoned armchair, lighting his curved rustic pipe.
From Book I, In Blood There is No Honor”

— Judith-Victoria Douglas

“Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and you're an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that's kind of relaxing.”

— Miriam Toews

“Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche?”

— Franz Wright

“Loneliness came over him, like an avalanche of snow. He was alone. Where he had always wanted to be. You can only trust yourself. There's a rat buried deep in everybody and they'll rat on you if they get pushed far enough.”

— William Lindsay Gresham

“What advice I would give to anybody about anything. Life is a slow-motion avalanche, and none of us are steering. (When asked in an interview about what question he's tired of being asked.)”

— Donald E. Westlake

“I know something about performing. I know that when it seems like the avalanche is about to roll over you, you face into it and keep both arms swimming as hard as you can. You smile and you sell it.”

— Jillian Lauren

“Silver Avalanche coming up the driveway," calls Jeffrey from upstairs.
"What are you, security?" I call back.”

— Cynthia Hand

“Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.”

— Milan Kundera

“You were blasted out of the sanctuary. The force of the explosion caused the first avalanche that buried the Qayom Malak, but the fig and olive trees remained exposed, a beacon for the other sanctuaries that were built in the coming years. The Christians were here, the Greeks, the Jews, the Moors. Their sanctuaries fell, too, to avalanche, fire, to scandal or fear, creating a nearly impenetrable wall around the Qayom Malak. You needed me to help you find it again. And you couldn't find me until you really needed me."
"What happens now?" Cam asked. "Don't tell me we have to pray."
Dee's eyes never left the Qayom Malak, even as she tossed cam the towel draped over her shoulder. "Oh, it's far worse, Cam. Now you've got to clean. Polish the angels, especially their wings. Polish them until they shine. We are going to need the moonlight to shine on them in precisely the right way.”

— Lauren Kate

“I was pretty sure if I tried to sing, all I would cause was an avalanche.”

— Rick Riordan

“What if I'm no better than you? What if instead of stopping you, I'm just another avalanche?”

— Leigh Bardugo

“Suddenly, as if the movement of his hand had released it, the load of her accumulated impressions of him tilted up, and down poured in a ponderous avalanche all she felt about him.”

— Virginia Woolf

“She would die here and not complain. She would be buried beneath this avalanche of lifelessness.”

— Marissa Meyer

“It seems that there is never to be any perfect rest. Even in Eden the snake rears its head among the laden boughs of the Tree of Knowledge. The silence of the dreamless night is broken by the roar of the avalanche; the hissing of sudden floods; the clanging of the engine bell marking its sweep through a sleeping American town; the clanking of distant paddles over the sea ...”

— Bram Stoker

“I covered hockey for a few years in the late '90s and early 2000s for the 'Colorado Springs Gazette,' and I covered the Avalanche for some of the glory years. I've done hockey off and on as a sportswriter but never played it.”

— John Branch

“I am left with the conviction that an avalanche would be easier to dissuade than that man.”

— R.L. LaFevers

“The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it; the last echoes died on the white slopes; the new mount glittered and lay still in the silent valley.”

— Evelyn Waugh

“Disaster was an avalanche, gathering speed with such acceleration that you worried more about getting out of its path, not finding the pebble at its center.”

— Jodi Picoult

“In the early 1950s, during the near avalanche of discoveries, rediscoveries, and redefinitions of subcellular components made possible by electron microscopy, those prospecting in this newly opened field were faced with the problem of what to do with their newly acquired wealth.”

— George Emil Palade

“I wanna survive an avalanche. I wanna be one of those people a dog finds buried under a ton of snow, almost dying of starvation.”

— Tre Cool

“What I do know is that with a celebrity's death comes an avalanche of media, and in that media is most often another death - it takes a life that is filled with complicated talent, hope, success and drive and reduces it to the 'story.'”

— James Belushi

“Some dangers are so spectacular and so much beyond normal experience that the mind refuses to accept them as real, and watches the approach of doom without any sense of apprehension. The man who looks at the onrushing tidal wave, the descending avalanche, or the spinning funnel of the tornado, yet makes no attempt to flee, is not necessarily paralyzed with fright or resigned to an unavoidable fate. He may simply be unable to believe that the message of his eyes concerns him personally. It is all happening to somebody else.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“Do you know, Richard, that it's the weight of one flake of snow that is one too many, and causes an avalanche? Without that one, last flake, the catastrophe would not happen. When using magic, you must know which is the one snowflake too many before you add its weight. The avalanche will be out of all proportion to what you think the weight of that flake could invoke.”

— Terry Goodkind

“Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside; they did not produce our beliefs, they do not destroy them; they may inflict on them the most constant refutations without weakening them, and an avalanche of afflictions or ailments succeeding one another without interruption in a family will not make it doubt the goodness of its God or the talent of its doctor.”

— Marcel Proust

“The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without interruption in the bosom of a family will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.”

— Marcel Proust

“The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.”

— Aldous Huxley

“My dad and I had been close - he called me Tuyet Bang, Vietnamese for 'avalanche,' because of my nonstop energy. I took a lot from him, like being a risk taker, and I know how much he loved my mother.”

— Michelle Phan

“Everything that's written about me has such a negative taint. It just has a life of its own, like an avalanche, and I don't think there's anything I can do to stop it.”

— Roseanne Barr

“The men have piled up in my past, have fallen trenchantly through my life, like an avalanche that doesn't mean to kill but is going to bury me alive just the same.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

“We were empty nesters, our last-born child having departed for Duke. Meredith decided we needed a dog to fill the vacuum. She heard about a litter in Colorado sired by Chopper, the legendary avalanche dog at the top of Aspen Mountain.”

— Tom Brokaw

“Regret, hurt, bereavement, loss, to permit the flow of even one tear at the upwelling of such feelings was to imperil ancient root systems and retaining walls. Mudslide and black avalanche would result and drown him.”

— Michael Chabon

“See thou, whatsoever be thy name
whether Fate, Life, or Devil! I cast thee down my gauntlet, I challenge thee to battle! Men of faint heart may bow before thy mysterious power, thy face of stone may inspire them with dread, in thy unbroken silence they may discern the birth of calamity and an impending avalanche of woe. But I am daring and strong, and I challenge thee to battle! Let us draw our swords, and join our bucklers, and rain such blows upon each other's crests as shall cause the very earth to shake again! Ha! Come forth and fight with me!”

— Leonid Andreyev

“My own drawing was a house made of books, but where there should have been a door, there was a book, and where there should have been windows, there were books, and where the chimney should have been open to let the smoke out, a book was covering the hole, so if anyone was in the house, they couldn't get out. They'd suffocate, to be found years later, a desiccated corpse still marking its place in the book it had been reading with a knobby finger bone, head caved in by an avalanche of fallen books. As I said, I liked books.”

— Nova Ren Suma

“Let me tell you what is coming. After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives you may win Southern independence, but I doubt it. The North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche.”

— Sam Houston

“Stand up like a mountain; have faith like a rock; love like an avalanche”

— Bob Goff

“When you're wearing the Avalanche logo, you battle.”

— Patrick Roy

“Our little pebble of poor performance helps to start, or to sustain, an avalanche.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

“The floating vapour is just as true an illustration of the law of gravity as the falling avalanche.”

— John Burroughs

“Beside the grand history of the glaciers and their own, the mountain streams sing the history of every avalanche or earthquake and of snow, all easily recognized by the human ear, and every word evoked by the falling leaf and drinking deer, beside a thousand other facts so small and spoken by the stream in so low a voice the human ear cannot hear them.”

— John Muir

“My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche, his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie.”

— Toni Morrison

“Nature photography ... that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear - it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves.”

— Robert Adams