Top 73 Quicksand Quotes & Sayings

The art of walking on quicksand is still beyond me. What I learned is only how difficult this art is to master and how hard people need to struggle to learn it.

Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.

If there's not any endgame, we're in quicksand. We take one more step, and we're still there, and there's no way out.

It may here be justly said, that genuine morality is preserved only in the school of adversity, and a state of continuous prosperity may easily prove a quicksand to virtue.

Making the best of things is... a damn poor way of dealing with them. My whole life has been a series of escapes from that quicksand.

The plague of pornography is swirling about us as never before. Pornography brings a vicious wake of immorality, broken homes, and broken lives. Pornography will sap spiritual strength to endure. Pornography is much like quicksand. You can become so easily trapped and overcome as soon as you step into it that you do not realize the severe danger. Most likely you will need assistance to get out of the quicksand of pornography. But how much better it is never to step into it. I plead with you to be careful and cautious.

The hardest part for me during the creation stage is actually putting words on paper that make sense and tell my story the way I see it. I sometimes feel I am slogging through quicksand when I write.

I don't go on Reddit, because I know that'll be quicksand and I won't be able to get out.

The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity—and until they do (and find the cure), all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.

In the godforsaken, obscene quicksand of life, there is a deafening alleluia rising from the souls of those who weep, and of those who weep with those who weep. If you watch, you will see The hand of God putting the stars back in their skies one by one.

It's interesting that the worse things get, the more we believe the next technological fix is going to get us out of it. But it's like being in quicksand: the more you struggle the deeper you sink.

What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.

The Chinese banking system is built on quicksand and that's the one thing a lot of people don't realize. [...] Everybody seems to think it is a free and clear open checkbook. It's not. [...] The banking system in China is extremely fragile.

Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.

When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of flesh.

Making the best of things is a damn poor way of dealing with them. My life has been a series of escapes from that quicksand.

When I go out to direct a film, every day we prepare too much, we think too much. Knowledge becomes a weight upon wisdom. You know, simple words lost in the quicksand of experience.

For a long time, Nella Larsen was the mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance. In the late 1920s, she published two sophisticated novels, 'Quicksand' and 'Passing,' and then her writing life came to an end. She died in obscurity in 1964.

I resolve to venture into the city on my own. I look at maps in the library—subway maps, bus maps, and regular maps—and try to memorize them. I’m afraid of getting lost; no, I’m afraid of sinking into the city as in a quicksand, afraid of getting sucked into something I can never escape.

The man who pauses on the paths of treason, Halts on a quicksand, the first step engulfs him.

We all have a personal pool of quicksand inside us where we begin to sink and need friends and family to find us and remind us of all the good that has been and will be.

While theoretically a person may block God out, logically there will be a breakdown because ultimately all enunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind. And if that moral doctrine is not absolute then the definer himself becomes undefined. That's what we are living with - an undefined definer giving us definitions for our course, and we are being trapped in the quicksand of the absence of objective truth.

Make today's solid ground out of yesterday's quicksand.

Shame is quicksand on the path to soul.

Never get in the middle of someone else's quicksand.

The boys had asked why, if it acted slowly, was it called quicksand. The Mollusks had replied that, as far as they were concerned, most English names for things were silly. The word that they used for quicksand was a deep grunt that translated roughly to "uh-oh.

You might be able to thrash your way out of a spiderweb, but thrashing in quicksand doesn’t work. The harder you fight, the more ground you lose. Struggling merely expedites your inevitable defeat.

Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of.

At last you kissed me, I could die in waves again, and one good lick of quicksand took.

There is not a single loophole or curveball or open trench to fall into for the man or woman who walks the path that Christ walks. When He says, "Come, Follow Me" (Luke 18:22), He means that He knows where the quicksand is and where the thorns are and the best way to handle the slippery slope near the summit of our personal mountains. He knows it all, and He knows the way. He is the way.

Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child... eventually.

I think about some of the novels I love - The Stranger, Disgrace, Quicksand and Passing, Giovanni's Room, The Talented Mr. Ripley. I think I'm more intrigued by characters who don't do the right thing and where we are allowed to identify with their shame/dishonesty/envy... whatever.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

All kingdoms look small through an airplane window - little dominions built on quicksand. But looking up from the ground, where most of us stand, they're rather impressive.

As I obsess about my ancient problems, I feel more like I'm sinking in quicksand than lighting a torch. I'm creating neither heat nor light, just the icky, perversely pleasurable squish of self-pity between my toes. My only defense is that I'm not the only one down here in the muck - our whole culture is doting on tales of personal tragedy.

I testify to you today that turning away from God brings broken covenants, shattered dreams, and crushed hopes. Such a quagmire of quicksand I plead with you to avoid. You are of a noble birthright. Eternal life in the kingdom of our Father is your goal.

Once, I got lost in the middle of the desert and had to follow the North Star to find the dirt road where my truck was parked a few miles away. Another time, I got stuck in quicksand for two days.

You're playing and you think everything is going fine. Then one thing goes wrong. And then another. And another. You try to fight back, but the harder you fight, the deeper you sink. Until you can't move... you can't breathe... because you're in over your head. Like quicksand.

Memories are like fireflies darting across the surface of my mind, showing me here and there images so sharp and vivid that I catch my breath in wonder before the vignette disappears, sinking like a pebble into the quicksand of regret and recrimination.

In a business like the movie business, you're going to have a lot of people competing. Somebody is always coming behind them who wants their job. Being an actor is like being in quicksand: whatever you do, it disappears very quickly. You have to keep reminding people.

Generally the impulse to find justice through punitive measures can be a kind of quicksand. What James Whitman, the scholar I cite in the chapter of my book, talks about as an urge to level down, I think you see that everywhere. We're going to be a punitive society, so we might as well level out that punitiveness. Bankers and college swim stars and everyone face that same kind of wrath.

And yet the motives of women are so inscrutable. You remember the woman at Margate whom I suspected for the same reason. No powder on her nose - that proved to be the correct solution. How can you build on such a quicksand? Their most trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or a curling tongs.

I worship the quicksand he walks in.

Vanity is the quicksand of reason.

I worship the quicksand he [Richard Nixon] walks in.

I did a movie called 'Quicksand No Escape' with Donald Sutherland and Tim Matheson. I think I was maybe 5. I was really little. Yeah, it was fun. And actually, Felicity Huffman played my mom.

There's no more place in the euro zone for well-meaning laxness when dealing with deficits and failings. If the demands on Greece aren't taken seriously, we'll get stuck in quicksand. In the worst case, this would make it acceptable for one tranche to not be paid out. It is in the Greeks own interest not to test that.

With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand... hopeless from the start.

The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorageis quicksand.

In my life, I was always floating around the edge of the dark side and saying what if take it a little bit too far, and who says you have to stop there, and what's behind the next door. Maybe you gain a wisdom from examining those things. But after a while, you get too far down in the quicksand.

The Chinese banking system is built on quicksand and that's the one thing a lot of people don't realize. Everybody seems to think it is a free and clear open checkbook. It's not. The banking system in China is extremely fragile.

I think you get to a time in life where by definition stuff's turning to quicksand and wherever you can get some solid footing of the familiar suddenly becomes real comforting.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Capitalism now seems more likely a swamp, a bog, a quicksand in which humanity is presently flailing about, unable to extricate itself, perhaps doomed to perish within a few generations from the long term effects of the technology which seemed to Marx its greatest gift to humanity.

Shyness is a curious thing, because, like quicksand, it can strike people at any time, and also, like quicksand, it usually makes its victims look down.

Luxury! more perilous to youth than storms or quicksand, poverty or chains.

In my life, I was always floating around the edge of the dark side and saying what if take it a little bit too far, and who says you have to stop there, and whats behind the next door. Maybe you gain a wisdom from examining those things. But after a while, you get too far down in the quicksand.

I think viewers quite like it when I'm suffering or eating or drinking something horrible or really up against it in some quicksand or whatever.

Some people fall in love and touch the sky. Some people fall in love and find quicksand. I hover somewhere in between, I swear, I can't make up my mind.