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

-Bryan, Richard H(udson)
  NPR broadcast, 2 Nov.

My definition of utter waste is a coachload of lawyers going over a cliff, with three empty seats.

-Hunt, Lamar
Quoted in Colin  Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

In our system, at about11.30pm on election night, they just push you off the edge of the clifföand that's it.You might scream on the way down, but you're going to hit the bottom, and you're not going to be in office.

-Mondale,Walter F(rederick)
  On losing to Ronald Reagan in the presidential elections, in the NewYork Times, 4 Mar.

Anyway,I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's aroundönobody big, I meanö except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the clifföI mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.

-Salinger,J(erome) D(avid)
The Catcher in the Rye, ch.22.

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland, At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee, Walled round with rocks as an inland island, The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

-Swinburne, Algernon Charles
  Poems and Ballads (2nd edn),'A Forsaken Garden'.

   O hark,O hear! how thin and clear And thinner, clearer, farther going! O sweet and far from cliff and scar The horns of Elfland faintly blowing! Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying: Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

-Tennyson
  The Princess, pt.4, added song, stanza 2.

I had mixed feelingsölike watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your car.

-Venables,Terry
  Of Paul Gascoigne's move fromTottenham Hotspur to the Italian club Lazio. Quoted in David PickeringThe Cassell Soccer Companion (1994).