Desolation Quotes

I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

We hold on STEVE's still smiling face as MICHAEL passes by. STEVE's eyes follow MICHAEL out of the room and then the smile disappears. It is replaced by a look of hunger and desolation.

No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith

to weep for someone who is gone is desolation, but to weep for someone who has never really existed is to lose a part of oneself.

There are few places in England where you can get so much wildness and desolation of sea and sandhills, wood, green marsh and grey saltings as at Wells in Norfolk.

To learn without thinking is labour in vain, to think without learning is desolation.

He who has lost only those of whose faith and truth he is sure, has not yet reached the depth of human desolation.

Desolate--Life is so dreary and desolate-- Women and men in the crowd meet and mingle, Yet with itself every soul standeth single, Deep out of sympathy moaning its moan-- Holding and having its brief exultation-- Making its lonesome and low lamentation-- Fighting its terrible conflicts alone.

The delusion of entertainment is devoid of meaning. It may amuse us for a bit, but after the initial hit we are left with the dark feeling of desolation.

There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

I hope we shall prove how much happier for man the Quaker policy is, and that the life of the feeder is better than that of the fighter; and it is some consolation that the desolation by these maniacs of one part of the earth is the means of improving it in other parts. Let the latter be our office, and let us milk the cow, while the Russian holds her by the horns, and the Turk by the tail.

All consolation that does not come from God is but desolation; when the soul has learned to receive no comfort but in God only, it has passed beyond the reach of desolation.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

The first thing I remember about the world and I pray that it may be the last is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which everyone has in some degree, and which is, at once, the glory and desolation of homo sapiens , provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.

Man may be doomed to loss, sorrow, and desolation, but if he tries his strength and will, however briefly, upon the indifferent vast hostility of the elements, he rages against futility and asserts his right of being

But neither Europe nor Africa can show any such desolation as America. The proudest, stubbornest, bitterest peasant of deserted Spain, the most primitive and superstitious Arab of the remotest oases, are a little more than kin and never less than kind at their worst; whereas in the United States one is almost always conscious of an instinctive lack of sympathy and understanding with even the most charming and cultured people.

There are women to whom nature has granted the gift of silent emotion. They have mobile faces, changeful eyes, soft lips, which express joy or desolation naturally, and with the charm of perfect simplicity and truth.

The Death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.

Leroy interrupted Chantal's fantasies: "Freedom? As you live our your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. You're free to melt your own individuality into the cauldron of the multitude either with a feeling of defeat or euphoria.

Many and many a person in Georgia asked me why we did not go to South Carolina; and, when I answered that we were en route for that State, the invariable reply was, - Well, if you will make those people feel the utmost severities of war, we will pardon you for your desolation of Georgia.

When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!

They're selling postcards of the hanging They're painting the passports brown The beauty parlor is filled with sailors The circus is in town Here comes the blind commissioner They've got him in a trance One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker The other is in his pants And the riot squad they're restless They need somewhere to go As Lady and I look out tonight From Desolation Row.

Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.

North was only a direction indicated by a compass--if a man had one, that is, for otherwise there was no north or south or east or west; there was only the brooding desolation.

Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.

There is nothing in either savage or civilized history that is more utterly complete, more remorselessly sweeping than the Father of Mercy´s campaign among the Midianites. The official report deals only in masses, all the virgins, all the men, all the babies. all ´creatures that breathe,´ all houses. all cities. It gives you just one vast picture ...as far as the eye can reach, of charred ruins and storm-swept desolation... Would you expect this same conscienceless God, this moral bankrupt, to become a teacher of morals, of gentleness, of meekness, of righteousness, of purity?

Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate; all that was once so beautiful is dead.

Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.

True the Black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept.And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.

My desolation does begin to make A better life.

I expected the unexpected and went [on the Moon] with an open mind. I think the visual scene was described by my words on first landing - "magnificent desolation." Magnificent for the achievement of being there, and desolate for the eons of lifelessness.

I also find the desert a wonderful metaphor for desolation and yet the exact counterpart of the ocean with its hidden depths. Both are vast, harsh, implacable, homogenous to the untrained eye, and beautiful. Bothallow the wind to roam on the surface. And both serve as wonderful vehicles for human survival stories.

A lean cheek; which you have not: a blue eye, and sunken; which you have not: an unquestionable spirit; which you have not: a beard neglected; which you have not: — but I pardon you for that; for, simply, your having1 in beard is a younger brother's revenue: — Then your hose should be ungarter'd, your bonnet unhanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and every thing about you demonstrating a careless desolation.

Thus violent deeds live after men upon the earth, and traces of war and bloodshed will survive in mournful shapes long after those who worked the desolation are but atoms of earth themselves.

The laws of war, that restrain the exercise of national rapine and murder, are founded on two principles of substantial interest: the knowledge of the permanent benefits which may be obtained by a moderate use of conquest, and a just apprehension lest the desolation which we inflict on the enemy's country may be retaliated on our own. But these considerations of hope and fear are almost unknown in the pastoral state of nations.

There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.

The great danger in today's world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience. Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor.

I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting — its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers ... it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.

There is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives?

Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, Wal-Mart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola.

I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn't happen, I may lose a little of the sense of isolation and desolation which abides with me. My circumstances allowing of nothing but the ejaculation of one-syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations.

The fountain of my heart dried up within me,-- With nought that loved me, and with nought to love, I stood upon the desert earth alone. And in that deep and utter agony, Though then, then even most unfit to die I fell upon my knees and prayed for death.

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.

Lovers should not separate from each other after making love without admiring each other, without being conquered as well as conquering, so that no feeling of satiation or desolation arises nor the horrid feeling of misusing or having been misused.

In the gay world, some of the most enriching and incredibly life-affirming and shaping relationships, very often between younger boys and older men, can be hugely positive experiences for those young boys. They can save those young boys from desolation, suicide and drug addiction, all sorts of things, providing they're consensual.

The perpetual mourner -- the grief that can never be healed -- is innocently enough felt to be wearisome by the rest of the world. And my sense of desolation increases. Each day seems a new beginning -- a new acquaintance with grief.

The appearance presented by the streets of London an hour before sunrise, on a summer's morning, is most striking even to the few whose unfortunate pursuits of pleasure, or scarcely less unfortunate pursuits of business, cause them to be well acquainted with the scene. There is an air of cold, solitary desolation about the noiseless streets which we are accustomed to see thronged at other times by a busy, eager crowd, and over the quiet, closely-shut buildings, which throughout the day are swarming with life and bustle, that is very impressive.

But under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of space.

I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.

All the earth, though it were full of kind hearts, is but a desolation and desert place to a mother when her only child is absent.