Top 100 Quotes About Desolation
#1. Men who have worked together to reach the stars are not likely to descend together into the depths of war and desolation.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#2. And I think that after nearly 85 years upon this planet that I have a right after working so hard at showing the desolation and the poverty, to show something beautiful for somebody as well.
Gordon Parks
#3. To learn without thinking is labour in vain, to think without learning is desolation.
Confucius
#4. How many hopes and dreams are trapped within these bones? How many wonders lie never to be discovered? This is what war is. Desolation, despair and loss. There are no victors.
David Gemmell
#5. 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.
Buzz Aldrin
#6. It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that, whenever we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation - of loneliness, poverty, and misery, the end and extreme of things - the thought of God comes into one's mind.
Vincent Van Gogh
#7. Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.
George Meredith
#8. All I can see is desolation, all I can smell is decay, all I can hear is the creaking, cracking sigh of undead voices on the wind, yet all I feel is hope. 18:00,
Frank Tayell
#9. How beautiful she is, Our Lady of compassion! How dear! How utterly unselfish! How filled with joy for Him - and us - in the depths of her own agony and desolation!
Alphonsus Liguori
#10. They passed lands that had no name, where fens of mirror pools stretched into unknown distances, thousands of fragments of sky sprinkled across this bastard offspring of earth and sea, lonely birds calling out over the desolation, and Yarvi breathed deep the salt chill and longed for home.
Joe Abercrombie
#11. Insofar as a purely transient construction of flesh and blood can remember (or foretell) what it is to be stone, Lucy understood the mountain's wish to listen at the window of a den of gamblers and be warmed by all that free-floating hope and desolation.
Helen Oyeyemi
#12. ...I experienced a sudden ache -- part desolation, part panic -- to observe the speed with which this mate, this familiar, was transforming herself into a separate person.
Ian McEwan
#13. Circumstances in life often take us places that we never intended to go. We visit some places of beauty, others of pain and desolation.
Kristin Armstrong
#14. Who shall contend with time,
unvanquished time, the conqueror of conquerors and lord of desolation?
Henry Kirke White
#15. I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life ...
Joseph Conrad
#16. The desolation and terror of, for the first time, realizing that the mother can lose you, or you her, and your own abysmal loneliness and helplessness without her.
Francis Thompson
#17. 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
Jim Perrin
#18. But the small cloud which appeared in the northwest four months ago had blown up into a mighty storm and then into a screaming tornado,sweeping away her world, whirling her out of her sheltered life,and dropping her down in the midst of this still,haunted desolation.
Margaret Mitchell
#19. The war produced a dreadful desolation in the underground movement. After the arrest of the Duma faction, the Bolsheviks had no centralized party organization at all. The local committees had an episodic existence, and often had no connections with the workers' districts.
Leon Trotsky
#20. This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past.
Viktor E. Frankl
#21. Artists create out of a sense of desolation. The spirit of creation is a excruciating, intricate exploration from within the soul.
El Greco
#22. She looked at Paul with a face broken open, with a look of utter love and desolation, as if she'd given him everything in the ten minutes she'd known him, and he'd taken it, oh, he'd taken it anyhow, knowing just how much it cost. I
Emily Fridlund
#23. Imagine a society in which there were neither rich nor poor. What evils, afflictions, sorrows, disorders, catastrophes, disasters, tribulations, misfortunes, agonies, calamities, despair, desolation and ruin would be unknown to man!
Jules Verne
#24. An anxiety for being me, forever trapped in myself, floods my whole being without finding a way out, shaping me into tenderness, fear, sorrow and desolation.
An inexplicable surfeit of absurd grief, a sorrow so lonely, so bereft, so metaphysically mine ...
Fernando Pessoa
#25. 'The Desolation of Smaug' stands alone as an action/adventure epic movie. It's visually stunning, and the 3D is incredible. Plus, it's directed by Peter Jackson, and he's extraordinary.
Luke Evans
#26. I believe in the lust of the flesh and the incurable desolation of the soul.
Hjalmar Soderberg
#27. The good Samaritan, he's getting dressed, he's getting ready for the show. He's going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Row.
Bob Dylan
#28. The only sound that's left after the ambulances go is Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row.
Bob Dylan
#29. 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.
William Henry Hudson
#30. He who has lost only those of whose faith and truth he is sure, has not yet reached the depth of human desolation.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall
#31. 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.
Margaret Campbell Barnes
#32. A sense of desolation settled within me: a cold, slimy stone lodged under my lungs. There was nothing happy about the woods, I thought, especially at night.
Craig Davidson
#33. No wonder simple men have always had their gods dwell in the high places. For as soon as a man lets his eye drop from the heavens to the horizon, he risks setting it on some scene of desolation.
Geraldine Brooks
#34. 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.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#35. The smoke drifts toward us across that vast desert of desolation with the rising of the wind.
J.M Shorney
#36. You pile of stones, you waste, you desolation, I'll stuff you with misery till it comes out of your eyes. I'll change your heart into green grass, and all you love into a sheep. I'll turn you into a bad poet with dreams.
Peter S. Beagle
#37. I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow.
W.G. Sebald
#38. While I waded in my desolation, the only luxury I found in our, now silent, trek to Belvar was that Malik and Leo continued to readjust on their seat, appearing to never find a comfortable position.
Scarlett Dawn
#39. 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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#40. While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend.
C.S. Lewis
#41. The Lord made what was once the desolation of the Palestine Mandate fertile again, as modern-day Israel, and if He so wills it, He will do the same for the Ilemi Triangle, for his own glory. The desert will bloom.
James Wesley, Rawles
#42. It might be well enough to wander if you've a place and people to come back to, but I tell you now there's no desolation like wanting to go home and truly not knowing where it is.
Elizabeth Kerner
#43. I learned that I was never alone, that there was Someone always very close by and, indeed, within me, giving me strength in times of weakness and desolation, light in times of darkness, joy in times of great sorrow and pain, and the will to struggle on when continuing seemed futile.
Joseph F. Girzone
#44. 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.
Jack London
#45. We stand todaybefore the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of socialism.
Rosa Luxemburg
#46. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.
Jeff VanderMeer
#47. After desolation, grief brings back our humanity
Mason Cooley
#49. Let me do my work each day, and if the darkened hours of despair overcome me, may I not forget the strength that comforted me in the desolation of other times ...
Max Ehrmann
#50. Where can one find a profounder desolation than in the poor child who has lost its mother?
Joyce Cary
#51. If you have settled this - if you have grasped the character of your heart and admitted your desolation apart from Christ - then, he says, you can begin to pray.
Timothy J. Keller
#52. In Cornwall, it is quite possible to take a stride from the richest vegetation into the abomination of desolation. It has been said in mockery that Cornwall does not grow wood enough to make coffins for the people.
Sabine Baring-Gould
#53. 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.
Sarah Doudney
#54. When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation.
Ian McEwan
#55. 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.
Charles Dickens
#56. 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.
Shelby Foote
#57. 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.
Milan Kundera
#58. But if you just got your first car and you're feeling around for the seat lever and find "Desolation Angels" instead, the beautiful people on the cover so lazily entwined, well, that's the type of experience that can turn your head around.
Tupelo Hassman
#59. Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.
Philip K. Dick
#60. A perfect misanthropist's heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us.
Emily Bronte
#61. Desolation would not be the proper word to describe his feelings now; it was more the sense of emptiness he imagined he might feel standing all alone on the surface of the moon.
Shusaku Endo
#62. A grateful loving heart carries with it, under every parallel of latitude, the warmth and light of the tropics. It plants its Eden in the wilderness and solitary place, and sows with flowers the gray desolation of rock and mosses.
John Greenleaf Whittier
#63. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.
William T. Sherman
#64. The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war's desolation.
Robert A. Heinlein
#65. Bitter, bitter, this desolation of angels.
Laini Taylor
#66. I have been very miserable since - miserable not for an hour but for months on end - but I can still feel that hour's misery in its perfect desolation, if I am fool enough to call it up in my mind.
Robertson Davies
#67. I'm struck by the sense of desolation in places like this when they're out of season. It's quite shabby and feels like something once happened here that has never quite been re-created.
Steve Hanley
#68. Anna watched as Abel walked across the empty schoolyard, she wondered whether there was a limit to desolation or whether it grew endlessly, infinitely. Desolation with a hundred faces and more, desolation of a hundred different kinds and more, like the color blue.
Antonia Michaelis
#69. In times of desolation, God conceals Himself from us so that we can discover for ourselves what we are without Him.
Margaret Of Cortona
#70. It was now the stormy equinoctial weather that sounds the wild dirge of autumn, and marches the winter in. I love, and always did, that grand undefinable music, threatening and bewailing, with its strange soul of liberty and desolation.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
#71. The personal desolation Christ is experiencing on the cross is what you and I should be experiencing
but instead, Jesus is bearing it, and bearing it all alone.
Why alone?
He's alone so that we might never be alone.
C.J. Mahaney
#72. There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
James Baldwin
#73. Female creatures owned the world, Howard thought. The earth itself was female. The shop was female. The females knew everything of beauty and desolation - he
Ernest Hebert
#74. Reading...can make you fell like not one lone cell stranded in the desolation of the world, but one of eight billion cells conjoined by the world, all hearts echoing the others in the song of one enormous heart.
Randall Silvis
#76. The explanation was plain; this desolation out here called forth all that was evil in human nature.
O.E. Rolvaag
#77. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.
Galway Kinnell
#78. Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.
Will Durant
#80. I felt in complicity with the tendency of this country to absolute desolation.
Julien Gracq
#81. There is a lump of desolation beneath the bony dip at my throat. It is no bigger than a coin, this spot, a peculiarly small place to hold such a feeling. I try to shove it to some deeper region, but there it sticks, a fragile skin-thickness from the outside world.
Franny Billingsley
#82. The increasing desolation of nature, the exhaustion of resources, the uneasiness and disintegration of the human spirit, all have been brought about by humanity's trying to accomplish something.
Masanobu Fukuoka
#83. A name could be either a ghost or a portent depending on which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in the liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.
Ruth Ozeki
#84. 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.
Hermann Hesse
#85. In the cool weak light the nightflames all had died, and the silent streets echoed death and desolation. Worlorn's day. Yet it was twilight.
George R R Martin
#86. A lean cheek, - a blue eye, and sunken, - an unquestionable spirit, - a beard neglected:- Then your hose should be ungartered, your bonnet unhanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and every thing about you demonstrating a careless desolation.
William Shakespeare
#87. The landscape artist had captured a distant prospect of an ancient hillside, surmounted by cyprus and a few tumbled columns; the mood was one of desolation and peace, a glorious past recalled, and now thankfully put to rest.
Stephanie Barron
#88. I have never been good at saying goodbyes to people. What else can they offer rather than a reciprocal desolation?
Aishah Madadiy
#89. For where thou art, there is the world itself,
With every several pleasure in the world,
And where thou art not, desolation.
William Shakespeare
#90. The wolf is the arch type of ravin, the beast of waste and desolation.
Theodore Roosevelt
#91. I took them all away, and if ever there was a time I needed distraction, this was it. In complete desolation, I looked at the world above. I watched the sky as it turned from silver to gray to the color of rain. Even the clouds were trying to get away.
Markus Zusak
#92. And therefore a giant hammer of pure stupidity lashed out of the screen and felled me again. I lay mewling, clutching my head with my sweaty hands, whimpering for my Mommy to make it stop. MAKE IT STOP!
But it did not stop. It. Did. Not. Stop.
The Desolation of Tolkien
John C. Wright
#93. Then think of fire, It's laughter, the music of splintering beams and glass, The flames reaching through the second story of a house almost as if to -mistakenly- rescue someone who left you years ago. It is so American, fire. So like us. It's desolation. And it's eventual, brief triumph.
Larry Levis
#94. Oliver sat huddled together, in a corner of the cart; bewildered with alarm and apprehension; and figuring strange objects in the gaunt trees, whose branches waved grimly to and fro, as if in some fantastic joy at the desolation of the scene.
Charles Dickens
#95. When in the throes of our desolation, it is difficult to hope. But when it is time, we walk the corridors of our heart, retrieving the shattered threads of once-believed dreams.
Gwendolyn M. Plano
#96. 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.
James Howard Kunstler
#97. Desolation, desolation, I owe so much to desolation.
Jack Kerouac
#98. In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.
Wilfred Burchett
#99. Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.
Patti Smith
#100. Plant diseases, drought, desolation, despair were recurrent catastrophes during the ages - and the ancient remedies: supplications to supernatural spirits or gods.
Norman Borlaug
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