Top 100 Quotes About Desolation
#1. 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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#2. 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
#3. 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!
Herman Melville
#4. A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry desolation in their way.
Fisher Ames
#5. I knew I had been lonely, Mem, yet I had no understanding of my desolation until my skin was finally touched.
Peter Carey
#6. A cold sense of desolation lodged itself somewhere in the base of my throat, and suddenly I was no longer enraged or devastated, but terrified of the immense, throbbing loneliness that was only now closing like a vise on my internal organs.
Anonymous
#7. Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.
Susanna Kaysen
#8. We shall not fight for the preservation of the enemy, which has laid waste with death and desolation the fields and hills of Ireland for 700 years.
James Larkin
#9. 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.
Stephen Fry
#10. Man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality ...
William Butler Yeats
#11. The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.
Mary Shelley
#12. A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.
John Millington Synge
#13. Toward dawn we shared with you
your hour of desolation,
the huge lingering passion
of your unearthly out cry,
as you swung your blind head
towards us and laboriously opened
a bloodshot, glistening eye,
in which we swam with terror and recognition.
Stanley Kunitz
#14. The Drawers are places of desolation," he said. "The Drawers are the waste lands.
Stephen King
#15. 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.
Haruki Murakami
#16. The deserts of Arabia are innocent of our civilised desolation-the ruins of Palestine are incapable of our modern gloom!
Wilkie Collins
#17. My friends are right:
there is beauty
in desolation.
Kelsey Sutton
#18. 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.
George Eliot
#19. Where there is hunger there is no hope. There is only desolation and pain. Hunger nurtures violence and fanaticism. A world where people starve will never be safe
Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva
#20. It's impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be.
Nadine Gordimer
#21. But here, is this place of eternal bareness and solitude, it seemed that life could never have been. The stark, eroded stones were things that might have been reared by the toil of the dead, to house the monstrous ghouls and demons of primal desolation.
Clark Ashton Smith
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. I have never been good at saying goodbyes to people. What else can they offer rather than a reciprocal desolation?
Aishah Madadiy
#26. For where thou art, there is the world itself,
With every several pleasure in the world,
And where thou art not, desolation.
William Shakespeare
#27. The wolf is the arch type of ravin, the beast of waste and desolation.
Theodore Roosevelt
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Suiffy, have you ever felt a sort of strange emptiness in the heart? A sort of aching void of the soul?'
'Oh, rather!'
'What do you do about it?'
'I generally take a couple of cocktails.
P.G. Wodehouse
#33. I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
John Keats
#34. 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
#35. The streets are empty. Wind skims the voids keeping neighbors apart, as if grazing the hollow of a cut reed, or say, a plundered mailbox. A familiar note is produced. It's the one Desolation plays to keep its instrument in tune.
Andrew Hussie
#36. We can feel isolated and powerless when living with chronic illness, but what if your story begins to bridge the barrier or open a way for someone to connect? What if your story offers a glimmer of hope to someone standing at the edge of desolation? ...What if your story starts the conversation?
Cindee Snider Re
#37. Plant diseases, drought, desolation, despair were recurrent catastrophes during the ages - and the ancient remedies: supplications to supernatural spirits or gods.
Norman Borlaug
#38. The zoo grounds reeked of desolation, but the silence had an undercurrent, a silvery vibe, like the hush of a concert hall just before the first note.
Suki Michelle
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Desolation, desolation, I owe so much to desolation.
Jack Kerouac
#43. 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
#44. It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Arrival often brings nothing but a sense of desolation and disappointment.
Rosamunde Pilcher
#45. Wisdom was a teapot, pouring from above. Desolation angels, served it up with love.
Patti Smith
#46. We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to whither; but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops
which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair.
William Peter Blatty
#47. 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.
Arthur Erickson
#48. It was night, and the rain fell; and falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood. And I stood in the morass among the tall and the rain fell upon my head-and the lilies sighed one unto the other in the solemnity of their desolation.
Edgar Allan Poe
#49. Abbey, with a cheap beer nestled in his hand, says simply, "Desolation in my heart.
Sean Prentiss
#50. I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.
William Tecumseh Sherman
#51. This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with interspaces blank and black
witch-fires glowing still and red in a great desolation.
Ambrose Bierce
#52. A blend of desolation and outrage. Or longing and fury. She wanted him back, she never wanted to see him again.
Ian McEwan
#54. Would a man nourished by beauty look like this? You have nothing but desolation and desperation here, you say? I bring you more of the same!
Kurt Vonnegut
#55. Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.
John Fowles
#56. Upon him I will visit famine and a fire,
Till all around him desolation rings
And all the demons in the outer dark
Look on amazed and recognize
That vengeance is the business of a man.
Patrick Rothfuss
#57. Every man may reign secure in his petty tyranny, and spread terror and desolation around him, until the trump of the Archangel shall excite different emotions in his soul.
James Otis
#58. In this atmosphere of wintry desolation and isolation, this slowly, very slowly increasing chill, my hands and lips started to freeze. Had I extinguished the sun? Had I killed the heart of all life?
Hermann Hesse
#59. No one can depict desolation who hasn't inhabited desolation and observed it very closely. Things condemned have a terrible beauty.
Tove Jansson
#60. Everyone is making love or else expecting rain
Bob Dylan
#61. Glory falls around us as we sob a dirge of desolation on the Cross
Maya Angelou
#62. It surged up out of the water and stood for an instant upright upon that surging and heaving desolation like Christ.
William Faulkner
#63. Waking up breaks my heart.
Getting dressed breaks my arms.
Joining the crowd breaks my legs.
Letting someone in ... does me in.
Casey Renee Kiser
#64. A pure crystal stream sprang laughing in the midst of desolation......
Sue Bridgwater
#65. If slavery, barbarism and desolation are to be called peace, men can have no worse misfortune.
Baruch Spinoza
#66. (This town) doesn't look like anything; it isn't anything. Its five tin-roofed huts cling to the skinny tracks of the Uganda Railway like parasites on a vine.
Beryl Markham
#67. Some of Mozart's Andantes emanate an ethereal desolation, a sort of dream funeral in another life.
Emil Cioran
#68. So we went to the Zoo; & I daresay I could write something interesting about that
a pale stone desert given over to charwomen & decorators: a few bears, a mandrill, & a fox or two
all in the desolation of depression.
Virginia Woolf
#69. Nearly everything great owes its existence to "despites": despite misery and affliction, poverty, desolation, physical debility, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstacles.
Thomas Mann
#70. 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
J.B. Priestley
#71. In cities, people go to work and all walk there together, like some arterial flow. And there's a certain desolation about it, an alienation that we all experience.
Roy Harper
#72. 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.
William Tecumseh Sherman
#73. Religion starts with desolation and ends with misery.
M.F. Moonzajer
#74. It was beyond desolate: it was where desolation goes to be by itself.
Elizabeth Hand
#75. Rebuke
Obstinate regression
bringing untold paths
of deep dark foreboding
depression...
Muse
#76. I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.
King George V
#77. Are you happy in your misery? Resting peaceful in desolation? It's the final tie that binds us The sole source of my consolation" "blue
Gayle Forman
#78. 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.
Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon
#79. Afghanistan's barren, ragged desolation moaned a long dirge of ancient wonder, the earth's broken features ready to receive fallen horsemen, the lost traveller, and all the butchered tribes.
Zia Haider Rahman
#80. Desolation is a file, and the endurance of darkness is preparation for great light.
John Of The Cross
#81. PRO3:24 When thou liest down, thou shalt not be afraid: yea, thou shalt lie down, and thy sleep shall be sweet. PRO3:25 Be not afraid of sudden fear, neither of the desolation of the wicked, when it cometh. PRO3:26 For the LORD shall be thy confidence, and shall keep thy foot from being taken.
Anonymous
#82. I didn't ask any questions. Everything I wanted to know was written in tortured phrases across the desolation of her face.
John Fante
#83. You know the way of the wind in the night - the desolate alleys my soul takes
John Geddes
#84. Mourning. At the death of the loved being, acute phase of narcissism: one emerges from sickness, from servitude. Then, gradually, freedom takes on a leaden hue, desolation settles in, narcissism gives way to a sad egoism, an absence of generosity.
Roland Barthes
#85. As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.
Milan Kundera
#86. Antarctica is otherworldly, like nothing I've ever seen before. Stark, cold, beautiful desolation.
Mark Hoppus
#87. Misery is a heart that can never be content with what it has and, by always craving something more, brings about its own destruction. And desolation is a heart so fearful of losing what it hoards that it never knows the richness that comes from being able to give.
Anne Bishop
#88. In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried ... nothing is so warming and companionable.
Elizabeth Goudge
#89. And he is enchanted by the beauty of small things: hot coffee, wind through an open window, the tapping of rain, a passing bicycle, the desolation of snow on a winter's day.
Simon Van Booy
#90. It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.
Seamus Heaney
#91. He has described in precise, measured words the beautiful desolation he feels at the close of novels where the message is that there is no end to human suffering, only endurance.
Diane Setterfield
#92. 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
#93. There are many good reasons for drinking, and one's just entered my head: If you don't drink when you're living, how the fuck can you drink when you're dead?
Warren Ellis
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. I felt in complicity with the tendency of this country to absolute desolation.
Julien Gracq
#98. Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.
Will Durant
#99. 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
#100. The explanation was plain; this desolation out here called forth all that was evil in human nature.
O.E. Rolvaag
