Desolation Quotes - Page 2

• 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.

  Charles Robert Maturin

  Heart, Agony, Desert

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• 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.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Clouds, Evil, Long

  H. P. Lovecraft (2016). “H. P. LOVECRAFT äóñ Ultimate Collection: 120+ Works ALL in One Volume: Complete Novellas & Short Stories, Juvenilia, Poetry, Essays & Collaborations: The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Out of Time, At the Mountains of Madness, The Dunwich Horror, Dagon, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Outsider, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Cats of Ultharäó_”, p.844, e-artnow

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• 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

  Depth, Lost, Humans

  "The Friends of Voltaire". Book by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, 1906.

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• 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.

  Alice Cary

  Fighting, Men, Soul

  Alice Cary, Phoebe Cary, Mary Clemmer (1876). “The Poetical Works of Alice and Phoebe Cary”, p.180

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• 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.

  Virginia Woolf

  Clouds, Sharks, Hands

  Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.58, Virginia Woolf

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• 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

  Lonely, Destiny, Belief

  Joseph Conrad (1999). “Heart of Darkness - Second Edition”, p.121, Broadview Press

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

  Confucius

  Thinking, Vain, Labour

  Confucius (1996). “Le Lun Yü en français”

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

  Susanna Kaysen

  Boredom, Despair, Emptiness

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• I was like a lost moon―my planet destroyed in some cataclysmic, disaster-movie scenario of desolation―that continued, nevertheless, to circle in a tight little orbit around the empty space left behind, ignoring the laws of gravity.

  Stephenie Meyer

  Moon, Law, Circles

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• 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

  Despair, Overcoming, Each Day

  Max Ehrmann (2017). “The Desiderata of Happiness”, p.11, Souvenir Press Ltd

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• When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

  John Steinbeck

  Wise, Jobs, Children

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• As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.

  Milan Kundera

  Choices, Unhappy, Your Freedom

  "Identity". Book by Milan Kundera, 1998.

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• 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

  Humanity, Trying, Spirit

  Masanobu Fukuoka (2010). “The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming”, p.159, New York Review of Books

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• 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

  God, Loneliness, Mind

  Vincent van Gogh (1959). “Complete Letters: With Reproductions of All the Drawings in the Correspondence”

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• 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

  Strong, Pain, Grief

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1954). “The Power of Emerson's Wisdom”

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

  George Meredith

  Death, Nature, Garden

  George Meredith (1862). “Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside: With Poems and Ballads”, p.203

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• Christianity indeed has equaled Judaism in the atrocities, and exceeded it in the extent of its desolation. Eleven millions of men, women, and children have been killed in battle, butchered in their sleep, burned to death at public festivals of sacrifice, poisoned, tortured, assassinated, and pillaged in the spirit of the Religion of Peace, and for the glory of the most merciful God.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Religious, Children, Sleep

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Homer, Euripides, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1929). “The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley”

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• 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

  Beautiful, Compassion, Agony

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• To engage human energy, human skill, and human talent in the service of peace, for the alternative is unthinkable - war, destruction, and desolation; and to build a world community which will stand as a lasting monument to the millions of men and women, to such devoted and distinguished world citizens and fighters for peace as the late Dag Hammarskjöld, who have given their lives that we may live in happiness and peace.

  Albert Lutuli

  War, Men, Skills

  "Africa and Freedom". Albert Lutuli's Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 11, 1961.

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• I sat in my desolation Withdrawn from all around, Feeling my life was a ruin, a failure. I was empty inside with the utter collapse of my being. I did not care anymore for living or dying. I was alone in my distress and desolation. But as I sat sadly on the ground, The sun reached out his hand to me and touched my face. And so my healing began.

  Marjorie Pizer

  Healing, Hands, Funeral

  Marjorie Pizer (2014). “To You the Living”, p.52, Lulu Press, Inc

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• 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

  Rome, Victory, Triumph

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• 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.

  William Shakespeare

  Love You, Eye, Shoes

  "The Plays of William Shakespeare".

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• Love is most nearly itself
  When here and now cease to matter.
  Old men ought to be explorers
  Here or there does not matter
  We must be still and still moving
  Into another intensity
  For a further union, a deeper communion
  Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
  The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
  Of the petrel and the porpoise.

  T. S. Eliot

  Life, Moving, Dark

  T.S. Eliot (2016). “Cuatro cuartetos: Precedido por La roca y Asesinato en la Catedral”, p.99, LUMEN

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• Glory falls around us as we sob a dirge of desolation on the Cross

  Maya Angelou

  Fall, Glory, Crosses

  Maya Angelou (2011). “I Shall Not Be Moved: Poems”, p.28, Random House

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• I -- I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday -- nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time -- his death and her sorrow -- I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together -- I heard them together.

  Joseph Conrad

  Powerful, Yesterday, Hands

  Joseph Conrad (2015). “Joseph Conrad Ultimate Collection: 18 Novels, 20+ Short Stories, Letters & Memoirs: Including Classics like Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Duel, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, Victory, The Shadow-Line & Under Western Eyes”, p.603, e-artnow

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