Quotes About Desolation

Only supreme in misery!

Thus with the Year Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark Surrounds me, from the chearful waies of men Cut off, and for the book of knowledg fair Presented with a Universal blanc Of Natures works to mee expung'd and ras'd, And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out.

Isa. xliii. 22, "Thou hast not called upon me, thou hast been weary of me.

The calm and the sorrow were so great that they bore down on his chest, and the loneliness was complete, a circle impenetrable.

Salinas for the alkali which was white as salt.

He's lonelier than you are because he has no lovely future to dream about.

She breathed that air he'd forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler.

An earth hard as iron lay locked beneath a sky whose mottled clouds spit snow like ashes sucked up a chimney and then dispersed with the smoke.

winter is no stranger to cold hearts.

In the middle of nowhere, a trunk heavy with gold is a burden, not treasure.

Because there wasn't anything else to do, he settled at the kitchen tablewith a bottle of mead and nearly emptied it. The anesthetic effect he hoped for hadn't happened, though. At least not yet.

It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.

The lobby was at once attractive and bleak, a place meant to impress without creating the desire to linger.

Every step stranger. The bones of buildings had torn through their stone skin and lay exposed. Collapsed walls buried the cobblestones. Shattered glass dusted the scene with razor-edged glitter. The dust clouds were lit brighter by a dozen fires burning out of sight.

Whoa, Mother Hubbard. That's some empty cupboard.

Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity.

There was nowhere to sit except the bunk, which was covered with rotting food, and a wooden stool, upon which sat a large fur-covered lump—an old cheese, perhaps, or a dead cat.

But never in his saddest dreams had he thought he'd spend his last years dusting this enormous old house for no one at all.

Repeated and prolonged proximity to moribund logging communities set off my misanthropy.

I]t was the way The ruined moonlight fell across her hair, It was that, and it was more. — Mark Strand, from section II of "What It Was," Blizzard of One: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)

It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.

He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable

The sumptuous age of stars and images is reduced to a few artificial tornado effects, pathetic fake buildings, and childish tricks which the crowd pretends to be taken in by to avoid feeling too disappointed. Ghost towns, ghost people. The whole place has the same air of obsolescence about it as Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard.

Here then at long last is my darkness. No cry of light, no glimmer, not even the faintest shard of hope to break free across the hold.