Quotes About Desolation

Emptiness will always cripple me.

You might come here Sunday on a whim. Say your life broke down. The last good kiss you had was years ago. You walk these streets laid out by the insane, past hotels that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try of local drivers to accelerate their lives. Only churches are kept up. The jail turned 70 this year. The only prisoner is always in, not knowing what he's done.

I have only these words that seem as if they climbed up from the bottom of a dry well.

How long has it been since I've seen sunlight? Down in the asshole of creation, it was a dim, perpetual crimson-and-magenta twilight.

Do you even know what death is, Tom?" I say. "It's dumb, and it's loud, and it smells bad; you're in Hell and you want to die to get away from it all, but you're already dead and there's nowhere to go. And what's worse is you know you're there because you deserve it, because you're such a fucking waste of skin and gristle. So no, I don't want to die. It's no fun and there's too many people like you there.

Shit," Jonny mumbled as he stepped on something soft and clinging in the doorway of the abandoned hotel. Then "Shit" again as he recognized the accuracy of his curse.

Wherever we are, it isn't like the Tenebrae. No desert monotony. No spiked mountains. It's more like forest land after a nuke attack. Bare, mossy skeleton-like trees and tough tangles of gray and green weeds sprouting on low rolling hills. Pretty much everything but the weeds seems dead here.

If you shot time in the gut, this is where it would crawl off to die.

I down whatever's in the glass, though, because at this point I'd drink paint thinner out of a hobo's galoshes.

Precisely because she had tended and pitied, the desolation is hers as well.

And words, little words, words too small for any hope or promise, not really soothing

The fields burned, the land destroyed, the lovers left broken in the brown dirt.

because you are weak and hollow and it doesn't matter anymore.

You take her out into the rain and you fall in love with her and she leaves you and you're desolate.

and suddenly darkness, suddenly only darkness.

almost time to go home—and he had come to rely on the desolate wastes of time that lay between these pleasures as an invalid comes to rely on the certainty of recurring pain. It was a part of him.

Then he was gone, and Prentice was alone in a silence that rang with all his shrill, unspoken words. He was so alone that the only thing to do was lie back on the bed and roll over and draw up his knees like an unborn baby, staring with dry eyes at a cluster of pink flowers on the wallpaper, knowing he had never been so alone in his life.

Being alone is a terrible, terrible thing. There's no one to run to, no one to confide in, no one who cares what happens to you.

she seemed too beautiful and too ethereal to be part of this dreary landscape.

Oh well, maybe the only beauty left in cities is in the oil slicks on the road and maybe there isn't any beauty left in the people who live in these places.

This, he thought, is what hell must be like. Hell without heat. There was something unholy about it all, something unbelievably diabolical.

The Psalms show us what healthy spiritual life looks like. You name everything that's happening inside of you. You give it language and expression, You articulate exactly what the desolation feels like. If you don't drag it up and give it words, then it's buried down in your being somewhere. And it will come out in other ways. Unhealthy, destructive ways. You'll keep it bottled up. And you'll be miserable.

The room seemed to have lost a certain essence that he could not pin down. Then knew suddenly what it was. The room was—lonely. For the first time in his life, he knew what loneliness was like. Until that moment the word had been meaningless to him.

seep in, with its physical cruelty, economic exploitation, and barren