Quotes About Desolation

There was no sign of any life, just erratic hints of a faded sun peeking down with sorrow on the dead world it once nourished.

So I'm alone. I have no one. Is that what you're telling me?" - Junco, Range (to be published April 2013)

He'd felt like a jack-o-lantern for the past few days, as if his guts had been yanked out with a fork and dumped in a heap while a grinning smile stayed plastered on his face.

You came one day and as usual in such matters significance filled everything - your eyes, the things you knew, the way you turned, leaned, stood, or sat, this way or that: when you left, the area around here rose a tilted tide, and everything that offers desolation drained away.

One traveler to the Congo came on a deserted town where a fifteen-foot boa constrictor was dining on smallpox victims' flesh, and on another where the vultures were so gorged that they were too heavy to fly.

I could write a guidebook about this city, this fallen city. Street by street, house by house, church by church. What happened in this building, who was betrayed, and by whom, in this apartment, who waited for whom on this street corner. And why the person never came.

The worst punishment you can give a man is to isolate him. I've never seen one who can handle it.

They make a desolation and call it peace.

So this is what it is to be a failure. The chief characteristic may be silence: the phone doesn't ring, he isn't asked out, nothing new happens. For most of his adult life he has conceived of failure in the form of a spectacular catastrophe, only to recognize at last that it has in fact crept up on him imperceptibly through cowardly inaction.

Nobody came to Jakku.

You are…you are…" The merchant tried to control himself. "You have nothing. You are nothing!

Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen.

I was applying myself to the subtler connoisseurship of the out-of-season, days without warmth and nights without encounters, empty pleasure-grounds and the violence of the tides.

Please, don't go. It's lonely. There's a hole in my head as big as the world and it's so very lonely...

The horror is this: In the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else.

I looked at this man. He was in his fifites, mostly bones inside hisblack suit, and gave off an odour, if you were as close up to him as I was, of a long-closed keyboard opened suddenly in an empty house. (73)

I looked at this man. He was in his fifties, mostly bones inside his black suit, and gave off an odour, if you were as close up to him as I was, of a long-closed keyboard opened suddenly in an empty house. (73)

cold, like swallowed tears.

Those sentimental radio hits, with their artificial naivete and empty crudities, are the pitiful remains and the maximum that people will tolerate by way of mental effort; it's a ghastly desolation and impoverishmment. By contrast, we can be very glad when something affects us deeply, and regard the accompanying pains as an enrichment.

In lei, Laide, viveva meravigliosamente la città, dura, decisa, presuntuosa, sfacciata, orgogliosa, insolente. Nella degradazione degli animi e delle cose, fra suoni e luci equivoci, al'ombra tetra dei condominii, fra le muraglie di cemento e di gesso, nella frenetica desolazione, una specie di fiore.

I muri nudi ed umidi, il silenzio, lo squallore delle luci: tutti là dentro parevano essersi dimenticati che in qualche parte del mondo esistevano fiori, donne ridenti, case allegre e ospitali. Tutto là dentro era una rinuncia, ma per chi, per quale misterioso bene?

Che triste sbaglio, pensò Drogo, forse tutto è così, crediamo che attorno ci siano creature simili a noi e invece non c'è che gelo, pietre che parlano una lingua straniera, stiamo per salutare l'amico ma il braccio ricade inerte, il sorriso si spegne, perché ci accorgiamo di essere completamente soli. [Il deserto dei Tartari]

we think there are beings like ourselves around us and instead there is nothing but ice and stones speaking a strange language; we are on the point of greeting a friend but our arm falls inert, the smile dies away because we are completely alone.

What a terrible mistake, thought Drogo, perhaps everything is like that — we think there are beings like ourselves around us and instead there is nothing but ice and stones speaking a strange language; we are on the point of greeting a friend but our arm falls inert, the smile dies away because we are completely alone.