Quotes About Desolation

The house stank; a stench all its own pervaded every corner. It was a threnody in the key of Cat minor, with a ground-bass of Old Dog, and modulations of old people, waning lives, and relinquished hopes.

I have been very miserable since - miserable not for an hour but for months on end - but I can still feel that hour's misery in its perfect desolation, if I am fool enough to call it up in my mind.

Evil is a kind of oblivion, having destroyed everything on its way there.

The worst was when there was nothing in the sky, nothing to grab, blue blue blue.

Tragedy reminds us that beauty is a redemptive presence in our lives: it is the face of love, shining in the midst of desolation.

In the State of Denmark there was the odor of decay...

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.

Grim evening at Gabès (windy, black clouds, hideous bungalows, "folklore" performance in the Hotel Chems bar): I can no longer take refuge in my thoughts: neither in Paris nor traveling. No escape.

I'm cold, the lover says, let's go back, but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked.

They were in flat empty country and she eased the silent car faster down a dead-straight road. The hot sky was tinted bottle-green by the windshield.

The house was closed up and empty. Locked doors, shaded windows, no broken glass. No burglars, no squatters. No feral Rose Sanderson, going to earth in a place she remembered.

completely deserted.

Not anymore—not exactly." If I'd had more words, I'd have described Greenstone's last operational motel, the Voyageur, a peeling L-shaped heap with scraggy whirlwinds of litter roaming the parking lot. Though technically "open," the Voyageur is always full, its rooms permanently occupied by the owner's grown children who failed to rise on the outside.

Buscamos a tientas la pared, como los ciegos; andamos a tientas como si no tuviéramos ojos; tropezamos en el mediodía como si fuera de noche; nos encontramos en lugares desolados como si hubiéramos muerto. Rugimos como osos y gemimos doloridos como tórtolas…;

Nobody took care of Lazarus, he no longer had any relatives or friends, and the great desert, which embraced the holy city, approached the very threshold of his dwelling place. And she came into his house, and she sprawled across his bed, like a wife, and she extinguished the fires.

My heart is a void, dead, and this makes me sad.

It hurt to be so alone. It hurt to be forgotten.

They died, leaving behind the kind of void that is never filled, a relentless ache that follows an abandoned child throughout her entire life. And

The old gal was only another lonely creature in a world that didn't care

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

The bruises hurt him, the cuts were still bleeding; but it was not for pain that he sobbed ; it was because he was all alone, because he had been driven out, alone, into this skeleton world of rocks and moonlight.

At the city gates a corpse or two hung, moldering, from the municipal gallows. Within the walls, there were the usual dirty streets, the customary gamut of smells, from wood smoke to excrement, from geese to incense, from baking bread to horses, swine and unwashed humanity. Peasants

The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills.

But neither Europe nor Africa can show any such desolation as America. The proudest, stubbornest, bitterest peasant of deserted Spain, the most primitive and superstitious Arab of the remotest oases, are a little more than kin and never less than kind at their worst; whereas in the United States one is almost always conscious of an instinctive lack of sympathy and understanding with even the most charming and cultured people.