Quotes About Desolation

The valley… was full of bones… and lo, they were very dry.

Abomination of desolation.

When you set in western lightland,Earth is in darkness as if in death.

In Mangando and Marimbanguengo, I saw the full misery and evil of the war, the pointlessness of it all, in the soldiers' eyes, like those of wounded birds, in their state of despair and abandon, in the second lieutenant in shorts sprawled on the table, the stray dogs gobbling up leftovers on the parade ground, the flag hanging from the flag­pole like a limp penis, I saw it in the twenty-year-old men sitting in the shade in silence, like old men in parks...

But God is only a white cold eye, a quarter-moon poised above the smoke, blinking, blinking, as the city is gradually pounded to dust.

Beyond the broken window hangs a windless night. Ashes swirling in starlight.

Somewhere in the ruins above them, the cats are howling.

The life went out of his eyes and it suddenly occurred to me that murderers are the loneliest people on the planet. It's the curse of Cain – the fugitive and the vagabond driven out from the face of the earth.

Both camels are dead and our provisions are done.

In cities, people go to work and all walk there together, like some arterial flow. And there's a certain desolation about it, an alienation that we all experience.

You are forever alone.

These trenches are like Pompeii, sir.

It wasn't as if we were waiting for a train, it wasn't as if we were waiting for a meal - it was just that there were was nothing to wait for. Nothing.

It's a lonely place. Sometimes it's the loneliest place in the world.

It sounded like something in a book and it did not make Mary feel cheerful. A house with a hundred rooms, nearly all shut up and with their doors locked—a house on the edge of a moor—whatsoever a moor was—sounded dreary. A man with a crooked back who shut himself up also! She stared out of the window with her lips pinched together, and it seemed quite natural that the rain should have begun to pour down in gray

I've stolen a garden. It isn't mine, it isn't anybody's. Nobody wants it, nobody cares for it, nobody ever goes into it. Perhaps everything is dead in it already, I don't know. I don't care, I don't care. Nobody has any right to take it from me when I care about it and they don't. They're letting it die, all shut in by itsellf!

Humans are always most lonely.

Arrakeen had become an ungenerous place, a contained place, unreasonable and self-righteous in its harsh outlines.

A forty-meter section of the hutment had been blasted away there and the selamlik's doors opened now onto drifting sand. A dust cloud hung low over the outside world blowing from pastel distances. Static lightning crackled from the cloud and the spark flashes of shields being shorted out by the storm's charge could be seen through the haze. The plain surged with figures in combat—Sardaukar and leaping gyrating robed men who seemed to come down out of the storm.

Nothing, nothing, the whole long day, nothing.

If I am ever to find these trees meaningful I must have you by the hand. As it is, they stretch dusty fingers into an obscure sky, and the snow looks up like a face dirtied with tears. Should I cry out and see what happens? There could only be a stranger wandering in this landscape, cold, unfortunate, himself frozen fast in wintry eyes.

Huge live oaks, hung with Spanish moss, partly hid a stately white Southern mansion in need of paint. Wisteria blossoms hung bell-like from vines climbing the walls. The Hardys mounted the steps of the still stately portico, supported by high, once-white round columns. Frank knocked repeatedly on the door. There was no response. As they circled the neglected structure, they rapped on windows, called out, pounded on side and back doors, with no results.

There were no ships to be seen, and no people; only here and there the traces of some old building. Many villages had flourished in these parts before the first Northmen came, but everything had long since been plundered and laid waste, so that nowadays men had to travel far to the south before they could find any prizes worth the taking.

A picture of my existence... would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow... stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.