Quotes About Desolation

Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them. —CORMAC MCCARTHY, Child of God, 1973

It was a place if not hell then certainly the room across the hall from it.

He could have set fire to it, the garden was dry enough, and burned it clean—privet, vines, and weeds; but he waited in his rooms through the winter instead, weeping and dreaming.

He hated winter. The same gray sky lay on the ground, day after day, gray as industrial smoke, and in the sky the ground floated like a street that's been salted, and his closets were cold, holes wore through his pockets, and he was lonely, indoors and out, with a loneliness like the loneliness of overshoes or someone else's cough.

few odd souls wandered about Surf Avenue looking for something to do. Sheets of newspaper blew like tumbleweed down broad, empty streets. Overhead, a pair of sea gulls hovered, scanning the ground for discarded scraps. All along the avenue, cotton candy stands, fun houses, and games of chance were tightly shuttered, like clowns without makeup. Nathan

Sam's Place had never felt so empty. He suspected the emptiness was not in the old Quonset hut; it was in him. There was nothing in him now, nothing but the great emptiness of death, which he seemed to carry with him like a virus.

The place had the gritty untidiness of belonging to no one, a litter bin for wasted time.

The walls were dun and featureless, the furniture was arranged with all the homeyness of a second-hand sale-room and clothes were littered everywhere. It wasn't a room so much as a suitcase with doors.

My soul is disconsolate when God is withdrawn.

That the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty

Then said I, Lord, how long [will people be like this]? And he answered, Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate [in other words, as long as people are around],

wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. Lose your child and you're… nothing. —Tennessee Williams

Still passing through the same desolate country, we see that he makes a note on the forsaken fields and the watch-towers in them. Cucumbers are cultivated in large quantities by the natives of Inner Africa, and the reader will no doubt call to mind the simile adopted by Isaiah some 2500 years ago, as he pictured the coming desolation of Zion, likening her to a "lodge in a garden of cucumbers.

In times of desolation, God conceals Himself from us so that we can discover for ourselves what we are without Him.

Great God! This is an awful place.

God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine.

O father, father Gone from us, lost to us, The church lies bereft, Alone, Desecrated, desolated. And the heathen shall build On the ruins Their world without God. I see it. I see it.

One phrase summarizes the horror of hell. "God isn't there."

God-forsaken is beautiful, too.

We're not meant for happiness, you and I.

Unlove's the heavenless hell and the homeless home.

I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.

We honor founders of these starving cities, Whose honor is the image of our sorrow.

There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.