Quotes About Desolation

Quentin felt cold all the time like he was trapped in his own private individual winter

It's a wasteland out there. Out here. You can do nothing or anything or everything, and none of it matters. You have to find something to really care about to keep from running totally off the rails.

Always winter but never Christmas.

It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened - an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark: there was nothing here but emptiness.

The ending is one of my blackest, utterly without hope of any sort.

The most terrifying thing I can think of is being alone - and I mean utterly alone, like no one else in the world alone - at night. That's the nucleus of the first story in my collection and it's also where the title came from for the book.

Downtown Detroit has more vacant buildings over 10 storeys than any city in the world.

This was more than death, it was the heart's death.

Human feeling. That's beyond my range. I'm rotten to the core.

I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail ghosts in my room.

Shall I tell her that in spite of everything they did I died then? Shall I tell her what it feels like to be dead? It's not being sad, it's quite different. It's being nothing, feeling nothing. (...) it's like walking along a road in a fog, knowing that you have left everything behind you. But you don't want to go back; you've got to go on.

The dark forest looked on fire. The trees were lit up like funeral pyres. She thought she saw bodies strapped to the trees, burning, burning, burning.

city was lost in darkness now, and anyone left there was lost, too.

A bird feeder hung from the porch roof, but there were no seeds in it. The curtains in all the windows were closed.

The Nausea has stayed down there, in the yellow light. I am happy: this cold is so pure, this night so pure: am I myself not a wave of icy air? With neither blood, nor lymph, nor flesh. Flowing down this long canal towards the pallor down there. To be nothing but coldness.

We stay silent for a moment. Evening is coming on; I can hardly make out the pale spot of her face. Her black dress melts with the shadow which floods the room. I pick up my cup mechanically, there's a little tea left in it and I bring it to my lips. The tea is cold. I want to smoke but I don't dare. I have the terrible feeling that we have nothing more to say to one another.

Neither sad nor gay is the desert—a boundless waste of sand under a burning waste of sky.

The house was as empty as a beer closet in premises where painters have been at work.

One of these days they'll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.

No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith

Their lives had stopped, frozen, as if in a picture, and the days were nothing more than empty squares on a calendar.

En dieper dan de nacht'lijk roode stad, in tocht en vuilnisch der beschaving, op een smal perron met betegelde muuren en reclameborden, zoek ik de gelede kookers, de spooren en mechanische zuuren van een helwitte zwam: ondanks ontbuiging het geborgen gevoel, als in een schoot. Maar wie ben ik, dat ik hoopen kan. Dat ik niet word zooals den Roltrap hier: slechts bewegend door betreding, en door beweging sneller eenzaam.

skin the off-white of a dirty motel sheet.

and the earth died screaming, while I lay dreaming...