Quotes About Catastrophe

There is all the difference in the world between knowing that a catastrophe is going to happen, and knowing that it has happened.

No, father, we are losing; and we shall go on losing, and I think we must even be ready for a catastrophe at any moment.

and his goose would be cooked; probably suicide would be his only way out.

It is an axiom of warfare that a good officer never reinforces failure. To do so simply throws away more lives and a good general will avoid doing that. A commander's task, even in moments of defeat, is to find some way forward, some way out of the current catastrophe and when General Haig assembled his reports and looked at his maps on 2-3 July, he saw that all was not yet lost in this battle on the Somme.

I don't suppose anybody really knows how bad a thing can be until it actually happens.

Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive.

But it was an unrefrigerated world. And everything ended badly.

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder… over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

I invoke the other's protection, the other's return: let the other appear, take me away, like a mother who comes looking for her child, from this worldly brilliance, from this social infatuation, let the other restore to me the religious intimacy, the gravity of the lover's world. (X once told me that love had protected him against worldliness: coteries, ambitions, advancements, interferences, alliances, secessions, roles, powers: love had made him into a social catastrophe, to his delight.)

There were no explosions. But the brutal calamitous physical noise was maybe worse.

In 1943 they had started a firestorm that all but wiped Hamburg out. Flames a thousand feet high, temperatures of a thousand degrees, the air on fire, the roads on fire, rivers and canals boiling. Forty thousand dead in one raid. Britain had lost sixty thousand in the whole war. They that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind. Hosea, one of the twelve minor prophets, but dead on the money in that case. The

The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.

Gathering Blue' was a separate book. I wanted to explore what a society might become after a catastrophic world event. Only at the end did I realize I could make it connect to 'The Giver.

Every generation has a macabre notion that wars, government prohibition, natural disasters or mankind itself could be the downfall of society and the world as a whole.

Catastrophe is the essence of the spiritual path, a series of breakdowns allowing us to discover the threads that weave all of life into a whole cloth.

We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the Earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored.

De qué sirven la verdad, la belleza o el conocimiento cuando las bombas de ántrax llueven del cielo?

Improvvisamente vide ciò che pensava invisibile. La fine del mondo.

There are some catastrophes that a poor writer's pen cannot describe and which he is obliged to leave to the imagination of his readers with a bald statement of the facts.

There is something so awe-inspiring in great afflictions that even in the worst times the first emotion of a crowd has generally been to sympathise with the sufferer in a great catastrophe.

Melancholy in a capitalist, like the appearance of a comet, presages some misfortune to the world.