Quotes About Catastrophe

One hemisphere was a giant bull's-eye, a series of concentric rings where solid rock had once flowed in kilometer-high ripples under some ancient hammer blow from space.

You'll never see the moments coming that will forever mutilate your life—at least not until after they've mowed you down. —SAVITAR

I have never suffered greatly ... If you can reach fifty without a catastrophe, you've won. You've got away with it.

The eruption of Krakatoa was, indeed, the first true catastrophe in the world to take place after the establishment of a worldwide network of telegraph cables—a network that allowed news of disaster to be flashed around the planet in double-quick time.

The death throes of Krakatoa lasted for exactly twenty hours and fifty-six minutes, culminating in the gigantic explosion that all observers now agree happened at 10:02 A.M. on Monday, August 27, 1883.

In the aftermath of Krakatoa's eruption, 165 villages were devastated, 36,417 people died, and uncountable thousands were injured—and almost all of them, villages and inhabitants, were victims not of the eruption directly but of the immense sea-waves* that were propelled outward from the volcano by that last night of detonations.

The explosion itself was terrific, a monstrous thing that still attracts an endless procession of superlatives. It was the greatest detonation, the loudest sound, the most devastating volcanic event in modern recorded human history, and it killed more than thirty-six thousand people.

When misfortune comes, The wisest even lose their mother wit

That all our gathered spoil was reaved and slaughtered, Flocks, herds, and herdmen, by some human hand

Your great good fortune, true, it was your ruin.

I am nothing more than the consequence of catastrophe.

All hell broke loose.

One may as well be optimistic. The road to catastrophe will be rougher if it's paved with dread.

If you think things can't get any worse, you have no imagination and no sense of history.

We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn't, why would there be so many of them? There's something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell's pork and beans, defending one's family from marauders. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive. All those other folks will die. That's what after-the-bomb stories are all about.

Humans are actually far more likely to get taken out by an impact event or a supervolcano than we are to get killed in a crash of a commercial airliner.

Mr. Stallone and Ms. Stone… a meeting as disastrous as the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic

Child!' Eleanor exclaimed. 'You didn't say there'd been a child!' 'I said a catastrophe,' her mother replied. 'And believe me, in cases such as these, the words are one and the same.

Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

Istoria universal? nu e altceva decât o repetare de catastrofe în aÅŸteptarea unei catastrofe finale.

En el estallido del volcán de nuestro ser, ¿bastaría el veneno acumulado en nosotros para envenenar al mundo entero?

Cei care cu adevarat il simt aceia sau il tolereaza cu orgoliu sau il prezinta ca pe o calamitate. Nimeni nu este insa incantat in fondul fiintei lui de aceasta achizitie catastrofala pentru viata care este spiritul.

There is no negator who is not famished for some catastrophic yes .

We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life.