Quotes About Devastation

HBOS had robbed me of my marriage, my family, my businesses, my longstanding friend and business partner, my income, my investments, my self-respect, my reputation, my privacy, my physical and mental health. It cost me my security, my image rights, my collection of classic cars - and very nearly my life.

Deliberately modifying the earth's atmosphere would be a desperate gamble with significant risks. Yet the more likely climate change is to cause devastation, the more attractive even the most perilous attempts to mitigate those changes will become.

I tried to imagine a church that did not support its country's wars as a matter of patriotic course and instead stood against the devastation and suffering they caused in people's lives. (from 'The Dance of the Dissident Daughter'.)

The shock of a sudden death, Joan Didion attests, is "obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.

She was very aware of the fact that her first act on the road to healing had been to devastate someone she loved. The shit road of being a drunk never went away.

But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.

The disaster came so swiftly and so completely that there was, Ryan conceded, a certain poetry in its magnificence.

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.

Up until the 17th century, Germany was far more advanced, but then everything devastated by the 30 Years War began to fall apart... The culture is not innocent.

Hillary Clinton means devastation. It means world instability.

To never see her again, to never hear her sweet voice, smell her warm scent…it was simply unbearable. The loss felt like death and in a way it was—the death of everything that meant anything to him. Gods, how was he going to go on?

Some of the most heart-breaking letters I receive are from people who tell how alcohol or drugs have ravaged their lives and destroyed their families.

Feelings flake off and fall in dust. The senses, vitrified, can no longer experience pleasure; they crack at the least provocation. Each of us, within, was as if devoured by a conflagration, and our hearts were no more than a pinch of ashes. Our souls were laid waste. For a long time now we had believed in nothing, not even in nothingness.

LIGHTNING CAN DEVASTATE a human being. Except for floods, it kills more people in the United States annually than any other weather event.

Loneliness was also the young woman in black who came almost every day to the Polytechnic. She knew exactly which of all the tangled skeletons lying on the cold concrete were those of her little girl and her husband. She would go straight to one of the sixty-four doors of Murambi and stand in the middle of the room before two intertwined corpses: a man clutching a decapitated child against him. The young woman in black prayed in silence, and then left.

Everytime you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart.

We worked so hard, so hard, building our world one brick at a time. And when it fell apart, it happened just like that. Everything was gone before you knew it.

But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.

What struck me first on reading the Ten Hoeve-Jacobson paper was how small the consequences of the radiation release from the Fukushima reactor accident are projected to be compared to the devastation wrought by the giant earthquake and tsunami.

One day, when we were coming back from school, we saw this big cloud of smoke coming up, and all these fire-trucks in the yard. The garage was burning down. I was 14, and we'd lost everything.

Tragedy struck the family when I was 10 days old. My eldest brother was killed in a car accident. He was six. My grandmother survived the incident, but the loss devastated my parents. I think they went into shock for a couple of years.

I thought you were gone, Pepper. It was bad enough to lose you the first time, but to lose you like that? I couldn't have dealt with that.

But there, war does not care for predetermination; it also destroys in fury that wich is immaterial, the hopes and expectations (from Requiem for a Hotel /Nekrolog auf ein Hotel,1918)

Something deep in the human soul awakens as things fall apart. Something in the soul knows that everything in this world can become lost. And something in the soul knows how to survive periods of devastation, disorientation and loss. Descent and falling is the way of the soul from its beginning. We each fell from the womb of life when the waters of the inner sea broke and it came time for us to breathe on our own.