Quotes About Disaster

invariably the character with the strongest, clearest goal motivation going in. To say this a different way: The goal that starts a scene ordinarily should be stated by the story person who is to be the viewpoint character in that scene. And once this viewpoint has been established, you will be wise to stay in that viewpoint at least through the disaster ending the scene.

5. Disaster works (moves the story forward) by seeming to move the central Figure further back from his goal, leaving him in worse trouble than he was before the scene started. It may seem paradoxical to beginning novelists that scenes work best when they move the lead character further from his story goal – that the best narrative progress often appears to be backwards.

What is a scene? It's a segment of story action, written moment-by-moment, without summary, presented onstage in the story "now." It is not something that goes on inside a character's head; it is physical. It could be put on the theater stage and acted out. What is the pattern of a scene? Fundamentally, it is: Statement of goal. Introduction and development of conflict. Failure of the character to reach his goal, a tactical disaster.

Everything beautiful is golden and strewn with pearls. Even golden people live here. But misfortune is a dark power, a monstrous, cannibalistic giant, who is, however, vanquished, because a good woman, who happily knows how to avert disaster, stands ready to help.

A collision at sea can ruin your entire day.

In the cosmos of a tragedy, even one or two mitigating moments can turn aside an unqualified disaster. But sometimes disaster is without defect, and every one of the thousand instants on which destinies turn goes terribly and perfectly wrong.

The bottom line is that heat kills more people than any other natural disaster, and yet heat waves go unnamed.

The bottom line is that heat kills more people than any other natural disaster, and yet heat waves go unnamed. They do not blow in with 100-mile-per-hour winds, a blistering, swirling shadowlike image on radar with a defined eye, or shake the ground in an intense display of drama. No. Heat is a silent killer. It slowly and stealthily moves into a region like a ghost, targeting the vulnerable and unsuspecting.

Titanic as it sank into the icy sea? Would you prefer that the men leap ahead of you into the lifeboats, leave you and your children to die?" Alva answered without pause. "If a woman had designed the ship in the first place, there would have been enough lifeboats for everyone.

But we glared into each other's eyes like men who have ruined each other already, and who only wait to make the full disaster known

I hope I'm wrong, but I am afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy - worse than Vietnam, not in the number who died, but in terms of its unintended consequences and its reverberation throughout the region.

Who are you? What do you want? Who are you?" Her voice was light and fast and intense and her mouth trembled. She seemed to be on the narrow edge of emotional disaster, holding herself in check with the greatest effort. And about her was a rich and heavy scent of brandy, and an unsteadiness, the eyes too swift and not exactly in focus.

Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes. It can no longer be of concern to great powers alone. For a nuclear disaster, spread by winds and waters and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike. Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.

Not long after Vayden left, there was a big rain, and a flood. Because the creeks and rivers are choked off, the water is diverted to other runoffs. Flooding is a huge problem, to say the least. An avalanche of mud and trees and topsoil swept through the valley and took out the Gray home. Crushed it and scattered it for miles downstream. Fortunately, no one was in the house; by then it was uninhabitable, not even Webster could stay

Only a change in our way of life would heal the sickness of our age — and this is only likely to happen when disaster confronts us.

Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest were wounded. Of 1,780 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too badly hurt to work. In the biggest hospital, that of the Red Cross, only six doctors out of thirty were able to function, and only ten nurses out of more than two hundred.

No es buen momento para un terremoto," Lupe used to say. "It's not a good moment for an earthquake.

It will all end very badly, Gus

Then the shit hit the fan.

The first is the extreme brevity of the financial memory. In consequence, financial disaster is quickly forgotten.

in 1835 Harvard's Jacob Bigelow had argued in a major address that in "the unbiased opinion of most medical men of sound judgment and long experience . . . the amount of death and disaster in the world would be less, if all disease were left to itself.

What is lacking in India are decent social services. The health service is a disaster. Education is a disaster.

I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest.

You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.