Quotes & Sayings About Bereft

Something escapes us, and we are escaping from ourselves, or losing ourselves, as part of an irreversible process; we have now passed some point of no return, the point where the contradictoriness of things ended, and we find ourselves, still alive, in a universe of non-contradiction, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy - of stupor in the face of a process which, for all its irreversibility, is bereft of meaning. — Jean Baudrillard

How strange it is, Anna. Yesterday, I have filed in my mind as a good day, notwithstanding it was filled with mortal illness and the grieving of the recently bereft. Yet it is a good day, for the simple fact that no one died upon it. We are brought to a sorry state, that we measure what is good by such a shortened yardstick. — Geraldine Brooks

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet, Long live the weeds and the wildness yet. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

Knowing this secret, being the only one chosen to know, makes me feel important in a way. But it's a negative importance, it's the importance of a blank sheet of paper. I can know because I don't count. I feel singled out, but also bereft. — Margaret Atwood

As all partings foreshadow the great final one, - so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be. — Charles Dickens

To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss. — Chris Womersley

I half ran back to the car, feeling needlessly afraid. I was thinking of the violence of my last meeting with Scott, of the way he was at the end - wild and paranoiac, on the edge of madness. There'll be no peace for him now. How can there be? I think about that, and the way he used to be - the way they used to be, the way I imagined them to be - and I feel bereft. I feel their loss, too. — Paula Hawkins

The human mind is a product of the Pleistocene age, shaped by wildness that has all but disappeared. If we complete the destruction of nature, we will have succeeded in cutting ourselves off from the source of sanity itself. Hermetically sealed amidst our creations and bereft of those of the
Creation, the world then will reflect only the demented image of the mind imprisoned within itself. Can the mind doting on itself and its creations be sane? — Edward O. Wilson

His warmth was like a gift given and snatched away, and she stood there with her back to the window, feeling chilled, bereft, and undone. And angry. It was a childish, cartoonish anger- facing Akiva, she had wanted to beat her fists at his chest and then fall against him and feel his arms close around her. — Laini Taylor

I suppose that anyone who does any kind of creative work some time in their life - especially as you grow into middle age! - you come to a time where you really question more and more frequently, whether you have anything else to offer. And at its worst, you feel utterly bereft of whatever creative force it takes to do that work. — Daniel Day-Lewis

A Small Consolation

Everything that we once were,
is now a sad and lonely verse.

When once I had so much to say,
I am now bereft of words.

Sometimes it is the order of things,
that make them seem much worse.

It's not as if you would have stayed,
if I hadn't left you first. — Lang Leav

Few - very few - are entirely bereft of at least one solace-giving memory: a childhood prayer answered, a testimony borne long ago, a fleeting moment of perfect peace. And for those few who despairingly insist they have never heard so much as a whisper, then know this: We don't need to look for a burning bush when all we need is to be still and remember that we have known the goodness of love, the rightness of virtue, the nobility of kindness and faithfulness. And as we remember, we can ask if we perceive in such beauties merely the random effects of Darwinian products, or the handwriting of God on our hearts. — Terryl L. Givens

Startled, I accidently knock over my inkwell. A black tsunami of ink sprawls out across the page, engulfing the tiny village of my words. They are swept away into the midnight sea. Gone forever. I am bereft. — Danger Slater

Inquisitor Lorsen's thin lip curled. "There is truly nothing in you of what separates man from animal, is there? You are bereft of conscience. An utter absence of morality. You have no principle beyond the selfish."
Cosca's face hardened as he leaned forwards. "Perhaps when you have faced as many disappointments and suffered as many betrayals as I, you will see it - there is no principle beyond the selfish, Inquisitor, and men are animals. Conscience is a burden we choose to bear. Morality is the lie we tell ourselves to make its bearing easier. There have been many times in my life when I have wished it was not so. But it is so. — Joe Abercrombie

All non-smokers seem to live in the belief that smokers have wandered naively through life, bereft of the knowledge that their habit is extremely bad for them. — Michael Marshall Smith

[ ... ] elite social engineers appear to be aiming at a "hetero-homo" world, i.e. where individuals are bisexual, promiscuous and bereft of family. — Henry Makow

The Prince's sudden relapse was a surprise. He usually appeared to be so much in control that it was difficult for her to imagine him losing his composure. Evidently he was quite shaken by this recent reverse. "You lost control again?" she asked. "One cannot lose what one never has," he told her. His defeat seemed total. She could not think of what to say, so she reached out and took him into her arms. He folded into her like a bereft child. She whispered into his ear. "You wonder if you have lost your humanity," she said. "But your feelings now are evidence to the contrary. What you now feel, regret, guilt, sadness, defeat - all are human. At the core of us all. You are not so removed from us as you think. — Patrick Sheane Duncan

Don't you have faith in your Saviour that He will raise you to life again? (...) Isn't that what you teach those grieving widows and bereft parents? (...) But you don't really believe that. You see nothing beyond the grave, so you are determined never to enter it. You want eternal life for yourself now, here in the flesh. You want to remain just as you are now, while all around you wither and die. (...) You crave the power that will come only when you can outlive them all. [Sylvian] — Karen Maitland

We are living in perilous times when the hearts and souls of men are sorely tried. Never before has the future been so utterly unpredictable; we are not so much in a period of transition with belief in progress to push us on, rather we seem to be entering the realm of the unknown, joylessly, disillusioned, and without hope. The whole world seems to be in a state of spiritual widowhood, possessed of the harrowing devastation of one who set out on life's course joyously in intimate comradeship with another, and then is bereft of that companion forever. — Fulton J. Sheen

But it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was deep and allowed my mind to relax entirely; then it would let go of the map of the place where I had fallen asleep and, when I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was; all I had, in its original simplicity, was the sense of existence as it may quiver in the depths of an animal; I was more bereft than a caveman; but then the memory - not yet of the place where I was, but of several of those where I had lived and where I might have been - would come to me like help from on high to pull me out of the void from which I could not have got out on my own; I passed over centuries of civilization in one second, and the image confusedly glimpsed of oil lamps, then of wing-collar shirts, gradually recomposed my self's original features. — Marcel Proust

Phineas Gage's case is not the only important
historical source in the effort to understand the neural basis of
reasoning and decision making ... [to understand the effect of] prefrontal damage ... The Hebb-Penfield and Ackerly-Benton shared a number
of personality traits ... They are bereft of a theory of
their own mind and of the mind of those with whom they interact — Antonio R. Damasio

Detached gibbous moonlight,
Befalls me,
Lying still on a sandy hill,
In a place far from home.
Home, where your warm hands,
Once embraced me,
Where you suckled me at birth,
And kissed me goodnight,
Where I once played as a child.
Now bereft and solitary,
I lie still far away,
In a foreign field of sand,
They'll bring me home
To you soon,
To lay me down
In an earthen chamber,
Beneath a green patch,
Close to you, so close,
Far from the guns of war. — Richard Kinsella

I will see you bereft of all that you have, of home and happiness and beautiful things. I will see your nation cast down and your allies drawn away. I will see you as alone and friendless and wretched as am I; and then you may live as long as you like, in some dark and lonely corner of the earth, and I shall call myself content.
-Lien, Albino Celestial (Dragon) — Naomi Novik

As a boy I slept in a meadow one night. It was summer and the sky was very clear. Before I fell asleep I saw Orion on the horizon, standing above the woods. Then I woke up in the middle of the night - and suddenly Orion was standing high above me. I have never forgotten that. I had learned that the earth is a planet and rotates; but I had learned it as one learns something from books and does not quite realize. But now, for the first time I felt that it really was like that. I felt that the earth was silently flying through the immensities of space. I felt it so strongly that I almost believed I had to hold onto something in order not to be hurled off. Probably it happened because, emerging from a deep sleep and bereft for a moment of memory and habit, I looked into the huge, displaced sky. Suddenly the earth was no longer firm - and since then it has never become wholly firm again - " He — Erich Maria Remarque

The mind, at length bereft
Of thinking and its pain,
Will soon disperse again,
And nothing will remain:
No, not a thing be left.

Only the ardent eye,
Only the listening ear
Can say, "The thrush was here!"
Can say, "His song was clear!"
Can live, before it die. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Alone, her soul destroyed and her heart bereft and empty, the Lady Ninnia touched her amulet and closed her eyes. "No," she breathed, "I was wrong. This time, my wisdom has failed me. Our daughter is not ready. To become the Handmaiden of Orion, one must know terrible grief in order to learn compassion." She gazed after her husband and shook her head sorrowfully. "Even the deaths of us, her parents, are not, I fear, enough. May she find what she needs upon that dark and deadly road upon which I have sent her. My poor, poor child - farewell. — Robin Jarvis

Are we bereft of citizenship because we are mothers, wives and daughters of a mighty people? Have women no country
no interests staked in public weal
no liabilities in common peril
no partnership in a nation's guilt and shame? — Angelina Grimke

Had the heavens fallen and mixed themselves with the earth, had the people of London risen in rebellion with French ideas of equality,* had the Queen persistently declined to comply with the constitutional advice of her ministers, had a majority in the House of Commons lost its influence in the country, - the utter prostration of the bereft husband could not have been more complete. — Anthony Trollope

Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax. — Lauren Willig

After all, the girl actually had faith in something, which was more than most people had in these dark times. It was wrong to destroy it. — Chris Womersley

Then perhaps there is a third kind of loss
the loss that comes when you notice the limits of your knowledge of God, when you feel bereft of guidance, when you feel the loss of God's saving power or of God's grace. This feeling of loss is really a way of noting, and mourning, God's hiddenness. This is the loss you name when you ask why God does not answer your prayers. It is the loss entailed when you realize that Jesus is more mysterious and more inscrutible than you had at first understood. — Lauren F. Winner

For those of us who are not members of a biker gang or the Marine Corps, solidarity means little more than the compassionate impulse that leads us to comfort a bereft friend; for Beezer and his merry band, solidarity is the assurance that someone's always got your back. — Stephen King

Then, when I was a senior in high school, I was kind of bereft and she put me in an acting class. — Beth Henley

Wherever forests have not been mowed down, wherever the animal is recessed in their quiet protection, wherever the earth is not bereft of four-footed life - that to the white man is an 'unbroken wilderness.'
But for us there was no wilderness, nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly. Our faith sought the harmony of man with his surroundings; the other sought the dominance of surroundings.
For us, the world was full of beauty; for the other, it was a place to be endured until he went to another world.
But we were wise. We knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard. — Chief Luther Standing Bear

Lady, you bereft me of all words/
My blood speaks to you in my veins. — William Shakespeare

Being single means getting used to your own company and not inventing excuses to keep people around you, None of which makes me feel any less bereft. The latest revelation: you have to relearn being your own again! — Mhairi McFarlane

Here's a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It's from the Old English bereafian, meaning 'to deprive of, take away, seize, rob'. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try. — Helen Macdonald

We adapt to our sorrows, I suppose, as unpleasant as they might be. One cannot weep forever. One simply runs dry of tears. — Chris Womersley

I read John Irving's novel 'The World According To Garp' when I was about 14 or 15. It was the first grown-up book that I had read. It is the story of a young man who grows up to be a novelist. I finished it, and I wanted to write a book that made the reader feel the way I felt at the end of that, which was sort of both bereft and elated. — Glen Duncan

By cutting ourselves off from the rest of creation, we are left bereft of awe and wonder and therefore of reverence and gratitude. We violate our very beings, and we have nothing but trivia to teach our young. — Matthew Fox

Patience. I colored patience gray, hung over with black clouds. I colored hope yellow, just like the sun we could see for a few short morning hours. Too soon the sun rose high in the sky & disappeared from view, leaving us bereft and staring at blue. — V.C. Andrews

Comes now a smiling New-Born Year To fill to-day with goodly cheer - An infant hale and lusty. Upon our door-sill he is left By Daddy Time, of clothes bereft Despite the season gusty. If he be Churl or doughty Knight, A Son of Darkness or of Light No man can tell, God bless him! But be he base or glorious Time puts it wholly up to us To dress him! — John Kendrick Bangs

I frowned at him. "Isn't sarcasm the opiate of the masses?"
"You're thinking of religion," he replied. "Sarcasm is the Xanax of the morally bereft. — Cecily White

Here lies a
wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft:
Seek not my name: a plague consume you wicked
caitiffs left!
Here lie I, Timon; who, alive, all living men did hate:
Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay
not here thy gait. — William Shakespeare

Life
luscious wet life bereft of
death, loss of empty shell
minus absent of nothing
exploding star cell
amoeba sweet algae
oxygen,
hydrogen flowering
in the vacuum of
space and magnetic motion. — H. Raven Rose

A bittersweet truth: she wasn't anyone's baby anymore. She'd been left bereft. Her value diminished. She was poor. Alex — Suanne Laqueur

If he was, somehow at the margin deficient, it was because the country did not rise to ask of him the performance of a thunderbolt. He gave what he was asked to give. And he leaves us (or "will leave") if not exactly bereft, lonely; lonely for the quintessential American. END. — William F. Buckley Jr.

If you can't be pretty, you have to learn to make yourself attractive. I found that all the pretty girls I went to high school with came to middle age as frumps, because they just got by with their pretty faces, so they never developed anything. They never learned how to be interesting. But if you are bereft of certain things, you have to make up for them in certain ways. Don't you think? — Iris Apfel

Feet gauge the pliable tracts of snowy hoodlum
Amidst the pacing sobs of our night sky
I watch you go, I watch them come
Within the life span of an iridescent sigh;
I watch the tracks bereft of a human hand,
I watch them trite in thy laconic land,
I watch them silent from where I stand,
I watch them marking a bloodied rand,
I watch the tracks bereft of a human hand,
I watch them silent from where I stand. — Ashfaq Saraf

A story is a wondrous invention. — Chris Womersley

Had I no eyes but ears, my ears would love. That inward beauty and invisible;
Or were I deaf, thy outward parts would move each part in me that were but sensible: Though neither eyes nor ears, to hear nor see, yet should I be in love by touching thee.
'Say, that the sense of feeling were bereft me, and that I could not see, nor hear, nor touch, and nothing but the very smell were left me, yet would my love to thee be still as much; for from the stillitory of thy face excelling comes breath perfum'd that breedeth love by smelling. — William Shakespeare

The rival you both share is myself. I do not wish to marry ... First, because my past habituated me to loneliness. I had always thought I hated it. And now I have found I treasure it. I do not want to share my life. I wish to be what I am, not what a husband must expect me to become in marriage. My second reason is my present. I never expected to be happy in life. Yet I find myself happy where I am situated now. I have varied congenial work ... I am admitted to the daily conversation of genius. Such men have their faults. Their vices. But they are not those the world chooses to imagine. I have no genius myself, I have no more than the capacity to aid genius in very small and humble ways ... I believe I owe a debt to good fortune. I am not to seek it elsewhere. I am to see it as precarious, as a thing of which I must not allow myself to be bereft. — John Fowles

I pushed myself forward and rose cautiously to my feet. A draft from the aft signaled that my dressing gown was open, but I didn't care. The nurses could take shots with their camera phones and upload them to their Flickr stream for all I cared, just so long as my face wasn't in it.
A wave of dizziness rolled over me when I took a step, but it was one of those gentle rocking swells and not a thirty-foot-tall fist of Poseidon. I could do this. I shuffled over carefully and leaned against the nightstand for support as I opened the drawer. Then I nearly fell over when Granuaile spoke from behind me.
"Nom nom nom!" she said.
I looked around for the cookies she must be referring to and then realized, belatedly, that the room was bereft of delicious baked goods. The only thing on display was my backside, and apparently she thought it looked tasty. — Kevin Hearne

The fictitious worlds created for kids are nearly bereft of female presence. It's sending a very clear message from the beginning that women and girls do not have half of the adventures, that they're not as important. We're teaching kids that girls and women don't take up half the space in the world. — Geena Davis

But for each person who is made happy by love, there will be many for whom it turns out to be a cause of regret. That is because it can be so fleeting; one moment it may take our breath away, the next it may leave us bereft. When it does that, love can be like a haunting, staying with us for year after year; we know that it is gone, but somehow we persuade ourselves that it is still there ... Nobody would choose to be in love like that, to hold on so strongly to something that was no longer there. — Alexander McCall Smith

It is a great thing to have a big brain, a fertile imagination, grand ideals, but the man with these, bereft of a good backbone, is sure to serve no useful end. — George Matthew Adams

It was an oddly satisfying idea to feel bereft as I left my mother this time. We only feel bereft when we're deprived of something meaningful. — Laura Anderson Kurk

For a moment man is a boy, for a moment a lovesick youth, for a moment bereft of wealth, for a moment in the height of prosperity; then at life's end with limbs worn out by old age and wrinkles adorning his face, like an actor he retires behind the curtain of death. — Bhartrhari

He was utterly incapable of resisting the maneuvers of the mealy-mouthed scoundrel that the Neapolitan Vincentian, Bugnini,77 a man as bereft of culture as he was of basic honesty, soon revealed himself to be. Even — Louis Bouyer

It was as if we were having two different conversations. Which wasn't that surprising after all, as we were clearly having two entirely different experiences of breaking up. His was soft, cushioned; Jude and his friends had broken his fall. Mine was cold, empty and bereft. I was freefalling in space and time, with nobody standing by to stop me hurtling headlong into obscurity. — Ruth Mancini

Though there are many barriers to expressing unreserved love, no such impediments to a developing a loving and generous heart deter a spiritual warrior. He who is without love is bereft of richness of life. Compassion, empathy, kindness, tenderness, and patience are essential for love. Anger, frustration, jealously, greed, and hatred are the antonym to love. When we love other people with all our ferocity, we transcend the misuse, waste, pain, tragedy, death, anguish, erotic obsessions, unaccountable confusion, and self-absorbed personal ambitions that, if left unchecked, numb our earthly existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

When we are cut off from the fulfillment of our basic needs we seek out substitutes to temporarily ease the longing. Bereft of connection to nature, connection to community, intimacy, meaningful self-expression, ensouled dwellings and built environment, spiritual connection, and the feeling of belonging, lots of us over-consume, overeat, over-shop, and over-accumulate. How much do you need to eat, to compensate for a feeling of not belonging? How much pornography to compensate for a deficit of intimacy? How much money to compensate for a deep sense of insecurity? No amount is enough — Charles Einstein

it's natural that we associate language with such verbal intercourse. Unfortunately, this association has led many to assume that language is an exclusive attribute of our species - we, after all, are the only creatures that use words - and to conclude that all other organisms are entirely bereft of meaningful speech. It is an exceedingly self-serving assumption. Other animals, commonly possessed of senses far more acute than ours, may have much less need for a purely conventional set of signs to communicate with others of their species, or even to glean precise information from members of other species. — David Abram

So many people seem to spend their lives trying to appear normal, predictable and consistent to themselves and those that surround them. They just end up bored with themselves, bereft of any depth of inner resources, suffocated by the inhibitions that defend their own monolithic identities. — Peter J. Carroll

The next day the German police picked them up, loaded them onto an armored truck and took them back to Colditz. Alexander was badly beaten by the German guards and taken to solitary, where he spent so long he lost track of time. With Pasha's death came the death of faith. Release me, Tatiana, release me, forgive me, forget me, let me forget you. I want to be free of you, free of your face, free of your freedom, free of your fire, free, free, free. The flight across the ocean was over, and with it all the warmth of his imagination. A numbness encroached on him, freezing him from the heart out, the anesthetic of despair creeping its tentacles over his ten-dons and his arteries, over his nerves and his veins until he was stiff inside and bereft of hope and bereft of Tatiana. Finally. But not quite. — Paullina Simons

This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot. — John Cleese

A full-throttled deployment of the practices of strategic communication would kill candor and leave truth bereft to fend for herself in the backstabbing night of political bogeys. — Nick Bostrom

Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God. — Robert Frost

I'm in awe of the universe, but I don't necessarily believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic. — David Bowie

We choose this. This place. This life. What it will be, and how we live it. We are not slaves to gods, or fate, or destinies woven in veils of smoke. We choose the people we want to be, and we choose the shape of the world in which we live. Nothing worthwhile comes without sacrifice. There is nothing so easy as swimming with the current, nothing so difficult as being the first to stand up. To say no. To point at a thing wrong and name it so. There are none so brave as those who choose to stand, when all others are content to kneel. None so worthy of the title 'hero' as those who fight when there are none to see it. Who choose a life bereft of accolade or fanfare, a life of struggle for the idea that we are all the same. Every one of us. And every one of us has the right to be happy. To know peace. To know love. — Jay Kristoff

O loving woman, man's fulfillment, sweet,
Completing him not otherwise complete!
How void and useless the sad remnant left
Were he of her, his nobler part, bereft. — Abraham Coles

Only eight months had gone since Henry VIII of England had been suspended in death, there to lie like Mohammed's coffin, hardly in the Church nor out of it, attended by his martyrs and the acidulous fivefold ghosts of his wives. King Francis of France, stranded by his neighbour's death in the midst of a policy so advanced, so brilliant and so intricate that it should at last batter England to the ground, and be damned to the best legs in Europe - Francis, bereft of these sweet pleasures, dwindled and died likewise. — Dorothy Dunnett

Then, were not summer's distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet. — William Shakespeare

Bereft of vision to guide the city's citizens forward, he could only draw them inward and backward, to encourage them to fight over imagined foes and manufactured hurt. — I.M. Savage

Years ago I met Richard Burton in Port Talbot, my home town, and afterwards he passed in his car with his wife, and I thought, 'I want to get out and become like him'. Not because of Wales, because I love Wales, but because I was so limited as a child at school and so bereft and lonely, and I thought becoming an actor would do that. — Anthony Hopkins

By what logical principle should the relief of death be granted only the terminally ill? Such a restriction is itself perverse. After all, the terminally ill face only a brief period of suffering. The chronically ill, or the healthy but bereft - they face a lifetime of agony. Why deny them the relief of a humane exit? — Charles Krauthammer

But how ridiculous that I should bereft simply because I couldn't spend hours in my world of make-believe! Wasn't the reality of my life interesting enough? This is surely the time to let go of grievances, I told myself sternly. What good does it do to dwell on them? Brooding on a nest of grudges will only hatch more grief. — Liza Dalby

I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are silent phantoms. Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking. But it leaves me so bereft of any memory of any human being and of me myself, that I transform this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. Were I to cry out - I can no longer see things clearly - my voice would receive the same indifferent echo from the walls of the earth. — Clarice Lispector

For the rest of the afternoon, Rebecca wandered around the house tidying up halfheartedly, feeling bereft and disoriented, trying to balance impassive mass of all the ordinary things of her life with her sense that everything had changed. Inevitably, the weightless moments with Mike began to seem unreal. All her furniture said that love was a bubble and a fluke. — Tim Farrington

One thing I learned on my sporadic spiritual journey was that mainstream culture's disdain and disrespect for the intellectual integrity of Christianity is unwarranted, and its conceited assumption that Christian beliefs are a product of blind faith, bereft of reason and intellect, is completely false. — David Limbaugh

Hope is an elixir of life. It is the engine that propels us forward in our pursuit of countless goals, all of which might otherwise be impossible to undertake if we were bereft of hope. — Gad Saad

There's nothing new about the government protecting corporations and calling it the freeing of the world or bringing democracy to bereft nations. — Henry Rollins

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it. — Jonathan Franzen

Like most people who actually live by a landlocked sound, bereft of hope of happiness, he had a particular aversion to any doctrines which left people without hope of happiness and told them that they lived by a landlocked sound. — Halldor Laxness

The mind is left bereft when it is nothing more than a tool of regurgitation. — Corey Taylor

It was as if the demise of the owner had lent the flat a physical void it hadn't had before. At the same time he had the feeling that he wasn't alone. Harry believed in the existence of the soul. Not that he was particularly religious as such, but it was one thing which always struck him when he saw a dead body: the body was bereft of something ... the creature had gone, the light had gone,there was not the illusory afterglow that long-since burned-out stars have. The body was missing its soul and it was the absence of the soul that made Harry believe. — Jo Nesbo

Was my sacrifice worth it? I felt hollow and bereft, yet the grief in my heart had palpable weight, bearing me down to the ground. I could not breathe. I carried the burden of my love for my family, and it threatened to suffocate me. — S. Jae-Jones

Amelia groped for the ring and began tugging and twisting it. "It's stuck again." She sounded disgruntled.
Cam pinned her wrist and bent his head, taking her finger into his mouth. She gasped as his tongue swirled around the base, leaving it wet. Gently, he used his teeth to draw the gold band off. Taking the ring from between his lips, he slid it back onto his own finger. Her hand, now bare, flexed as if bereft, and she looked at him uncertainly.
"You'll get used to wearing it." Cam smoothed his hand along the plane of her midriff and stomach. "We'll try it on you a few minutes at a time. Like breaking a horse to harness." He grinned at her expression. — Lisa Kleypas

We wander in our thousands over the
face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the
seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me
that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.
We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends
those whom we
obey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the most
free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties,
even those for whom
home holds no dear face, no familiar voice,
even they have to meet the
spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its
valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its trees
a
mute friend, judge, and inspirer. — Joseph Conrad

Did you love well what very soon you left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache. Never so full, I never was bereft so utterly. The winter evenings drift dark to the window. Not one work will make you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake from your night toward me. The only gift I got to keep or give is what I've cried, floodgates let down to mourning for the dead chances, for the end of being young, for everyone I loved who really died. I drank our one year out in brine instead of honey from the seasons of your tongue. — Marilyn Hacker

And the centurion who stood by said:
Truly this was a son of God.
Not long ago but everywhere I go
There is a hill and a black windy sky.
Portent of hill, sky, day's eclipse I know;
Hill, sky, the shuddering darkness, these am I.
The dying at His right hand, at His left,
I am - the thief redeemed and the lost thief;
I am the careless folk; I those bereft,
The Well-Belov'd, the women bowed in grief.
The gathering Presence that in terror cried,
In earth's shock in the Temple's veil rent through,
I; and a watcher, ignorant, curious-eyed,
I the centurion who heard and knew — Adelaide Crapsey

Christopher Argent kept stealing disbelieving looks at Farah, his blue eyes reflecting the ambient glow like an alley cat's. Dorian understood why the man would dare in his presence.
First, because Christopher Argent was an unfeeling, fearless killer-for-hire.
And second, because most of the incarcerated men at Newgate had considered Dougan's Fairy some mythical creature, a sight too rare and beautiful to be beheld by a common man. Maybe even a fancy born of an imagination keen enough to take possession of the prison. To meet her was to gaze upon a fantasy realized, to remember the desperate yearnings of a lonely prisoner bereft of kindness, mercy, or beauty. To be blinded by the embodiment of all three of those things. For a man like Argent, one born to incarceration, the sight might have him reassessing some long-held cynical philosophies. — Kerrigan Byrne

These eyes, tho' clear To outward view of blemish or of spot, Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot, Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear Of sun, or moon, or star, throughout the year, Or man, or woman. Yet I argue not Against Heaven's hand or will, not bate a jot Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer Right onward. — John Milton

O father, father
Gone from us, lost to us,
The church lies bereft,
Alone,
Desecrated, desolated.
And the heathen shall build
On the ruins
Their world without God.
I see it.
I see it. — T. S. Eliot

Repentance recall men from what is according to their nature; all that it does is to make them cease from sinning. Had it been a case of a trespass only, and not of a subsequent corruption, repentance would have been well enough; but when once transgression had begun men came under the power of the corruption proper to their nature and were bereft of the grace which belonged to them as creatures in the Image of God. — Athanasius Of Alexandria

We're so bereft of support of theatre in this day and age. — Stefanie Powers

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,
And from they slender store two loaves alone to thee are left,
Sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.

Attributed to the Gulistan of Moslih Eddin Saadi — Hazel Felleman

TO MR. CYRIACK SKINNER UPON HIS BLINDNESS
Cyriack, this three years day these eys, though clear
To outward view, of blemish or of spot;
Bereft of light thir seeing have forgot,
Nor to thir idle orbs doth sight appear
Of Sun or Moon or Starre throughout the year,
Or man or woman. Yet I argue not
Against heavns hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear vp and steer
Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, Friend, to have lost them overply'd
In libertyes defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side.
This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask
Content though blind, had I no better guide. — John Milton

Oh my little ragtag, rubbish people, who do not trust and are not trusted! Tread with care, Mister Policeman; the hated have no reason to love! Oh, the strange and secret people, last and worst, born of rubbish, hopeless, bereft of god. The best of luck to you, my brother ... my brother in darkness ... Do what you can for them, Mister Po-leess-maan. — Terry Pratchett

Concert pianists get to be quite chummy with dead composers. They can't help it. Classical music isn't just music. It's a personal diary. An uncensored confession in the dead of night. A baring of the soul. Take a modern example. Florence and the Machine? In the song 'Cosmic Love,' she catalogs the way in which the world has gone dark, distorting her, when she, a rather intense young woman, was left bereft by a love affair. 'The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out. — Marisha Pessl