Desolating Quotes & Sayings

Of these latter, desolating states, she comments: 'Loneliness, in its quintessential form, is of a nature that is incommunicable by the one who suffers it. Nor, unlike other non-communicable emotional experiences, can it be shared via empathy. It may well be that the second person's empathic abilities are obstructed by the anxiety-arousing quality of the mere emanations of the first person's loneliness. — Olivia Laing

Of all the things that oppress me, this sense of the evil working of nature herself -my disgust at her barbarity -clumsiness -darkness -bitter mockery of herself -is the most desolating. — John Ruskin

The rules are simple: the first one to lose dies. — Kazuki Takahashi

It is not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing. — Wallace Stegner

You cannot stay the shell in its flight; after it has left the mortar, it goes on to its mark, and there explodes, dealing destruction all around. Just as little can you stay the consequences of a sin after it has been committed. You may repent of it, you may even be forgiven for it, but still it goes on its deadly and desolating way. It has passed entirely beyond your reach; once done, it cannot be undone. — William Mackergo Taylor

There's nothing more irresistible to a man than a woman who's in love with him. — Ernest Lehman

Sorrow you can hold, however desolating, if nobody speaks to you. If they speak, you break down. — Bede Jarrett

I am not insane," he said. "A woman of your highly advanced intellect ought to be able to perceive that I am in love. With you. I wish you had told me. It was deuced embarrassing to find it out from your *brother*. — Loretta Chase

Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside. — Helen Macdonald

If the relation of morality to art were based simply on the demand that art be concerned with values, then almost every author should satisfy it even if he wrote with his prick while asleep. (Puritans will object to the language in that sentence, and feminists to the organ, and neither will admire or even notice how it was phrased.) — William H Gass

I'm not a perfectionist, but I like discipline. I'm obedient, but I'm not a perfectionist. I think it's important to work your hardest and be as kind as possible to everyone you work with. The goal, every day, is keeping focused on that. — Natalie Portman

Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained — Malcolm Muggeridge

In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: 'Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.' He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either. — Helen Macdonald

Despite all the drawbacks, the Internet provides a wide array of information - and some of it is being watched pretty carefully by the pros. — Gary Weiss

Once again I had the desolating sense of having all along ignored what was finest in him. Perhaps it was just the incongruity of seeing him aloft and stricken, since he was by nature someone who carried others. I didn't think he knew how to act or even how to feel as the object of help. — John Knowles

When you follow your heart, you should have no regrets. When you follow someone elses, those regrets may lose your heart. — Anonymous

If slavery be the destined sword of the hand of the destroying angel which is to sever the ties of this Union, the same sword will cut in sunder the bonds of slavery itself. A dissolution of the Union for the cause of slavery would be followed by a servile war in the slave-holding States, combined with a war between the two severed portions of the Union. It seems to me that its result might be the extirpation of slavery from this whole continent; and, calamitous and desolating as this course of events in its progress must be, so glorious would be its final issue, that, as God shall judge me, I dare not say that it is not to be desired. — John Quincy Adams

This capacity for living easily and familiarly at an extraordinary level of abstraction is the source of modern man's power. With it he has transformed the planet, annihilated space, and trebled the world's population. But it is also a power which has, like everything human, its negative side, in the desolating sense of rootlessness, vacuity, and the lack of concrete feeling that assails modern man in his moments of real anxiety. — William Barrett

Creditor. One of a tribe of savages dwelling beyond the Financial Straits and dreaded for their desolating incursions. — Ambrose Bierce

I guess there are a lot of people who don't know the right thing to say. You don't notice them so much because they pretend they do. — Cath Crowley

Before there was a proper understanding and a sense of God's presence, the idea that everything would one day end was utterly desolating. — Paulo Coelho

Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

People who are mean or unkind or rigid - think about it - cannot laugh at themselves. — Eileen Brennan

I have a giant ego and terrible self-esteem, so I need to hit the re-set button fairly regularly - to get into presence, and humility, and being right-sized. — Anne Lamott

If you think there is freedom of the press in the United States, I tell you there is no freedom of the press ... They come out with the cheap shot. The press should be ashamed of itself. They should come to both sides of the issue and hear both sides and let the American people make up their minds — Bill Moyers

The system of slavery, maintained for over two hundred years at the South, had performed a most perverting, morally desolating, and we might say, demonizing work on the dominant race, which people bred under our free civilization can not at once understand, nor scarcely believe when it is declared unto them. This reluctance to believe unwelcome truths has been the snare of our national life. We have not been willing to believe how hardened, despotic, and cruel the wielders of irresponsible power may become. When — John McElroy

And, oh God, in my misspent youth as a housewife, I, too, used to bake bread, in those hectic and desolating days just prior to the woman's movement, when middle-class women were supposed to be wonderful wives and mothers, gracious hostesses ... I used to feel so womanly when I was baking my filthy bread. — Angela Carter

Pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain. — John Selden

I came here,' said Dick, rather oblivious of the purpose with which he had really come, 'with my bosom expanded, my heart dilated, and my sentiments of a corresponding description. I go away with feelings that may be conceived but cannot be described, feeling within myself that desolating truth that my best affections have experienced this night a stifler! — Charles Dickens

Spain as a modern centralized nation is an illusion, a very unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, the desolating resultlessness of a century of revolution, may very well be due in large measure to the artificial imposition of centralized government on a land essentially centrifugal. — John Dos Passos

The prayers of God's saints strengthen the unborn generation against the desolating waves of sin and evil. — Edward McKendree Bounds

By the word of God ... the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. 2 Peter 3:5-7. Another storm is coming. The earth will again be swept by the desolating wrath of God, and sin and sinners will be destroyed. — Ellen G. White

At the end of his life, no man, if he be sincere and in possession of his faculties, would ever wish to go though it again. Rather than this, he will much prefer to choose complete nonexistence. — Irvin D. Yalom