Killing The Soul Quotes & Sayings

The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul. — Herbert Hoover

It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York; it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me. Were I to list them all, I would fill up a book the size of the Manhattan yellow pages, and that would merely be the prologue. Every time I submit myself to the snubs and indignities of that swaggering city and set myself adrift among the prodigious crowds, a feeling of displacement, profound and enervating, takes me over, killing all the coded cells of my hard-won singularity. The city marks my soul with a most profane, indelible graffiti. There is too much of too much there. — Pat Conroy

If you visit the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, it will brand your soul for life. — Howard Lyman

I cannot explain how two souls join. No man or element or god ever could. But you are tied to each other. Because of that - because of your true, consuming, pure love - you will thrive together . . . or you will perish together.
"I don't understand." I swallowed, trying to make sense of it all.
If he hadn't heard your voice, he'd be fine. But once he aged, however many years from now that might come, you would have found yourself deteriorating then. Or if you had disobeyed Me so fully that I had to kill you, he'd have died in the same breath. You are tied through your souls. Now, what happens to one body happens to the other. And since your voice has taken hold of him, killing him slowly, you fall down with him. Slower, of course, as you are still Mine. But it will consume you eventually, all the same. — Kiera Cass

In the usual way I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of "normal" work. In my twenties some of my work for children was published by Macmillan. However, I was twenty-seven before my adult novel, The Birthgrave, was taken by DAW Books in the USA. This enabled me finally to stop doing stupid and soul-killing jobs, and start working day and night as a professional writer. It felt like a rescue from damnation, and still does. — Tanith Lee

It gave him hope - hope that he had not lost his soul in the act of killing, hope that humanity could still be found, and honor could be regained ... — Sarah J. Maas

Here dwells a snake, one thousand miles long
Coiled, one thousand miles deep
Eyes like candy, it has eyes like candy
Hard and blue, but soft as kittens feet
Out of sight or in the element of light
It could be a devil, it could be an angel
With spiders inside a vision from hell
Its spine is a vertical scream
Slow as concrete, blurred as a dream
Fueled by inertia, depth, radius, and velocity,
Its soul
a twisted wreckage of despair and pain
And the spiders inside are just praying for rain
Killing time killing time
And praying for rain
One thousand miles deep — James O'Barr

How do you act like you've lost your soul? Akiva asked. He meant it as a lighthearted question about a children's game, but when he heard himself say the words, he thought, Who knows better than I?
You betray everything you believe in. You drown your grief in vengeance. You kill and keep killing until there's no one left. — Laini Taylor

Batman: You can't build a better world by killing criminals--it bankrupts your soul and society's by reinforcing the same cycle of violence. — Peter J. Tomasi

They made a major mistake," he blurted out, "the dumb bastards, when they didn't start by killing you first."
"Benjamin Thomas Parish, that was the sweetest and most bizarre compliment anyone's ever given me."
I kissed him on the cheek. He kissed me on the mouth.
"You know," I whispered, "a year ago, I would have sold my soul for that."
He shook his head. "Not worth it." And, for one-ten thousandth of a second, all of it fell away, the despair and grief and anger and pain and hunger, and the old Ben Parish rose from the dead. The eyes that impaled. The smile that slayed. In another moment, he would fade, slide back into the new Ben, the one called Zombie, and I understood something I hadn't before: He was dead, the object of my schoolgirl desires, just as the schoolgirl who desired him was dead. — Rick Yancey

If we kill off the wild, then we are killing a part of our souls. — Jane Goodall

Each killing steals a bit of humanity until a murderer is nothing more than an animal. A hunger replaces the spirit. A want for what was lost, but as with innocence, the soul can never be replaced. Joy, love, and peace flee such a vessel and in their stead blooms a desire for blood and death. — Michael J. Sullivan

It's just words. How can words be dangerous?"
"You have a lot to learn about the world, baby girl. Nothing is more dangerous than words."
"That's stupid. What about a gun? A gun can kill you dead."
"Only your body," Billy said. "It can't kill your soul. Words can kill your soul. — Catherine Ryan Hyde

Don't leave me alone!
A cry in the night,
OF anguish heart-stiking,
Of soul-killing fright.
Live for my living
Or else I must die
Don't leave me alone.
A world heard that cry. — Anne McCaffrey

There is some comfort in killing that which has hurt you, but it is cold comfort. It'll destroy things inside of you that the original pain wouldn't have harmed. Sometimes it's not a question of whether a piece of your soul is going to go missing, only which piece it's going to be. — Laurell K. Hamilton

The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls. — Thomas Carlyle

From the beginning I've searched out those writers unafraid to stir up the emotions, who entrust me with their darkest passions, their most indestructible yearnings, and their most soul-killing doubts. I trust the great novelists to teach me how to live, how to feel, how to love and hate. I trust them to show me the dangers I will encounter on the road as I stagger on my own troubled passage through the complicated life of books that try to teach me how to die. — Pat Conroy

I have brought peace to this land, and security," he began.
"And what of your soul, when you use the cleverness of argument to cloak such acts? Do you think that the peace of a thousand cancels out the unjust death of one single person? It may be desirable, it may win you praise from those who have happily survived you and prospered from your deeds, but you have committed ignoble acts, and have been too proud to own them. I have waited patiently here, hoping that you would come to me, for if you understood, then some of your acts would be mitigated. But instead you send me this manuscript, proud, magisterial, and demonstrating only that you have understood nothing at all."
"I returned to public life on your advice, madam," he said stiffly.
"Yes; I advised it. I said if learning must die it should do so with a friend by its bedside. Not an assassin. — Iain Pears

This one," he said, "is for my wife."
With a pointed glance, Gideon signaled the band to start. An instantly recognizable bass beat ratcheted up my pulse.
"Lifehouse!" Shawny crowed, clapping her hands. "I love them!"
"He's calling you his wife already!" Megumi yelled, leaning toward me. "How freaking' lucky are you?"
I didn't glance at her. I couldn't. My attention was riveted on Gideon as he looked directly at me and sang, telling me in a lusciously raspy voice that he was desperate for change and starving for truth.
He was answering my song.
My eyes burned even as my heart began to beat with a different rhythm. Had I thought he'd be unemotional? My Good, he was killing me, baring his soul in the rough timbre of his voice.
"Holy fuck," Cary said, his eyes on the stage. "The man can sing."
I was hanging by a moment, too, hanging on to every word, hearing his message about chasing after me and falling more in love. — Sylvia Day

We cannot escape from our daily routine, because it will go with us wherever we go ... God must be sought and found in the things of our world. By regarding our daily duties as something performed for the honour and glory of God, we can convert what was hitherto soul-killing monotony, to a living worship of God in all our actions. Everyday life must become itself our prayer. — Karl Edward Wagner

Nothing so bad you need to be cruel. Tough, yes. You'll have to kill, yes. But there's a difference in the heart. One makes you mean. The other keeps you going. — Marjorie M. Liu

So tell me: were you born broken just like me, born hungry? Are we all of us born with some part of us missing? Are we each us born with a hole?....Born with a hole and no earthly way of finding just the exact right plug to fill it, not 'til you've tried 'em from A to Z and back once more: booze, fags, work, candy, men, girls, heroin, methedrine, methadone, God. Tried having a baby. Tried killing yourself. A hundred religions, from Calvin to the Dalai Lama and back again; tried every damn thing you could think of and some you had to stumble over....You stick a plug in your weakness like a finger in the proverbial dike and let pressure build up let it swell and swell 'til there's nothing left but tension, nothing left but what's left over--the absence, not the presence. The wound you shape your soul around. — Gemma Files

Doctors have throughout time made fortunes on killing their patients with their cures. The difference in psychiatry is that it is the death of the soul. — R.D. Laing

Even by the end of the seventeenth century, fifty years before our starting point, there was no shortage of people in Europe who felt that the Christian religion had been gravely discredited. Protestants and Catholics had been killing each other in the hundreds of thousands, or millions, for holding opinions that no one could prove one way or the other. The observations of Kepler and Galileo transformed man's view of the heavens, and the flood of discoveries from the New World promoted an interest in the diversity of customs and beliefs found on the other side of the Atlantic. It was obvious to many that God favored diversity over uniformity and that Christianity and Christian concepts - like the soul and a concentration on the afterlife - were not necessarily crucial elements since so many lived without them. — Peter Watson

I could do it. I could rip your life out like a fury, like a beast.
I could stand over you with my red hands
and lap the heart out of your hollow chest.
I'm a wolf, I'm a woman, I'm a building hurricane.
I'm whole-way sharp teeth, soul-sick wet claws.
I say "love me," and you say, "you're killing me."
I say, "i'd die for you," and you say," You'd kill for me - that's not the same thing. — Elisabeth Hewer

People know about the Klan and the overt racism, but the killing of one's soul little by little, day after day, is a lot worse than someone coming in your house and lynching you. — Samuel L. Jackson

By the tons it is coming into this country - the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms. Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him. — Harry J. Anslinger

We both know that killing someone doesn't make you admirable. I'm not about to forget this. I just hope you have enough soul left that what you've done still bothers you." The recording ended, and Bull smiled at the blank screen wearily. "Every time," he told the hand terminal. "And next time too. — James S.A. Corey

Killing rips the soul apart. — J.K. Rowling

Corporations have been killing the risk-taking and exploration that makes software great. They have tried to rip the soul out of development. — Brian Behlendorf

Money is not the issue. Having the courage to give your highest gift is the issue.
There is no security in doing something for a living when you are dying inside while doing it. That is taking care of the body at the expense of the soul. And a withering soul cannot help but produce a withering body.
So do not think you are 'taking care of yourself' by killing your spirit to keep your body alive.
How long will you put off what you are dying to do? — Neale Donald Walsch

But the more familiar one becomes with any religious system, while yet the conscience and will are unawakened and obedience has not begun, the harder is it to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Such familiarity is a soul-killing experience, and great will be the excuse for some of those sons of religious parents who have gone further toward hell than many born and bred thieves and sinners. — George MacDonald

killing is the ultimate expression of hatred and fear, as sex is the ultimate expression of romantic love and desire. And, as with sex, killing a stranger who has otherwise provoked no emotion is inherently unnatural. I suppose you could say that a man who kills a stranger is not unlike a woman who has sex under analogous circumstances. That a man who is paid to kill is like a woman who is paid to fuck. Certainly the man is subject to the same reluctance, the same numbing, the same regrets. The same damage to the soul. — Barry Eisler

I happened to see Larry King interview Billy Graham shortly after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. I had read an article the previous month about violent video games and their effects on the minds of children, desensitizing them to the act of killing. Larry King asked Billy Graham what was wrong with the world, and how such a thing as Columbine could happen. I knew, because Billy Graham was an educated man, he had read the same article I had read, and I began calculating his answer for him, that violence begets violence, and that we live in a culture desensitized to the beauty of human life and the sanctity of creation. But Billy Graham did not blame video games. Billy Graham looked Larry King in the eye and said, 'Thousands of years ago, a young couple lived in a garden called Eden, and God placed a tree in the Garden and told them not to eat from the tree ... '
And I knew in my soul he was right. — Donald Miller

We were friends, somehow. But in the end, somehow, he intended to be a mortal enemy. All the while that he was making the gestures of a close and precious friend he was fattening my soul in a coop till it was ready for killing — Saul Bellow

Leisure time is only leisure time when it is earned; otherwise, leisure time devolves into soul-killing lassitude. There's a reason so many new retirees, freed from the treadmill of work, promptly keel over on the golf course: Work fulfills us. It keeps us going. — Ben Shapiro

Sullivan ... Cassie ... in case you don't ... I wanted to tell you ... "
I waited. I didn't push him.
"They made a major mistake," he blurted out, "the dumb bastards, when they didn't start by killing you first."
"Benjamin Thomas Parish, that was the sweetest and most bizarre compliment anyone's ever given me."
I kissed him on the cheek. He kissed me on the mouth.
"You know," I whispered, "a year ago, I would have sold my soul for that."
He shook his head. "Not worth it. — Rick Yancey

Do I have to do everything myself?" The cry was a soul-freezing mixture of rage and torment. "Ain't there no one to stop asking questions and just do my bidding? By God, I'll kill and kill and kill and kill and never stop killing if people don't do what I say. I'll beat you dummies till the blood runs out of your eyes. I'll tie every man on this godforsaken island to a tree and he'll bark like a dog for me to throw him a bone. — Walter Kaylin

I could not for my soul distinguish ever the distinction between "religious anger" and "commonplace anger", "religious killing" and "commonplace killing", "religious slandering and irreligious", and so forth. — Swami Vivekananda

Your soul is drenched black with the blood of your victims, my dear, and that is why you can't see it. When you die, that heavy blood filled essence will sink to the bottom of the earth where you will burn in eternity for your crimes. — Maria V. Snyder

Oh, yes, there are ways in which men can be destroyed short of murder. We can destroy a man's reputation, we can shake somebody else's confidence in him by whispering criticism or by deliberate fault finding. That is the kind of thing which our Lord is here indicating, and His whole purpose is to show that all that is included in this commandment: 'Thou shalt not kill.' Killing does not only mean destroying life physically, it means still more trying to destroy the spirit and the soul, destroying the person in any shape or form. — D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

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WHAT TO BEGIN NEXT

I can't decide what work, what study, to being next, among the several possible. If there is no spirit, no soul, no divine dimension or value, then whatever we do is just killing time, meaningless and idle. On the other hand, if God and the mystery of spirit overlap with this time and place in simultaneous layering, then anything we work on performs eternity and is the very motion of mystery. Each gesture and word and idea appears in this moment's presence and in the other as well. This is a great truth of being.

Whether a particular actions leads toward a future heaven or hell is not worth considering. Even when you will die is not important. Eternity creates itself at this point. This moment is where you grow nearer and nearer God. Time and the infinite curl together in every nick, touch, taw, tine, and root fiber. Here and now is where you can be shown the miracle of what continuously occurs. — Bahauddin

The Spirit of Love, wherever it is, is its own blessing and happiness, because it is the truth and reality of God in the soul; and therefore is in the same joy of life, and is the same good to itself everywhere and on every occasion. Would you know the blessing of all blessings? It is this God of Love dwelling in your soul, and killing every root of bitterness, which is the pain and torment of every earthly, selfish love. For all wants are satisfied, all disorders of nature are removed, no life is any longer a burden, every day is a day of peace, everything you meet becomes a help to you, because everything you see or do is all done in the sweet, gentle element of Love. — William Law

Soul! If anybody had ever struggled with a soul, I am the man. And I wasn't arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear - concentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein was my only chance - barring, of course, the killing him there and then, which wasn't so good, on account of unavoidable noise. But his soul was mad. — Joseph Conrad

The law of God is not to return evil for evil;
indeed, if you try in this way to stamp out wickedness
it will come upon you all the stronger. It is not difficult
for you to kill the man, but his blood will surely stain
your own soul. You may think you have killed a bad
man
that you have gotten rid of evil
but you will soon
find out that the seeds of still greater wickedness have
been planted within you. — Leo Tolstoy

People always think killing requires a force: a cup of poison tipped into a mouth, a knife parting flesh from bone, a fist brought down repeatedly.
Wrong.
Here's how you kill: You stay silent, you make bargains that peel the layers off your soul one by one, you build a scaffolding of flimsy excuses and live your life on them. I may have killed to save, but I killed all the same. — Roshani Chokshi

I dread the loss of her I've never touched
love keeps me a slave in a cage of tears
I gnaw my tongue with which to her I can never speak
I miss a woman who was never born
I kiss a woman across the years that say we shall never meet
Everything passes
Everything perishes
Everything palls
my thought walks away with a killing smile
leaving discordant anxiety
which roars in my soul
No hope No hope No hope No hope No hope No hope No hope — Sarah Kane

Let me tell you a little story. There was once a boy who wasn't even old enough to shave. Beaten. Naked. He was sent out into the great desert with only a small dagger for protection. I have killed cobras with my bare hands and I have lived through conditions so horrendous, not even hell itself scares me. If any of you think for one minute that I have any soul left to prevent me from killing you, you're sadly mistaken. If you think for one minute, any of you are capable of killing me, then I say try it. But make sure you've had a good confession beforehand, because I assure you it will be the very last mistake you make in this lifetime. (Sin) — Kinley MacGregor

Christianity has basically communicated to men that the reason God put you on this Earth is to be a good boy. Mind your manners, be a nice guy. That's soul killing! — John Eldredge

When the Pentagon feels free and even gleeful about killing anybody and Everybody who gets in the way of their vicious crusade for oil, the public soul of this country has changed forever, and professional sports is only a serenade for the death of the American dream. Mahalo. — Hunter S. Thompson

What sensitive, sane soul can stand in the presence of such insanity and do nothing? Yet to expose the slaughter of seals in Canada is to deliver oneself into the hands of a bureaucratic inquisition. To witness the killing of a seal is a crime. To film or photograph the slaughter is a felony. To oppose the massacre is to subject oneself to jail time, beatings, heavy fines, and officially sanctioned harassment. - Paul Watson — Paul Watson

Women find that as they vanquish the predator, taking from it what is useful and leaving the rest, they are filled with intensity, vitality, and drive.
The predator's rage can be rendered into a soul-fire for accomplishing a great task in the world. The predator's craftiness can be used to inspect and understand things from a distance. The predator's killing nature can be used to kill off that must properly die in a woman's life,or what she must die to in her outer life, these being different things at different times. Usually, she knows exactly what they are. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

He wanted also to be forgiven for all he had done; he longed for the unity of the world's creation to melt his sins and anger, because his soul was joined to it. His body shook with the passion of the love that had found him, from which he had been exiled in the blood and the flesh of long killing. — Sebastian Faulks

Feed me. If you don't, all the way to Rosalinda's, I'm explaining the entirety of the history of Angel, the vampire with a soul given to him by gypsies as punishment for him killing one of their own. This history will range from Buffy, The Vampire Slayer through to Angel, his own TV show. I'll also add my opinions on why they should never have cancelled Angel. I'll tell you now, this is multi-part and doesn't all have to do with the fact that David Boreanaz is hot. And, if you delay, I might even have time to get into why I think Joss Whedon should be recommended for sainthood. — Kristen Ashley

And she felt the beauty in the music now, drank it in with tears streaming down her face. Never had she been so naked in worship before her Creator, allowing the adoration to bleed out her very fingertips onto the strings, playing her heart's cry for every single lost soul, for the loss of innocence every generation to come would possess as a result of what happened at the killing fields of Auschwitz. — Kristy Cambron

Eating Out Alone"
The loneliness inside me is a place,
Harvard where no one might always be someone.
When we're alone people we run from change
to the mysterious and beautiful
I am eating alone at a small white table,
visible, ignored ... the moment that tries the soul,
an explorer going blind in polar whiteness.
Yet everyone who is seated is a lay,,
or Paul Claudel, at the next table declaiming:
"L'Academie Groton, eh, c'est une ecole des cochons."
He soars from murdered English to killing French,
no word unheard, no sentence understood
a vocabulary to mortify Racine ...
the minotaur steaming in a maze of eloquence — Robert Lowell

Never lose yourself on the stage. Always act in your own person, as an artist. The moment you lose yourself on the stage marks the departure from truly living your part and the beginning of exaggerated false acting. Therefore, no matter how much you act, how many parts you take, you should never allow yourself any exception to the rule of using your own feelings. To break that rule is the equivalent of killing the person you are portraying, because you deprive him of a palpitating, living, human soul, which is the real source of life for a part. — Constantin Stanislavski

And what is that religion that sanctions, even by its silence, all that is embraced in the 'Peculiar Institution'? If there can be any thing more diametrically opposed to the religion of Jesus, than the working of this soul-killing system - which is as truly sanctioned by the religion of America as are her minsters and churches - we wish to be shown where it can be found. — Sojourner Truth

Forgive me for killing you, O noble beast,' he whispered the ancient apology that all hunters offered, as he gently touched the deer's head. 'May your soul find purpose again, while your body sustains my soul. — Amish Tripathi

The images start to darken and she feels another hunger well up in her, this one having to do with another kind of desire. The desire to feed, to possess, and the aggressive thrill of a predator capturing and killing its prey as it tears into unspoiled flesh. Its teeth ripping and rending and the satisfying coppery taste of blood. There is the ultimate moment of surrender of drinking away the life essence. The pinnacle of lust which mounts in the very last breath, when the light drains from the victim's eyes and when the soul fades ... Then there is only a triumphant cry to the moonlight and the beckoning depths of the ever waiting water. — Melissa St. Hilaire

To us, the high-resounding "isms" to which our contemporaries ask; us to give our allegiance, now, in 1948, are all equally futile: bound to be betrayed, defeated, and finally rejected by men at large, if containing anything really noble; bound to enjoy, for the time being, some sort of noisy success; if sufficiently vulgar, pretentious and soul-killing to appeal to the growing number of mechanically conditioned slaves that crawl about our planet, posing as free men; all destined to prove, ultimately, of no avail. — Savitri Devi

And in Kandahar he was taught about survival, about fighting and killing and hunting, and he learned much else without being taught, such as looking out for himself and watching his tongue and not saying the wrong thing, the thing that might get him killed. About the dignity of the lost, about losing, and how it cleansed the soul to accept defeat, and about letting go, avoiding the trap of holding on too tightly to what you wanted, and about abandonment in general, and in particular fatherlesness, the lessness of fathers, the lessness of the fatherless, and the best defenses of those who are less against those who are more: inwardness, forethought, cunning, humility and good peripheral vision. The many lessons of lessness. The lessening from which growing could begin. — Salman Rushdie