More Terrible Quotes & Sayings

Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I knew beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid. I thought how terrible the nights must have been in a time when men knew the things were there and were deadly. But no, that's wrong. If I knew they were there, I would have weapons against them, charms, prayers, some kind of alliance with forces equally strong but on my side. Knowing they were not there made me defenseless against them and perhaps more afraid. — John Steinbeck

So, as Lymond strode out and stopped, rigid and white by the doorpost, Sybilla set eyes on Francis, the son of her heart; and so Francis Crawford, after four years of unharnessed power, came face to face at last with his mother.

And Kate, falling upon the door and looking up at her self-contained relative by marriage, saw his face torn apart and left, raw as a wound without features; only pain and shock and despair and appalled recognition, all the more terrible for being perfectly voiceless. — Dorothy Dunnett

She had gone to sleep on these facts years ago, after a period of much misery, her head resting on them as on a pillow; and she had a great dread of being awakened out of so simple and untroublesome a condition. Therefore it was that she searched with earnestness for a heading under which to put Mrs. Wilkins, and in this way illumine and steady her own mind; and sitting there looking at her uneasily after her last remark, and feeling herself becoming more and more unbalanced and infected, she decided pro tem, as the vicar said at meetings, to put her under the heading Nerves. It was just possible that she ought to go straight into the category Hysteria, which was often only the antechamber to Lunacy, but Mrs. Arbuthnot had learned not to hurry people into their final categories, having on more than one occasion discovered with dismay that she had made a mistake; and how difficult it had been to get them out again, and how crushed she had been with the most terrible remorse. Yes. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

But when Edward kissed Frederica Marshall, something terrible happened - something that had never happened in a lifetime of kisses.
He didn't see an end.
He wasn't going to want a sweet farewell in a few weeks' time. He wouldn't walk away with a light heart. He was going to want more and more - more kisses, more of her, again and again. — Courtney Milan

Sometimes he remembered having heard how soldiers under fire in the trenches, and having nothing to do, try hard to find some occupation the more easily to bear the danger. It seemed to Pierre that all men were like those soldiers, seeking refuge from life: some in ambition, some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in playthings, some in horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine, and some in government service. 'Nothing is without consequence, and nothing is important: it's all the same in the end. The thing to do is to save myself from it all as best I can,' thought Pierre. Not to see IT, that terrible IT. — Leo Tolstoy

When Maddie prepared for bed behind her screen that night, she emerged to find the most terrible sight yet.

"Oh, really, Logan. That just isn't fair."
He looked up from his reclines pose in her bedroom chaise longue, his face partly covered behind a book bound in dark green leather. "What?"

"You're reading Pride and Prejudice?"

He shrugged. "I found it on your bookshelf."
Seeing him read any book was bad enough. But her favorite book? This was sheer torture.

"Just promise me something, please," she said.

"What's that?"

"Just promise me that I'm not going to come out from around this screen one night and find you holding a baby." That seemed the only possibility more devastating to her self-control.

"He chucked. "It doesna seem likely."

"Good. — Tessa Dare

I have some security that could protect me against provocations but of course there are more terrible actions that could not be stopped by any security. — Garry Kasparov

I've seen some springs that ended up being terrible winters. We human beings are gregarious. We can't live alone. For our lives to be possible, we depend on society. It's one thing to overturn a government or block the streets. But it's a different matter altogether to create and build a better society, one that needs organization, discipline and long-term work. Let's not confuse the two of them. I want to make it clear: I feel sympathetic with that youthful energy, but I think it's not going anywhere if it doesn't become more mature. — Jose Mujica

Fading light means more than just the end of another day. Night is when terrible things emerge from their sleep and seek soft flesh and hot blood. — Jim Butcher

The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible. There are principalities and powers. Angels are the thoughts of God. Now he had been dissolved into his thoughts which are beyond our conception in their nature and their multiplicity and their power. God was at least the name of something which we thought was good. Now even the name has gone and the spiritual world is scattered. There is nothing any more to prevent the magnetism of many spirits. — Iris Murdoch

It's a terrible thing but it seems like tragedy brings people together, makes them more supportive, more dependent. — Beatrice Sparks

When I was young I believed people should be told everything and that, as a pastor, I had a duty to share all my knowledge. Over the years I came to see that was a mistake. A person may know only what they are capable of assimilating. I have been thinking about this for half my life, and especially since I have been in Israel, but there are few people I can confide in. Really only you. You see, it is a terrible thing to disturb someone's equilibrium. If a person has become accustomed to thinking in a particular way, even a slight digression from that can prove painful. Not everybody is open to new ideas, to making their understanding more precise and supplementing it, to change. I have to admit that I am changing. Today my views on many matters have diverged from those generally accepted in the Catholic world, and I am not the only person in that situation. "You see, the birth of the One whom — Lyudmila Ulitskaya

There is a terrible pain," she said softly, "about being abandoned by someone who loves someone else more than you. A pain and an emptiness and a determination never again to give anyone that power. — Mary Balogh

Author Martha Beck says of the ego, "Don't leave home without it." But do not let your ego totally run the show, or it will shut down the show. Your ego is a wonderful servant, but it's a terrible master - because the only thing your ego ever wants is reward, reward, and more reward. And since there's never enough reward to satisfy, your ego will always be disappointed. Left unmanaged, that kind of disappointment will rot you from the inside out. An unchecked ego is what the Buddhists call "a hungry ghost" - forever famished, eternally howling with need and greed. Some version of that hunger dwells within all of us. We all have that lunatic presence, living deep within our guts, that refuses to ever be satisfied with anything. I have it, you have it, we all have it. My saving grace is this, though: I know that I am not only an ego; I am also a soul. And I know that my soul doesn't care a whit about reward or failure. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Was it truly so terrible for a man of God to have sex? The Protestants had been doing it for half a millennium and they seemed no more hell-bound than the Catholics for it. And was it so wrong to want both? I wanted to lead this church, I wanted to help people find God. But dammit, I wanted Poppy too, and I didn't think it was fair that I had to choose. — Sierra Simone

Make the matter even more terrible than the truth — Arthur Conan Doyle

In the end I created a career of my own, concentrating on my writing and lecturing, reaching larger audiences than I would had I ended up with tenure and a full teaching load. It was Virginia Woolf who said that it is terrible to be frozen out of a sacred tradition-but even more terrible to be frozen into it. — Michael Parenti

I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster. ... The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That's genius. — Sam Shepard

I was so much in the habit of having Albertine with me, and now I suddenly saw a new aspect of Habit. Hitherto I had regarded it chiefly as an annihilating force which suppresses the originality and even the awareness of one's perceptions; now I saw it as a dread deity, so riveted to one's being, its insignificant face so incrusted in one's heart, that if it detaches itself, if it turns away from one, this deity that one had barely distinguished inflicts on one sufferings more terrible than any other and is then as cruel as death itself. — Marcel Proust

Being the bearer of bad news is a terrible thing; sometimes you don't know if you'll have the words, the delicacy,the strength. You think of the person on the other side: how you're about to bring their world crashing down with a single phone call and deep inside them they'll hate you because their sorrow will just be searching for someone to blame. Then what do you say? That you're sorry? Sorry for what? They'll hate you even more because they'll know you're not sorry like they are. They'll know you haven't been destroyed like they have. — Emma Abdullah

I wanted to deny him, but that's the terrible power of a diary: it not only calls forth the person you used to be but rubs your nose in him, reminding you that not all change is evolutionary. More often than not, you didn't learn from your mistakes. You didn't get wiser, but simply older, growing from the twenty-five-year-old who got stoned and accidentally peed on his friend Katherine's kitten to the thirty-five-year-old who got drunk and peed in the sandbox at his old elementary school. "The sandbox!" my sister Amy said at the time. "Don't you realize that children have to pee in there? — David Sedaris

Atheism in legislation, indifference in matters of religion, and the pernicious maxims which go under the name of Liberal Catholicism are the true causes of the destruction of states; they have been the ruin of France. Believe me, the evil I denounce is more terrible than the Revolution, more terrible even than The Commune. I have always condemned Liberal Catholicism, and I will condemn it again forty times over if it be necessary. — Pope Pius IX

The Dark Lord lies alone and friendless, abandoned by his followers. His servant has been chained these twelve years. Tonight, before midnight ... the servant will break free and set out to rejoin his master. The Dark Lord will rise again with his servant's aid, greater and more terrible than ever he was. Tonight ... before midnight ... the servant ... will set out ... to rejoin ... his master. ... — J.K. Rowling

It was from the Lion that the light came. No one ever saw anything more terrible or beautiful. — C.S. Lewis

If he was dull as a statesman he was more dull in private life, and it may be imagined that such a woman as his wife would find some difficulty in making his society the source of her happiness. Their marriage, in a point of view regarding business, had been a complete success, - and a success, too, when on the one side, that of Lady Glencora, there had been terrible dangers of shipwreck, and when on his side also there had been some little fears of a mishap. — Anthony Trollope

Omri refused to get involved in an argument. He was somehow scared that if he talked about the Indian, something bad would happen. In fact, as the day went on and he longed more and more to get home, he began to feel certain that the whole incredible happening - well, not that it hadn't happened, but that something would go wrong. All his thoughts, all his dreams were centered on the miraculous, endless possibilities opened up by a real, live, miniature Indian of his very own. It would be too terrible if the whole thing turned out to be some sort of mistake. — Lynne Reid Banks

I've never agreed with the conventional wisdom that 'actors are great liars.' If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be 'actors are terrible liars,' because only bad actors lie on the job. The good ones hate fakery and avoid manufactured emotion at all costs. Any script is enough of a lie anyway. (What experience does any actor have with flying a spacecraft? Killing someone?) What's called for, what actors are hired for, is to bring reality to the arbitrary. — Rob Lowe

This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel ... total loss of all basic motor skills: Blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue - severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally ... you can actually watch yourself behaving in the terrible way, but you can't control it. — Hunter S. Thompson

He seems so frivolous and so careless, but he gives money to beggars, not frivolously or carelessly, but because he believes in giving money to beggars, and giving it to them "where they stand".
He says he knows perfectly well all the arguments against giving money to beggars. But he finds those to be precisely the arguments for giving money to them. If beggars are lazy or deceptive or wanting a drink, he knows only too well his own lack of motivation, his own dishonesty, his own thirst.
He doesn't believe in "scientific charity" because that is too easy, as easy as writing a check. He believes in "promiscuous charity" because that is really difficult. "It means the most dark and terrible of all human actions - talking to a man. In fact, I know of nothing more difficult than really talking to the poor men we meet." (pp. 13-14) — Dale Ahlquist

As time passed there was no more buying food, no money, no supplies. On some days, we wouldn't even have a crumb to eat. There's a vivid scene in Nanni Loy's The Four Days of Naples, a movie made after the war about the uprising of the Neapolitans against the occupying Germans, in which one of the young characters sinks his teeth into a loaf of bread so voraciously, so desperately, I can still identify with him. In those four famous days in late September, when Naples rose up against the Germans - even before the Allies arrived, it was the climax of a terrible period of deprivation and marked the beginning of the end of the war in Italy. — Sophia Loren

It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That's it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything. That's it. That's what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything. — William Faulkner

To live when you do not want to is dreadful, but it would be even more terrible to be immortal when you did not want to be. As things are, however, the whole ghastly burden is suspended from me by a thread which I can cut in two with a penny-knife. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Mortimer had maxed three credit cards stocking the cave with canned goods and medical supplies and tools and everything a man needed to live through the end of the world. There were more than a thousand books along shelves in the driest part of the cave. There used to be several boxes of pornography until Mortimer realized that he'd spent nearly ten days in a row sitting in the cave masturbating. He burned the dirty magazines to keep from doing some terrible whacking injury to himself. — Victor Gischler

I wanted more of those sweltering kisses. I felt terrible about that. But the warm sunny fragrance of him ... he smelled better than any human being I'd ever met. "Okay" I said unsteadily, "forget what I said about not exchanging names. Who are you?"
"For you, honey ... I'm trouble." -Haven & Hardy — Lisa Kleypas

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal. — Plato

I had not expected the gentle, tentative surge of gratitude I began to feel...for St. Paul's School, the spring, and the early morning. I needed the morning light and the warbling birds. I needed to find a way to live in this place for a moment and get the good of it. I had tried to hold myself apart, and the aloneness proved more terrible than what I had tried to escape. — Lorene Cary

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable. — Hypatia

I think this whole division between the genres has more to do with marketing than anything else. It's terrible for the culture of music. — Tom Waits

For a time, it would work well. then it worked less and my pain was more. I would go through wild bouts of depression, horrible comedowns. I understand why kids kill themselves. I absolutely do. You feel terrible. You feel soul-less. "I'll never do it to my child". — Channing Tatum

'Grease' is an awesome movie. I wish they'd make a new one, more for our time. The graphics are terrible when you look back on it. — Kyrie Irving

Fulfill - you can far more than fulfill - the brightest anticipations of those who, in the name of human freedom, and in the face of threats that have ripened into terrible realities since, fought that battle which placed you where you now stand. — Robert Dale Owen

[Simone Weil's] life is almost a perfect blend of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny. — Flannery O'Connor

Affiiction makes God appear to be absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. A kind of horror submerges the whole soul. During this absence there is nothing to love. What is terrible is that if, in this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, God's absence becomes final. — Simone Weil

-Are you ready to return to the outside world, Billy?
-No, definitely not, sir.
-Well, you can't stay here forever now, can you?
-Why not? I'm not bothering anybody, sir.
-Because it's not healthy. You're a very special young man, Billy. It's time you found that out on your own, out there. The world may not be as terrible as you think.
-I would like to stay here one more month, if I may, sir.
-One more month? Why?
-Summer will be over, sir. I can't go out there if it's going to be summertime.
-And why not?
-I wouldn't want to see any young girls playing. I would not want to see any flowers outside.
-Why?
-Because everything happy right now is going to die.
-But Billy...
-I would not like to be reminded of anything pretty.
-But Billy, of course, anything might...
-I would not like to be reminded.
-OK, OK. We will se what we can do, Billy. — Joe Meno

Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon. — Fay Weldon

Some people
Never find the right kind of love
you know, the kind that steals
your breath away.
Like diving into a snowmelt.
The kind that jolts your heart,
sets it beating apace.
An anxious hiccuping of hummingbirds wings.
The kind that makes every terrible minute apart feel like hours.
Days.
Years.
Some people flit from one insane possibility to the next.
Never experincing the connection of two people.
rocked by destiny.
Never knowing what it means to love someone else,
more than themselves.
More than life itself, or the promise of something better.
Beyond this world,
More even (forgive me!) than god.
Lucky me, I found the right kind of love.
With the wrong person. — Ellen Hopkins

Taste of sin is terrible in that it is the sweetest tasting fruit. Did not even Eve succumb to it? The more you taste it, the more greedy you become for it. — Jeyamohan

My grandmother once told my mother that there is a splice of quartz inside each of us, like the quartz inside a compass or clock. We feel the stone glow warm when we find what it is we are meant to do. My grandmother was a singer; voice was her quartz, a second heartbeat that reminded her always of who she was. My mother's quartz is dance and Joaquin's is the piano. The saddest souls in the world, my mother believes, are those who never discover this thing within them. There is a difference between those who wander in search of that glow and those who wander in hopes of evading it. It is frightening, after all - that first awakening when the radiance within threatens to topple you. Even more terrifying is the decision to allow the fire to continue smoldering, because the brighter you let it get, the more terrible the darkness should you ever let it out."

- Elizabeth Genovise "Irises" (O. Henry prize winner 2016) — Elizabeth Genovise

In a drawl so low, it seemed to suspend time, the old man said, "When the last leaf falls from the Widow's Tree this year, she'll be done for good. No coming back. No bothering anyone no more. Nobody will find her bones, and before next spring, nobody'll even remember her. She'll just be a wisp of a thing."
Peggy looked toward the tree, now hidden behind a low patch of morning cloud. She breathed out hard through her nose. "That's a terrible thing to do. Even for you, even to her."
"Set in motion a long time ago," he said blithely. "Just took this long to finish up. — Alex Bledsoe

It is possible to conceive of something even more terrible than a hell of suffering, and that is a hell of boredom. — Victor Hugo

Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more.' — Kate Atkinson

My Favorite Kid President Quotes "Create something that will make the world more awesome." "Treat everybody like it's their birthday." "If you can't think of anything nice to say, you're not thinking hard enough." "Be somebody who makes everybody feel like a somebody." "Give the world a reason to dance!" "Us humans are capable of war and sadness and other terrible stuff. But also CUPCAKES!" "Love changes everything so fill the world with it!" "Grown-ups who dream are the best kinds of grown-ups." "Don't be IN a party. BE a party." And my personal favorite, "Mail someone a corn dog. — Rainn Wilson

The coast is an edgy place. Living on the coast presents certain stark realities and a wild, rare beauty. Continent confronts ocean. Weather intensifies. It's a place of tide and tantrum; of flirtations among fresh- and saltwaters, forests and shores; of tense negotiations with an ocean that gives much but demands more. Every year the raw rim that is this coast gets hammered and reshaped like molten bronze. This place roils with power and a sometimes terrible beauty. The coast remains youthful, daring, uncertain about tomorrow. The guessing, the risk; in a way, we're all thrill seekers here. — Carl Safina

Everything made by human hands looks terrible under magnification
crude, rough, and asymmetrical. But in nature every bit of life is lovely. And the more magnification we use, the more details are brought out, perfectly formed, like endless sets of boxes within boxes. — Roman Vishniac

Their characteristics are well-known. They're beautiful
when they're not astoundingly ugly. They're both goddesses for men to worship, and demons for them to flee. They adore children, sometimes to the point of unhealthy obsession. They have a strong association with nature, from which they're often assumed to draw magical power. Their anger is a terrible thing to behold, and all the more fearsome because anything can spark it; the rules by which these creatures operate are not those of rational men. They are creatures of fanciful whim, and they never, ever, can be understood.
I'm talking, of course, about women. — Marie Brennan

And no Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor at night. — Soren Kierkegaard

It is said, once a wise man from the far North told me; it is said that there are in certain parts of Scandinavia cities within cities like there are circles within circles; existent yet invisible. And those cities are inhabited by creatures more terrible than imagination can create : man-shaped but man-devouring, as black and as silent as the night they prowl in. — Johanna Sinisalo

I see no light behind that terrible curtain. I do not think one religion better than another and I think the Christian religion has brought far more misery crime and suffering far more tyranny and evil than any other. — Eliza Lynn Linton

It's easy to show terrible people's behavior on screen, and we all just kind of nod and go, 'Isn't that terrible.' It's more interesting when you can show terrible behavior in the interest of something good. — Damien Chazelle

The ordinary, utterly mundane reason behind the massacre makes it somehow more terrible, and far more depressing. The word 'senseless' springs to mind, and Idris thwarts it. It's what people always say. A senseless act of violence. A senseless murder. As if you could commit sensible murder. — Khaled Hosseini

The danger of pride
I see increasingly how difficult it is to exercise authority in a community. We are so inclined to want authority for the honour, prestige and admiration that comes with it. Inside each of us is a little tyrant who wants power and the associated prestige, who wants to dominate, to be superior and to control. We are frightened of criticism. We feel we are the only ones to see the truth - and that, sometimes, in the name of God ... So the community becomes 'our' project.
... And Christians can sometimes hide these tendencies behind a mask of virtue, doing what they do for 'good' reasons. There is nothing more terrible than a tyrant using religion as his or her cover. I know my own tendencies toward this and I have to struggle against them constantly. — Jean Vanier

But, Doc, I'm not fourteen any more, and I'm not Lulamae. But the terrible part is (and I realized it while we were standing there) I am. I'm still stealing turkey eggs and running through a brier patch. Only now I call it having the mean reds. — Truman Capote

We had the great depression, we had two world wars, we had the flu epidemic. We had oil shock. We had all these terrible things happen. But something about the American system unleashed more and of a potential to human beings over that hundred years so that we had a seven for one improvement in - there's never been any - I mean, you have centuries where if you've got a 1 percent improvement, then it's something. So we've got a great system. And we've got more productive capacity now than we ever have. — Howard Warren Buffett

All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings. — Stefan Zweig

Nothing was more beautiful than a night sky dusted with stars. Nothing was more terrible than a night sky scrawled with a thousand destinies. Night was inevitable. Like me. — Roshani Chokshi

For indeed, what is more dire than the evils which today afflict the world? What is more terrible for the discerning than the unfolding events? What is more pitiable and frightening for those who endure them? To see a barbarous people of the desert overrunning another's lands as though they were their own; to see civilization itself being ravaged by wild and untamed beasts whose form alone is human. — Maximus The Confessor

It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak. — Edmond Jabes

How terrible would it be to just wait there pathetically alone for him never to show up?"
Eudoxia's expression grew more serious. "That's what you're doing anyway, my dear. — Ann Brashares

Strangely, the subsequent AIDS works that have become iconic in our culture rarely mention the movement, or the engaged community of lovers, but both formations were inseparable from the crisis itself. Now, looking back, I fear that the story of the isolated helpless homosexual was one far more palatable to the corporations who control the reward system in the arts.The more truthful story of the American mass - abandoning families, criminal governments, indifferent neighbors - is too uncomfortable and inconvenient to recall. The story of how gay people who were despised, had no rights, and carried the burden of a terrible disease came together to force the country to change against its will, is apparently too implicating to tell. Fake tales of individual heterosexuals heroically overcoming their prejudices to rescue helpless dying men with AIDS was a lot more appealing to the powers that be, but not at all true. — Sarah Schulman

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so ... Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still. — Oscar Wilde

She'd fucked him over hardcore. She'd betrayed him and she'd lied to him, and she knew that as far as he was concerned she'd led him on and used him as well, had consorted with people who wanted to see him dead and given them information to help them make him so. Most of all, she'd hurt him. And if the pain in her chest was anything close to what he'd felt, she was more than willing to admit he deserved to get his own back. Was willing to do more than admit it; was willing to take it, in the hopes he'd eventually decide she'd been punished enough and they could maybe move on. — Stacia Kane

How absurd these words are, such as beast and beast of prey. One should not speak of animals in that way. They may be terrible sometimes, but they're much more right than men ... They're never in any embarrassment. They always know what to do and how to behave themselves. They don't flatter and they don't intrude. They don't pretend. They are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky. — Hermann Hesse

For those who dispair that their lives are without meaning and without purpose, for those who dwell in a lonelines so terrible that it has withered their hearts, for those who hate because they have no recognition of the destiny they share with all humanity, for those who would squander their lives in self-pity and in self-destruction because they have lost the saving wisdom with which they are born, for all these and many more, hope waits in the dreams of a dog, where the scared bature of life may be clearly experienced without all but binding filter of human need, desire, greed, envy and endless fear. And here, in dream woods and fields, along with the shores of dream seas, with the profound awareness of the playful presence abiding in all things, Curtis is able to prove what she thus far only dared to hope is true: that although her mother never loved her, there is one who always has. — Dean Koontz

The thing that got me about the Orphan Trains was that the experiences were so varied. Some of the kids went from neglect and hunger in New York to loving farm families who couldn't wait to fatten them up, who gave them medical care, an education, affection. And some of the kids became the victims of terrible cruelty, and more hunger, and more neglect - it all depended on who adopted them off of the train. — Laura Moriarty

A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of laughter more terrible than any sadness-a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild. — Jack London

Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us - grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one's own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another. * * * P — Susan Sontag

My grandfather ran off the V-2 rocket film a dozen times and then hoped that someday our cities would open up more and let the green and the land and the wilderness in more, to remind people that we're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big. When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, someday it will come in and get us for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be. You see? — Ray Bradbury

What laid me low was no mystical vision, no message from God, but a blow of compassion. In a wakeful mind, no force is more terrible, or precious. — Scott Russell Sanders

What is interesting is that the term Aryan was adopted by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler in the early 20th century to describe a people group they deemed as purely Germanic (must be of one people group) and more "evolved" than the rest of European peoples and the rest of the world. And yet, the true Aryans were one of the most famous groups of people who were of mixed descent. Hitler and the Nazis were playing off of Charles Darwin's model of higher and lower races. This idea, claimed by this humanistic religion, has been a cause of terrible atrocities in WWI, WWII, and mass exterminations of people by leaders like Stalin (Soviet Union) and Mao (China), among others. — Bodie Hodge

I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors' continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea;
I have longed to move away
From the repetition of salutes,
For there are ghosts in the air
And ghostly echoes on paper,
And the thunder of calls and notes.
I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
Neither by night's ancient fear,
The parting of hat from hair,
Pursed lips at the receiver,
Shall I fall to death's feather.
By these I would not care to die,
Half convention and half lie. — Dylan Thomas

At about this point I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moon-brains. I felt in terrible danger of puking. I didn't know whether it was the awful movie giving me a stomach-ache or all that caviar I had eaten. — Sylvia Plath

Death comes to me again, a girl
in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.
It's not so terrible she tells me,
not like you think, all darkness
and silence. There are windchimes
and the smell of lemons, some days
it rains, but more often the air is dry
and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living. I like it,
she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
especially when they fight, and when they sing. — Dorianne Laux

Her armpits were still slightly wet & she examined them one by one. No hair. This was one of her greatest assets over her sister who had underarm hair.Her slender arms & long legs were also free of hair. She had only a little bit of pubic hair, she noticed. It must be terrible to have lots of ugly underarm & thick coarse arm & leg hairs that you had to shave off daily, she thought. A bit more pubic hair, she wouldn't mind, she decided. But they tended to tickle men's nostrils & make them sneeze.[MMT] — Nicholas Chong

People use their leaders almost as an excuse. When they give in to the leader's commands they can always reserve the feeling that these commands are are alien to them, that they are the leader's responsibility, that the terrible acts they are committing are in his name and not theirs. This, then, is another thing that makes people feel so guiltless, as Canetti points out: they can imagine themselves as temporary victims of the leader. The more they give in to his spell, and the more terrible the crimes they commit, the more they can feel that the wrongs are not natural to them. It is all so neat, this usage of the leader; it reminds us of James Franzer's discovery that in the remote past tribes often used their kings as scapegoats who, when they no longer served the people's needs, were put to death. These are the many ways in which men can play the hero, all the while that they are avoiding responsibility for their own acts in a cowardly way. — Ernest Becker

You can make yourself believe that someone can look into your eyes and read your mind. You can wish for it, or dread it. There is no cause for either. As long as you carry your words inside, they are safe. You are the sole keeper. But sometimes that is a terrible curse, Adam. Those unformed words take on an enormous weight. Sometimes the burden of them becomes more than you can carry. For me it did. I simply had to share it. And Angela came to me. (238) — Linda Olsson

There was no back home any more, not in the essential way, and that was part of Paris too. Why we couldn't stop drinking or talking or kissing the wrong people no matter what it ruined. Some of us had looked into the faces of the dead and tried not to remember anything in particular. Ernest was one of these. He often said he'd died in the war, just for a moment; that his soul had left his body like a silk handkerchief, slipping out and levitating over his chest. It had returned without being called back, and I often wondered if writing for him was a way of knowing his soul was there after all, back in its place. Of saying to himself, if not to anyone else, that he had seen what he'd seen and felt those terrible things and lived anyway. That he had died but wasn't dead any more. — Paula McLain

...it was the very government and the way they treated us that started us on that road. For example, in my case, when they beat me in the DIC cells for being a "communist" and an "extremist" and all that, they awoke a great curiosity in me: "What is communism? What is socialism?" Every day they beat me over the head with that. And I began to ask myself: "What's a socialist country? How are problems solved there? How do people live there? Are the miners massacred there?" And then I began to analyze: "What have I done? What do I want? What do I think? Why am I here? I only asked for justice for the people, I only asked for education to be better, I asked that there be no more massacres like the terrible San Juan massacre. Is that socialism? Is that communism? — Domitila Barrios De Chungara

What a thing it is to have music that plays your terrible thoughts. I imagined that one piece could drive more delicate women than myself to insanity. — Jackie Kay

It's as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race - scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unknown throughout human history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day ... all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley. — Philip Roth

Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window ... that was the moment, Maxi. Not when 'everything changed.' When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we've become, what we've been all the time."
"And what we've always been is ... ?"
"Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who's paying for it, who's starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs ... planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There's no uninnocent dead. — Thomas Pynchon

But the more he strained to think, the clearer it became to him that it was undoubtedly so, that he had actually forgotten, overlooked in his life one small circumstance - that death would come and everything would end, that it was not worth starting anything and that nothing could possibly be done about it. Yes, it was terrible, but it was so. — Leo Tolstoy

There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that these have passed away like a tale that is told ... — Ouida

Once more there sounded within me the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity no other chance will be given to us. — Nikos Kazantzakis

The terrible part of this looming catastrophe is that people have been working on solutions for years and have developed concrete steps to massively reduce our energy use, while stimulating whole new industries and technologies that are more efficient and affordable. — David Suzuki

Who can estimate the misery that has been caused by this infamous doctrine of eternal punishment? Think of the lives it has blighted-of the tears it has caused-of the agony it has produced. Think of the millions who have been driven to insanity by this most terrible of dogmas. This doctrine renters God the basest and most cruel being in the universe ... There is nothing more degrading than to worship such a god. — Robert Green Ingersoll

The woman wants the man to love her for ever and ever. She deliberately shuts her eyes to those two terrible enemies - Time and Change. Men are more realistic. They know that all things pass. And yet, it's precisely out of this tension between the two sexes that civilization has evolved. Had this not been present, man would have become extinct like the many animals who were overtaken by this fate. Why do I say this? Because I see this "push" and "pull" as masculine and feminine principles, respectively, both of which are essential for the survival of the human race. — Khushwant Singh

There is a room in the Department of Mysteries, that is kept locked at all times. It contains a force that is at once more wonderful and more terrible than death, than human intelligence, than forces of nature. It is also, perhaps, the most mysterious of the many subjects for study that reside there. It is the power held within that room that you possess in such quantities and which Voldemort has not at all. That power took you to save Sirius tonight. That power also saved you from possession by Voldemort, because he could not bear to reside in a body so full of the force he detests. In the end, it mattered not that you could not close your mind. It was your heart that saved you. — J.K. Rowling

My God, he couldn't help thinking, how terrible it is to be that age, to have emotions so near the surface that the slightest turbulence causes them to boil over. That, very simply, was what adulthood must be all about
acquiring the skill to bury things more deeply. Out of sight and, whenever possible, out of mind. — Richard Russo

This was to me a far more terrible loss than the two that I had suffered before. For though, Lord help me, I had travelled far enough from all paths of decent or godly living, yet there was in me, though I myself write it, a certain goodness of heart which, when I was sober (or sick) made me very sorry of all that I had done before the fit came on me. And this I lost wholly: having in place thereof another deadly coldness at the heart. I am not, as I have before said, ready with my pen, so I fear that what I have just written may not be readily understood. — Rudyard Kipling

No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero — Frank Herbert