World Shattered Quotes & Sayings

Behind them, across the hall, the dancers shattered their roses on the floor, and Aedion grinned at his queen as the entire world went to hell. — Sarah J. Maas

I want to rewind the clock, take back the night when the world shattered. I want to erase everything that went wrong. — Amy Hatvany

By confusing life with play-acting and play-acting with life, one may perhaps construct a tolerable moral world from shattered fragments of the past — William Hardy McNeill

Your heart will be shattered by sorrow if you force it to live in tomorrow's ephemeral imagination - world instead of in today's eternal reality - now. — Sri Chinmoy

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. — John Green

Then Samuel died and the world shattered like a dish. — John Steinbeck

We're like a shattered peasant society. I mean, the last study I saw of it was done in around 1980, and the United States was at the level of Bangladesh, it was very close to Iran.33 Eighty percent of Americans literally believe in religious miracles. Half the population thinks the world was created a couple thousand years ago and that fossils were put here to mislead people or something - half the population. You just don't find things like that in other industrial societies.34 Well, — Noam Chomsky

Dong.
Dong.
Dong.
The third toll of the church bells hovered in the air, and everything became still. Someone in the village had died. Valerie froze.
Dong.
A forth toll shattered the silence. The world split open, exposing a raw inside.
Valerie and Peter looked at each other first in confusion, then in awful understanding.
The fourth bell meant only one thing: Wolf attack.
She had never heard the fourth bell except for the time she and Peter had rung it themselves.
With those bells, Valerie knew.
Life would never be the same, — Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

Once the violence has ceased, the US should immediately call on the World Bank and other international institutions to convene a donors conference to rebuild Lebanon's shattered infrastructure. — John Conyers

He saved the world, but he shattered mine. — Margaret Stohl

Here's to everyone who has survived something devastating
something that shattered your self-confidence and distorted your world in one blow. Whether you were fierce in the face of it or fell to pieces or shoved it out of sight for years
I don't care how you got here. Every day you are stronger. Every day you are healing. Every day that you survive, you are telling that event, that person, that illness, that memory: YOU DO NOT DEFINE ME. Keep on.
Acknowledgements — Tammara Webber

There,to survive,they will no doubt readapt,drawing upon the resilence and courage they displayed during the Vietnam War to perserve harmony with nature and cosmic forces. There they will live with unflagging dignity,working unceasingly from day to day to salvalge the remaining pieces of their shattered world. — Gerald Hickey

I think the world has mostly ended because the cities we wander through are as rotten as we are. Buildings have collapsed. Rusted cars clog the streets. Most glass is shattered and the wind drifting through the hollow high-rises moans like an animal left to die. I don't know what happened. Disease? War? Social collapse? Or was it just us? The Dead replacing the Living? I guess it's not so important. Once you're arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which road you took. — Isaac Marion

The river was behind him. The wind was full of acid. In the slow float of light I looked away, down at the river. On the brink of freezing, it gleamed in large, bulging blisters. The water, where it still moved, was black and braided. And it occurred to me then how it took hours, sometimes days, for the surface of a river to freeze over - to hold in its skin the perfect and crystalline world - and how that world could be shattered by a small stone dropped like a single syllable. — Nam Le

Clairvoyant, Hornblower could foresee that in a year's time, the world would hardy remember the incident. In twenty years, it would be entirely forgotten. Yet those headless corpses up there in Muzillac; those shattered redcoats; those Frenchmen caught in the four-pounder's blast of canister
they were as dead as if it had been a day in which history had been changed. — C.S. Forester

On the day that Raphael crossed the border, the seas had turned a violent impossible blue, as had every river and every lake across the world. Even the rain that fell from the sky was a glorious blue, and when it shattered, it left behind a sparkling residue, faceted diamond dust in the palm — Nalini Singh

He can't take his eyes off the stars, but I can't take mine off his face. — Amie Kaufman

If we remain fearful, then we will be further stripped of power as we barrel towards this neofeudalistic state where there is a world of masters and serfs, a kind of permanent underclass. That's what's happening; that's what's being created. Rapacious corporate business interests have shattered all kinds of regulations and controls. They have carried out a coup d'etat in slow motion. And it's over; they've won. — Chris Hedges

I'm not sure what exactly you think we've been through. We were best friends, then we were a couple, then my momma got sick and you needed your dick sucked so you cheated on me. I took care of my sick momma alone. No one to lean on. Then she died and I moved. I got my heart and world shattered and came home. You've been here for me. I didn't ask you to but you have. I'm thankful for that but it doesn't make all that other stuff go away. It doesn't make up for the fact you deserted me when I needed you the most. So excuse me if when my world is once again about to be jerked out from under me that you aren't the first person I run to. You haven't earned that yet. — Abbi Glines

She was sitting in a dark room, curled up and her head buried on her knees. His name echoing in her mind, like a thunder over a seashore. She was torn between the happiness brought by the waves, that touched her feet and fear of losing herself in the chaos. created by the sound that shattered her whole world into pieces. — Akshay Vasu

I know something happens between the time our mothers and fathers and teachers and mentors send us out into the world telling us, "The world is yours," and "You are beautiful," and "You can be anything," and the time we return to them.

Something happens when people tell me I have a pretty face, ignoring me from the neck down. When I watch the news and see unarmed black men and women shot dead over and over, it's kind of hard to believe this world is mine.

Sometimes it feels like I leave home a whole person, sent off with kisses from Mom, who is hanging her every hope on my future. By the time I get home I feel like my soul has been shattered into a million pieces.

Mom's love repairs me. — Renee Watson

Today he was being reminded yet again of the obvious: The world doesn't give even the slightest damn about us or our petty problems. We never quite get that, do we? Our lives have been shattered - shouldn't the rest of us take notice? But no. To the outside world, Adam looked the same, acted the same, felt the same. We get mad at someone for cutting us off in traffic or for taking too long to order at Starbucks or for not responding exactly as we see fit, and we have no idea that behind their facade, they may be dealing with some industrial-strength shit. Their lives may be in pieces. They may be in the midst of incalculable tragedy and turmoil, and they may be hanging on to their sanity by a thread. — Harlan Coben

Fighting for survival in a shattered world ... the truth is her only hope. — Veronica Roth

When your world has shattered, ain't nothing else matters. It ain't over, it's only love and that's all. — Bryan Adams

I make collages. I join the shattered world creating a new harmony. — Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

All the ideals and beliefs you ever had have crashed about your gun-deafened ears - you don't believe in God or them or the infallibility of England or anything but bloody war and wounds and foul smells and smutty stories and smoke and bombs and lice and filth and noise, noise, noise - you live in a world of cold sick fear, a dirty world of darkness and despair - you want to crawl ignominiously home away from these painful writhing things that once were men, these shattered, tortured faces that dumbly demand what it's all about in Christ's name ... — Evadne Price

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it's based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility. — Martha C. Nussbaum

More than 100,000 soldiers will soon return home with the post-traumatic stress I know so well, not to mention the mysterious effects of deplted uranium ... and the ripples of resentment and animosity this war has sent throughout the world will inevitably wash up on U.S. shores.
As I write this, mainstream political dialogue is still focused on the crazy idea that we can somehow still "win" the war in Iraq. For someone like me, a citizen of both countries, what outcome would constitute a victory? When you're talking about war, about so many thousands dead, so many families shattered on both sides, how can anyone claim victory? — Wafaa Bilal

Axes bit wood into pieces and hammers nailed it back together. Humans could never accept the world as it was and live in it. They were always breaking it and living amongst the shattered pieces. — Robin Hobb

Life goes on, and deadlines arrive, even when it seem the world should stop out of respect for a shattered self-esteem. — Kelly Bingham

If you are liberated then you can be in the crowd and there is no crowd. You can be surrounded by the world and their is no world. You have shattered the prism of illusion. — Frederick Lenz

And one thing, as they sometimes do, led not to another, but shattered a world. — Richard Flanagan

But the problem was, Sacks wasn't comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country - and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid, even — Malcolm Gladwell

My world, created by glass and flame in the birth of your heat, implodes inside the shadowed walls of my heart.
I swallowed the shards you gave me, your eyes on mine.
Nothing is easy.
I wait, feeling your hands holding the shattered pieces of my soul together in the molten, darkest recesses of the heart you claimed, unwilling to give up.
I am inside you, waiting to come out. — Rachel Thompson

Alas! You have shattered the beautiful world with a brazen fist; It falls, it is scattered - By a demigod destroyed. We are trailing the ruins into the void and wailing over a beauty undone and ended. Earth's mighty son, more splendid rebuild it, you that are strong, build it again within! And begin a new life, a new way, lucid and gay, and play new songs. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Death, of course, like chastity, admits of no degree; a man is dead or not dead, and a man is just as dead by one means as by another; but it is infinitely more horrible and revolting to see a man shattered and eviscerated, than to see him shot. And one sees such things; and one suffers vicariously, with the inalienable sympathy of man for man. One forgets quickly. The mind is averted as well as the eyes. It reassures itself after that first despairing cry: "It is I!"
"No, it is not I. I shall not be like that."
And one moves on, leaving the mauled and bloody thing behind: gambling, in fact, on that implicit assurance each one of us has of his own immortality. One forgets, but he will remember again later, if only in his sleep. — Frederic Manning

If we fail, the planet will grow sterile and your people will die in hunger, thirst and waves of plagues. Our people and the thrm's will die more slowly because the poisons here will render us unable to conceive. The skies will cease to be blue, the land will lose its verdure and the seas, well, the seas will be the first to go. Anything that does survive will be broken, mutant, discontinuous from us and mutually exclusive. It will be the new life of a shattered world, a world for chitinous, crawly things, not one for soft and tender emotion. I hope, child, I have answered your question.
Meg said nothing. None of it made sense, but she still felt an urge to deny it, deny it, even though Ekaterina's strange, rolling words carried a ring of truth. Suddenly, the autumn chill cut through all her layers of bundling wraps. She could not stop shivering. — Robert Stikmanz

If I woke up one morning and realized that all I ever was going to be was a business man, I'd probably die. All my dreams would be shattered. Early in life I had many dreams. I dreamed of being a great basketball star. I dreamed of being a preacher. I dreamed of saving the world from war and racism. And I dreamed of being a great poet. Today, I dream only of writing. — Harley King

In seven days, God created the world. And in seven seconds, I shattered mine. — Breaking Benjamin

Any story told in this machine age must be a story of fragments, for fragments are all the world has left: interrupted threads of talk at crowded cocktail parties; snatches of poems heard as a radio dial spins through its arc; incomplete commandments reclaimed from shattered stones. — Dexter Palmer

I vowed that I would never tell anyone of my shame. They say that when you kept a secret, it eats you up inside, but I felt it was better that way. I wanted to appear strong in front of my children and my family. I didn't want anybody to know. And I would maintain my persona as Jenni, the Rivera Rebel who had never lost a fight. But deep down inside I knew I had lost a piece of myself that I would never recover. My soul had been shattered, but to the outside world I did just as I had been taught since I was a little girl; I kept my head up and continued forward. It is, after all, the Rivera way. — Jenni Rivera

Cain killed Abel, and the blood cried out from the ground
a story so sad that even God took notice of it. Maybe it was not the sadness of the story, since worse things have happened every minute since that day, but its novelty that He found striking. In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest things. In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of his laws, for example, that shock will spend itself in waves; that our images will mimic every gesture, and that shattered they will multiply and mimic every gesture ten, a hundred, or a thousand times. Cain, the image of God, gave the simple earth of the field a voice and a sorrow, and God himself heard the voice, and grieved for the sorrow, so Cain was a creator, in the image of his creator. — Marilynne Robinson

And it shall come to pass that what men made shall be shattered, and the Shadow shall lie across the Pattern of the Age, and the Dark One shall once more lay his hand upon the world of man. Women shall weep and men quail as the nations of the earth are rent like rotting cloth. Neither shall anything stand nor abide . . . Yet one shall be born to face the Shadow, born once more as he was born before and shall be born again, time without end. The Dragon shall be Reborn, and there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth at his rebirth. In sackcloth and ashes shall he clothe the people, and he shall break the world again by his coming, tearing apart all ties that bind. Like the unfettered dawn shall he blind us, and burn us, yet shall the Dragon Reborn confront the Shadow at the Last Battle, and his blood shall give us the Light. Let tears flow, O ye people of the world. Weep for your salvation. — Robert Jordan

European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches. The experience changed the way people referred to the glamour of battle; they treated it no longer as a positive quality but as a dangerous illusion. — Virginia Postrel

Why are we so desperate to escape the material world? Is it really so bleak? Or could it be, rather, that we have made it bleak: obscured its vibrant mystery with our ideological blinders, severed its infinite connectedness with our categories, suppressed its spontaneous order with our pavement, reduced its infinite variety with our commodities, shattered its eternity with our time-keeping, and denied its abundance with our money system? — Charles Eisenstein

He felt that the world that have been shattered was once more stern to life and his soul, and new beauty and a new and steadfast foundations. — Leo Tolstoy

Think; Of a world without men. Where the sun shines, and the rain falls. Where the grass grows, nibbled by deer in the early morning. Where the unwary deer is pounced on by the wolf. Where the wolf when it dies in turn, is swallowed up by the earth. And where it's body lies the grass grows thicker...There is a balance in the natural world which no other creature can upset. But you, you have that power. Power, endless power: But not the wisdom to know where it will lead. You can reach out your hand and change the world. Change one thing, and that may change another unforeseen, and that another, and another, until the world lies about you in ruins and you stand alone in the desert wind of your shattered dreams... — Jay Ashton

The one thing she hated worse than being fussed over was being ignored. — Joe Abercrombie

And the Shdaow fell upon the Land, and the World was riven stone from stone. The oceans fled, and the mountains were swallowed up, and the nations were scattered to the eight corners of the World. The moon was as blood, and the sun was as ashes. The seas boiled, and the living envied the dead. All was shattered, and all but memory lost, and one memory above all others, of him who brought the Shadow and the Breaking of the World. And him they named Dragon. - from Aleth nin Taerin alta Camora, The Breaking of the World. Authoer unknown, the Fourth Age. — Brandon Sanderson

But he was coming. He would be here soon, all sweet and brave and shattered and kind. He would come carrying and clever-fingered and oh so unaware of oh so many things. He was rough against the world, but even so ... — Patrick Rothfuss

You can be broken into a dozen shattered pieces and still heal the world because service has its own medicine
hope. — Shannon L. Alder

Is he ... is Dimitri a Strigoi?
Mason hesitated only a moment, like he was afraid to answer me, and then - he nodded.
My heart shattered. My world shattered. — Richelle Mead

When expectations are shattered, practice allowing that to be the way it is. Relax, let go, allow, and recognize that some of your desires are about how you think your world should be, rather than how it is in that moment. Become an astute observer ... judge less and listen more. Take time to open your mind to the — Wayne W. Dyer

He grabbed me with both hands and began pushing me backward.
I lost my balance. The ledge was at an angle, and it was covered with loose gravel. I was less than a foot from the edge.
It was at that very moment that the clouds parted. The September sun burst through. The entire world was illuminated.
Time shattered into moments.
I could see for a hundred miles in every direction.
I could see mountain peeks and pristine lakes. And I could somehow feel as well as see the never-ending drop that toyed with me, ruffling my hair, pulling at my back, one step behind me. — Axel Avian

She is ... she is Bloody Melody and perfect. God created her and then shattered the mold afterward, for the world could not handle two of her. — J.J. McAvoy

Each of us will have our own Fridays - those days when the universe itself seems shattered and the shards of our world lie littered about us in pieces. We all will experience those broken times when it seems we can never be put together again. We will all have our Fridays. But I testify to you in the name of the One who conquered death - Sunday will come. In the darkness of our sorrow, Sunday will come. No matter our desperation, no matter our grief, Sunday will come. In this life or the next, Sunday will come. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

But the main reason for my immobility lay quite elsewhere. True enough, my uncle's betrayal had made me fiercely determined never to be beholden to anyone again - but back then my distrust of others had only reinforced my sense of self. The world might be rotten, I felt, but I at least am a man of integrity. But this faith in myself had been shattered on account of K. I suddenly understood that I was no different from my uncle, and the knowledge made me reel. What could I do? Others were already repulsive to me, and now I was repulsive even to myself. — Soseki Natsume

The King of Adarlan is dead," Manon said. The world stopped. "Aelin Galathynius killed him and shattered his glass castle."

Elide covered her mouth with a hand, shaking her head. Aelin... Aelin...

"She was aided," Manon went on, "by Prince Aedion Ashryver."
Elide began sobbing.

"And rumor has it Lord Ren Allsbrook is working in the North as a rebel."

Elide buried her face in her hands. Then there was a hard, iron-tipped hand on her shoulder.

A tentative touch.

"Hope," Manon said quietly. — Sarah J. Maas

When your world feels like it's been shattered to a million pieces, it doesn't hurt any less or more because of the details. — Erin Emerson

I am here because I am the one that must love Peter so much that he can feel worthy, worthy enough to bear to let the goodness of Young Valentine flow into him, making him whole, making him Ender. Not Ender the Xenocide and Andrew the Speaker for the Dead, guilt and compassion mingled in one shattered, broken, unmendable heart, but Ender Wiggin the four-year-old boy whose life was twisted and broken when he was too young to defend himself. Wang-mu was the one who could give Peter permission to become the man that child should have grown up to be, if the world had been good. — Orson Scott Card

The Gathering
According to the Kabbalah, in the beginning everything was God. When God contracted to make room for creation, spiritual energy filled the void. The energy poured into vessels which strained to hold the great power. The vessels shattered, sending countless shards, bits of the glowing matter, into the vastness of the universe.
These scattered bits of divine light must be collected. When the task is done the forces of the dark will be vanquished and the world will be healed. — Leonard Nimoy

If you must know, I don't talk about myself because no one ever cared enough to listen. (Jack)
What do you mean? (Lorelei)
Think about it, Lorelei. How many times a day do you ask someone how they're doing? Their world may have just shattered and yet they look up and say, 'Fine, thank you, and you?' No one cares to hear other people's problems. 'Twas a lesson I learned early in life. (Jack) — Kinley MacGregor

Because the world is unkind, and eventually, it will swallow you whole, turning your hopes into shattered dreams, and your dreams into nightmares. — Mia Asher

Whitman himself "accepted" a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes the shattered skull of the suicide, the "grey sick faces of onanists," etc., etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world. The "democratic vistas" have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilisation as it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous attitude and become a passive attitude - even "decadent," if that word means anything. — George Orwell

Learning of my father's passing at age 55 not only shattered the world, far from home, that had become my reality, but catapulted my childhood and relationship with family - which had felt like another lifetime - into the present. — Tim Cope

Little men," he once said, "spend their days in pursuit of such things. I know from experience that at the moment of their deaths they see their lives shattered before them like glass. I've seen them die. They fall away as if they have been pushed, and the expressions on their faces are those of the most unbelieving surprise. Not so, the man who knows the virtues and lives by them. The world goes this way and that. Ideas are in fashion or not, and those who should prevail are often defeated. But it doesn't matter. The virtues remain uncorrupted and uncorruptible. They are rewards in themselves, the bulwarks with which we can protect our vision of beauty, and the strengths by which we may stand, unperturbed, in the storm that comes when seeking God. — Mark Helprin

He was just a loser with a credit card.
Maybe in the past I never realized that. Hell, maybe I'd been the kind of guy who thought money equaled class. Maybe I thought the air of arrogance Zach wore as armor made him superior to others.
And then I fell in love with a girl who was the epitome of the opposite of my world.
She shattered everything I thought I knew. And though she might be the one wearing glasses, it was me who was finally seeing clearly. — Cambria Hebert

Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. — Carl Jung

There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives
when the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and grey fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forget all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands. — George Eliot

Once, he told them the truth. Chiseled a single commandment upon a slab of stone: That is how to live: in the choosing. There are no rules but those you make for yourself. The man to whom he'd entrusted the tablet promptly shattered it, chiseled ten precise commands upon two stone slabs and carried them down a mountain with the pomp and circumstance of a prophet. Religious wars ravaged that world ever since. — Karen Marie Moning

I never met the boy, or his parents, but I see kids like him every day." Sonia tells Connor. "Their world is shattered, and they're so desperate for validation that they'd blow themselves up to get it. Any parent who disowns that boy after what he did, and didn't do . . . doesn't deserve to have children at all, much less a child to give away. — Neal Shusterman

In my humdrum life I was exalted one day by perfumes exhaled by a world that had been so bland. They were the troubling heralds of love. Suddenly love itself had come, with its roses and its flutes, sculpting, papering, closing, perfuming everything around it. Love had blended with the most immense breath of the thoughts themselves, the respiration that, without weakening love, had made it infinite. But what did I know about love itself? Did I, in any way, clarify its mystery, and did I know anything about it other than the fragrance of its sadness and the smell of its fragrances? Then, love went away, and the perfumes, from shattered flagons, were exhaled with a purer intensity. The scent of a weakened drop still impregnates my life. — Marcel Proust

As she walked through the foggy streets toward the ramshackle docks, Celaena had prayed Yrene Towers wasn't foolish enough to tell anyone - especially the innkeeper - about the money. Prayed Yrene Towers seized her life with both hands and set out for the pale-stoned city of Antica. Prayed that somehow, years from now, Yrene Towers would return to this continent, and maybe, just maybe, heal their shattered world a little bit. — Sarah J. Maas

We're all fallen people in a fallen world.
Where does a man find healing amid so many broken places? How does he find love in the ruins and vine-wrapped shattered pieces of his own soul?
Because love's springing up through the rocks. — Charles Martin

My mission is to get on the stage and say, 'Listen, I'm a woman, I'm free, I'm a mother, I'm a lover, I'm a friend; I'm shattered by men most of the time, but I'll keep falling in love with them because it's the most thrilling thing in the world; that's what makes me human.' — Lou Doillon

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed. — Jerry Saltz

My world shattered that day. I lost my best friend. I lost my heart. My shield. My soul. And buried it right along with his body. The boy who hadn't been who he said he was - the boy who'd protected me from my own family. The boy who took two bullets for me and paid with his life. Bang, Bang was the new soundtrack to my life. Welcome to the Mafia. — Rachel Van Dyken

Scarlett pressed down on the tip of the blade. A single drop of ruby blood welled. Carefully Julian brought her finger to his mouth, and when his soft lips touched her skin the entire world shattered into a million shards of colored glass. — Stephanie Garber

Yes. A language that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. Hence, every time we try to speak of what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thing we are trying to represent. [ ... ] Consider a word that refers to a thing- " umbrella", for example. [ ... ] Not only is an umbrella a thing, it is a thing that performs a function. [ ... ] What happens when a thing no longer performs its function? [ ... ] the umbrella ceases to be an umbrella. It has changed into something else. The word, however, has remained the same. Therefore it can no longer express the thing. — Paul Auster

Once the bomb release was yanked, it was finished. Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the bombs struck, the enemy ships themselves were gone half around the visible world, like bullets in which a savage islander might not believe because they were invisible; yet the heart is suddenly shattered, the body falls in separate motions, and the blood is astonished to be freed on the air; the brain squanders its few precious memories and, puzzled, dies. — Ray Bradbury

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments. — Susan Sontag

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered ... it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. — G.K. Chesterton

Artists are agents of chaos. It is the artists
job to encourage entropy, to promote chaos. Idols must be killed, icons crushed, beliefs
shattered. It is the artists job to encourage legitimate, unadulterated, raw thought and
emotion. Art that does nothing new, that simply fills an established role, is not art.
It is a product. A stale, stagnant product of a disgustingly mundane process that has been
done so much it is assumed mandatory. Little different than feces. The last thing the world
needs is to get shittier. — Jonathan Culver

Unfortunately, now in boxing people are only allowed to punch. In Judo, people are only allowed to throw. I do not despise these kinds of martial arts. What I mean is, we now find rigid forms which create differences among clans, and the world of martial art is shattered as a result. — Bruce Lee

The brown earth, the torn, blasted earth, with a greasy shine under the sun's rays; the earth is the background of this restless, gloomy world of automatons, our gasping is the scratching of a quill, our lips are dry, our heads are debauched with stupor - thus we stagger forward, and into our pierced and shattered souls bores the torturing image of the brown earth with the greasy sun and the convulsed and dead soldiers, who lie there - it can't be helped - who cry and clutch at our legs as we spring away over them. We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill. — Erich Maria Remarque

Humans could never accept the world as it was and live in it. They were always breaking it and living among the shattered pieces. — Robin Hobb

A lady kept up appearances and never lost her dignity - even when her world had just shattered around her in the stall of the women's bathroom. — Carolyn Brown

She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of "race", imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgement of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world's physical laws. This entire episode took me from fear to a rage that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

All was shattered, and all but memory lost, and one memory above all others, of him who brought the Shadow and the Breaking of the World. And him they named Dragon. — Robert Jordan

I have lived through a fucking world war," I said, my voice low and venomous. "I have lost a child. I have lost two husbands. I have starved with an army, been beaten and wounded, been patronized, betrayed, imprisoned, and attacked. And I have fucking survived!" My voice was rising, but I was helpless to stop it. "And now should I be shattered because some wretched, pathetic excuses for men stuck their nasty little appendages between my legs and wiggled them?! — Diana Gabaldon

I am old enough to remember what it was like when the theories of Freud first escaped from the study and the clinic, and the great game of Hunt-the Complex began, to the entertainment and alarm of a war-shattered and disillusioned world. — Mary Butts

In a universe where all values have been shattered, where religions and histories and literatures and social structures have lost their meaning, man has to stand up again, accept his condition, accept that he is alone, and has no protection, and proceed to create his own world, his own values, his own decisions, his own actions - and be willing to pay the consequences, to be responsible for everything he thinks says, and does. — Jud Newborn

The world I'd known had shattered around me in an instant, and now everything seemed so surreal. People went on doing exactly what they'd done before while I tip-toed through this new reality. — Katie Ashley

He thought even if they became one person, it still wouldn't be close enough. She opened her mouth beneath his and the world shifted. He lifted her, melding their bodies as tightly as their mouths. This kiss was no friendly kiss, nothing of gratitude in it.
It was raw vulnerability, a lifetime of loneliness being shattered, Alex fusing himself to someone in a way he'd never imagined possible. — Cindy C. Bennett

He roughly grated out, "Don't run from me. Not now. This is for both of us." He held her thighs apart to force her to continue to accept the powerful thrusts. Changing his angle ever so slightly, he hit that one location that turned her world into a starry night. Her body shattered. Muscles ripples, gripped, and clamped down. — Zoe Forward

But nobody in one lifetime could read more than a fragment of what was here, this broken labyrinth of words, this shattered, interrupted story of a people and a world through the centuries, the millennia. — Ursula K. Le Guin

And here he is, letting the massive steel street door click shut behind him, standing at the top of the three iron steps that lead down to the shattered sidewalk. New York is probably, in this regard at least, the strangest city in the world, so many of its denizens living as they (we) do among the unreconstructed remnants of nineteenth-century sweatshops and tenements, the streets potholed and buckling while right over there, around the corner, is a Chanel boutique. We go shopping amid the rubble, like the world's richest, best-dressed refugees. — Michael Cunningham

After all, there was nothing preposterous and world-shaking in the idea that there might be events which overstepped the limited categories of space, time, and causality. Animals were known to sense beforehand storms and earthquakes. There were dreams which foresaw the death of certain persons, clocks which stopped at the moment of death, glasses which shattered at the critical moment. All these things had been taken for granted in the world of my childhood. And now I was apparently the only person who had ever heard of them. In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into. Plainly, the urban world knew nothing about the country world, the real world of mountains, woods and rivers, of animals and 'God's thoughts' (plants and crystals). I found this explanation comforting. At all events, it bolstered my self-esteem. — C. G. Jung

It would have been amazing to have been a student at Oxford during that golden moment in the 1910s, rubbing elbows with the likes of Aldous Huxley and T.E. Lawrence, before World War I shattered everything forever. — Kevin Kwan

Here in this room, with our bodies entwined, I felt that I could trust this fierce love that had shattered and rebuilt my life. But outside, the world was a cold and dangerous place. I didn't know if love would be enough. — Jane Harvey-Berrick