Disaster Quotes - Page 2

And she thought then how strange it was that disaster—the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face—could be at times, such a thing of beauty.

I pulled the sheet off their faces. Their faces were black with coal dust and didn't look like anything was wrong with them except they were dirty. The both of them had smiles on their faces. I thought maybe one of them had told a joke just before they died and, pain and all, they both laughed and ended up with a smile. Probably not true but but it made me feel good to think about it like that, and when the Sister came in I asked her if I could clean their faces and she said, "no, certainly not!" but I said, "ah, c'mon, it's me brother n' father, I want to," and she looked at me and looked at me, and at last she said, "of course, of course, I'll get some soap and water."When the nun came back she helped me. Not doing it, but more like showing me how, and taking to me, saying things like "this is a very handsome man" and "you must have been proud of your brother" when I told her how Charlie Dave would fight for me, and "you're lucky you have another brother"; of course I was, but he was younger and might change, but she talked to me and made it all seem normal, the two of us standing over a dead face and cleaning the grit away. The only other thing I remember a nun ever saying to me was, "Mairead, you get to your seat, this minute!

The future of the next generation relies on astronomers obtaining a full understanding ofthe rapidly changing human environmental conditions and the halting of biologically toxic corporategovernment policies. The overloading of the electromagnetic environment is one of these disastrouspolicies that must stop.

Sleep!May be you will wake up tomorrow and find that things never changed, the apocalypse never happened, and everything's fine, normal, at home.Or may be you will wake up tomorrow and find that things have changed, for the better, the apocalypse is over and there's light, hope and a new home.Sleep, you crazy soul, just sleep.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

You're a shit cake with cum for whipped cream and dynamite for candles.

Adversity kills fearful people just by showing them its weapons. As to whether that weapon is fatal or fake, they don't care to know before they surrender!

The positive emotions that arise in...unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved.

It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.

It does not matter what I believe. The past is done. Hope is irrelevant. We measure success and failure in history with a cost of lives. Penicillin saved people, and the world wars exterminated them. Success and failure. Feelings, regrets, the point where they knew they made mistakes...it is interesting but unfortunately, irrelevant. Did they go to their death and grieve for what they did? Did the makers of the atomic bomb grieve for the destruction they dedicated their lives towards creating? Who cares? They did it. Whether they knew what they were creating, or whether they talked themselves into believing it was for the best, the glory of history is being able to view it in black-and-white. However honorable one's initial intention, a villain will always be a villain.

I’ve seen a lot of stuff… maybe I’ve seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I’ve seen what they can do, how evil they can be… I’ve seen the Holocaust and I’ve seen Jonestown, I’ve seen the Vietnam War and I’ve seen Hiroshima… I’ve seen the Chernobyl disaster… I’ve seen the World Trade Center attack… I’ve been alive too long, over a hundred years is a long time to be alive,” Alecto sighed, staring at the cigarette he was holding.

Always be prepared. Preparation with the anointing of the Holy Spirit secures success. Not being prepared and not having the anointing of the Holy Spirit, spells utter disaster

Procrastination is the foundation of all disasters.

Tragedy descends, and in the carnage our enraged cynicism screams ‘If there was a God, He would not have allowed this!’ And somehow we’ve conveniently forgotten that once upon a time He allowed us to tell Him to go away, and once upon that time we allowed ourselves to take Him up on that offer.

[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.

The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster.

When I got home, my roof was gone. Overnight the weight of the snow became too much to carry. What tipped the scale? Think about it: there must have been a final snowflake that did it, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a milligram that made all the difference.

If this is really it...if you're really done with me...will you let me hold you tonight? - Travis

This is a paradise of rising to the occasion that points out by contrast how the rest of the time most of us fall down from the heights of possibility, down into diminished selves and dismal societies. Many now do not even hope for a better society, but they recognize it when they encounter it, and that discovery shines out even through the namelessness of their experience. Others recognize it, grasp it, and make something of it, and long-term social and political transformations, both good and bad, arise from the wreckage. The door to this ear's potential paradises is in hell.

So I flirt with disaster once or twice. Who doesn’t?”He snorted. “You don’t just flirt with disaster, you have intercourse with it.

It was a symposium of horror and heroism, the like of which has not been known in the civilized world since man established his dominion over the sea.

We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political in the economics and indifference...the relief will be very political, in who gives how much (Bush offering 15 million, then 35 million under pressure, the cost of his inauguration and then 350 million under strong international pressure)...but the event itself transcends politics, the realm of things we cause and can work to prevent. We cannot wish that human beings were not subject to the forces of nature, including the mortality... we cannot wish for the seas to dry up, that the waves grow still, that the tectonic plates ceast to exist, that nature ceases to be beyond our abilities to predict and control... But the terms of that nature include such catastrophe and suffering, which leaves us with sorrow as not a problem to be solved but a fact. And it leaves us with compassion as the work we will never finish

I will feel no guilt on shutting my door to those who didn't listen.

If a country is not governed well, all sort of disasters will become a routine of that country!

I had the vertiginous feeling one gets standing at the precipice of an unresolved plan, for I had brought Bon and myself to the brink of disaster without knowing how to save us. But was not this how all plans developed, unknown to their maker until he wove for himself a parachute, or else melted into air?

In books there are chapters to separate out the moments, to show that time is going by and things are changing, and sometimes the parts even have titles that are full of promise—'The Meeting', 'Hope', 'Downfall'—like paintings do. But in life there's nothing like that, no titles or signs or warnings, nothing to say 'Beware, danger!' or 'Frequent landslides' or 'Disillusion ahead'. In life you stand all alone in your costume, and too bad if it's in tatters.

If your life is a miserable disaster, you might want to consider, that it's because you are doing something wrong.

The few trees still upright were stripped of their branches, lonely flagpoles without a nation to claim them.