Disaster Quotes

“It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“You don't need another Human Being to make your life complete, but let's be honest. Having your wounds kissed by someone who doesn't see them as disasters In your soul, but cracks to put their love into, Is the most calming thing In this World.”
― Emery Allen

“A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Daemon!" Dee called from the kitchen. "I need your help!"
"We should go see what she's doing before she destroys your kitchen." He rubbed his hands down his face. "It's possible.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, Obsidian

“darkness falls upon Humanity
and faces become terrible
things
that wanted more than there
was.

all our days are marked with
unexpected
affronts - some
disastrous, others
less so
but the process is
wearing and
continuous.
attrition rules.
most give
way
leaving
empty spaces
where people should
be.

and now
as we ready to self-destruct
there is very little left to
kill

which makes the tragedy
less and more
much much
more.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“The lamp tipped over, nailing Kane in the head.
Sabin shook his head. The man was a walking disaster Literally. Whenever Kane stepped into a room, things went to hell pretty quickly. Sabin expected the ceiling to cave in any moment. And yea, it had happened before.”
― Gena Showalter, The Darkest Night

“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”
― Susan Sontag

“Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles

“Let's get something straight; you're not a piece of shit, you're amazing. It doesn't matter who buys me drinks, or who asks me to dance, or who flirts with me. I'm going home with you. You've asked me to trust you, and you don't seem to trust me. - Abby, Beautiful Disaster”
― Jamie McGuire, Beautiful Disaster

“You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“This is the time we have to walk stepping on the storm.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“A tornado of thought is unleashed after each new insight. This in turn results in an earthquake of assumptions. These are natural disasters that re-shape the spirit.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“You have to jump into disaster with both feet.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“How many times had those awful words - "I know what I'm doing" - been uttered throughout history as prelude to disaster? ”
― Christopher Buckley, Supreme Courtship

“When the great ship containing the hopes and aspirations of the world, when the great ship freighted with mankind goes down in the night of death, chaos and disaster, I am willing to go down with the ship. I will not be guilty of the ineffable meanness of paddling away in some orthodox canoe. I will go down with the ship, with those who love me, and with those whom I have loved. If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child. It has filled the good with horror and with fear; but it has had no effect upon the infamous and base. It has wrung the hearts of the tender; it has furrowed the cheeks of the good. This doctrine never should be preached again. What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman, you, minister of the gospel, to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine: neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty Of Man, Woman And Child

“Love is a curious mixture of opposites, a blend of extreme selfishness and total devotion. A paradox! Besides which, love, everybody is always talking about love, love, but love isn't something you choose, you catch it like a disease, you get trapped in it, like a disaster.”
― Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness

“The few trees still upright were stripped of their branches, lonely flagpoles without a nation to claim them.”
― Mike Mullin, Ashfall

“Over the years, Americans in particular have been all too willing to squander their hard-earned independence and freedom for the illusion of feeling safe under someone else's authority. The concept of self-sufficiency has been undermined in value over a scant few generations. The vast majority of the population seems to look down their noses upon self-reliance as some quaint dusty relic, entertained only by the hyperparanoid or those hopelessly incapable of fitting into mainstream society.”
― Cody Lundin, When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need to Survive When Disaster Strikes

“People from the past, have a tendency to walk back into the present, and run over the future.”
― Anthony Liccione

“The white flashed back into a red ball in the southeast. They all knew what it was. It was Orlando, or McCoy Base, or both. It was the power supply for Timucuan County.

Thus the lights went out, and in that moment civilization in Fort Repose retreated a hundred years.

So ended The Day.”
― Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon

“I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam -- good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.”
― Gore Vidal, At Home: Essays 1982-1988

“Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.”
― Nadine Gordimer, Get a Life

“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.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

“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.”
― Anita Shreve, The Pilot's Wife

“Here's a new 'Blessing' for our time --

'May Anderson Cooper never be sent to report on your town!”
― Vera Nazarian

“Every step gets him closer to greatness...or disaster.”
― Jody Feldman, The Seventh Level

“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.”
― Rebecca Solnit

“The past is a grenade that explodes when thrown.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“It is a mysterious thing how cheerful people become in the face of disaster. My father whistled as he boarded up the windows, and my mother from time to time would call to him happily out the back door. She obviously was enjoying the unusual pleasure of having him home on a weekday morning. Tomorrow they might be ruined or dead, today they had each other.”
― Katherine Paterson, Jacob Have I Loved