Desolate Quotes - Page 3

• The lonely sunsets flare forlorn Down valleys dreadly desolate; The lonely mountains soar in scorn As still as death, as stern as fate.

  Robert W. Service

  Lonely, Sunset, Fate

  Robert William Service, “The Land God Forgot”

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• When I remember how unhappy I was in adolescence - about the fact that, though I wasn't really using the term to or for myself, I knew that I was gay - I think, "Oh, if someone then could have shown me just an hour in the life that I have now, I would have made it through all of that misery and despair just fine." The pain lay in thinking that I had a desolate future.

  Andrew Solomon

  Pain, Gay, Thinking

  Source: andrewsolomon.com

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• When you're spending that much time by yourself in your car looking at landscapes, it's desolate. Most of the other people around you are invisible in their own cars. You're driving past houses where maybe once in a while somebody is out, but that's about it. So I was interested in that aesthetic and I decided I wanted to write an apocalyptic narrative, but the more I thought of it, it seemed bizarre and untenable to me to pick one, so I just didn't.

  Lucy Corin

  Writing, Past, Car

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The far northern scenery is absolutely desolate but is marvelously beautiful, and I shall never regret that I have seen it, even though it cost me the unbelievable privations and exertions which we suffer here.

  Robert Bunsen

  Beautiful, Regret, Suffering

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• Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion.

  John Steinbeck

  Confusion, Humanity, Passing

  John Steinbeck (2003). “America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction”, p.146, Penguin

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• The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn't pinpoint. A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It's very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she'd been stood up by the man she planned to marry.

  Tennessee Williams

  Men, Play, Ideas

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• A vacant mind invites dangerous inmates, as a deserted mansion tempts wandering outcasts to enter and take up their abode in its desolate apartments.

  George Stillman Hillard

  Art, Temptation, Mind

  George Stillman Hillard (1854). “Six Months in Italy”, p.121

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• We hear often of the distress of the negro servants, on the loss of a kind master; and with good reason, for no creature on God's earth is left more utterly unprotected and desolate than the slave in these circumstances.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Loss, Earth, Kind

  Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Beecher STOWE (2016). “Collected Works (Complete and Illustrated Editions: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Queer Little Folks, The Chimney-Corner, ...)”, p.292, Harriet Beecher Stowe

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• War wreaked on you his hideous ravishment;
  We, we alone, Nereids inviolate,
  Remain to weep, with the sea-birds to chant:
  Corinth is lost, Corinth is desolate.

  Hilda Doolittle

  War, Loss, Sea

  Hilda Doolittle, Louis L. Martz (1986). “Collected Poems 1912-1944”, p.338, New Directions Publishing

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• There's an aesthetic theme, which is cities at two o'clock in the morning. Not cities packed with people going out to clubs and dancing but desolate, empty streets. It's off-putting but there's a strange comfort to it as well, that desolate urban environment.

  Moby

  Morning, Cities, Two

  "'The Humility That Comes From Being Hated': Moby Interviewed". Interview with Stephen Dalton, thequietus.com. May 9, 2011.

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• Of all the ruinous and desolate places my uncle had ever beheld, this was the most so. It looked as if it had once been a large house of entertainment; but the roof had fallen in, in many places, and the stairs were steep, rugged, and broken. There was a huge fire-place in the room into which they walked, and the chimney was blackened with smoke; but no warm blaze lighted it up now. The white feathery dust of burnt wood was still strewed over the hearth, but the stove was cold, and all was dark and gloomy.

  Charles Dickens

  Uncles, Heart, Dark

  Charles Dickens (1870). “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”, p.429

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• Seventy percent of Earth's surface is water and over 99 percent is uninhabited, so you would expect nearly all impactors to hit either the ocean or desolate regions on Earth's surface. So why do movie meteors have such good aim?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Ocean, Water, Earth

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• And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
  That dying chose the living world for text
  And never could have rested in the tomb
  But that, long travelling, he had come
  Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
  In a most desolate stony place.

  William Butler Yeats

  Life, Men, Long

  William Butler Yeats (1931). “Later Poems”, p.98, Library of Alexandria

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• I broke my heart in two
  So hard I struck.
  What matter? for I know
  That out of rock,
  Out of a desolate source,
  Love leaps upon its course.

  William Butler Yeats

  Heart, Two, What Matters

  William Butler Yeats (1997). “The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition”, p.267, Simon and Schuster

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• What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian, and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and Milton, much more of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray! Our summer of English poetry, like the Greek and Latin before it, seems well advanced towards its fall, and laden with the fruit and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal tints, but soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering and shading leaves, and leave only a few desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in the blasts of age.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Summer, Latin, Fall

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.261, Xist Publishing

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• Where Christ brings His cross He brings His presence; and where He is none are desolate, and there is no room for despair.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Despair, Rooms, Christ

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Theodore Tilton (1862). “Last Poems”, p.68

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• Think of it! A few more boats, a few more planks of wood nailed together in a particular way at a thrifty cost and all those men and women whom the world can so ill afford to loose would be with us today. There would be no mourning in thousands of homes which now are desolate and these words need not have been written.

  Lawrence Beesley

  Home, Men, Thinking

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• Eros harrows my heart: wild gales sweeping desolate mountains, uprooting oaks.

  Sappho

  Heart, Mountain, Uprooting

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• If we drive our fellow species to extinction, we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world we inherited from our elders.

  James Hansen

  Nature, Climate, World

  "Coal-fired power stations are death factories. Close them". www.theguardian.com. February 15, 2009.

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• He that has no present Christ has a future, dark, chaotic, heaving with its destructive ocean; and over it there goes forever--black-pinioned winging its solitary and hopeless flight, the raven of his anxious thoughts, and finds no place to rest, and comes back again to the desolate ark with its foreboding croak of evil in the present and evil in the future.

  Alexander MacLaren

  Ocean, Dark, Anxious Thoughts

  Alexander Maclaren (1859). “Sermons preached in Union chapel, Manchester”, p.289

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• Wrapped in his sad-colored cloak, the Day, like a Puritan, standeth
  Stern in the joyless fields, rebuking the lingering color,--
  Dying hectic of leaves and the chilly blue of the asters,--
  Hearing, perchance, the croak of a crow on the desolate tree-top.

  Bayard Taylor

  Blue, Color, Tree

  Bayard Taylor (1875). “Home Pastorals, Ballads and Lyrics”, p.33

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• The joy of a strong nature is as cloudless as its suffering is desolate.

  Ouida

  Strong, Joy, Suffering

  Ouida (1890*). “Puck. In Maremma”

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• Desolate--Life is so dreary and desolate--
  Women and men in the crowd meet and mingle,
  Yet with itself every soul standeth single,
  Deep out of sympathy moaning its moan--
  Holding and having its brief exultation--
  Making its lonesome and low lamentation--
  Fighting its terrible conflicts alone.

  Alice Cary

  Fighting, Men, Soul

  Alice Cary, Phoebe Cary, Mary Clemmer (1876). “The Poetical Works of Alice and Phoebe Cary”, p.180

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• Peitaho Heavy rains fall on Yuyen, the northland kingdom of swallows. White pages of rain envelop the sky, and fishing boats off the Island of the Emperor Chin disappear on the ocean. Which way have they gone? More than a thousand years ago the mighty emperor Tsao Tsao cracked his whip and drove his army against the Tartars. He left us a poem: "Let us move east to the Stone Mountains." Today we still shiver in the autumn gale, in desolate winds, yet another man is in the world.

  Mao Zedong

  Rain, Ocean, Moving

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• Although love dwells in gorgeous palaces, and sumptuous apartments, more willingly than in miserable and desolate cottages, it cannot be denied but that he sometimes causes his power to be felt in the gloomy recesses of forests, among the most bleak and rugged mountains, and in the dreary caves of a desert.

  Giovanni Boccaccio

  Climbing, Mountain, Desert

  Giovanni Boccaccio, Charles Balguy (1822). “The decameron, or, Ten days' entertainment, of Boccaccio:”, p.148

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