Wreckage Quotes - Page 3

• The word that came to me now was "defiant." Because a person had to be defiant to be able to stand amid the wreckage of her life and instead of shaking a fist, pick up a hammer.

  Karen White

  Hammers, Fists, Able

  Karen White (2011). “The Beach Trees”, p.238, Penguin

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• I close my eyes and I take a deep breath and I think about my life and how I ended up this way. I think about the ruin, devastation and wreckage I have caused to myself and to others. I think about self-hatred and self-loathing. I think about how and why and what happened and the thoughts come easily, but the answers don't.

  James Frey

  Eye, Thinking, Self

  James Frey (2003). “A Million Little Pieces”, p.25, Rutgers University Press

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• Somewhere, on the long road that wound through those four years, the girl with her sachet & dancing slippers had slipped away & there was left a woman with sharp green eyes, who counted pennies & turned her hands to many menial tasks, a woman to whom nothing was left from the wreckage except the indestructible red earth on which she stood.

  Margaret Mitchell

  Girl, Eye, Hands

  Margaret Mitchell, Pat Conroy (2008). “Gone with the Wind”, p.680, Simon and Schuster

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• The true wisdom of the philosopher ought to insist in enjoying everything. Yet we apply ourselves to dissecting and destroying everything that is good in itself, that has virtue, albeit the virtue there is in mere illusions. Nature gives us this life like a toy to a weak child. We want to see how it all works; we break everything. There remains in our hands, and before our eyes, stupid and opened too late, the sterile wreckage, fragments that will not again make a whole. The good is so simple.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Nature, Children, Stupid

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• I came from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its wreckage and terrible ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamour for it. It is some poor farmer's boy, or son of some poor widow away off in some modest community, or perhaps the scion of a great family, who will have to do the fighting.

  Woodrow Wilson

  War, Son, Fighting

  "The papers of Woodrow Wilson".

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• This person had arrived, he had illuminated her, he had ensorcelled her with notions of miracle and beauty, he had both understood and misunderstood her, he had married her, he had broken her heart, he had looked upon her with those sad and hopeless eyes, he had accepted his banishment, and now he was gone. What a stark and stunning thing was life- that such a cataclysm can enter and depart so quickly, and leave such wreckage behind!

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Heart, Eye, Broken

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2013). “The Signature of All Things”, p.325, A&C Black

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• There's that older poem of John Ashbery's-"America"-with the pun "I'm a wrecker," so wreckage and building out of the ashes of that. We're haunted by the genocide that is America, the decimation of so many native cultures. As a mix-blood European ancestry American, you're a nexus of all those violences, and yet there's a relative personal identity as well.

  Anne Waldman

  Blood, America, Identity

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle, and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it's still the mansion you remember. Or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild. Because after disaster strikes, the important thing is that you move on. But if you're like me, you just keep chasing the storm.

  Rob Thomas

  Life, Moving, Blow

  Rob Thomas (2007). “Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations into Veronica Mars”, p.46, BenBella Books, Inc.

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• Whatever alleged 'truth' is proven by results to be but an empty fiction, let it be unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead gods, dead empires, dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and wreckage!

  Anton Szandor LaVey

  Philosophy, Darkness, Fiction

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• With vision only, you get no follow-through. With enforcers only, the vision is realized but leaves a lot of wreckage.

  Colin Powell

  Vision, Follow Through

  Colin L. Powell (1995). “My American Journey”, Random House Incorporated

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• The fact is that the New Deal did not work. It prolonged what might have been a troubling two-year downturn into a horrifying blow to world prosperity that ended up in a war that killed countless millions. It was one of the greatest acts of wreckage in world history.

  Llewellyn Rockwell

  War, Blow, Years

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• Opportunity can't reward you with its many gifts if you fail to recognize it and act on it. What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made from the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one. Let the good times roll!

  Ernie J Zelinski

  Opportunity, Civilization, People

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• The potential beauty of human life is constantly made ugly by man's ever recurring song of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever rising tides of revenge. Man has never risen above the injunction of the lex talionis: "Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot." In spite of the fact that the law of revenge solves no social problems, men continue to follow its disastrous leading. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Song, Revenge, Ocean

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• If you can create even the illusion of high profitability for a few years, then when the thing collapses you can walk out of the wreckage a very rich man.

  Paul Krugman

  Men, Years, Illusion

  Interview with Jonathan Tasini, www.playboy.com. February 15, 2012.

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• Liberalism in various guises - feminism, the sexual revolution, gay activism - has been at war with marriage and family for several decades now. And when do-gooders look around at the wreckage of human lives caused by disintegrating families, they call for government to act as father, mother, brother, and sister.

  Mona Charen

  Mother, Brother, Father

  Mona Charen (2006). “Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help and the Rest of Us”, Sentinel

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• When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

  Margaret Atwood

  Dark, Glasses, Confusion

  "Alias Grace". Book by Margaret Atwood, www.nytimes.com. September 1996.

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• An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium. But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity.

  E. O. Wilson

  War, Humanity, Sacred

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• The wreckage of stars - I built a world from this wreckage.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Stars, World, Life Affirming

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2010). “The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche”, p.323, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• We know that in September, we will wander through the warm winds of summer's wreckage. We will welcome summer's ghost.

  Henry Rollins

  Summer, Wind, September

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• You just have to work really hard to tune out the noise and the static. Because it gets louder, and people really have an opinion, and you don't want to shy away from taking chances for fear of what people will say, or living in the wreckage of the future [of] what may be if I do this.

  Jennifer Aniston

  People, Tunes, Shy

  "Jennifer Aniston says she won't let tabloids steal her joy". "Associated Press" Interview, www.cbsnews.com. March 24, 2014.

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• But the people of the disaster area fundamentally needed to understand that the rest of Australia had noticed their misery and their stoicism and their intense sense of community and determination to arise from the sodden wreckage of their homes, and that Australians would dig deep to help. I helped to describe the community ethos which quickly triumphed over incipient despair. It is this mobilisation of the unifying spirit that thrills us all, even as we mourn.

  Peter Cosgrove

  Leadership, Determination, Home

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• In the periods of crisis, the bigger firms absorb the smaller ones,and when the industrial monsters eventually go down, the wreckage is far greater than when the little enterprises buckle.

  Robert Heilbroner

  Monsters, Littles, Bigger

  Robert L. Heilbroner (2011). “The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers”, p.160, Simon and Schuster

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