Desolate Quotes

“It’s hard to safeguard a genuine life course, when love tips over from endearing care into tedium, through laziness of imagination or loss of interest, and the storyline becomes barren and desolate, insipidly dull, turning into a threadbare act with the same trite modus operandi. “The same procedure as every year, James!” ("Things needing to be changed")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lost
memories? Then are we not each dreamers of tomorrow and yesterday, since dreams
play when time is askew? Are we not all adrift in the constant sea of trial and when all is done, do we not all yearn for ships to carry us home?”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“Call me crazy, but there is something terribly wrong with this city.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“I can’t help but ask, “Do you know where you are?”
She turns to me with a foreboding glare. “Do you?”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“There is a stillness between us, a period of restlessness that ties my stomach
in a hangman’s noose. It is this same lack in noise that lives, there! in the
darkness of the grave, how it frightens me beyond all things.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“Did Bach ever eat
pancakes at midnight?”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“Even among familiar faces, people often feel invisible and desolate, like an island in cold waters or a shadow apart from the crowd. Be the reason another never feels alone.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“It has been raining here for ten years.I keep an accurate record of time and can state this with no fear of contradiction.”
― Alastair Bruce, Wall of Days

“By then there had been other men. She'd flung herself at other closed windows. The windows never broke, but her heart, at the end, was in splinters.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House

“History doesn’t start with a tall building
and a card with your name written on it, but jokes do. I think someone is taking
us for suckers and is playing a mean game.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“I steal one glance over my shoulder as soon as we are far from the foreboding luminance of the neon glow, and it is there that my stomach leaps into my throat. Squatting just shy of the light and partially concealed by the shade of an alley is a sinister silhouette beneath a crimson cowl, beaming a demonic smile which spans from cheek to swollen cheek.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“She leaves my side and heads deeper into
the apartment singing, “—if the spirit tries to hide, its temple far away… a
copper for those they ask, a diamond for those who stay.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“I rouse Emily to our guests, as she finishes off our fifteenth snowman by setting the head atop its torso. She stands limp at my direction, pointing out the coming shadows and I cannot help but hear a muffled sigh as she decapitates her latest creation with a single push of her hand.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“That’s a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their right
mind would point at this thing and say, ‘I’m going to fly in my Model-A1’.
People would much rather say, ‘Get in my whirly-gig’. And that’s what you
should name it.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“It was a shock to me to turn from the wonderful smoky beauty of a sunset over London, with its lurid lights and inky shadows and all the marvellous tints that come on foul clouds even as on foul water, and to realise all the grim sternness of my own cold stone building, with its wealth of breathing misery, and my own desolate heart to endure it all.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Your real secret hiding place is not a dark cave, it is not a dusky forest, it is not a desolate house in the middle of nowhere but your real secret hiding place is always your own mind! Every person ultimately hides himself over there, in his own mind!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“He inhabits now that part of himself
Which lay formerly desolate and uncolonised.

- Mark of Patmos”
― Lawrence Durrell, On Seeming to Presume

“Only the house was still desolate and the day had a livid ruined atmosphere, time had been damaged in some deep way, like on a day of bereavement or frightful national disaster.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“I will not attempt to describe how I got through the next few days. There are desolations of the spirit which can only be hinted at. I sat there huge-eyed in the wreck of myself.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“He knew that he still hoped for that small and half forgotten figure to fall in beside him. Leaning into the salt wind with his hands in his pockets and his clothes flapping. He’d seen him one final time in a dream. God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest. Trudging the shingles of the universe, his thin shoulders turned to the stellar winds and the suck of alien moons dark as stones. A lonely shoreloper hurrying against the night, small and friendless and brave.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“The most desolate road is the most perfect road when you want to walk all alone!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“That is the story of life after all, isn't it? Killing time until time kills you. Pretty desolate if one thinks about it. Well, let's collect memories, lots and lots of them, all before we might realise that our lives were just a shimmer!”
― Ryan Gelpke, 2018: Our Summer of Creeping Boredom and Beautiful Shimmering

“For some days after his return home—in fact, until his friend's arrival, Tom was thoroughly beaten down and wretched, notwithstanding his efforts to look hopefully forward, and keep up his spirits. His usual occupations were utterly distasteful to him; and, instead of occupying himself, he sat brooding over his late misfortune, and hopelessly puzzling his head as to what he could do to set matters right. The conviction in which he always landed was that there was nothing to be done, and that he was a desolate and blighted being, deserted of gods and men.”
― Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford

“The scribe was young, but the eyes he lifted to Moses' were as old as Egypt herself. There was no future in them, only the long past.”
― Dorothy Clarke Wilson, Prince of Egypt