Abyss Quotes

But first whom shall we sendIn search of this new world, whom shall we findSufficient? Who shall tempt, with wand'ring feetThe dark unbottomed infinite abyssAnd through the palpable obscure find outHis uncouth way, or spread his aery flightUpborne with indefatigable wingsOver the vast abrupt, ere he arriveThe happy isle?

John Milton

I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert.

Bruce Crown

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.

Herman Melville

Reality. I am stuck. I am hostage to my own destination. When I close my eyes, my wings can take me anywhere in the universe. I abandon myself and I soar. Where only the most profound and intense souls can withstand the sick atmospheres.

Robert Neil Flieischer

I gazed upon the earth and saw that a body, in its tender faithlessness, had located it in the sky. A splendid scarf of blood, looming above the abyss.

Joë Bousquet

When the ship approached the equator, I stopped going out on deck in the daytime. The sun burned like a flame. The days had shortened and night came swiftly. One moment it was light, the next it was dark. The sun did not set but fell into the water like a meteor. Late in the evening, when I went out briefly, a hot wind slapped my face. From the ocean came a roar of passions that seemed to have broken through all barriers:'We mus procreate and multiply! We must exhaust all the powers of lust!' The waves glowed like lava, and I imagined I could see multitudes of living beings - algae, whales, sea monsters - reveling in an orgy, from the surface to the bottom of the sea. Immortality was the law here. The whole planet raged with animation. At times, I heard my name in the clamor: the spirit of the abyss calling me to join them in their nocturnal dance. ("Hanka")

Isaac Bashevis Singer

If ever again we happened to lose our balance, just when sleepwalking through the same dream on the brink of hell’s valley, if ever the magical mare (whom I ride through the night air hollowed out into caverns and caves where wild animals live) in a crazy fit of anger over some word I might have said without the perfect sweetness that works on her like a charm, if ever the magic Mare looks over her shoulder and whinnies: “So! You don’t love me!” and bucks me off, sends me flying to the hyenas, if ever the paper ladder that I climb so easily to go pick stars for Promethea—at the very instant that I reach out my hand and it smells like fresh new moon, so good, it makes you believe in god’s genius—if ever at that very instant my ladder catches fire—because it is so fragile, all it would take is someone’s brushing against it tactlessly and all that would be left is ashes—if ever I had the dreadful luck again to find myself falling screaming down into the cruel guts of separation, and emptying all my being of hope, down to the last milligram of hope, until I am able to melt into the pure blackness of the abyss and be no more than night and a death rattle,I would really rather not be tumbling around without my pencil and paper.

Hélène Cixous

A growing heat, like a million blazing suns all focused on me, lit my insides. It felt like I was being cooked in the Gabriella Roast Cooker, me spinning around-and-around to heat my flesh evenly. For some reason I was having trouble comprehending the sudden change in my revolving world as I swelled with a horrible, billowing fire.

Laura Kreitzer

If you are good at building bridges, you will never fall into the abyss!

Mehmet Murat ildan

If you keep on retaliating what you receive, you'll be stuck in a infinite abyss of revenge and vendetta.

Pushkar Saraf

Love is the gentle breeze that tingles in your heart when your mind floats into the abyss of unspoken words

Bluenscottish

Every puff was like sucking in the abyss, yet he inhaled until his lungs filled with toxic smoke that clouded his thoughts of her.

Ahmed Mostafa

I believe that theology is facing the abyss.I must face the abyss, the abyss of existence, the abyss of mystery. (Rubem Alves, p. 189)

Mev Puleo

Send a coin into the abyss and wish for a blissful kiss

Sean F. Hogan

An Abyss is a deep and terrible chasm. What’s a chasm? A deep gash in the rocks.

Diane Samuels

There was no justice in rebellion. This Javert had come to believe after seeing Marseille fall headfirst into the abyss of the revolution.

Kelsey Brickl

The human soul is an abyss

Fernando Pessoa

«And in the end» said the witch to the drowning prince «You've been the one choosing the thornless path in spite of knowing where it could lead. The one who afraid of the pricking roses, plunged himself into an abyss without petals

Nur Bedeir

If we presume that the boundary of the universe is a kind of surrounding wall,then we think like ancestors who thought there's abyss at the edge of flat earth.

Toba Beta

And so, she turned her back on the abyss for another day.

Megan Kennedy

And any room that I enter may become a sideshow tent where I must take my place upon a rickety old bench on the verge of collapse. Even now the Showman stands before my eyes. His stiff red hair moves a little toward one shoulder, as if he is going to turn his gaze upon me, and moves back again; then his head moves a little toward the other shoulder in this never-ending game of horrible peek-a-boo. I can only sit and wait, knowing that one day he will turn full around, step down from his stage, and claim me for the abyss I have always feared. Perhaps then I will discover what it was I did - what any of us did - to deserve this fate.

Thomas Ligotti

Most of the time, we try to tell ourselves "I'm confident" or "I'm doing well." But then, in a moment alone at home, you feel how close you are to some kind of abyss.

Christian Tetzlaff

the abyss you stare into and that stares back at you is your reflection in the mirror - we all have it - that shadow self - that dark heart...

John Geddes

Death was a leech; no matter which side of the spectrum you were on, either dead or alive, it fed. It either acquired your soul or devoured all your joyful emotions.

Laura Kreitzer

To see someone you love in so much pain—especially emotional pain that can’t be remedied—was the worst form of torture.

Laura Kreitzer

Books—they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.

John Green

for we all have our own twilights and mistsand abyssesto return to.

Sanober Khan

At that darkest moment, while drowning in the Abyss of Emotional Bankruptcy, reflect on this universal truth: the difference between success and failure is one more time.

Ken Poirot

There is no feeling that is comparable to that of being truly lost. I don’t mean lost in the woods, or desert, but lost in the way that only can happen internally. Lost to the deepest,blackest pit of your soul, clinging to ghosts of past times, when you thought you knew who andwhat you were. When this happens, you have two choices; you can give in to your darkest inclinations,and accept what you are, or you can fight, knowing that it is a losing battle, that the good halfof your soul is strong, but can never erase the bad part.

H.D. Gordon

Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better.

Criss Jami

In the recumbence of depression, your information-gathering system collates its intelligence and reports to you these facts: (1) there is nothing to do; (2) there is nowhere to go; (3) there is nothing to be; (4) there is no one to know. Without meaning-charged emotions keeping your brain on the straight and narrow, you would lose your balance and fall into an abyss of lucidity. And for a conscious being, lucidity is a cocktail without ingredients, a crystal clear concoction that will leave you hung over with reality. In perfect knowledge there is only perfect nothingness, which is perfectly painful if what you want is meaning in your life.

Thomas Ligotti

the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time

Sir James Hall

The woman turns away; one wing blackens like an onyx gem while the other glows white like a bright spotlight. She flies into the sky, leaving the crowd staring in astonishment. Angels fly away in two directions. Half make a black storm of moving, twisting shapes. The other half forms a white-as-snow moving cloud. The ranks are divided.

Laura Kreitzer

When they speak of Hell there's something they miss there's a worse place to be and it's called the Abyss.

Stanley Victor Paskavich

This is why the deepest form of pain comes out as silence.

Holly Goldberg Sloan

I have seen people starting the fire with water, turning every breeze into a storm, create chaos out of peace. Few people are meant to destroy everything and themselves no matter what, and if you hold on to them long they will take you into their abyss and tear you into pieces.

Akshay Vasu

Love fills the infinite.

Kamand Kojouri

As the new year began, [Patricia Highsmith] felt completely paralysed, incapable of reading or picking up the phone. 'I can feel my grip loosening on my self,' she wrote. 'It is like strength failing in the hand that holds me above an abyss.' She wished there was a more awful-sounding word for what she was feeling than simply 'depression'. She wanted to die, she said, but then realised that the best course of action would be to endure the wretchedness until it passed. Her wish was, 'Not to die, but not to exist, simply, until this is over'.

Andrew Wilson

To have reservations is to show true leadership. To have certainty without question, to lead people to battle with no qualms, or to prosecute without hesitation are qualities of a tyrant.

Laura Kreitzer

Let me be strong, for to be anything else is to languish in the abyss of compromise and to descend to places of impoverishment so destitute that they will squelch my soul and crush my heart.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:It longed for the adventure of Ignorance

Sri Aurobindo

I open my eyes. I want to know:what is in the abyss of a kiss? Are stars born in these black caves that house bated breaths and unspoken words? Do our souls crawl on these tender cheeks to greet one another by ivory gates? What happens when we kiss?Where do you go?Don’t tell me. For I have lost my desire to know. Kiss me so that I forget myself. I close my eyes and fall in the abyss.

Kamand Kojouri

Passion drove her deeper, into the abyss beneath his skin where she mapped his soul to the dance of his heartbeat...

Virginia Alison

And as for the vague something --- was it a sinister or a sorrowful, a designing or a desponding expression? --- that opened upon a careful observer, now and then, in his eye, and closed again before one could fathom the strange depth partially disclosed; that something which used to make me fear and shrink, as if I had been wandering amongst volcanic-looking hills, and had suddenly felt the ground quiver, and seen it gape: that something, I, at intervals, beheld still; and with throbbing heart, but not with palsied nerves. Instead of wishing to shun, I longed only to dare --- to divine it; and I thought Miss Ingram happy, because one day she might look into the abyss at her leisure, explore its secrets and analyse their nature.

Charlotte Brontë

Deal with all this, live with myself, you mean? I honestly don't know. I stand often enough at the abyss of my soul, asking that same question, looking down into the dark crevices where the black monsters dwell on the bottom. They gaze up at me, and I look them in the eyes. “This also you are,” they say, and I almost fall into the void.”“And then?”Anaxantis shrugged.“And then? I turn around and go do what needs to be done. What else is there?

Andrew Ashling

If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.

Cory Doctorow

What an abyss of ignorance hiding under the guise of love and care!

Sunday Adelaja

After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.

Andrew Wilson

My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm's edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss.

Edvard Munch

When a man is standing at the top of a cliff, it isn’t fear of falling that keeps him rooted to the edge — it’s the fear of not being able to resist the desire to jump, just to see what falling feels like.

Cristelle Comby

While we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the 'new', which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found.

Roberto Bolaño

A great relationship ... breaches the barriers of a lofty solitude, subdues its strict law, and throws a bridge from self-being to self-being across the abyss of dread of the universe.

Martin Buber

Put a man on the brink of the abyss and - in the unlikely event that she doesn't fall into it - he will become a mystic or a madman... Which is probably the same thing!

Apostolos Doxiadis

[death]...the abyss from where no traveler is permitted to return

George Washington

There was an image in my mind—an expectation of what it would be like when I finally gave myself fully to a man. It wasn’t like this. It was always at night with candles flickering lazily, music filling the air with a sexy melody, and maybe a bubble bath. But no. It was infinitely better, and there was no froo froo, stereotypical scene that played out. It was incredible. Brilliant. Amazing. Indescribable, really. Like all the planets in the galaxy aligned for a perfect moment in time. As if this was the beginning of time. From now until the rest of eternity, everything finally had meaning.

Laura Kreitzer

We both must burn this midnight oil together. You’re just as new to me as I am you.” --Andrew

Laura Kreitzer

Ignorance has one virtue: persistence. It will insist through dogged persistence on leading others to follow its vision no matter how misguided. Ignorance will drive the world to the brink of failure and catastrophe and beyond into the abyss with arrogance and anger because wisdom is often too polite to fight. Wisdom doesn’t like to impose its will, but that is all ignorance understands—force over free will and choice. Sooner or later the world comes to its senses, but oh the damage that has been done.

John Kramer

I've often thought that there isn't any "I" at all; that we are simply the means of expression of something else; that when we think we are ourselves, we are simply the victims of a delusion.

Aleister Crowley

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Life is painful and messed up. It gets complicated at the worst of times, and sometimes you have no idea where to go or what to do. Lots of times people just let themselves get lost, dropping into a wide open, huge abyss. But that's why we have to keep trying. We have to push through all that hurts us, work past all our memories that are haunting us. Sometimes the things that hurt us are the things that make us strongest. A life without experience, in my opinion, is no life at all. And that's why I tell everyone that, even when it hurts, never stop yourself from living.

Alysha Speer

Abyss Quotes

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