Disaster Quotes

How strange it (the earthquake) must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way!

William Dean Howells

The few trees still upright were stripped of their branches, lonely flagpoles without a nation to claim them.

Mike Mullin

Procrastination is the foundation of all disasters.

Pandora Poikilos

We are terrible for each other, and, yes, we are a disaster. But tell me your heart doesn't race for a hurricane or a burning building. I'd rather die terrified than live forever.

Joey Comeau

If your life is a miserable disaster, you might want to consider, that it's because you are doing something wrong.

Bryant McGill

Always be prepared. Preparation with the anointing of the Holy Spirit secures success. Not being prepared and not having the anointing of the Holy Spirit, spells utter disaster

Pr. Paddick Van Zyl

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?

Walker Percy

When I got home, my roof was gone. Overnight the weight of the snow became too much to carry. What tipped the scale? Think about it: there must have been a final snowflake that did it, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a milligram that made all the difference.

Lauren Oliver

And then it struck him what lay buried far down under the earth on which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform whole cities into mounds of rubble. These, too, were helping to create the rhythm of the earth. He stopped dancing and, catching his breath, stared at the ground beneath his feet as though peering into a bottomless hole.

Haruki Murakami

Not everything that happens in your life has to hit you like a hurricane.

Joyce Rachelle

What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.

Virginia Woolf

I had the vertiginous feeling one gets standing at the precipice of an unresolved plan, for I had brought Bon and myself to the brink of disaster without knowing how to save us. But was not this how all plans developed, unknown to their maker until he wove for himself a parachute, or else melted into air?

Viet Thanh Nguyen

[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.

Lorrie Moore

There had to be something new, some fresh angle. As the rain pattered down around him, Kapenda thought. What was the weirdest thing he'd seen since this all started? He'd been in the tiny town of Chew Stoke a few weeks earlier, filming the remains of a vehicle that had been washed into a culvert and whose driver had died. In Grovehill, no one had died yet but there were abandoned cars strewn along the streets and surrounding tracks, hulking shapes that the water broke around and flowed over in fractured, churning flurries.That was old. Every television station had those shots.He'd been there the year before when the police had excavated a mud-filled railway tunnel and uncovered the remains of two people who had been crushed in a landslide. What they needed was something like that here, something that showed how weak man's civilized veneer was when set against nature's uncaring ferocity. He needed something that contrasted human frailty and natural strength, something that Dali might have painted - a boat on a roof, or a shark swimming up the main street. He needed that bloody house to collapse.("Into The Water")

Simon Kurt Unsworth

So I flirt with disaster once or twice. Who doesn’t?”He snorted. “You don’t just flirt with disaster, you have intercourse with it.

Dannika Dark

Not having ice cream,” she proclaimed, “is the culmination of all disasters!

Brandon Sanderson

...disaster, when it is quite sure of its own strength, will announce itself by hardly moving its lips...

Chris Cleave

It's certainly true that Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population. The literature on the subject is pretty unanimous in its opinion that the Soviet system had taken a poorly designed reactor adn then staffed it with a group of incompetents. It then proceeded, as the interviews in this book attest, to lie about the disaster in the most criminal way. In the crucial first ten days, when the reactor core was burning and releasing a steady stream of highly radioactive material into the surrounding areas, the authorities repeatedly claimed that the situation was under control. . . In the week after the accident, while refusing to admit to the world that anything really serious had gone wrong, the Soviets poured thousands of men into the breach. . . The machines they brought broke down because of the radiation. The humans wouldn't break down until weeks or months later, at which point they'd die horribly.

Svetlana Alexievich

It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.

Aleksandar Hemon

It's called the Infinity Effect.

Edward M. Wolfe

Here's a new 'Blessing' for our ti

Vera Nazarian

During times of disaster sorrow brings people together in a spirit of friendship, and influences man to recognize the blessings of becoming his brother's keeper.

Napoleon Hill

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

When someone refuses listening to reason disaster will surely follow.

Ken Poirot

Many of those who elected to remain might have escaped. 'Chivalry' is a mild appellation for their conduct. Some of the vaunted knights of old were desperate cowards by comparison. A fight in the open field, or jousting in the tournament, did not call out the manhood in a man as did the waiting till the great ship took the final plunge, in the knowledge that the seas round about were covered with loving and yearning witnesses whose own salvation was not assured.

The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters

It was a symposium of horror and heroism, the like of which has not been known in the civilized world since man established his dominion over the sea.

The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters

And he thought of the two people who had held his job before him: Sam and Astrid. Both beaten into despair by trying to hold this group of kids together in the face of one disaster after another. Both of them now happy to let Edilio handle it.“No wonder,” Edilio muttered.“Stay inside unless absolutely necessary,” Edilio shouted, and not for the first or last time wished he was still just Sam’s faithful sidekick.

Michael Grant

Everyone deserves the chance to survive. I think of this every time I see another disaster. There are probably people dying who don’t have to.

James Hubbard

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 I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." To this day, especially in times of "disaster," I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.

Fred Rogers

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.

Chuck Palahniuk

A few years ago the Deists denied the inspiration of the Bible on account of its cruelty. At the same time they worshiped what they were pleased to call the God of Nature. Now we are convinced that Nature is as cruel as the Bible; so that, if the God of Nature did not write the Bible, this God at least has caused earthquakes and pestilence and famine, and this God has allowed millions of his children to destroy one another. So that now we have arrived at the question -- not as to whether the Bible is inspired and not as to whether Jehovah is the real God, but whether there is a God or not.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Most creatures run when they sense danger. People grab a six-pack and a folding chair.

Nenia Campbell

If a country is not governed well, all sort of disasters will become a routine of that country!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Distractions can be disastrous if they are allowed, they will steal precious time and energy from most important things that matters in life.

Bamigboye Olurotimi

Good fortune will elevate even petty minds, and gives them the appearance of a certain greatness and stateliness, as from their high place they look down upon the world; but the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes more conspicuous in times of disaster and ill fortune...

Plutarch

Every step gets him closer to greatness...or disaster.

Jody Feldman

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

If this is really it...if you're really done with me...will you let me hold you tonight? - Travis

Jamie McGuire

Flying in a modern jet airplane doses the human with levels of radiation comparable to those found in nuclear disaster zones.

Steven Magee

President Trump's health care plan is a human rights disaster.

Steven Magee

The Fukushima nuclear complex went on to become the worst man-made engineering disaster in all of human history, outside of war.

Steven Magee

There she stood, hiding; the mother without child, the voiceless woman full of anger. Her smoked nails hammered her evaporated heart snivelling in the grotty kitchen of disaster. Her face, depleted, cauterised. Her eyes wheezed shame at what she knew would happen to her daughter, again and all over again.

Laura Gentile

I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:The past, present, and future walk into a bar—it was tense.

Kelli Russell Agodon

You presume to name those who have no name. We are pandemonium and disaster. We are the dancing, gibbering horror of the world.

Brenna Yovanoff

The further we are from the last disaster, the closer we are to the next.

Daniel Silva

It does not matter what I believe. The past is done. Hope is irrelevant. We measure success and failure in history with a cost of lives. Penicillin saved people, and the world wars exterminated them. Success and failure. Feelings, regrets, the point where they knew they made mistakes...it is interesting but unfortunately, irrelevant. Did they go to their death and grieve for what they did? Did the makers of the atomic bomb grieve for the destruction they dedicated their lives towards creating? Who cares? They did it. Whether they knew what they were creating, or whether they talked themselves into believing it was for the best, the glory of history is being able to view it in black-and-white. However honorable one's initial intention, a villain will always be a villain.

Caroline Hanson

There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.

David Nicholls

Adversity kills fearful people just by showing them its weapons. As to whether that weapon is fatal or fake, they don't care to know before they surrender!

Israelmore Ayivor

Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and agonies of the soul, but all the time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will always be, the tragedy of the bedroom.

Leo Tolstoy

The great pagan sadness of modern man is largely due to his premonition of ultimate disaster.

Francis Stuart Campbell

We are creatures of rage and madness and bitter tears and we knew that from the start. Our end was disaster and we knew that from the start. We knew it all from the start.

Thomas Curtis Clark

We'd all mourn for a while, but at the end of the day we were a tough lot, and we'd survive.

Suzanne Johnson

And we mustn't lose our sense of humor," Mrs. Which said. "The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.

Madeleine L'Engle

I’ve seen a lot of stuff… maybe I’ve seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I’ve seen what they can do, how evil they can be… I’ve seen the Holocaust and I’ve seen Jonestown, I’ve seen the Vietnam War and I’ve seen Hiroshima… I’ve seen the Chernobyl disaster… I’ve seen the World Trade Center attack… I’ve been alive too long, over a hundred years is a long time to be alive,” Alecto sighed, staring at the cigarette he was holding.

Rebecca McNutt

Sleep!May be you will wake up tomorrow and find that things never changed, the apocalypse never happened, and everything's fine, normal, at home.Or may be you will wake up tomorrow and find that things have changed, for the better, the apocalypse is over and there's light, hope and a new home.Sleep, you crazy soul, just sleep.

Sanhita Baruah

The future of the next generation relies on astronomers obtaining a full understanding ofthe rapidly changing human environmental conditions and the halting of biologically toxic corporategovernment policies. The overloading of the electromagnetic environment is one of these disastrouspolicies that must stop.

Steven Magee

People always say that digital cameras are much more stable than film cameras, but the truth is that digital cameras, or any kind of digital technology, is one of the most unstable things in the world. A film camera can last decades if you know how to look after it, but digital things can break down instantly. A violent storm, a nuclear bomb, even something as minor as a cracked screen or the releasing of newer models, can make a digital product just a block of useless metal.

Rebecca McNutt

People from the past, have a tendency to walk back into the present, and run over the future.

Anthony Liccione

Rather blessings, after counting my misfortunes, I realized how the more blessed I am.

Anthony Liccione

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Disaster Quotes

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