Catastrophes Quotes

“It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles

“I’ve suffered a great many catastrophes in my life. Most of them never happened.”
― Mark Twain

“It's called the Infinity Effect.”
― Edward M. Wolfe, In the End

“Wherever you go in the next
catastrophé
Be it sickroom, or prison,
or cemet’ry
Do not fear that your stay will be
solit’ry
Countless souls share your fate,
you’ll have company!”
― Roman Payne, The Basement Trains: A 21st Century Poem

“Chris, soap people are like
us-they seldom go outdoors. And when they do, we only hear about it,
never see it. They loll about in living rooms, bedrooms, sit in the
kitchens and sip coffee or stand up and drink martinis-but never, never
go outside before our eyes. And whenever something good happens,
whenever they think they're finally going to be happy, some catastrophe
comes along to dash their hopes.”
― V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic

“Many times, we give beautiful names to our miseries and catastrophes. And that's how we lock down the memories inside us, from which we always want to escape.”
― Akshay Vasu, Between the Abyss and Paradise

“He has always been the kid who cries too easily and laughs too easily, the kid who begins giggling in church for no reason at all, who blinks hotly in shame and frustration whenever he misses a question in class, living in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade

“But we humans now represent a new and perhaps decisive factor. Our intelligence and our technology have given us the power to affect the climate. How will we use this power? Are we willing to tolerate ignorance and complacency in matters that affect the entire human family? Do we value short-term advantages above the welfare of the Earth? Or will we think on longer time scales, with concern for our children and our grandchildren, to understand and protect the complex life-support systems of our planet? The Earth is a tiny and fragile world. It needs to be cherished.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Cuvier, in his 'Theory of the Earth,' first published in 1812, based his conclusions on his unparalleled correlative research in stratigraphy, comparative anatomy, and palaeontology. At that time he wrote: 'Every part of the earth, every hemisphere, every continent, exhibits the same phenomenon. [...] There has, therefore, been a succession of variations in the economy of organic nature [...] the various catastrophes which have disturbed the strata [...] have given rise to numerous shiftings of this (continental) basin. [...] It is of much importance to mark, that these repeated irruptions and retreats of the sea have neither been slow nor gradual; on the contrary, most of the catastrophes which occasioned them have been sudden; and this is specially easy to be proved, with regard to the last of these catastrophes. [...] I agree, therefore, [...] in thinking, that if anything in geology be established, it is, that the surface of our globe has undergone a great and sudden revolution, the date of which [...] cannot be [...] much earlier than five or six thousand years ago [...] (also), one preceding revolution at least had put (the continents) under water [...] perhaps two or three irruptions of the sea.”
― Chan Thomas, The Adam & Eve Story: The History of Cataclysms

“Some natural catastrophes are inevitable while others act as reminders of how we abuse nature daily. We are part of nature, and we feel relaxed with this deep harmony.”
― Noha Alaa El-Din, It's Hard to Please Vandanya: The Suitcase

“It is in the sphere of the media that we most clearly see the event short-circuited by its immediate image-feedback. Information, news coverage, is always already there. When there are catastrophes, the reporters and photojournalists are there before the emergency services. If they could be, they would be there before the catastrophe, the best thing being to invent or cause the event so as to be first with the news.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“I have started to think of the sickness not as a single, contained catastrophe, but as part of a series of waves. We are still burning. What will be the wave that puts us out?”
― Laura van den Berg, Find Me

“The real catastrophes are always different-unimaginable, unprepared for, unknown”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles

“The trial is rarely as big as the perception of our smallness has made it.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The children were bilious for a few days, and inclined to dislike each other: but they accepted the change in their lives practically without noticing it. It is a fact that it takes experience before one can realize what is a catastrophe and what is not. Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica