Best 369 quotes in «disaster quotes» category

On February 9th, 1942, the SS Normandie, a proud ocean liner and the pride of the French Merchant Marine, was being converted into a troop transport. A welder’s torch cut through a bulkhead and set afire a bundle of flammable rags and a stack of life jackets. The fire soon roared throughout the ship and since the internal fire protection system had been disabled, the only assistance available was from the New York City Fire Department. Fireboats pumped water onto the blaze until it caused this magnificent vessel to become unstable. I guess it never occurred to anyone that the water going into the ship, should have been pumped out! On February 10th, the ship rolled over onto its port side, sinking into the mud alongside Pier 88 in Manhattan. Investigations ensued with the thought being that this tragedy was caused by enemy sabotage. However, later findings indicated that the fire had been completely accidental. There are still some allegations contradicting this, and claims that the fire was indeed arson and involved “Lucky” Luciano, the Mafia boss who controlled the waterfront. From the time the fire started until the Normandie was righted in 1943, I watched what was happening to the now renamed USS Lafayette from a perfect vantage point at the top of the Palisades near North Street Park. It was the talk of the town and everyone continued to speculate as to who was at fault. “It must have been the Nazis,” was the conventional wisdom. The soldiers to whom I frequently talked, stationed at the searchlights and gun emplacements, were the ones who surely would know. Eventually, stripped of her superstructure, the ship was righted at great expense. There was talk of converting her into an aircraft carrier, or of cutting her down to become a smaller vessel. However, in the end she was sold for $161,680 to Lipsett, Inc., an American shipyard, where the once magnificent ship was reduced to scrap metal.

On the palm of my hand there's a disaster. I must have been born with it. I carry it with me wherever I go.

Or if there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it, Making it momentany as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And, ere a man hath power to say ‘Behold!’ The jaws of darkness do devour it up. So quick bright things come to confusion

People keep asking me, "Where do you get the ideas for your books?" From the worst moments in my life. I call that "literature through disaster." I got the whole Tales from Earth's End Saga that way, as well as Numenon. Don't be afraid of the hard times.

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.

People don't look like people anymore after they've fallen from over a hundred floors above the ground.

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

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

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.

Politics is a global disaster whereas religion is merely ridiculous.

[S]he had difficulty crediting it could really happen in her own lifetime. She knew this was exactly how people would feel just before the real apocalypse, that nearly everyone who’d faced some intrusive threat to their everyday existence – war, revolution, genocide, purges, disaster – had faced it with the firm conviction that things like this just didn’t happen or didn’t happen here or didn’t happen to people like them.

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.

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

Some of my operations are great triumphs and tremendous. But they're only triumphs because there are also disasters

Sometimes catastrophes split you in half and even if all the pieces are there, they might not ever fit back together.

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

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

The hospital was a microcosm of these larger failures, with comprised physical infrastructure, compromised operating systems, and compromised individuals. And also instances of heroism. The scenario was familiar to students of mass disasters around the world. Systems always failed. The official response was always unconscionably slow. Coordination and communication were particularly bad. These were truths Americans had come to accept about other people's disasters. It was shocking to see the scenario play out at home.

The lamp tipped over, nailing Kane in the head. Sabin shook his head. The man was a walking disaster Literally. Whenever Kane stepped into a room, things went to hell pretty quickly. Sabin expected the ceiling to cave in any moment. And yea, it had happened before.

There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention- that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary- the sunshine, the memories, the future,- which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.

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")

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

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea has been an absolute disaster to the public image of astronomy.

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

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.

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

They share another long look. This one is reserved for ill-fated observers in the moments before impending, inescapable calamity, whether it be natural disaster or violent failure of humanity; a look of resigned melancholy and awe, unblinking in the face of a revealed, horrific, sacred truth. And they realize again, in this darkest hour of the darkest day, they remain alone, fundamentally alone.

They told us it was a dance, a party, a pageant, so we ran laughing together straight into the disaster.

This is what comes from the wrong kind of attentiveness. People get brain fade. This is because they've forgotten how to listen and look as children. They've forgotten how to collect data. In the psychic sense a forest fire on TV is on a lower plane than a ten-second spot for Automatic Dishwasher All. The commercial has deeper waves, deeper emanations. But we have reversed the relative significance of these things. This is why people's eyes, ears, brains and nervous systems have grown weary. It's a simple case of misuse.

Those crazy physicists that spend all day cooking themselves under an atomic reactor and all night writing stories for Weird World have done it. Spoiled my day completely. One of those idiots has hung the world up like a celluloid ball in an airstream.

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.

The white flashed back into a red ball in the southeast. They all knew what it was. It was Orlando, or McCoy Base, or both. It was the power supply for Timucuan County. Thus the lights went out, and in that moment civilization in Fort Repose retreated a hundred years. So ended The Day.

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.

We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political in the economics and indifference...the relief will be very political, in who gives how much (Bush offering 15 million, then 35 million under pressure, the cost of his inauguration and then 350 million under strong international pressure)...but the event itself transcends politics, the realm of things we cause and can work to prevent. We cannot wish that human beings were not subject to the forces of nature, including the mortality... we cannot wish for the seas to dry up, that the waves grow still, that the tectonic plates ceast to exist, that nature ceases to be beyond our abilities to predict and control... But the terms of that nature include such catastrophe and suffering, which leaves us with sorrow as not a problem to be solved but a fact. And it leaves us with compassion as the work we will never finish

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

Tragedy is a disaster; but desperation after that tragedy is a much greater disaster!

When dark situations arise, it is opportunity for you to reveal the leader in you. Rise and deal with them.

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.

When she thought of New York City now, the place where she’d lived for most of her life, the only home she’d ever really known, she realized the city was like a person who now oftentimes struggled to stand proud because both its legs had collapsed in a sea of dust, fire and scattered office papers.

You can't stop the storm from coming so you better run for cover.

We do not engage in idle or intentional gossip which undermines someone else's integrity or which spreads the seeds of fear by talking unthinkingly about illness, disasters, and all the other fears which run rampant in the world.

A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.

You don't need another Human Being to make your life complete, but let's be honest. Having your wounds kissed by someone who doesn't see them as disasters In your soul, but cracks to put their love into, Is the most calming thing In this World.

Actually, for everybody, having sex the first time is never a good time. It's always a disaster.

When someone refuses listening to reason disaster will surely follow.

You're a shit cake with cum for whipped cream and dynamite for candles.

A false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.

A friend of mine, a dedicated golfer, shot a hole in one playing by himself. Disaster.

After Skins I became mildly famous, which was a bit of a disaster.

A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.