Best 78 quotes in «plague quotes» category

London is an ancient city,' he added. 'She holds bound in her belly the bones of giants and her soul is of old magic. Some wicked thing is abroad with this plague Charlie, all of us feel it. Perhaps something terrible has arisen with the King's return. A long-sleeping demon awoken and now stalking among us.

March 1898 What a strange dream I had last night! I wandered in the warm streets of a port, in the low quarter of some Barcelona or Marseille. The streets were noisome, with their freshly-heaped piles of ordure outside the doors, in the blue shadows of their high roofs. They all led down towards the sea. The gold-spangled sea, seeming as if it had been polished by the sun, could be seen at the end of each thoroughfare, bristling with yard-arms and luminous masts. The implacable blue of the sky shone brilliantly overhead as I wandered through the long, cool and sombre corridors in the emptiness of a deserted district: a quarter which might almost have been dead, abruptly abandoned by seamen and foreigners. I was alone, subjected to the stares of prostitutes seated at their windows or in the doorways, whose eyes seemed to ransack my very soul. They did not speak to me. Leaning on the sides of tall bay-windows or huddled in doorways, they were silent. Their breasts and arms were bare, bizarrely made up in pink, their eyebrows were darkened, they wore their hair in corkscrew-curls, decorated with paper flowers and metal birds. And they were all exactly alike! They might have been huge marionettes, or tall mannequin dolls left behind in panic - for I divined that some plague, some frightful epidemic brought from the Orient by sailors, had swept through the town and emptied it of its inhabitants. I was alone with these simulacra of love, abandoned by the men on the doorsteps of the brothels. I had already been wandering for hours without being able to find a way out of that miserable quarter, obsessed by the fixed and varnished eyes of all those automata, when I was seized by the sudden thought that all these girls were dead, plague-stricken and putrefied by cholera where they stood, in the solitude, beneath their carmine plaster masks... and my entrails were liquefied by cold. In spite of that harrowing chill, I was drawn closer to a motionless girl. I saw that she was indeed wearing a mask... and the girl in the next doorway was also masked... and all of them were horribly alike under their identical crude colouring... I was alone with the masks, with the masked corpses, worse than the masks... when, all of a sudden, I perceived that beneath the false faces of plaster and cardboard, the eyes of these dead women were alive. Their vitreous eyes were looking at me... I woke up with a cry, for in that moment I had recognised all the women. They all had the eyes of Kranile and Willie, of Willie the mime and Kranile the dancer. Every one of the dead women had Kranile's left eye and Willie's right eye... so that every one of them appeared to be squinting. Am I to be haunted by masks now?

Miracles are like murders. After the first one, each becomes easier than the last for, with each success, the miracle-worker's certainty in himself becomes stronger.

No, we love war. War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment. “It's the mark of a very, very young soul,” Mr. Whittier used to say, “to try and fix the world. To try and save anyone from their ration of misery.” We have always loved war. We are born knowing that war is why we're here. And we love disease. Cancer. We love earthquakes. In this amusement-park fun house we call the planet earth, Mr. Whittier says we adore forest fires. Oil spills. Serial killers.

One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the need to make a dreaded disease foreign. It was the "French pox" to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese. But what may seem like a joke about the inevitability of chauvinism reveals a more important truth: that there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness.

Our virus is a lot smarter than the ones you see in zombie movies. It doesn't make its victims stagger around slobbering and moaning so anyone in their right minds would run the other way. It gets you cozying up to people so you cough and sneeze it right into their faces. We just need the vaccine. Then we'll be okay.

[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. "The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned and towns deserted. The wrath of the Lord is upon us and He may be intending to destroy the whole of creation. People are without leaders and direction. They want to be given a reason for this, so they can be reassured, so they will return to their prayers and their obiediences. All this is going on, and you are concerned about the safety of two Jews?

Surely she was redeemed? At least a little? Please? Please, if there is a God watching, please see that I have redeemed myself. But it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. She had to do more. For as long as she lived she would have to do more. Starting with Caine.

Love in the flesh remained elusive. It drew yet frightened him. This was the late eighties, after all, the most terrifying days of the plague. Surrounded everywhere by insolent youth and beauty, Paul looked and lusted but didn’t dare touch.

One of the cafés had that brilliant idea of putting up a slogan: 'the best protection against infection is a good bottle of wine', which confirmed an already prevalent opinion that alcohol is a safeguard against infectious disease. Every night, towards 2 a.m., quite a number of drunk men, ejected from the cafés , staggered down the streets, vociferating optimism.

Pye turned his paw over and chewed his claws. “Humph. What you think of me is none of my business.” “You don’t know, do you?” “Know more than you . . . Know what?” “You are dead.” Pye patted his paws. “No, I’m not.” He rolled on his back and stretched, enjoying the warmth of the fire. “I’ve been here since 1665.” Pye chuckled. “You are, if I may so, in remarkably good condition.” Apart from the hole in your head, missing tail, and pulmonic plague cough. “I’ve seen them come. Seen them go. Seem them hang around in limbo. That’s what it’s called when beings don’t leave this Earth.” “Purgatory!” “I am responsible for many deaths,” Rita said. “You!?” “They couldn’t build the graves fast enough to bury the bodies.” “I don’t understand how a mere stump-tailed fur ball could endanger life.” “If I were you I'd think that.” A silence followed before Rita said, “I did not work alone.” “Oh?

Rats died in the street; men in their homes. And newspapers are concerned only with the street.

She closed her eyes; and in the sweet slumber lying her spirit tiptoed from its lodging place. It's folly to shrink in fear, if this is dying; for death looked lovely in her face.

Some, often without knowing it, suffered from being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch with them through the usual channels of friendship, letters, trains, and boats. Others, fewer these, Tarrou may have been one of them, had desired reunion with something they couldn't have defined, but which seemed to them the only desirable thing on earth. For want of a better name, they sometimes called it peace.

The addiction to our mobiles may insidiously unlock evil actions by helplessly surrendering to the plague of blatant indifference, arrogant inattention, and flighty bee-lining and sophisticated acts of revenge. Smartphones may unstitch positive points in our lives and incidentally enchant us by instant selfies but, with some, they might inexorably trigger off shabby and despicable practices. ("Even if the world goes down, my mobile will save me" )

The fleeting systems lapse like foam,'" he mumbled what was evidently a quotation. "That's it—foam, and fleeting. All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals, destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared the land of its wild vegetation. And then he passed, and the flood of primordial life rolled back again, sweeping his handiwork away—the weeds and the forest inundated his fields, the beasts of prey swept over his flocks, and now there are wolves on the Cliff House beach." He was appalled by the thought. "Where four million people disported themselves, the wild wolves roam to-day, and the savage progeny of our loins, with prehistoric weapons, defend themselves against the fanged despoilers. Think of it! And all because of the Scarlet Death—

The mourning of a loved one never ends with a funeral. It comes back every so often, like a stage performer eager for a curtain call and expects you to be loud about it. ...I gave it all the lung capacity I had.

Volume II: Chapter 5 The God sends down his angry plagues from high, Famine and pestilence in heaps they die. Again in vengeance of his wrath he falls On their great hosts, and breaks their tottering walls; Arrests their navies on the ocean's plain, And whelms their strength with mountains of the main.

The perfection of created life and the absolute beauty of nature is tarnished only by mortality and the cruel evils perpetrated by human kind. If humanity is the plague- only the divine is the cure...

They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

War is the plague of mankind; I am and remain in solidarity with eternal peace.

Was it possible to feel nostalgic about something that had never happened to him, possible for nostalgia to be taken in by the body as a free pathogen to infect the consciousness with stray sentiments? Perhaps, in his dreams, he had traveled back in time, or even drifted into another dimension of space-time and inhabited the body, experiences, and nostalgia of another. To even envisage so allowed the trauma of those lost moments, though not his own, to draw from him a certain envy for the entity in whose memories he had basked vicariously. . .Perhaps, nostalgia was a microorganism. . .the bacterium that infected. . . Yes. . .maybe he was sick.

The powerful God has power over the plague.

There have been many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared. [...] When a war breaks out people say: 'It won't last, it's too stupid.' And war is certainly too stupid, but that doesn't prevent it from lasting. Stupidity always carries doggedly on, as people wold notice if they were not always thinking about themselves. In this respect, the citizens of Oran were like the rest of the world, they thought about themselves, in other words, they were humanists: they did not believe in pestilence. A pestilence does not have human dimensions, so people tell themselves that it is unreal, that it is a bad dream which will end. But it does not always end and, from one bad dream to the next, it is people who end, humanists first of all because they have not prepared themselves.

Twas doing nothing was his curse. Is there a vice can plague us worse?

With The Dread, first kiss was the beginning. Second kiss was the end.

. When the plague struck Chicago, the townspeople here erected the gargoyles, and nary a soul was lost to the Black Death.” “The bubonic plague predates Chicago by about five hundred years.” He lowered himself to the bench. “I know. I was very disappointed when I found out. Almost as bad as when I learned there were no fairies. The world is much more interesting with goblins and plagues.” “Unless you catch the plague.

You're murderers," she told the stunned crowd. "You killed him. He was a miracle, and you killed him. Now you've just got me. And I'm a curse.

Complex rules restricting our labour markets are not some naturally occurring phenomenon. Just as excessive regulation is not some external plague that's been visited on our businesses.

Your skin and plague don't define you.

Adolescence is a plague on the senses.

Ambition sufficiently plagues her proselytes, by keeping themselves always in show, like the statue of a public place.

And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.

An unkind heart is the worst. It is a plague to its possessor, and a torment to those around him.

From winter, plague and pestilence, good lord, deliver us!

False fears are a plague, a modern plague!

He'd always thought Roag was one rat short of a plague.

Please your eye and plague your heart.

I have really bad luck with my thumbs. It plagues me, actually. It drives me crazy! Both of them are very oddly shaped.

[Jews were] fomenting a general plague on the whole world.

Gossiping is the plague of little towns.

I refuse to repent, and I won't plague myself over what is done and past

Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

Shun, as you would the plague, a cleric who from being poor has become wealthy, or who, from being nobody has become a celebrity.

Pittacus said, "Every one of you hath his particular plague, and my wife is mine; and he is very happy who hath this only".

The newspaperman has become a walking plague. He spreads the contagion of lies and calumnies.

The plague of government is senile delinquency.

There are more things to admire in men than to despise.

War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.

Trust yourself to do what you really feel like doing, and what you feel like doing will change. Don't, and it will plague you.