Destruction Quotes

“When you have so much to live for, fear is more predominant than ever.”
― Michael Zboray, Teenagers War: Vietnam 1969

“He was always looking for new and interesting ways to destroy himself.”
― Kalen Dion

“Walking back in the lamp-stained dark, the duckboards greasy and glittering with frost, she wanted to sing, she wanted to scream, she wanted to make love to him, she wanted to die.”
― Lesley Glaister, Blasted Things

“And then came Mrs Fletcher, snapping her scissors, the soft scrunch of the blades through thick hanks, the gradual sensation of lightness. Now every scrap of hair that Powell had touched was gone.”
― Lesley Glaister, Blasted Things

“As we all know, everyone feels fear. How it’s handled is what’s different between people. You look into the eyes of anyone on board the plane and see it. It’s ever-present.”
― Michael Zboray, Teenagers War: Vietnam 1969

“He frowned, pulled her roughly against him. She could feel the tickle of his chest hair against her cheek and his bristles on top of her head. She could feel the outraged beating of his heart.”
― Lesley Glaister, Blasted Things

“Destruction is the universal law; do you not know, poor mortals, that life is a race to dissolution?”
― Seneca, Four Tragedies and Octavia

“Are we so utterly foolish that to repent of our ignorance will require the destruction of our lives? And if this is the sad reality, then let us be destroyed so that we can begin the process of rebuilding.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“We have destroyed something by our presence,” said Bernard, “a world perhaps.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Iris kissing the lips of a dying boy. Imagine! So very kind, so killingly funny! Cross-eyed Iris in her specs, whatever did the poor boy think?”
― Lesley Glaister, Blasted Things

“I love you the way a knife loves a heart, the way a bomb loves a crowd; the way your mother warned you about, essentially.”
― Joey Comeau

“Do I stand alone in the darkness, or do I rise in the shadows? The choice is mine, but what they fail to tell me, is that it doesn't make a difference. Either way, I am destined for destruction.”
― Arti Manani, Seven Sins

“I want to pluck the sun from the sky and set fire to the whole earth, the whole universe. I want to see all creation engulfed in flames. Everything must burn and burn forever. Especially morality. And democracy. I want to see the flesh of those creatures melting in front of me. I want to see all their corrupt bones and internal organs on fire.”
― Mark Romel, The Mistletoe Murders: A Nietzschean Murder Mystery

“In nature destruction has purpose. It breaks down the weak and makes way for strong beings.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner, The Magic of Nature: Meditations & Spells to Find Your Inner Voice

“I am here because I want a place from which I can start over.”
― Louis Yako

“Before me all things crumble.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“I can't help it if I understand that everything tends to ruin. Over our heads, Skylab is eternally falling down, I can see it all, the debris raining without cessation. I was a skinny guy, but I was morbidly obese with doom.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death

“Low down and near the horizon hung a great, red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, there was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group. And on the earth, in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, there spread a vast city in which there was no living thing to be seen. And all the temples, towers, palaces, pyramids, and bridges cast long, disastrous-looking shadows in the light of that withered sun. Once a great river had flowed through the city, but the water had long since vanished, and it was now only a wide ditch of grey dust.

"Look well on that which no eyes will ever see again," said the Queen. "Such was Charn, that great city, the city of the King of Kings, the wonder of the world, perhaps of all worlds. Does your uncle rule any city as great as this, boy?"

"No," said Digory. He was going to explain that Uncle Andrew didn't rule any cities, but the Queen went on:

"It is silent now. But I have stood here when the whole air was full of the noises of Charn; the trampling of feet, the creaking of wheels, the cracking of the whips and the groaning of slaves, the thunder of chariots, and the sacrificial drums beating in the temples. I have stood here (but that was near the end) when the roar of battle went up from every street and the river of Charn ran red." She paused and added, "All in one moment one woman blotted it out forever."

"Who?" said Digory in a faint voice; but he had already guessed the answer.

"I," said the Queen. "I, Jadis, the last Queen, but the Queen of the World.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

“Desire is never destructive. But evil desire can cause a destruction.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“They are the pieces from which the whole is fashioned. But what I must remember is that the pieces aren’t there to reconstruct what they used to be before the pieces became pieces. They are there to construct something that is more than the sum total of whatever they used to be.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Doubt leads to destruction.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“An undemocratic government uses its weapon against its own people. Democratic governments do that to other nations.”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land

“A demon does not pick apples: a demon fucks shit up.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“A tool of destruction that we create, will always be used against us.”
― Mihail Militaru

“The purpose of my purpose is not to destroy my purpose before I discover it, although destruction of this sort seems to be a widely held purpose.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away.”
― Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings

“[D]estruction only becomes negative if exhausted”
― Iain Hamilton Grant

“Comparing yourself with others is one of the highest form of self-destruction and people who love themselves don't destroy themselves.”
― Sarvesh Jain

“Disobedience to God leads to destruction.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Thoughts at a Café Table
Between the Kazan and the Iron Gates

Progress has now placed the whole of this landscape underwater. A traveller sitting at my old table on the quay at Orsova would have to peer at the scenery through a thick brass-hinged disc of glass; this would frame a prospect of murk and slime [...] Moving a couple of miles downstream, he would fumble his way on to the waterlogged island and among the drowned Turkish houses; or, upstream, flounder among the weeds and rubble choking Count Széchenyi's road and peer across the dark gulf at the vestiges of Trajan on the other side; and all round him, above and below, the dark abyss would yawn and the narrows where currents once rushed and cataracts shuddered from bank to bank and echoes zigzagged along the vertiginous clefts would be sunk in diluvian since. [...]

He could toil many days up these cheerless soundings, for Rumania and Yugoslavia have built one of the world's biggest ferro-concrete dams and hydro-electric power plants across the Iron Gates. This has turned a hundred and thirty miles of the Danube into a vast pond which has swollen and blurred the course of the river beyond recognition. It has abolished cayons, turned beetling crags into mild hills and ascended the beautiful Cerna valley almost to the Baths of Hercules. Many thousands of the inhabitabnts of Orşova and the riparian hamlets had to be uprooted and transplanted elsewhere. The islanders of Ada Kaleh have been moved to another islet downstream and their old home has vanished under the still surface as though it has never been. Let us hope that the power generated by the dam has spread well-being on either bank and lit up Rumanian and Yugoslav towns brighter than ever before because, in everything but economics, the damage is irreparrable.

[... M]yths, lost voices, history and hearsay have all been put to rout, leaving nothing but this valley of shadow. Goethe's advice, 'Bewahre Dich vor Räuber und Ritter und Gespenstergeschichten',* has been taken literally, and everything has fled.

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* Beware of the robber, the cavalier, and ghost stories.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water