Abyss Quotes

I couldn't rid myself of the sense that Roy was in danger somehow, that old demons were driving him toward an abyss, and that if only I was a better brother, my intervention would prevent his fall. ~ Barack Obama

There was an abyss. And books contained magical incantations to raise what was hidden there, all the great mysteries. ~ Stephen King

Shut one eye then the other
Peek into every corner of yourself
See that there are no nails no thieves
See that there are no cuckoo's eggs

Shut then the other eye
Squat and jump
Jump high high high
On top of yourself

Fall then with all your weight
Fall for days on end deep deep deep
To the bottom of your abyss

Who doesn't break into pieces
Who remains whole gets up whole
Plays ~ Vasko Popa

Look at these cliffs! Some are abrupt and unpredictable. Some other are soft and with smooth slopes. Yet, they all have the same purpose: either to lure you and bring you down or to teach you how to stand up, firmly, on their rims while contemplating the horizon. Here, you have the perfect vision of the abyss beneath. the majesty of the skies above, or the endlessness of the horizon in front; but you can't see what's behind, and that's how it should be! What's the point in contemplating something that you already know and lived? Haven't your coming here made you know the paths on which you walked? That's why, what belongs to the past should remain there. The past gives us the lessons. We do not need a heavier luggage than this! ~ Irina Serban

Except for our pompous means of comfort, human condition is not much different from animal condition - we are tormented each day with animal like anxieties, insecurities and fears, and each torment makes us believe that perhaps having more comfort will change our condition, but it never does, rather, it only shoves us deeper into the abyss of psychological darkness. ~ Abhijit Naskar

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Psalm 22:1 We here behold the Saviour in the depth of his sorrows. No other place so well shows the griefs of Christ as Calvary, and no other moment at Calvary is so full of agony as that in which his cry rends the air--"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" At this moment physical weakness was united with acute mental torture from the shame and ignominy through which he had to pass; and to make his grief culminate with emphasis, he suffered spiritual agony surpassing all expression, resulting from the departure of his Father's presence. This was the black midnight of his horror; then it was that he descended the abyss of suffering. No man can enter into the full meaning of these words. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Out of abysses of Illiteracy, Through labyrinths of Lies, Across wastelands of Disease ... We advance Out of dead-ends of Poverty, Through wilderness of Superstition, Across barricades of Jim Crowism ... We advance. ~ Melvin B. Tolson

A neat little apartment with a neat little bourgeois life. A neat little security on the edge of the abyss. Do you really see that? ~ Erich Maria Remarque

I know I'm a little different from everyone else, but I'm still human being. That's what I'd like you to realize. I'm just a regular person, not some monster. I feel the same things everyone else does, act the same way. Sometimes, though, that small difference feels like an abyss. But I guess there's not much I can do about it. ~ Haruki Murakami

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures. ~ William James

All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself. ~ William Butler Yeats

We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into. ~ John Jeremiah Sullivan

Yet man is born to love. He is compassionate, just and good. He sheds tears for others and such tears give him pleasure. He invents stories to make him weep. Whence then this furious desire for wars and slaughter? Why does man plunge into the abyss, embracing with passion that which inspires him with such loathing? Why do men who revolt over such trivial issues as attempts to change the calendar allow themselves to be sent like obedient animals to kill and be killed? ~ Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber Of Humanity

I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the goodwilled imitation of that emotion, and for this reason it was a temptation to exaggerate, to throw a rope of superlatives across the abyss that divided experience from its representation by anecdote. ~ Ian McEwan

Thinking leads inexorably to the abyss. It did not work for Tolstoy. It might not even have worked for Nietzsche, who arguably thought more clearly about such things than anyone in history. But if it is not thinking that can be relied upon in the direst of situations, what is left? Thought, after all, is the highest of human achievements, is it not?
Perhaps not.
Something supersedes thinking, despite its truly awesome power. When existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinking collapses in on itself. In such situations - in the depths - it's noticing, not thinking, that does the trick. ~ Jordan B. Peterson

I myself am an absolute abyss. ~ Antonin Artaud

Danny should have been elated: Everything they had thought might happen was now happening. He wasn't elated, however; he was anxious. At 10:30, an hour into trading, every financial stock went into a free fall, whether it deserved to or not. "All this information goes through me," he said. "I'm supposed to know how to transmit information. Prices were moving so quickly I couldn't get a fix. It felt like a black hole. The abyss." It ~ Michael Lewis

Language falters in the abyss; it fractures at the site of trauma. We need to find a different way of speaking from the depths, reclaiming the notion that language about God is always fractured language, always broken, and never complete. ~ Shelly Rambo

An abyss is not nothing; it has environs & edges. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

Animals will be seen on the earth who will always be fighting against each other with the greatest loss and frequent deaths on each side. And there will be no end to their malignity; by their strong limbs we shall see a great portion of the trees of the vast forests laid low throughout the universe; and, when they are filled with food the satisfaction of their desires will be to deal death and grief and labour and wars and fury to every living thing; and from their immoderate pride they will desire to rise towards heaven, but the too great weight of their limbs will keep them down. Nothing will remain on earth, or under the earth or in the waters which will not be persecuted, disturbed and spoiled, and those of one country removed into another. And their bodies will become the sepulture and means of transit of all they have killed.

O Earth! why dost thou not open and engulf them in the fissures of thy vast abyss and caverns, and no longer display in the sight of heaven such a cruel and horrible monster? ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Fear not. For fear itself is fed by fear, and all fears pass. Did no one tell you so? Come take my hand, my friend, and we will peer into this fear's abyss. And jump! And know. ~ Felix Dennis

We are surrounded by abysses, but the greatest of all depths is in our own heart, and an irresistible leaning leads us there. Draw thyself from thyself! ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

My tactic is to look at you
To learn how you are
Love you as you are
My tactic is to talk to you
And listen to you
And construct with words
An indestructible bridge
My tactic is to stay in your memory
I don't know how
Nor with what pretext
But stay within you
My tactic is to be honest
And know you are too
And that we don't sell each other illusions
So that between us there is no curtain or abyss
My strategy instead is
Deeper and simpler.
My strategy is that some day
I don't know how, nor with what pretext
That finally you need me. ~ Mario Benedetti

We stepped out gaily on a carpet of flowers, little imagining the abyss beneath ~ Louis Philippe De Segur

Despair is deep. An abyss that swallows dreams. A wall at the world's end. Behind it I await death. Because all our work has come to this. ~ Catherine Fisher

The evil spirits returned to Belial inside the mountain. He stared with a dire face into the blackened ooze of the Abyss that filled the large lake inside their sanctuary. Small flames of fire flitted across the surface of it. The sixty plus other gods gathered around their leader like a bodyguard of Watchers, swords drawn, javelins and maces held tight. Would they fight this day? Belial said, still staring into the oblivion, "It is worse than I thought." Molech whined, "Are the heavenly host approaching?" "No. He transfigured." "Glorification," said Molech. "Is that not a call to battle?" "He is not attacking us on our turf. He is challenging us to his." "It is almost upon us," said Belial. "All gods, prepare for war. ~ Brian Godawa

The end of World War I also marked the end of bourgeois culture. An inner emptiness developed that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, paved the way for two ideologies that dragged Europe and the world into an abyss and plunged it into a catastrophe. ~ Walter Kasper

And when it seemed as though the mists were hiding a fathomless abyss, Lipa and her mother who were born in poverty and prepared to live so till the end, giving up to others everything except their frightened, gentle souls, may have fancied for a minute perhaps that in the vast, mysterious world, among the endless series of lives, they, too, counted for something ... ~ Anton Chekhov

I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over the dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow, but I kept looking, and it could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stones, worn clear of the mortar by the stress of years, and by thus using every projection and inequality move downwards with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall. ~ Bram Stoker

Two men in a small boat, never sure what they might encounter out on the sea or what they might pull up from the abyss, beneath melted stars and electric full moons, where breakers and swells assault the islets like hysterical herds of cattle and the lunatic eye of the lighthouse never lets us out of its sight. ~ Morten A. Strøksnes

Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: It's four o clock. At five I have my abyss ... ~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

One cannot cross an abyss in two jumps. ~ David Lloyd George

And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. Ahh . . . an educated man. Well, you're not as stupid as you look. Don't quote Nietzsche at me, kid. That German crackpot wouldn't know a real monster if it bit him on the ass. ~ Larry Correia

I was hopelessly looking for the sky in the abyss
But it turned out that it is in your eyes ~ Marina Matiss

[Buddhism and Christianity] are in one sense parallel and equal; as a mound and a hollow, as a valley and a hill. There is a sense in which that sublime despair is the only alternative to that divine audacity. It is even true that the truly spiritual and intellectual man sees it as sort of dilemma; a very hard and terrible choice. There is little else on earth that can compare with these for completeness. And he who does not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha. ~ G.K. Chesterton

And even though body has entwined with body, vows have been whispered into the lover's ears in the throws of unimaginable passion, there's a pang still. One has not felt understood by the lover. And that is a different quality of loneliness. A constant dull hammering. Like static hum. Dissonance. Ultimately it translates into a plain inability to see the other's view. We shout betrayal. We shift blame. We feel inadequate. When it is plain inability. So their intimacy has a narrow gap running across, like a rift between two continents and it's only when you examine it from above, do you really see it. You realize that the gap could be the breadth of a hairline but it is deep. It's darkness stretches all the way down into a free falling abyss. ~ Sakoon Singh

There is no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest parts of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide. ~ Rachel Carson

For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ's birth, there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old OCtober and so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer. FOr these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. THe spider-web hears them, trembles--breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them. ~ Ray Bradbury

The secret to success, to parenting, to life, is to not count up the cost. Don't focus on all the steps it will take. Don't stare into the abyss at the giant leap it will take. That view will keep you from taking the next small step. ~ Regina Brett

When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The Secret of Enlightenment is not in Perfection but in Completeness. Everything that is below the Abyss carries the imperfection within.
After the Infinite establishes Divine Order, the Life of Duality as we know it on Earth begins. It is Yin and Yang in its Manifestation, and only through the two meeting, marrying, merging, they both reach God.' Ama Alchemy of Love by Nuit Quote ~ Natasa Nuit Pantovic

You are my life." Though his words were barely a whisper, they seemed to echo from somewhere deep within him, enveloping my body and infusing me with something unshakable. "There is nothing I would not do to make you happy. Before I met you, my world was a string of days that were gray and empty. I had nothing to look forward to, and I cannot tell you what it was like, facing down eternity alone. Every day I wished for you. Every day I held on in hopes that eventually we would meet. And when I finally found you..."
He leaned in and kissed me again, astenderly as before. His hand slid underneath my shirt, splaying across my stomach, but the touch wasn't sexual. It was as if he were trying to memorize me, just as I was trying to memorize him.
"I have existed for more eons than I remember. I have seen the sun rise and fall so many times that the days lost all meaning. For so long, they passed me by in a blur. But that night we met by the river - the night you gave up yourself in order to save a virtual stranger - my heart began to beat again."
He took my hand and pressed it against his chest, and there it was - thump thump, thump thump, strong and beautiful. I would've given anything to keep his heart beating. The black abyss that had become my world in those hours I'd thought he was dead had faded, but it was a scar I would always bear. I couldn't go back to that. Even if I had Milo, I would never have another Henry. ~ Aimee Carter

If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt. ~ William James

He unwittingly takes a false step and plunges into the abyss. ~ Paulo Coelho

A man's perspective is limited by the brevity of his existence.
Even living deliberately, how far up can we reach?
Standing on our miniscule patch of time, how far into the future can we see? How much of the past can one truly understand?

Yet, only a recreant spends their precious drops of sand before dropping back
into the abyss lounging in indulgence, not striving for understanding, knowledge,
answers that those of us
scourged/consecrated with consciousness
should seek with unconquerable passion. ~ Alpha Four

The role of the parents is not to become the child, but to provide guidance to it, to walk it through the same abyss the parents walked through but with the help of a light called parental guidance. - On Parenting. ~ Lamine Pearlheart

I have fallen into an abyss. I live in a world so curious, so strange. Of the dream that was my life, this is my nightmare. ~ Camille Claudel

I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind. A dim, subconscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves. Hell, Netley. We're in Hell. ~ Alan Moore

Men's private self-worlds are rather like our geographical world's seasons, storm, and sun, deserts, oases, mountains and abysses, the endless-seeming plateaus, darkness and light, and always the sowing and the reaping. ~ Faith Baldwin

The Dark Lord has Nine. But we have One, mightier than they: the White Rider. He has passed through the fire and the abyss, and they shall fear him. We will go where he leads. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When a human being becomes so still that they begin to lose awareness of their gender, and they are simply looking into that abyss where there is no notion of self whatsoever, the world disappears. And that's really the only place to go. It's the only place to remain. ~ Andrew Cohen

He was dead; I needed to let his memory go, too. That was the first step for me, before discrimination.
Yet my love was the ghost of a young girl's dream. It walked alone in the abyss, stubbornly, where only illusions prospered on tears and regrets. My love had a life of its own; it was perverted but nevertheless still vital. For that reason, I wanted to return to deep space. Honestly, I would have preferred it if we had traveled forever and never stopped at another star system. To fall into endless blackness, that was my new fantasy.
The young girl with the ancient dream wept. I could hear her; I even saw her tears on the glass of the observation deck. It made me feel old. I didn't want to know her name. I couldn't forget Tem but I needed to forget her. ~ Christopher Pike

The night is alive with stars, and when I lie down and look up, I get lost up there. I feel like I'm falling, but upward, into the abyss of sky above me. ~ Markus Zusak

Where was it written that I, child of no one, deserved such joy? It only happened at night, this abyss of dread, never during the day. Only in the empty hours between today and yesterday, when I was alone with my sleeping lover and the weight of the past crept upon me like a reproachful ghost. ~ C.W. Gortner

Adjustment, that synonym for conformity that comes more easily to the modern tongue, is the theme of our swan song, the piper's tune to which we dance on the brink of the abyss, the siren's melody that destroys our senses and paralyzes our wills. ~ Robert M. Lindner

It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself up out of the dark abyss of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. ~ H.L. Mencken

I became a new person; sucked into the neutrality of the abyss, comforted by social norms, and set free from the burden of individuality. ~ Joss Sheldon

He wanted nothing more to do with love; he was fed up with the whole business. He had thought that he could just give up and follow his father's advice, but he had advanced too far in his work; he had crossed the abyss that separates a man from his dream, and now there was no going back. He couldn't go forward or back. It was easier just to leave the stage. ~ Paulo Coelho

Every period of time is a sphinx that throws itself into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved. ~ Heinrich Heine

You explode, if that's more to your taste, shoot yourself all around in endless darts, be prodigal, spendthrift, reckless: I shall implode, collapse inside the abyss of myself, towards my buried centre, infinitely. ~ Italo Calvino

The only way I can describe the visions I witnessed with even faint approximation is in terms of other scenes which might arouse similar impressions of tortuous chaos: perhaps a festival of colors twisting in blackness, a tentacled abyss that alternately seems to glisten moistly as with some horrendous dew, then suddenly dulls into an arid glow, like bone-colored stars shining over an extra-terrestrial desert. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Descartes gave sight to the blind. These saw the errors of antiquity and of the sciences. The path he struck out is since become boundless [ ... ] In fathoming this abyss no bottom has been found. We are now to examine what discoveries Sir Isaac Newton has made in it. ~ Voltaire

As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered. ~ Maurice Maeterlinck

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit - and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame ~ Jeff VanderMeer

O Lord, I am Thy servant; I am Thy servant, and the son of Thy handmaid: Thou hast broken my bonds in sunder. I will offer to Thee the sacrifice of Let my heart and my tongue praise Thee; yea, let all my bones say, O Lord, who is like unto Thee? Let them say, and answer Thou me, and say unto my soul, I am thy salvation. Who am I, and what am I? What evil have not been either my deeds, or if not my deeds, my words, or if not my words, my will? But Thou, O Lord, are good and merciful, and Thy right hand had respect unto the depth of my death, and from the bottom of my heart emptied that abyss of corruption. And this Thy whole gift was, to nill what I willed, and to will what Thou willedst. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

If we presume that the boundary of the universe is a kind of surrounding wall,
then we think like ancestors who thought there's abyss at the edge of flat earth. ~ Toba Beta

It was the least she could do. For Nehemia - for. . . a lot of other people. There was nothing left in her, not really. Only ash and an abyss and the unbreakable vow she'd carved into her flesh, to the friend who had seen her for what she truly was. ~ Sarah J. Maas

If you choose to dwell within the abyss, expect only darkness to surround you. ~ Val Edward Simone

Alas! Victor, when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness? I feel as if I were walking on the edge of a precipice, towards which thousands are crowding, and endeavouring to plunge me into the abyss. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

My love", she whispered, so low she sounded to Jacques as if she were speaking from the bottom of an abyss, "now we shall belong to each other in a strange country that you do not know. It is the country of madmen but not the country of brutes. I am taking away your vulgar senses and giving you others more refined. ~ Rachilde

It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss. ~ Emile Durkheim

Elizabeth, when you look into the darkness you have two choices. You either fall into it, so you'll never fear the unknown again. Or you stay on the ledge, always wondering what's there. Torturing yourself over it. Elizabeth, I live in the abyss, and would like you to leap into the unknown with me. Will you join me? ~ LeeAnn Whitaker

Mind led body
to the edge of the precipice.
They stared in desire
at the naked abyss.
If you love me, said mind,
take that step into silence.
If you love me, said body,
turn and exist. ~ Anne Stevenson

I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps. ~ David Mitchell

It was as if hell itself had taken human form and come up from the abyss. ~ Brima Lamin & Chantale Wesley-Lamin, The Walk - Memoir Of A Liberian Civil War Survivor, 2016

He had never clearly fathomed the true weight of a word of good, truth, and purity cast in the stream of human speech and the deep bend it cut in it. Nor had he thought that a word spoken boldly and loudly, with no hint of false shame, but rather with courage, that this word would not drown in the ugly cries of fashionable satyrs but would plunge like a pearl into the abyss of public life and always find itself a shell.
Many stumble over a good word, blushing in embarrassment, and utter a careless word boldly and loudly, never suspecting that it, too, unfortunately, will not go for naught but will leave a long trail of often times ineradicable evil.
p. 296 ~ Ivan Goncharov

Eagles live in the darkness,
And the sons of the Alps
Cross over the abyss without fear
On lightly-built bridges.
***
Growing weak on the separate mountains
Then give us calm waters;
Give us wings, and loyal minds
To cross over and return. ~ Friedrich Holderlin

When they turned, Pelletier and Espinoza saw an older woman in a white blouse and black skirt, a woman with a figure like Marlene Dietrich, as Pelletier would say much later, a woman who despite her years was still as strong willed as ever, a woman who didn't cling to the edge of the abyss but plunged into it with curiosity and elegance. A woman who plunged into the abyss sitting down. ~ Roberto Bolano

We belong to an age where apocalypse is our daily bread, coffee's black, and we know we're part of the abyss. Red Spider White Web is right on target in conveying that understanding. It splinters in the mind ... the underworld of the century's imaginings. ~ Brian Aldiss

If you understand hallucination and illusion, you don't blindly follow any leader. You must know if the person is sane or insane, over the abyss. ~ Marguerite Young

For it is only in accepting death that one can truly live, and for the human animal, death has always been the great black beast from the abyss to be dreaded or defeated or avoided or hated - but never looked upon clearly face to face. ~ David Zindell

I imagine pushing you into the red abyss and jumping in after you, with you, so we can burn together, forever, a tree of life, light, sex. ~ Caroline Kepnes

Somehow Luke understood - in a way that Lando never had, that Hand and Leia and Chewbacca had simply never grasped - just how dark a place the universe really was.
Lando guessed that was where Luke got his humility. His kindness. His gentle faith that people could change for the better. That must have been why he rarely smiled, and almost never made jokes. Because the goodness was all he rally had. It was his lifeline. The rope to which he clung, dangling over the abyss. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover

In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.

All save one. There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dínen.
"You cannot enter here," said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. "Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!"
The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.
"Old fool!" he said. "Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!" And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade.

And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the city, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of war nor of wizardry, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.
And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns, in dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

He'd spent his life carefully not looking into an abyss of rage like the pit of hellfire he'd so often been told awaited pagans, because if he ever really looked, he feared he might be angry forever. ~ K.J. Charles

Everything, alas, is an abyss, - actions, desires, dreams, words! ~ Charles Baudelaire

It was as if these depths, constantly bridged over by a structure that was firm enough in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of the abyss. A difference had been made moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had, all the while, not appeared to feel the need of rebutting his charge of an idea within her that she didn't dare express, uttered just before one of the fullest of their later discussions ended. ~ Henry James

He sat there, the master, the artist who had achieved his dignity, the author of "A Wretched Man," who, employing a form of exemplary purity, had renounced bohemianism and the dismal chasm, had broken with the abyss and reviled all vileness. He had risen high, transcending his knowledge and outgrowing all irony, he had adjusted his responsibilities toward the public and its trust in him-he, whose fame was official, whose name was ennobled, and whose style was a model for schoolboys. ~ Thomas Mann

Under a Certain Little Star"

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity in case I'm mistaken.
May happiness not be angry if I take it for my own.
May the dead forgive me that their memory's but a flicker.
My apologies to time for the multiplicity of the world overlooked
each second.
My apologies to an old love for treating the new one as the first.
Forgive me far-off wars for taking my flowers home.
Forgive me open wounds for pricking my finger.
My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the
abyss.
My apologies to those in railway stations for sleeping comfortably
at five in the morning.
Pardon me hounded hope for laughing sometimes.
Pardon me deserts for not rushing in with a spoonful of water.
And you O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage,
forever still and staring at the same spot,
absolve me even if you happened to be stuffed.
My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs.
My apologies to large questions for small answers.
Truth, do not pay me too much attention.
Solemnity, be magnanimous to me.
Endure, O mystery of being that I might pull threads from your
veil.

Soul, don't blame me that I've got you so seldom.
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere.
My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and
woman.
I know that ~ Wisława Szymborska

Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul! ~ Emily Bronte

Ladies,

I have bad news for you. Men are pigs. No really. I know you think you know what I'm talking about but you don't know the half of it. You have no idea how depraved we men really are.

I'm about to tell you the truth about men. The whole truth. Not that sanitized holier-than-thou shit they feed you in all those other relationship books.

I'm gonna take you into the abyss that is the male mind. It's a dark and scary place. You're not gonna like it. It's dirty in there. Icky. Don't touch anything. Bring hand sanitizer. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

I created myself, echo and abyss, by thinking. I multiplied myself by going deeply into myself ... ~ Fernando Pessoa

Movies like 'The Abyss' and 'Jaws' make people think the ocean is threatening. It's not. It's very tranquil. ~ Graham Hawkes

My God my bright abyss
into which all my longing will not go
once more I come to the edge of all I know
and believing nothing believe in this. ~ Christian Wiman

The power of the word, with which the cast away is cast away, pronounces the turning away from all moral uncertainty, from every sympathy with the abyss, the reneging of that phrase of compassion, that "to understand all is to forgive all", and what was beginning here was that "wonder of the reborn impartiality", which was briefly mentioned in one of the author's dialogues with not a little mystery. What strange coherence! ~ Thomas Mann

A duplicitous country with a duplicitous leadership is going to give us more duplicity. And that duplicity is going lead us off an abyss. That's going to happen. ~ Matt Shea

Between them, the fear, the fear shared in common, and, through the fear, the abyss of fear over which they join one another without being able to do so, dying, each alone, of fear. ~ Maurice Blanchot