Barren Quotes

Eugenie, you're a woman without equal, and no matter how much you annoy the hell out of me and no matter how much I try to get you out of my head - and believe me, both occur regularly - I can't stay away from you. Even if you were barren, I'd take you as my consort in an instant and spend the rest of my life with you - childless, so long as it meant you'd be by my side. I would gladly bring you to my bed with no other thoughts than taking joy from your body. It would be enough.
- Dorian ~ Richelle Mead

This truth may be handled either sinfully or profitably; sinfully as when it is treated on only to satisfy curiosity, and to keep up a mere barren speculative dispute ... This point of election ... is not to be agitated in a verbal and contentious way, but in a saving way, to make us tremble and to set us upon a more diligent and close striving with God in prayer, and all other duties. ~ Anthony Burgess

It was funny how nature reclaimed this world in its own way. It was silly to say humans were destroying the environment; we were simply changing it. Nature would persevere until the world was a barren wasteland. ~ Wildbow

Already it is twilight down in the Laredito. Bats fly forth from their roostings in courthouse and tower and circle the quarter. The air is full of the smell of burning charcoal. Children and dogs squat by the mud stoops and gamecocks flap and settle in the branches of the fruit trees. They go afoot, these comrades, down along a bare adobe wall. Band music carries dimly from the square. They pass a watercart in the street and they pass a hole in the wall where by the light of a small forgefire an old man beats out shapes of metal. They pass in a doorway a young girl whose beauty becomes the flowers about.

They arrive at last before a wooden door. It is hinged into a larger door or gate and all must step over the foot-high sill where a thousand boots have scuffled away the wood, where fools in their hundreds have tripped or fallen or tottered drunkenly into the street. They pass along a ramada in a courtyard by an old grape arbor where small fowl nod in the dusk among the gnarled and barren vines and they enter a cantina where the lamps are lit and they cross stooping under a low beam to a bar and belly up one two three.

There is an old disordered Mennonite in this place and he turns to study them. A thin man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers. The recruits order glasses of whiskey and drink them down and order more. There are monte games at tables by the wall and there are whores at another ~ Cormac McCarthy

The Gentle Gardener
I'd like to leave but daffodils to mark my little way,
To leave but tulips red and white behind me as I stray;
I'd like to pass away from earth and feel I'd left behind
But roses and forget-me-nots for all who come to find.
I'd like to sow the barren spots with all the flowers of earth,
To leave a path where those who come should find but gentle mirth;
And when at last I'm called upon to join the heavenly throng
I'd like to feel along my way I'd left no sign of wrong.
And yet the cares are many and the hours of toil are few;
There is not time enough on earth for all I'd like to do;
But, having lived and having toiled, I'd like the world to find
Some little touch of beauty that my soul had left behind. ~ Edgar A. Guest

Some brains are barren grounds, that will not bring seed or fruit forth, unless they are well manured with the old wit which is raked from other writers and speakers. ~ Margaret Cavendish

You see the barren earth when We send water down upon it, stirring, sprouting and producing every sort of lovely species.* That because God is the Truth: He revives the dead and is capable of everything!
Quran-AlHaj(5,6) ~ Anonymous

You English palisade yourselves up behind 'must nots' and I commence to think it is a barren fortress in which you wall yourselves. - Caleb ~ Geraldine Brooks

Some look at the hills from far away and see only the barren lands; some travel amongst the hills and find the most beautiful valleys! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

They were too young then to know what they would ultimately need from a barren and heart-sore life ... ~ Frank O'Hara

I say, we were so robbed, and hunted, and were made so poor, that our father told us it was a dreadful thing to bring a child into the world, and that what we should pray for, was, that our women might be barren and our miserable race die out! ~ Charles Dickens

Hence there are many things that governments, corporations and individuals can do to avoid climate change. But to be effective, they must be done on a global level. When it comes to climate, countries are just not sovereign. They are at the mercy of actions taken by people on the other side of the planet. The Republic of Kiribati – an islands nation in the Pacific Ocean – could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to zero and nevertheless be submerged under the rising waves if other countries don't follow suit. Chad could put a solar panel on every roof in the country and yet become a barren desert due to the irresponsible environmental policies of distant foreigners. Even powerful nations such as China and Japan are not ecologically sovereign. To protect Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo from destructive floods and typhoons, the Chinese and Japanese will have to convince the Russian and American governments to abandon their 'business as usual' approach. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Rome was not the first state of organized gangsterdom, nor was it the last; but it was the only one that managed to bamboozle posterity into an almost universal admiration. Few rational men admire the Huns, the Nazis or the Soviets; but for centuries, schoolboys have been expected to read Julius Caesar's militaristic drivel ("We inflicted heavy losses upon the enemy, our own casualties being very light") and Cato's revolting incitements to war. They have been led to believe that the Romans had attained an advanced level in the sciences, the arts, law, architecture, engineering and everything else. It is my opinion that the alleged Roman achievements are largely a myth; and I feel it is time for this myth to be debunked a little. What the Romans excelled in was bullying, bludgeoning, butchering and blood baths. Like the Soviet Empire, the Roman Empire enslaved peoples whose cultural level was far above their own. They not only ruthlessly vandalized their countries, but they also looted them, stealing their art treasures, abducting their scientists and copying their technical know-how, which the Romans' barren society was rarely able to improve on. No wonder, then, that Rome was filled with great works of art. But the light of culture which Rome is supposed to have emanated was a borrowed light: borrowed from the Greeks and the other peoples that the Roman militarists had enslaved. ~ Petr Beckmann

May the day of my birth perish. May it turn to darkness. May God above not care about it. May no light shine on it. May gloom and utter darkness claim it once more. May a cloud settle over it. May blackness overwhelm it. May thick darkness seize it. May it not be included among the days of the year nor be entered in any of the months. May that night be barren. May no shout of joy be heard in it. May those who curse days curse that day. May its morning stars become dark. May it wait for daylight in vain and not see the first rays of dawn, for it did not shut the doors of the womb on me to hide trouble from my eyes.
Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb? Why were there knees to receive me and breasts that I might be nursed? For now I would be lying down in peace; I would be asleep and at rest.
Why is light given to those in misery, and life to the bitter of soul,
to those who long for death that does not come, who search for it more than for hidden treasure, who are filled with gladness and rejoice when they reach the grave?
For sighing has become my daily food; my groans pour out like water.What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me.I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest, but only turmoil. ~ Anonymous

He had read of 'Space': at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now - now that the very name 'Space' seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean all the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he now saw that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes-and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they made it simply the heavens. The heavens which declared the glory."
C. S. Lewis ~ C.S. Lewis

For my part, I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew. ~ Edmund Burke

She made the ground a canvas and transformed the dusty barren land into a beautiful painting ever ~ Manoj Kumar Duppala

Tell us of this Calim Desert," said Wulfgar. "What is a desert?" "A barren land," replied Deudermont grimly, not wanting to understate the challenge that would be before them if they chose that course. "An empty wasteland of blowing, stinging sands and hot winds. Where monsters rule over men, and many an unfortunate traveler has crawled to his death to be picked clean by vultures." The four friends shrugged away the captain's grim description. Except for the temperature difference, it sounded like home. ~ R.A. Salvatore

As you may know, some of the stereotyped behaviors exhibited by autistic children are also found in zoo animals who are raised in a barren environment. ~ Temple Grandin

Daughter of heaven and earth, coy Spring,
With sudden passion languishing,
Teaching barren moors to smile,
Painting pictures mile on mile,
Holds a cup of cowslip wreaths
Whence a smokeless incense breathes. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

As I stand among the barren gulches in these days and look away at the slow-awakening hills of Montana, I hear the high, swelling, half tired, half-hopeful song of the world. As I listen I know that there are things, other than the Virtue and the Truth and the Love, that are not for me. There is beyond me, like these, the unbreaking, undying bond of human fellowship - a thing that is earth-old. ~ Mary MacLane

The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory. ~ Gary Zukav

In what way, or by what manner of working, God changes a soul from evil to good, how He impregnates the barren rock
the priceless gems and gold
is to the human mind an impenetrable mystery, in all cases alike. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

She might be that most unfortunate of women, a barren queen, ~ Sharon Kay Penman

There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer's block, where you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling you talent run down your leg and into your sock. ~ Anne Lamott

I stayed in L.A. long enough to get on my feet, and then I moved back to New York. The reason I moved here was that I don't feel warm outside of a city; it's too barren in the suburbs, and L.A. is a suburb. Here, it felt active. ~ Iggy Pop

For truly barren is profane education, which is always in labor but never gives birth. For what fruit worthy of such pangs does philosophy show for being so long in labor? Do not all who are full of wind and never come to term miscarry before they come to the light of the knowledge of God, although they could as well become men if they were not altogether hidden in the womb of barren wisdom? ~ Gregory Of Nyssa

Her sadness makes her impossibly beautiful, like snow blanketing a barren landscape. ~ Marie Lu

No-mind is consciousness without thought. Only in that way is it possible to think creatively, because only in that way does thought have any real power. Thought alone, when it is no longer connected with the much vaster realm of consciousness, quickly becomes barren, insane, destructive. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The plants that produce visions can function- for those of us who have inherited the New World Order of barren materialism, cut off from our spiritual heritage by a spiteful culture that gives us nothing but ashes- as the talismans of recognition that awaken our minds to reality. ~ Daniel Pinchbeck

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross a ~ Imperial War Museum

A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. How does the consumer benefit from the steady decline of a film's quality? ~ Jack Valenti

There is much I do not understand about the way humans think of punishment and forgiveness, and what happens to sinners when they die. I wish Jessamine was here to explain it to me, for the plants do not speak of heaven and hell. They speak only of the turning of the seasons and of starting anew each spring. Never despair, they counsel, for the orchard that is barren one season may bear fruit in plenty in the next. ~ Maryrose Wood

So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium. ~ Nick Hornby

Long ago Mars was an oasis of running water.Today the Martiansurfaceis a sterile,barren desert. Here on Earth, who knows what climactic knobs we unwittingly turn,which might one day render Earth as dry and lifeless as Mars. (From the cover of Old Poison by Joan Francis) ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Service without spirituality is exhausting and hopeless. But . . . spirituality without service is barren and selfish. ~ Joanna Weaver

Our people do not want barren theories from their democracy. Maury Maverick has expressed very quaintly, but clearly, what they really want when he says: 'We Americans want to talk, pray, think as we please and eat regular'. ~ Robert H. Jackson

Love the broken.
Lift the fallen.
Care for the barren. ~ Debasish Mridha

A soldier picked up the still-living girl and carried her to the barren fireplace. ~ James Rollins

I think that's what changed you, Beth. Your job. The film critic. Critics are parasites. They live off other people's creativity. They bring nothing into this world. They're like barren women who steal other people's babies in grocery store parking lots. Those who can't do, teach, and those who can't teach, criticize. ~ Rainbow Rowell

I think it would be impossible not to be an Internet kid, coming from New Zealand, because culturally it's a little barren. ~ Lorde

Without art, we're handicapped, and living a stifled, barren existence. ~ Ken Danby

Art is a barren route, of which glory is the oasis. ~ Henri Murger

If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends; for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend? ~ William Shakespeare

I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape ... . If you read for escape you will never try to change your life, or anyone else's. It's a politically barren act, if nothing else. The overuse of imaginative fiction enables people to avoid the knowledge that they are actually alive. ~ M. John Harrison

Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us be therefore cautious of how we strip her. ~ Samuel Johnson

IMPROVIDENCE
The other lives I might have led
All now might as well be
Dead. Survived by no one.
Barren, without issue of any sort:
This withered bud, failed
In art and love. With no time left
To change my course. But time enough
for infinite remorse. ~ John Tottenham

I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Fuck You Poem #45

Fuck you in slang and conventional English.
Fuck you in lost and neglected lingoes.
Fuck you hungry and sated; faded, pock marked, and defaced.
Fuck you with orange rind, fennel and anchovy paste.
Fuck you with rosemary and thyme, and fried green olives on the side.
Fuck you humidly and icily.
Fuck you farsightedly and blindly.
Fuck you nude and draped in stolen finery.

Fuck you while cells divide wildly and birds trill.
Thank you for barring me from his bedside while he was ill.
Fuck you puce and chartreuse.
Fuck you postmodern and prehistoric.
Fuck you under the influence of opiun, codeine, laudanum, and paregoric.
Fuck every real and imagined country you fancied yourself princess of.
Fuck you on feast days and fast days, below and above.
Fuck you sleepless and shaking for nineteen nights running.
Fuck you ugly and fuck you stunning.

Fuck you shipwrecked on the barren island of your bed.
Fuck you marching in lockstep in the ranks of the dead.
Fuck you at low and high tide.
And fuck you astride
anyone who has the bad luck to fuck you, in dank hallways,
bathrooms, or kitchens.
Fuck you in gasps and whispered benedictions.

And fuck these curses, however heartfelt and true,
that bind me, till I forgive you, to you. ~ Amy Gerstler

We arrived and the miracle happened.
It was the sea and the wind in the bells.
We came from far, from years
Thirsty as dust, from humble
fishermen's nets on barren shore."
~ José Manuel Cardona, from Poems to Circe, The Birnam Wood (El Bosque de Birnam, Consell Insular D'Eivissa, 2007).
Translated from the Spanish by Helene Cardona. ~ José Manuel Cardona

Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away. ~ Arthur Helps

It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart. It did not last very long, a quarter of an hour perhaps; but it returned to me in a dream at night, and since, through all the barren days, I caught a glimpse of it now and then. Sometimes for a minute or two I saw it clearly, threading my life like a divine and golden track. But nearly always it was blurred in dirt and dust. Then again it gleamed out in golden sparks as though never to be lost again and yet was soon quite lost once more. ~ Hermann Hesse

A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. A fop of fields is no better than his brother on Broadway. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In our methodical American life, we still recognize some magic in summer. Most persons at least resign themselves to being decently happy in June. They accept June. They compliment its weather. They complain of the earlier months as cold, and so spend them in the city; and they complain of the later months as hot, and so refrigerate themselves on some barren sea-coast. God offers us yearly a necklace of twelve pearls; most men choose the fairest, label it June, and cast the rest away. ~ Thomas Wentworth Higginson

However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or
complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't
this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will
never even be offered life in the first place? ~ Richard Dawkins

My head was a desolate place and as barren as the bare hills of Le Marche. Until I began to build in it, only vultures nested there. ~ Lisa St. Aubin De Teran

Scientific Religion is compatible with Science and in fact, they enrich each other. That's because scientific religion is simply the realization of divinity within one's heart. Therefore, Science and Scientific Religion smoothen each other's path of progress. While on the contrary, far from being compatible with Science, Theoretical Religion consistently tries to impede the development of human society. Moreover, being rigidly based on bookish doctrines, it keeps making efforts to drag the human society back to the Stone Age.
I am afraid, if you don't act now, the relentless battle between Theoretical Religions will turn this beautiful planet which we call home, into a barren wasteland. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The greatest injustice you can do yourself is 'shapeshifting' to please others. It's tiring and debilitating, even to be around someone as fake as this, but basically, it's ridiculous. Why would anyone, even a Rag Tag, try and pretend to be what they're not?
I'll tell you. Because they're trying to hide their darker side behind a veneer of respectability. And they hate you because you don't do the same. Their psyche leaves them feeling bare and barren inside. And they look at you and they have that hollow feeling of being lost and alone. They live in the gloom of other empty people.
They watch how you are, and they understand that the battle they're fighting isn't against you at all, it's against themselves. And for that they hate you.
But remember, it's their choice ~ Karl Wiggins

Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock. ~ Marcel Proust

The road to success leads through the valley of humility, and the path is up the ladder of patience and across the wide barren plains of perseverance. As yet, no short cut has ever been discovered. ~ Joseph F. Lamb

People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. ~ Eric Hoffer

All I ask is to be held above the barren wastes of want. ~ Wilfred Owen

The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize or are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination ... without nature-awakened imagination most persons do not really live in the world, they merely pass through it as they live dull lives of quiet desperation. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable? ~ Arthur Golden

It is not possible to spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the mutilation visible everywhere - mutilation of spontaneity, of joy in learning, or pleasure in creating, or sense of self ... Because adults take the schools so much for granted, they fail to appreciate what grim, joyless places most American schools are [they are much the same in most countries], how oppressive and petty are the rules by which they are governed, how intellectually sterile and esthetically barren the atmosphere, what an appalling lack of civility obtains on the part of teachers and principals, what contempt they unconsciously display for students as students. ~ John Holt

Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless. ~ Kenneth E. Boulding

The language I have learn'd these forty years, My native English, now I must forego: And now my tongue's use is to me no more Than an unstringed viol or a harp, Or like a cunning instrument cased up, Or, being open, put into his hands That knows no touch to tune the harmony: Within my mouth you have engaol'd my tongue, Doubly portcullis'd with my teeth and lips; And dull unfeeling barren ignorance Is made my gaoler to attend on me. I am too old to fawn upon a nurse, Too far in years to be a pupil now: What is thy sentence then but speechless death, Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath? ~ William Shakespeare

As TARDIS comes to rest, the only sound, its insistent hum, seems to fill the space entirely, and then this too is lost as the viewer is thrown outside, no longer a
participant, but forced into the detached role of observer: the police box now sitting at a tilt in a dark and barren alien landscape accompanied by the chilling audionaturalism of wind noise [...] In the silence of electronic sound, the audience ejection is experienced as sudden sensory deprivation, making the impression of das unheimliche
the dominant one. Again the fourth wall is breached, this time a figure cuts between us and the ship, carrying a spear rather than a torch, his shadow lengthening impossibly across the landscape towards TARDIS. When the end titles and signature start up, the eerie recognition threatens to become full blown horror as if the music,
having transported us here, is now leaving us to face an awakening of our repressed pasts. Next week, the titles inform us, THE CAVE OF SKULLS. ~ Dene October

Must I accept the barren Gift?
-learn death, and lose my Mastery?
Then let them know whose blood and breath
will take the Gift and set them free:
whose is the voice and whose the mind
to set at naught the well-sung Game-
when finned Finality arrives
and calls me by my secret Name.

Not old enough to love as yet,
but old enough to die, indeed-
-the death-fear bites my throat and heart,
fanged cousin to the Pale One's breed.
But past the fear lies life for all-
perhaps for me: and, past my dread,
past loss of Mastery and life,
the Sea shall yet give up Her dead!

Lone Power, I accept your Gift!
Freely I make death a part of me;
By my accept it is bound
into the lives of all the Sea-

yet what I do now binds to it
a gift I feel of equal worth:
I take Death with me, out of Time,
and make of it a path, a birth!

Let the teeth come! As they tear me,
they tear Your ancient hate for aye-
-so rage, proud Power! Fail again,
and see my blood teach Death to die! ~ Diane Duane

On a planet where for thousands of years, even today, a woman's worth has been judged exclusively by the productivity of her womb, what the hell is the point of a barren woman? ~ Elissa Stein And Susan Kim

The variable that marks some periods as barren and some as rich in prophetic vision is in the interest, the level of seeking, the responsiveness of the hearers. The variable is not in the presence or absence or the relative quality and force of the prophetic voices. The prophet grows in stature as people respond to his message ... It is the seekers, then, who make the prophet. ~ Robert K. Greenleaf

It has bloomed again,
This flower that I thought dead.
In one moment of despair
And pain,
I'd trampled it in the ground
Upon this barren plain.
Little did I know
That it would rise again,
This flower that I thought dead.
My soul would need
A surer weapon than despair
To crush a thing so bright, so fair. ~ Ruskin Bond

and that their conquering hordes spread northward, subduing the Finns and Lapps, whom they found in possession of the land, partly exterminating them, partly forcing them up into the barren mountains of the extreme North. ~ Hjalmar H. Boyesen

He sat down among the evidence at a barren communal desk in the basement of the station. He looked through the stack of extra fliers that my father had made up. He had memorized my face, but still he looked at them. He had come to believe that the best hope in my case might be the recent rise in development in the area. With all the land churning and changing, perhaps other clues whould be found that would provide the answer he needed.
In the bottom of the box was the bag with my jingle-bell hat. When he'd handled it to my mother, she had collasped on the rug. He still couldn't pinpoint the moment he'd fallen in love with her. I knew it was the day he'd sat in our family room while my mother drew stick figures on butcher paper and Buckley and Nate slept toe to toe on the couch. I felt sorry for him. He had tried to solve my murder and he failed. He had tried to love my mother and he had failed.
Len looked at the drawing of the cornfield that Lindsey had stolen and forced himself to acknowledge this: in his cautiousness, he had allowed a murderer to get away. He could not shake his guilt. He knew, if no one else did, that by being with my mother in the mall that day he was the one to blame for George Harvey's freedom.
He took his wallet out of his back pocket and laid down the photos of all the unsolved cases he had ever worked on. Among them were his wife's. He turned them all face-down. 'Gone,' he wrote on each one of them. He would no longer wait for a date t ~ Alice Sebold

...for most of the ride through British Columbia we were treated to stunning scenery ranging from majestic peaks shrouded in mist to more barren vistas reminiscent of the Old West ... to churning rivers fed by waterfalls twisting down mountains like the woven tassels on the white summer Chanel bag I'd left back home. Do waterfalls ever feel unfashionable after Labor Day ~ Doreen Orion

With so much trauma and drama in everyday life, the beauty of peace and solitude beckons like an oasis in a barren wasteland. ~ Jo Ann V. Glim

The road of life is strewn with the bodies of promising people. People who show promise, yet lack the confidence to act. People who make promises they are unable to keep. People who promise to do tomorrow what they could do today. Promising young stars, athletes, entrepreneurs who wait for promises to come true. Promise without a goal and a plan is like a barren cow. You know what she could do if she could do it, but she can't. Turn your promise into a plan. Make no promise for tomorrow if you are able to keep it today. And if someone calls you promising, know that you are not doing enough today. ~ Iyanla Vanzant

Must not a poet hunt the unicorn through bush and bramble, through snow and fire, over desert and mountain, through thickets and over long barren roads even though he suspects sometimes that the unicorn does not exist- or exists only in his imagination? ~ May Sarton

At the crest of the hill outside Agor, Henry pulled the car to the side of the road and we got out to take in the view. In the falling shadows, the little Arab village at the foot of the Jewish settlement looked nothing like so grim and barren as it had a few minutes before when we'd driven down its deserted main street. A desert sunset lent a little picturesqueness even to that cluster of faceless hovels. As for the larger landscape, you could see, particularly in this light, how someone might get the impression that it had been created in only seven days, unlike England, say, whose countryside appeared to be the creation of a God who'd had four or five chances to come back to perfect it and smooth it out, to tame and retame it until it was utterly habitable by every last man and beast. Judea was something that had been left just as it had been made; this could have passed for a piece of the moon to which the Jews had been sadistically exiled by their worst enemies rather than the place they passionately maintained was theirs and no one else's from time immemorial. What he finds in this landscape, I thought, is a correlative for the sense of himself he would now prefer to effect, the harsh and rugged pioneer with that pistol in his pocket. ~ Philip Roth

Tell me about the hands that broke you like tree branches. Tell me about the heart that made you a home, the barren soul that used your dry bones like kindling in the middle of winter. Tell me about the house fire, the ashes which you rose from. Tell me about your resurrection - but don't you dare tell me that you are not strong enough this time, don't you dare tell me that you cannot
rise again,
and again,
and again. ~ Bianca Sparacino

I find the aesthetics of the 20th century hopelessly barren. ~ Twyla Tharp

Marriage has for women many equivalents of joining a mass movement. It offers them a new purpose in life, a new future and a new identity (a new name). The boredom of spinsters and of women who can no longer find joy and fulfillment in marriage stems from an awareness of a barren, spoiled life. By embracing a holy cause and dedicating their energies and substance to its advancement, they find a new life full of purpose and meaning. ~ Eric Hoffer

It has a supernatural grandeur which expands the soul and unites it with God. I say an Our Father or a Hail Mary when I feel so spiritually barren that I cannot summon up a single worth while thought. These two prayers fill me with rapture and feed and satisfy my soul. ~ Therese Of Lisieux

So I dream nightly of an embarcation,
captains, captains,
iron passageways, cabin lights,
Brooklyn across the waters,
the great dull boat, visitors, farewells,
the blurred vast sea--
one trip a lifetime's loss or gain :

as Europe is my own imagination
--many shall see her,
many shall not--
though it's only the old familiar world
and not some abstract mystical dream.

And in a moment of previsioning sleep
I see that continent in rain,
black streets, old night, a
fading monument . . .

And a long journey unaccomplished
yet, on antique seas
rolling in gray barren dunes under
the world's waste of light
toward ports of childish geography
the rusty ship will
harbor in . . . ~ Allen Ginsberg

Thou hast had thty day, old dame, but thy sun has long been set. Thou art now the very emblem of an old warhorse turned out on the barren heath; thou hast had thy paces in thy time, but now a broken amble is the best of them. ~ Walter Scott

Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of the demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed. ~ Herman Melville

And far away, across the snow-covered mountains, on a barren plain before the ruins of a once-great city, a flower began to bloom ~ Sarah J. Maas

The town was as barren as an empty movie set, the only movement from deer that wandered the boulevards. His eyes skimmed silent streets as he searched for the bed and breakfast. A half-grown fawn, grazing near the side of the road, lifted its head and hurried off to its mother. ~ Danika Stone

T is liberty crowns Britannia's Isle,
And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile. ~ Joseph Addison

Isaiah calls the Church barren because her children are born without effort by the Word of faith through the Spirit of God. It is a matter of birth, not of exertion. ~ Martin Luther

Bond came to the conclusion that Tilly Masterton was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and 'sex equality.' As a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits
barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied. He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them. ~ Ian Fleming

Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures Whilst the landscape round it measures, Russet lawns and fallows grey, Where the nibbling flocks do stray, Mountains on whose barren breast The labouring clouds do often rest; Meadows trim with daisies pied, Shallow brooks, and rivers wide. ~ John Milton

When winter stern, his gloomy front uprears,
A sable void the barren earth appears;
The meads no more their former verdure boast,
Fast-bound their streams, and all their beauty lost;
The herds, the flocks, in icy garments mourn, and wildly murmur for the Spring's return;
From snow-topp'd hills the whirlwinds keenly blow,
Howl through the woods, and pierce the vales below,
Through the sharp air a flaky torrent flies,
Mocks the slow sight, and hides the gloomy skies. ~ George Crabbe

If thou dost continually draw thine impulse, thy life, the whole of thy being from the Holy Spirit, without whom thou canst do nothing; and if thou dost live in close communion with Christ, there will be no fear of thy having a dry heart. He who lives without prayer - he who lives with little prayer - he who seldom reads the Word - he who seldom looks up to heaven for a fresh influence from on high - he will be the man whose heart will become dry and barren; but he who calls in secret on his God - who spends much time in holy retirement - who delights to meditate on the words of the Most High - whose soul is given up to Christ - who delights in his fullness, rejoices in his all-sufficiency, prays for his second coming, and delights in the thought of his glorious advent - such a man, I say, must have an overflowing heart; and as his heart is, such will his life be. It will be a full life; it will be a life that will speak from the sepulcher, and wake the echoes of the future. "Keep thine heart with all diligence," and entreat the Holy Spirit to keep it full; for, otherwise, the issues of thy life will be feeble, shallow, and superficial; and thou mayest as well not have lived at all. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Long live the weeds that overwhelm
My narrow vegetable realm!
The bitter rock, the barren soil
That force the son of man to toil;
All things unholy, marred by curse,
The ugly of the universe. ~ Theodore Roethke

Because I see these mountains they are brought low, because I drink these waters they are bitter, because I tread these black rocks they are barren, because I have found these islands they are lost; Upon seal and seabird dreaming their innocent world my shadow has fallen. ~ Kathleen Raine

There's an extremely fine line between "boldly transgressive" and spiritually barren, ~ Mark Steyn

As we crossed the border, I saw God in the sky in the form of huge sunburst cloud above the barren desert. He seemed to be pointing a finger at me and saying, Pass here my son and go on, you're on the road to heaven. ~ Jose N Harris

For nearly a hundred years, psychiatry has been striving to apply medical model thinking to psychiatric disorders. In this model, the symptoms besieging patients are sorted into specific disease entities and the causes then identified and removed. For doctors of internal medicine, this works. In the case of diabetes mellitus, for example, the symptoms of urinary frequency, fatigue, and confusion often lead to suspicion of the underlying cause, which is confirmed by blood sugar monitoring and then treated by insulin replacement.

But psychiatric symptoms are much harder to sort into diagnoses. People with depression sometimes become paranoid. People with schizophrenia sometimes become depressed. Some people who hear voices have no other symptoms whatsoever, and others who hear voices also fall victim to terrible mood swings. Thus far, the hope that psychiatry would be able to identify homogeneous disease states, uncover the biological underpinnings, and remedy them has been largely a barren one.

Kappler's symptoms, however, evolved when the hope for psychiatry's becoming a true medical specialty was bright to the point of being blinding. Over the years he would collect over a dozen diagnoses and cavalierly take a myriad of medicines, but no one would be able to bring him close to confronting the past he had disowned, to stand a chance of making peace with it and, ultimately, overcoming it. (46) ~ Keith Ablow

The first plague-spot is the accumulation of wealth in few hands, and the selfish withdrawal of its possessors from the life of the community. In an agricultural society like that of Judah, that clotting of wealth took the shape of 'land-grabbing,' and of evicting the small proprietors. We see it in more virulent forms in our great commercial centres, where the big men often become big by crushing out the little ones, and denude themselves of responsibility to the community in proportion as they clothe themselves with wealth. Wherever wealth is thus congested, and its obligations ignored by selfish indulgence, the seeds are sown which will spring up one day in 'anarchism.' A man need not be a prophet to have it whispered in his ear, as Isaiah had, that the end of selfish capitalism is a convulsion in which 'many houses shall be desolate,' and many fields barren. ~ Alexander MacLaren