Bereft Quotes

It was as if we were having two different conversations. Which wasn't that surprising after all, as we were clearly having two entirely different experiences of breaking up. His was soft, cushioned; Jude and his friends had broken his fall. Mine was cold, empty and bereft. I was freefalling in space and time, with nobody standing by to stop me hurtling headlong into obscurity. ~ Ruth Mancini

As you can see," Daisy said, "one glass is filled with soap water, one with clear, and one with blue laundry water. The other, of course, is empty. The glasses will predict what kind of man you will marry."

They watched as Evie felt carefully for one of the glasses. Dipping her finger into the soap water, Evie
waited for her blindfold to be drawn off, and viewed the results with chagrin, while the other girls erupted with giggles.

"Choosing the soap water means she will marry a poor man," Daisy explained.
Wiping off her fingers, Evie exclaimed good-naturedly, "I s-suppose the fact that I'm going to be m-married at all is a good thing."

The next girl in line waited with an expectant smile as she was blindfolded, and the glasses were repositioned. She felt for the vessels, nearly overturning one, and dipped her fingers into the blue water. Upon viewing her choice, she seemed quite pleased. "The blue water means she's going to marry a noted author," Daisy told Lillian. "You try next!"

Lillian gaveher a speaking glance. "You don't really believe in this, do you?"

"Oh, don't be cynical - have some fun!" Daisy took the blindfold and rose on her toes to tie it firmly around Lillian's head.

Bereft of sight, Lillian allowed herself to be guided to the table. She grinned at the encouraging cries of the young women around her. There was the sound of the glasses being moved in front of her, and she waited with h ~ Lisa Kleypas

Hope is an elixir of life. It is the engine that propels us forward in our pursuit of countless goals, all of which might otherwise be impossible to undertake if we were bereft of hope. ~ Gad Saad

Repentance recall men from what is according to their nature; all that it does is to make them cease from sinning. Had it been a case of a trespass only, and not of a subsequent corruption, repentance would have been well enough; but when once transgression had begun men came under the power of the corruption proper to their nature and were bereft of the grace which belonged to them as creatures in the Image of God. ~ Athanasius Of Alexandria

Years ago I met Richard Burton in Port Talbot, my home town, and afterwards he passed in his car with his wife, and I thought, 'I want to get out and become like him'. Not because of Wales, because I love Wales, but because I was so limited as a child at school and so bereft and lonely, and I thought becoming an actor would do that. ~ Anthony Hopkins

We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends--- those whom we obey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the most free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties, --- even those for whom home holds no dear face, no familiar voice, --- even they have to meet the spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its tress--- a mute friend, judge, and inspirer.
Say what you like, to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear conscience.
All this may seem to you sheer sentimentalism; and indeed very few of us have the will or capacity to look consciously under the surface of familiar emotions.
There are the girls we love, the men we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the pleasures! But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp. ~ Joseph Conrad

Here's a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It's from the Old English bereafian, meaning 'to deprive of, take away, seize, rob'. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try. ~ Helen Macdonald

The mind is left bereft when it is nothing more than a tool of regurgitation. ~ Corey Taylor

But when she finally got the wings to fly she realized she had nowhere else to go to ... ~ Sanhita Baruah

Life
luscious wet life bereft of
death, loss of empty shell
minus absent of nothing
exploding star cell
amoeba sweet algae
oxygen,
hydrogen flowering
in the vacuum of
space and magnetic motion. ~ H. Raven Rose

Feet gauge the pliable tracts of snowy hoodlum
Amidst the pacing sobs of our night sky
I watch you go, I watch them come
Within the life span of an iridescent sigh;
I watch the tracks bereft of a human hand,
I watch them trite in thy laconic land,
I watch them silent from where I stand,
I watch them marking a bloodied rand,
I watch the tracks bereft of a human hand,
I watch them silent from where I stand. ~ Ashfaq Saraf

Comes now a smiling New-Born Year To fill to-day with goodly cheer - An infant hale and lusty. Upon our door-sill he is left By Daddy Time, of clothes bereft Despite the season gusty. If he be Churl or doughty Knight, A Son of Darkness or of Light No man can tell, God bless him! But be he base or glorious Time puts it wholly up to us To dress him! ~ John Kendrick Bangs

While an ever-increasing number of people consider themselves agnostic, the great majority of these people live as if they are atheists, bereft of all the magnificent life-enhancing benefits a God-centered life provides. These individuals are agnostics intellectually, but atheists behaviorally. Such people need to make a choice: Will I live as if there is a God or as if there is no God? You can be an agnostic intellectually, but you cannot live as an agnostic; you live as either a believer or as an atheist. You live either as if life is random chance or as if it is infused with ultimate meaning. Moses chose to look carefully and see a miracle in that burning bush. If we look carefully, we, too, will see a miracle - in everything. ~ Dennis Prager

I Am the Highway"

Pearls of swine bereft of me
Long and weary my road has been
I was lost in the cities
Alone in the hills
No sorrow or pity for the leaving I feel

I am not your rolling wheels
I am the highway
I am not your carpet ride
I am the sky

Friends and liars don't wait for me
I'll get on all by myself
I put millions of miles
Under my heels
And still too close to you
I feel

I am not your rolling wheels
I am the highway
I am not your carpet ride
I am the sky

I am not your blowing wind
I am the lightening
I am not your autumn moon
I am the night

Chris Cornell (July 20, 1964 - May 18, 2017) ~ The Friends And Fans Of Chris Cornell

My mind is, to use a disgustingly obvious simile, like a wastebasket full of waste paper; bits of hair, and rotting apple cores. I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends. It was that way with Ann: I admired her wit, her riding, her vivacious imagination - all the things that made her the way she was. I could lean on her as she leaned on me. Together the two of us could face anything - only not quite anything, or she would be back. And so she is gone, and I am bereft for awhile. But what do I know of sorrow? ~ Sylvia Plath

We adapt to our sorrows, I suppose, as unpleasant as they might be. One cannot weep forever. One simply runs dry of tears. ~ Chris Womersley

The human mind is a product of the Pleistocene age, shaped by wildness that has all but disappeared. If we complete the destruction of nature, we will have succeeded in cutting ourselves off from the source of sanity itself. Hermetically sealed amidst our creations and bereft of those of the
Creation, the world then will reflect only the demented image of the mind imprisoned within itself. Can the mind doting on itself and its creations be sane? ~ Edward O. Wilson

He recalled those brief years when his song had fallen silent, his refusal to heed it leaving him bereft, without guidance. It had been hard to be so rudderless in a sea of chaos and war. This, however, was much worse, because now there was the chill, the bone-deep cold that had seeped into him in the Ally's domain and lingered on here in this world of myriad paths, all seemingly so dark. And the words, of course, those words that hounded him from the Beyond. We will make an ending, you and I. ~ Anthony Ryan

To the lazy man the world appears bereft of all blessings; if poor, he has no friends; if rich, he has no ambition; he aims at nothing, and generally hits his mark. ~ James Ellis

By cutting ourselves off from the rest of creation, we are left bereft of awe and wonder and therefore of reverence and gratitude. We violate our very beings, and we have nothing but trivia to teach our young. ~ Matthew Fox

Bereft of vision to guide the city's citizens forward, he could only draw them inward and backward, to encourage them to fight over imagined foes and manufactured hurt. ~ I.M. Savage

We're so bereft of support of theatre in this day and age. ~ Stefanie Powers

Then, when I was a senior in high school, I was kind of bereft and she put me in an acting class. ~ Beth Henley

As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must lure me to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft. ~ Erica Jong

Lady, you bereft me of all words/
My blood speaks to you in my veins. ~ William Shakespeare

When you grasp excessively for anything in this world - and for you that happens to be food - you deny what is trying to emerge from deep within you. Failing to experience what is supposed to happen - your own internal communion with self - you are thrown into an awful, primordial void, bereft by what feels like the absence of your Creator. You don't really mean to be grasping for food. You mean to be grasping for God. And there is only one way to do that. You cannot find Him except where He lives. And He lives in you. ~ Marianne Williamson

But how ridiculous that I should bereft simply because I couldn't spend hours in my world of make-believe! Wasn't the reality of my life interesting enough? This is surely the time to let go of grievances, I told myself sternly. What good does it do to dwell on them? Brooding on a nest of grudges will only hatch more grief. ~ Liza Dalby

The world is well supplied with spiders whose male ancestors died after mating. The world is bereft of spiders whose would-be ancestors never mated in the first place. ~ Richard Dawkins

Only the most arrogant, shortsighted, and spiritually bereft of our species would say that, at any cost to other species, we need only worry about our own. ~ Timothy Walker

Had the heavens fallen and mixed themselves with the earth, had the people of London risen in rebellion with French ideas of equality,* had the Queen persistently declined to comply with the constitutional advice of her ministers, had a majority in the House of Commons lost its influence in the country, - the utter prostration of the bereft husband could not have been more complete. ~ Anthony Trollope

For a moment man is a boy, for a moment a lovesick youth, for a moment bereft of wealth, for a moment in the height of prosperity; then at life's end with limbs worn out by old age and wrinkles adorning his face, like an actor he retires behind the curtain of death. ~ Bhartrhari

And far away, as Frodo put on the Ring and claimed it for his own, even in Sammath Naur the very heart of his realm, the Power in Barad-dûr was shaken, and the Tower trembled from its foundations to its proud and bitter crown. The Dark Lord was suddenly aware of him, and his Eye piercing all shadows looked across the plain to the door that he had made; and the magnitude of his own folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash, and all the devices of his enemies were at last laid bare. Then his wrath blazed in consuming flame, but his fear rose like a vast black smoke to choke him. For he knew his deadly peril and the thread upon which his doom now hung.

From all his policies and webs of fear and treachery, from all his stratagems and wars his mind shook free; and throughout his realm a tremor ran, his slaves quailed, and his armies halted, and his captains suddenly steerless, bereft of will, wavered and despaired. For they were forgotten. The whole mind and purpose of the Power that wielded them was now bent with overwhelming force upon the Mountain. At his summons, wheeling with a rending cry, in a last desperate race there flew, faster than the winds, the Nazgûl, the Ringwraiths, and with a storm of wings they hurtled southwards to Mount Doom. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

How strange it is, Anna. Yesterday, I have filed in my mind as a good day, notwithstanding it was filled with mortal illness and the grieving of the recently bereft. Yet it is a good day, for the simple fact that no one died upon it. We are brought to a sorry state, that we measure what is good by such a shortened yardstick. ~ Geraldine Brooks

If he was, somehow at the margin deficient, it was because the country did not rise to ask of him the performance of a thunderbolt. He gave what he was asked to give. And he leaves us (or "will leave") if not exactly bereft, lonely; lonely for the quintessential American. END. ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

In the week I promised myself I should naturally read, for to the habitual reader reading is a drug of which he is the slave; deprive him of printed matter and he grows nervous, moody, and restless; then, like the alcoholic bereft of brandy who will drink shellac or methylated spirit, he will make do with the advertisements of a paper five years old; he will make do with a telephone directory. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

A book collector is mad enough to begin with, Watson; but tempt him with some such bait as this Shakespeare quarto and he is bereft of all sanity. ~ Vincent Starrett

Although the frightful is, perhaps rightly, conjoined in our minds with the darkly coloured, the harshly dissonant - with bludgeon blows and the odours of decay - the most terrible experiences are often bereft of these properties of melodrama. ~ John Franklin Bardin

Homo sapiens, too, belongs to a family. This banal fact used to be one of history's most closely guarded secrets. Homo sapiens long preferred to view itself as set apart from animals, an orphan bereft of family, lacking siblings or cousins, and, most importantly, without parents. But that's just not the case. Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. The chimpanzees are the closest. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Was my sacrifice worth it? I felt hollow and bereft, yet the grief in my heart had palpable weight, bearing me down to the ground. I could not breathe. I carried the burden of my love for my family, and it threatened to suffocate me. ~ S. Jae-Jones

The fictitious worlds created for kids are nearly bereft of female presence. It's sending a very clear message from the beginning that women and girls do not have half of the adventures, that they're not as important. We're teaching kids that girls and women don't take up half the space in the world. ~ Geena Davis

A full-throttled deployment of the practices of strategic communication would kill candor and leave truth bereft to fend for herself in the backstabbing night of political bogeys. ~ Nick Bostrom

From heart to heart
a heartbeat staggers, looking for a haven.
Bereft. It is easier to enter heaven
than to pass through each others' eyes ~ Bill Knott

Sadness isn't a kilesha, a habit pattern evoked by challenge. Sadness is what the mind feels when it is bereaved or bereft. All the wisdom in the world about the inevitability of change or the lawfulness of karma does not ease the heaviness in the mind that we feel when we lose someone, or something, we hold dear [p. 148]. ~ Sylvia Boorstein

Love permeates everything, the world is saturated with it, or is emptied of it. Always this beautiful or this bereft. ~ Anne Michaels

When we are cut off from the fulfillment of our basic needs we seek out substitutes to temporarily ease the longing. Bereft of connection to nature, connection to community, intimacy, meaningful self-expression, ensouled dwellings and built environment, spiritual connection, and the feeling of belonging, lots of us over-consume, overeat, over-shop, and over-accumulate. How much do you need to eat, to compensate for a feeling of not belonging? How much pornography to compensate for a deficit of intimacy? How much money to compensate for a deep sense of insecurity? No amount is enough ~ Charles Einstein

Are we bereft of citizenship because we are mothers, wives and daughters of a mighty people? Have women no country
no interests staked in public weal
no liabilities in common peril
no partnership in a nation's guilt and shame? ~ Angelina Grimke

He pulled out of her mind abruptly. She knew because she felt bereft. Starkly alone. The feeling was raw and ugly after having him there with her. She wanted him back, and that wasn't an intelligent response. ~ Christine Feehan

Startled, I accidently knock over my inkwell. A black tsunami of ink sprawls out across the page, engulfing the tiny village of my words. They are swept away into the midnight sea. Gone forever. I am bereft. ~ Danger Slater

There are few of us but who have been touched somehow by death. Some may not have been touched closely by it nor yet have kept vigil with it, but somewhere along our lives, most of us are sorely bereft of someone near and deeply cherished - and all of us will some day meet it face to face. ~ Richard L. Evans

He was utterly incapable of resisting the maneuvers of the mealy-mouthed scoundrel that the Neapolitan Vincentian, Bugnini,77 a man as bereft of culture as he was of basic honesty, soon revealed himself to be. Even ~ Louis Bouyer

A choice is the root of all morality. Without choice, one can have no moral code. In a vacuum bereft of alternatives, there can be no values. And without values, there can be no reason for a code of ethics. What gives our lives meaning is which alternatives we choose. If we have no options, if we can take but one path, we are by definition slaves. ~ Dave Galanter

As soon as that majestic force,
which had already pierced me once
before I had outgrown my childhood, struck my eyes,
I turned to my left with the confidence
a child has running to his mamma
when he is afraid or in distress
to say to Virgil: 'Not a single drop of blood
remains in me that does not tremble
I know the signs of the ancient flame.'
But Virgil had departed, leaving us bereft:
Virgil, sweetest of fathers,
Virgil, to whom I gave myself for my salvation.
And not all our ancient mother lost
could save my cheeks, washed in the dew,
from being stained again with tears. ~ Dante Alighieri

Detached gibbous moonlight,
Befalls me,
Lying still on a sandy hill,
In a place far from home.
Home, where your warm hands,
Once embraced me,
Where you suckled me at birth,
And kissed me goodnight,
Where I once played as a child.
Now bereft and solitary,
I lie still far away,
In a foreign field of sand,
They'll bring me home
To you soon,
To lay me down
In an earthen chamber,
Beneath a green patch,
Close to you, so close,
Far from the guns of war. ~ Richard Kinsella

Alone, her soul destroyed and her heart bereft and empty, the Lady Ninnia touched her amulet and closed her eyes. "No," she breathed, "I was wrong. This time, my wisdom has failed me. Our daughter is not ready. To become the Handmaiden of Orion, one must know terrible grief in order to learn compassion." She gazed after her husband and shook her head sorrowfully. "Even the deaths of us, her parents, are not, I fear, enough. May she find what she needs upon that dark and deadly road upon which I have sent her. My poor, poor child - farewell. ~ Robin Jarvis

To accept life in an Israeli open prison and enjoy limited autonomy and the right to work as underpaid laborers in Israel, bereft of any workers' rights, or 2) resist, even mildly, and risk living in a maximum-security prison, subjected to instruments of collective punishment, including house demolitions, arrests without trial, expulsions, and in severe cases, assassinations and murder. ~ Noam Chomsky

I'm in awe of the universe, but I don't necessarily believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic. ~ David Bowie

Discipline
I am old and I have had
more than my share of good and bad.
I've had love and sorrow, seen sudden death
and been left alone and of love bereft.
I thought I would never love again
and I thought my life was grief and pain.
The edge between life and death was thin,
but then I discovered discipline.
I learned to smile when I felt sad,
I learned to take the good and the bad,
I learned to care a great deal more
for the world about me than before.
I began to forget the "Me" and "I"
and joined in life as it rolled by:
this may not mean sheer ecstasy
but is better by far than "I" and "Me. ~ Meryl Gordon

Leadership is about having clear & grand vision, taking initiatives, possessing courage to question the status quo, ability to set large goals, consistently inspire self & others towards those goals, being self motivated and capability to motivate others, being spirited & strong to surmount any obstacle on the path, humility & openness to listen and learn from others, strength to stand for what he believes is right, while being flexible enough to revisit & review his beliefs, ability to organize & shift paradigms of his own & others, ability to attract, retain, develop & work with bigger leaders than himself, ability to trust others & being trust worthy , to think big & not petty, being above self, kind & giving, ability to sacrifice for others and to be bereft of insecurities & suspicion, ability to take risks, learn from both success & failure, being able to forget & forgive mistakes and mishaps of others, being focused, patient & persistent, to possess an amazing ability to be simple & easy to understand, to communicate & express with clarity and above all, being human. ~ Krishna Saagar

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet, Long live the weeds and the wildness yet. ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

Sumire was so bereft of household goods the place looked deserted. There weren't any curtains in the windows and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a gang of intellectual refugees. ~ Haruki Murakami

So many people seem to spend their lives trying to appear normal, predictable and consistent to themselves and those that surround them. They just end up bored with themselves, bereft of any depth of inner resources, suffocated by the inhibitions that defend their own monolithic identities. ~ Peter J. Carroll

It was as if the demise of the owner had lent the flat a physical void it hadn't had before. At the same time he had the feeling that he wasn't alone. Harry believed in the existence of the soul. Not that he was particularly religious as such, but it was one thing which always struck him when he saw a dead body: the body was bereft of something ... the creature had gone, the light had gone,there was not the illusory afterglow that long-since burned-out stars have. The body was missing its soul and it was the absence of the soul that made Harry believe. ~ Jo Nesbo

You want to control me." She spoke dispassionately as though observing the plight of another woman far distant from herself.
Dragon looked up, surprised. "You are my wife."
"Say rather possession for so do you think, do you not?"
He shrugged, wondering why she stated the obvious. "All wives belong to their husbands."
"I wanted to be free."
His eyes darkened. There was greater challenge here than even he had thought. "You wanted to be safe from Wolscroft and the rest of them, even from me when you though misguidedly. That is why you fled."
She shook her head. "Oh, no, safety was a convent from which not even my father could have forced me. But it was not to one such that I fled, was it? I wanted freedom, and having tasted it, however briefly, I want it still."
His hands tightened on her, driven by the sudden, piercing pain her words brought. Did she think to leave him again? To flee as she had done and leave him once more bereft. No, by heaven, she would not! "No one is free," he said fiercely. "We are all enmeshed in duty and responsibility."
"Your duty is of your own choosing, for you did not return here after many years away and willingly take up your inheritance. Your destiny is of your own making and you the master of it as much as any man can claim to be. I want the same myself, no more, less."
"But you are a woman . . ." His bewilderment was genuine. Such yearnings as she described belonged to the realm of men. Women were fo ~ Josie Litton

In our folk nobody has any experience of youth, there's barely even any time for being a toddler. The children simply don't have any time in which they might be children........Indeed... there's simply no way that we would be able to provide our children with a viable childhood, one that is real. Naturally, there are consequences. There's a certain ever present, not to be liquidated childishness that permeates our folk; We often act in ways that are totally and utterly ridiculous and, indeed, precisely like children we do things that are crazy, letting loose with our assets in a manner that is bereft of all rationality, prodigious in our celebrations, partaking in a light-headed frivolousness that is divorced from all sensibility, and often enough all simply for the sake of some small token of fun, so much do we love having our small amusements. But our folk isn't only childish, to a certain extent we also age prematurely, childhood and old age mix themselves differently with us than by others. We don't have any youth, we jump right away into maturity and, then, we remain grown-ups for too long and as a consequence to this there's a broad shadow of a certain tiredness and a sort of hopelessness that colours our essential nature, a nature that as a whole is otherwise so tenacious and permeated by hope, strong hope. This, no doubt, this is related to why we're so disinclined toward music - we're too old for music, so much excitement, so much passion doesn't sit well with our he ~ Franz Kafka

These eyes, tho' clear To outward view of blemish or of spot, Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot, Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear Of sun, or moon, or star, throughout the year, Or man, or woman. Yet I argue not Against Heaven's hand or will, not bate a jot Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer Right onward. ~ John Milton

Happiness will never flourish in a life bereft of optimism. ~ Carlos Wallace

There's nothing new about the government protecting corporations and calling it the freeing of the world or bringing democracy to bereft nations. ~ Henry Rollins

Men feel more bereft without a woman than women will feel bereft without a man ~ Dennis Prager

God forbid you should be bereft, Miz Mimi," I'd said. "Tell you what. If you let me pick the play - something not too controversial, I promise - I'll do it." Her frown had disappeared into the brilliant Mimi Corcoran ~ Stephen King

it's natural that we associate language with such verbal intercourse. Unfortunately, this association has led many to assume that language is an exclusive attribute of our species - we, after all, are the only creatures that use words - and to conclude that all other organisms are entirely bereft of meaningful speech. It is an exceedingly self-serving assumption. Other animals, commonly possessed of senses far more acute than ours, may have much less need for a purely conventional set of signs to communicate with others of their species, or even to glean precise information from members of other species. ~ David Abram

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Christopher Argent kept stealing disbelieving looks at Farah, his blue eyes reflecting the ambient glow like an alley cat's. Dorian understood why the man would dare in his presence.
First, because Christopher Argent was an unfeeling, fearless killer-for-hire.
And second, because most of the incarcerated men at Newgate had considered Dougan's Fairy some mythical creature, a sight too rare and beautiful to be beheld by a common man. Maybe even a fancy born of an imagination keen enough to take possession of the prison. To meet her was to gaze upon a fantasy realized, to remember the desperate yearnings of a lonely prisoner bereft of kindness, mercy, or beauty. To be blinded by the embodiment of all three of those things. For a man like Argent, one born to incarceration, the sight might have him reassessing some long-held cynical philosophies. ~ Kerrigan Byrne

It was easy to imagine the beginning of time here, but also, perhaps, its end. ~ Chris Womersley

The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes
to me a beatitude
is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women
or men
can suffer is to be bereft of their past. ~ Shirley Abbott

No soul can be forever banned, Eternally bereft, Whoever falls from God's right hand Is caught into his left. ~ Edwin Markham

They thought I was stubborn. In the strict sense of the word there is no such thing as a stubborn insane person...When one possessed of the power of recognizing his own errors continues to hold an unreasonable belief-that is stubbornness. But for a man bereft of reason to adhere to an idea which to him seems absolutely correct and true because he has been deprived of the means of detecting his error- that is not stubbornness. It is a symptom of his disease, and merits the indulgence of forbearance, if not genuine sympathy. ~ Clifford Whittingham Beers

Destiny leaves no soul bereft of it's compliment. - Roald le Beau ~ Emma Holly

The street-crowd below held no one of interest. They bored me. They bored God. Surely they bored themselves. The beggars were dull, the passerby grey, the lounging riffraff leaned bereft of lazy charm. If any possessed magic, they kept it hidden. If they thirsted for miracles, they settled for drinking brown fog flavored with smoke, with a chaser of dust and horse-shit. Every tenth breath spitting it to the cobbles with a wet "splat". ~ Raymond St. Elmo

[ ... ] elite social engineers appear to be aiming at a "hetero-homo" world, i.e. where individuals are bisexual, promiscuous and bereft of family. ~ Henry Makow

His warmth was like a gift given and snatched away, and she stood there with her back to the window, feeling chilled, bereft, and undone. And angry. It was a childish, cartoonish anger- facing Akiva, she had wanted to beat her fists at his chest and then fall against him and feel his arms close around her. ~ Laini Taylor

He never ever thought of giving it up. Not once not ever.

He lead a hard life bereft of comforts but he loved his life. His struggles gave a meaning and a purpose to his life. His struggles inflamed the fire burning within his soul.

A fire that was burning within him and which would one day either burn him or burn the literary world! ~ Avijeet Das

The second paragraph of the Declaration that is very much an expression of Jefferson's imagination. It envisions a perfect world, at last bereft of kings, priests, and even government itself. In this never-never land, free individuals interact harmoniously, all forms of political coercion are unnecessary because they have been voluntarily internalized, people pursue their own different versions of happiness without colliding, and some semblance of social equality reigns supreme. As Lincoln recognized, it is an ideal world that can never be reached on this earth, only approached. And each generation had an obligation to move America an increment closer to the full promise, as Lincoln most famously did. The American Dream, then, is the Jeffersonian Dream writ large, embedded in language composed during one of the most crowded and congested moments in American history by an idealistic young man who desperately wished to be somewhere else. ~ Joseph J. Ellis

Then, were not summer's distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet. ~ William Shakespeare

The God of the gaps argument for God fails when a plausible scientific account for a gap in current knowledge can be given. I do not dispute that the exact nature of the origin of the universe remains a gap in scientific knowledge. But I deny that we are bereft of any conceivable way to account for that origin scientifically. ~ Victor J. Stenger

Did you love well what very soon you left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache. Never so full, I never was bereft so utterly. The winter evenings drift dark to the window. Not one work will make you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake from your night toward me. The only gift I got to keep or give is what I've cried, floodgates let down to mourning for the dead chances, for the end of being young, for everyone I loved who really died. I drank our one year out in brine instead of honey from the seasons of your tongue. ~ Marilyn Hacker

I used to be a wanderess without roots – discontent and bereft of belonging and then he took me to The Last Best Place where I was touched and warmed through. Never before have I felt the breath-taking spirit of the frontier as distinctly as I do here and never before have I felt so at home where all things magnificent are made more so by inspired calm of earthy humility. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

Something escapes us, and we are escaping from ourselves, or losing ourselves, as part of an irreversible process; we have now passed some point of no return, the point where the contradictoriness of things ended, and we find ourselves, still alive, in a universe of non-contradiction, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy - of stupor in the face of a process which, for all its irreversibility, is bereft of meaning. ~ Jean Baudrillard

As all partings foreshadow the great final one, - so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be. ~ Charles Dickens

I lie on my bed and slip into a troubled, bereft sleep full of falling women and the barking of dogs always out of sight. ~ Carolyn Parkhurst

Don't live each day as if it were your last,
for you might break your back and breathe your last.
Rather, live as if a hundred days left;
oh, not so pressured, of tension bereft.

We do work to live, not do live to work;
always rushing is not fun, but a joke.
Live each day not so stressed nor so relaxed;
it's in balanced way where joy's at the max. ~ Rodolfo Martin Vitangcol, The Pink Poetry

That which Dante saw written on the door of the inferno must be written in a different sense also at the entrance to philosophy: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Those who look for true philosophy must be bereft of all hope, all desire, all longing. They must not wish for anything, not know anything, must feel completely bare and impoverished. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,
And from they slender store two loaves alone to thee are left,
Sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.

Attributed to the Gulistan of Moslih Eddin Saadi ~ Hazel Felleman

Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax. ~ Lauren Willig

Being single means getting used to your own company and not inventing excuses to keep people around you, None of which makes me feel any less bereft. The latest revelation: you have to relearn being your own again! ~ Mhairi McFarlane

I will see you bereft of all that you have, of home and happiness and beautiful things. I will see your nation cast down and your allies drawn away. I will see you as alone and friendless and wretched as am I; and then you may live as long as you like, in some dark and lonely corner of the earth, and I shall call myself content.
-Lien, Albino Celestial (Dragon) ~ Naomi Novik

The good ones

who listen

to women

to children and the poor

die too soon,

their lives bedeviled

by opposition:

our hearts grieve for them.


This was the world my father knew.


A poor man

he saw good men come and mostly go;

leaving behind

the stranded and bereft.

People of hopes, dreams, and so much

hard work!

Yearning for a future
suddenly

foreclosed.


But today

you write me all is well

even though the admirable

Hugo Chavez

has died this afternoon.


Never again will we hear that voice

of reasoned anger

and disgust

of passionate vision

and of triumph.


This is true.


But what a lot he did in his 58 years!

You say.

What a mighty ruckus

Hugo Chavez made!


This is also true.


Thank you for reminding me.


That though life -

this never-ending loop -

has passed us by today

but carried off

in death

a hero

of the masses

it is his spirit

of fiercely outspoken

cariño

that is not lost.


That inheritance

has gone instantly

into ~ Alice Walker

O father, father
Gone from us, lost to us,
The church lies bereft,
Alone,
Desecrated, desolated.
And the heathen shall build
On the ruins
Their world without God.
I see it.
I see it. ~ T. S. Eliot

I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are silent phantoms. Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking. But it leaves me so bereft of any memory of any human being and of me myself, that I transform this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. Were I to cry out - I can no longer see things clearly - my voice would receive the same indifferent echo from the walls of the earth. ~ Clarice Lispector

We choose this. This place. This life. What it will be, and how we live it. We are not slaves to gods, or fate, or destinies woven in veils of smoke. We choose the people we want to be, and we choose the shape of the world in which we live. Nothing worthwhile comes without sacrifice. There is nothing so easy as swimming with the current, nothing so difficult as being the first to stand up. To say no. To point at a thing wrong and name it so. There are none so brave as those who choose to stand, when all others are content to kneel. None so worthy of the title 'hero' as those who fight when there are none to see it. Who choose a life bereft of accolade or fanfare, a life of struggle for the idea that we are all the same. Every one of us. And every one of us has the right to be happy. To know peace. To know love. ~ Jay Kristoff

NEWT shuffles over awkwardly to the bereft THESEUS. NEWT hesitates, struggling to find words of comfort. Then for the first time in his life, he puts his arms around his brother. They hug.

NEWT: I've chosen my side. ~ J.K. Rowling