Bombed Out Quotes

In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities. ~ Cynthia Ozick

Wordlessly they settled on a third-story ledge near Patriarch's Pond, of the roof across from Luce's window, where they used to watch her sleep. The memory would be fresher in Daniil's mind, but the faint recollection of Luce lying dreaming under the covers still sent a warm rush across Daniel's wings.
Both were somber.In the bombed-out city, it was sad and ironic that her building had been spared when she hadn't. They stood in silence in the cold night,both carefully tucking back their wings so that they wouldn't accidentially touch. ~ Lauren Kate

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?

That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…

Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.

I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.

I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluste ~ Donna Tartt

The giant white cube is now impeding rather than enhancing the rhythms of art. It preprograms a viewer's journey, shifts the emphasis from process to product, and lacks individuality and openness. It's not that art should be seen only in rutty bombed-out environments, but it should seem alive. ~ Jerry Saltz

I played in bombed-out houses and grew up with the ever-present consequences of a lost war and the awareness that my own country had inflicted terrible pain on many nations during the horrific World War II. ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

And that unconscious ease that comes of being so young - still oblivious to the blows that will destroy parts of her. Past the age of forty, everyone is like a bombed-out city. ~ Virginie Despentes

I wouldn't want to live in Berlin. It's bombed out and there's a lot of techno. ~ Sloane Crosley

In late 2009, I returned to Baghdad after a lengthy absence. I was living alone, in the Hamra Hotel, the twice bombed-out de facto international news bureau. ~ Michael Hastings

They are a testament not only to the Afghans' hunger for literacy, but also to their willingness to pour scarce resources into this effort, even during a time of war. I have seen children studying in classrooms set up inside animal sheds, windowless basements, garages, and even an abandoned public toilet. We ourselves have run schools out of refugee tents, shipping containers, and the shells of bombed-out Soviet armored personnel carriers. The thirst for education over there is limitless. The Afghans want their children to go to school because literacy represents what neither we not anyone else has so far managed to offer them: hope, progress, and the possibility of controlling their own destiny. ~ Greg Mortenson

In the years that she had been tying scraps to the branches, the tree had died and the fruit had turned bitter. The other apple trees were hale and healthy, but this one, the tree of her remembrances, was as black and twisted as the bombed-out town behind it. ~ Kristin Hannah

This is the truth of bombed-out ruins: hit a city hard enough and the cheap arrogant veneer will crumble faster than you can snap your fingers; it's the old stuff, the stuff that's endured, that might just keep enduring. I ~ Tana French

During World War II, a few years after Norma Jeane's time in an orphanage, thousands of children were evacuated from the air raids and poor rations of London during the Blitz, and placed with volunteer families or group homes in the English countryside or even in other countries. It was only postwar studies comparing these children to others left behind that opened the eyes of many experts to the damage caused by emotional neglect. In spite of living in bombed-out ruins and constant fear of attack, the children who had been left with their mothers and families tended to fare better than those who had been evacuated to physical safety. Emotional security, continuity, a sense of being loved unconditionally for oneself - all those turn out to be as important to a child's development as all but the most basic food and shelter. ~ Gloria Steinem

The thing about tragedy is that it isn't about just getting through it, it's about getting on with your life when the dust has settled but the landscape is bombed out, smoke in the air, charred remains at your feet. ~ Andrea Dunlop

Layla smiled through her tears, "If I'd known that all it would take to get us talking is a romantic getaway to a bombed-out part of Eastern Europe, I would have gotten Kendra to set it up a long time ago."
"Romantic, huh?" He smiled. "I like romantic. ~ Paige Tyler

She thought she understood the tourists. You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of war and torture. ~ Don DeLillo

The brigadier I knew has left his bombed-out face, leaving me alone with the clock, shelves of handsome books nobody ever reads, and one certainty: that whatever I do with my life, however much power, wealth, experience, knowledge, or beauty I'll accrue, I, too, will end up like this vulnerable old man. When I look at Brigadier Reginald Philby, I'm looking down time's telescope at myself. M ~ David Mitchell

An LSD experience without the LSD -that was a laugh. In fact, the heads are pouring in by the hundreds, bombed out of their gourds, hundreds of heads coming out into the absolute open for the first time. It is like the time the Pranksters went to the Beatles concert in full costume, looking so bizarre and so totally smoked that no one could believe they were. Nobody would risk it in public like that. Well the kids are just having an LSD experience without the LSD, that's all, and this is what it looks like. A hulking crazed whirlpool. That's nice. ~ Tom Wolfe

In the corridor outside, a trolley squeaks by. The brigadier I knew has left his bombed-out face, leaving me alone with the clock, shelves of handsome books nobody ever reads, and one certainty: that whatever I do with my life, however much power, wealth, experience, knowledge, or beauty I'll accrue, I, too, will end up like this vulnerable old man. When I look at Brigadier Reginald Philby, I'm looking down time's telescope at myself. ~ David Mitchell

Coral reefs are under assault. They are rapidly being degraded by human activities. They are over-fished, bombed and poisoned. They are smothered by sediment, and choked by algae growing on nutrient-rich sewage and fertilizer run-off. They are damaged by irresponsible tourism and are being severely stressed by the warming of the world's oceans. Each of these pressures is bad enough in itself, but together, the cocktail is proving lethal. ~ Klaus Topfer

Before you bombed my boy Osama I always thought an explosion was such a quick thing but now I know better. The flash is over very fast but the fire catches hold inside you and the noise never stops ... I live in an inferno where you could shiver with cold Osama. This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop. ~ Chris Cleave

Cervantes told me history is the mother of truth.
Borges told me historical truth is not what took place; it is what we think took place.
So Billy Shakespeare was queer.
Ronnie was the greatest president in history, right up there on Mount Rushmore.
AIDS is mankind's greatest plague.
Israel only kills terrorists.
America never bombed Lebanon.
Jesus was straight. Juda and he were just friends.
Roseanne's parents molested her as an infant.
Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat deserved their Nobels.
And Gaetan Dugas started the AIDS epidemic. ~ Rabih Alameddine

In 2008 alone, the Taliban bombed two hundred schools. Suicide bombings and targeted killings were regular occurrences. ~ Malala Yousafzai

It was an egregious violation of the American Constitution. We were innocent American citizens, and we were imprisoned simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. It shows us just how fragile our Constitution is. ~ George Takei

The present mood in which they sat relaxed was nothing more than the relief of two people coming back to a bombed building once familiar, shared as a dwelling, and finding all over the smashed foundations a rose-ash haze of willow herb. No more, no less. It is a ruin; but suspense at least, at least the need for sterile resolution, have evaporated with the fact of the return. Terror of nothingness contracts before the contemplation of it. It is not, after all, vacancy, but space; an area razed, roped off by time; by time refertilized, sown with a transfiguration, a ruin-haunting, ghost-spun No Man's crop of grace. ~ Rosamond Lehmann

Through a bombed cemetery, long-forgotten Londoners unearthed and flung into trees, grinning in rotted formal wear. A curlicued swing set in a cratered playground. The horrors piled up, incomprehensible, the bombers now and then dropping flares to light it all with the pure, shining white of a thousand camera flashes. As if to say: Look. Look what we made. ~ Ransom Riggs

Over? Did you say over? Nothing is over until WE decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? ~ John Belushi In Animal House

Hitler bombed London into submission but in fact it created a sense of national solidarity. ~ Tom Paulin

They bombed my granny's chippie, left it completely flat. I'll have her for that ~ Jane Couch

And rivaling the Democratic Peace theory as a categorical factoid about modern conflict prevention is the Golden Arches theory: no two countries with a McDonald's have ever fought in a war. The only unambiguous Big Mac Attack took place in 1999, when NATO briefly bombed Yugoslavia.234 ~ Steven Pinker

I was shocked when they told me congratulations, you won, that's the good news. Then the bad news is that you have six battles next week. That was a bit of a shocker. I was exhausted. And I had Chopped shooting that same week. I didn't have a sous chef lined up; I thought that was bad karma to try to think ahead. So I scrambled. I scrambled the jets, took off and we bombed our target. I think it's gone well. ~ Geoffrey Zakarian

In our culture, we get very much into shorthanding people. And I got shorthanded as That Guy: Jennifer Lopez, movies bombed, therefore he must be a sort of thoughtless dilettante, solipsistic consumer blahblahblah. It's hard to shake those sort of narratives. ~ Ben Affleck

Margaret Thatcher, growing up in a bombed and battered Britain, derived a distrust which has grown with the years not just of Germany but of all continental Europe. ~ Douglas Hurd

Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her. ~ Pat Conroy

Our house was bombed, and the roof fell in. We were sitting under the stairs of the basement, and we were quite safe, but it brought home the realization. In two nights 400 people were killed in small town. ~ Roger Bannister

Too soon the two weeks were over and we were back in Lugano, and there we learned about Disaster.
We weren't completely ignorant. We knew about disaster from our previous schools and previous lives. We'd had access to televisions and newspapers. But the return to Lugano marked the beginning of Global Awareness Month, and in each of our classes, we talked about disaster: disaster man-made and natural. We talked about ozone depletion and the extinction of species and depleted rain forests and war and poverty and AIDS. We talked about refugees and slaughter and famine.
We were in the middle school and were getting, according to Uncle Max, a diluted version of what the upper-schoolers were facing. An Iraqi boy from the upper school came to our history class and talked about what it felt like when the Americans bombed his country. Keisuke talked about how he felt responsible for World War II, and a German student said she felt the same.
We got into heated discussions over the neglect of infant females in some cultures, and horrific cases of child abuse worldwide. We fasted one day each week to raise our consciousness about hunger, and we sent money and canned goods and clothing to charities.
In one class, after we watched a movie about traumas in Rwanda, and a Rwandan student told us about seeing his mother killed, Mari threw up. We were all having nightmares.
At home, Aunt Sandy pleaded with Uncle Max. "This is too much!" she said. "You can't dump all the ~ Sharon Creech

My theory is that Kurt had a lot of residual pain from his childhood. And when you pile that on top of his experience in World War II - he was in Dresden when it was bombed and saw a city annihilated. When you combine those two things, my impression of Kurt Vonnegut at 84 was that he was a very pained and haunted man. ~ Charles J. Shields

Right here in our bodies, in our defense of our right to experience joy, in the refusal to abandon the place where we have been most completely invaded & colonized, in our determination to make the bombed & defoliated lands flower again and bear fruit, here where we have been most shamed is one of the most radical & sacred places from which to transform the world. ~ Aurora Levins Morales

Not everyone will be saved, Ana. You are a medic. You have lived your life with that motto. What changed? It's not any different now."
"No, it is. I wasn't a medic that bombed people. I was a medic that had to make choices based on the fact that people were already bombed. That's a huge difference. You can't save everyone, you're right. But you can prevent the need for saving. ~ Eli Addis

Americans are not used to being bombed in their beds, but if you come from anywhere outside America, it's not highly unusual. ~ Mira Nair

It was a Russian airplane that was bombed over the Sinai Peninsula. When the Russians conduct air strikes on IS, they are doing so because they too are threatened by terror. ~ Martin Schulz

Michael Moore: a man who never without an excuse for keeping murdering tyrants in power. But now he's supporting the man who bombed Milosevic into submission? How about an explanation, Mr Moore? ~ Andrew Sullivan

If they (the young pilots) are on land, they would be bombed down, and if they are in the air, they would be shot down. That's sad ... Too sad ... To let the young men die beautifully, that's what Tokko is. To give beautiful death, that's called sympathy. ~ Takijiro Onishi

I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten indeed the word 'terrorized' is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be. ~ Donald Rumsfeld

By the most basic definition of the law, Mohammed was not eligible, but he was allowed to stay in the United States and obtain a work visa - while the INS processed his petition. Moving with the lightning speed of a government agency, the INS rejected his petition for amnesty as a farmworker three years later. Then, Mohammed applied for a general amnesty, claiming he had been living continuously in the United States from 1982 to 1986. Actually, he was a teenager in Jordan then, but again, Mohammed was allowed to stay while the INS considered his request. As it was considering, Mohammed bombed the World Trade Center.15 ~ Ann Coulter

We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye, ~ Jeremiah

Following this logic, to bomb BASF in Ludwigshafen would be to mock the people who bombed BASF in Brazil. The Latin American comrades feel differently. BASF does as well. ~ Red Army Faction

He thought about history, the hidden human anxieties behind momentous events. The tiny trivial things that were probably bothering Einstein or Darwin or Newton as they formulated their theories: arguments with the landlady, maybe, or concern over a blocked fireplace. The pilots who bombed Dresden, fretting over a phrase in a letter from back home: What did she mean by that? Or what about Columbus, when he was sailing toward the New Land ... who knows what was on his mind? The last words spoken to him by an old friend, perhaps, a person not even remembered in history books ... ~ Michel Faber

I completely bombed the audition ... I was insecure, stopping and starting. I went to the bathroom and cried. ~ Lake Bell

Dear sir, Mr. B.J. Thing ... er ... we the people of Britain are fed up with being bombed. We had enough of it last time with old Hitler so will you just leave us in peace, you live your life and we'll live ours, hope you are well ... please don't drop any bombs.
Yours sincerely, Mr. and Mrs. J. Bloggs ~ Raymond Briggs

We inadvertently bombed the Chinese Embassy. But Clinton now is working very hard. He has sent a letter of apology to the Chinese. And, he's also given them a gift certificate for future nuclear secrets. ~ David Letterman

[During the 20th century] ... 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. ~ Rudolph Rummel

The lucky ones, the ones who weren't here when the place was getting bombed to hell. We're not like these people. We shouldn't pretend we are. The stories these people have to tell, we're not entitled to them. ~ Khaled Hosseini

maybe even just time travelled; we hadn't really decided yet.
Personally, I'd rather go with parallel universe, mostly because
it just sounded so much cooler. We had no idea how or when
we could get back, which meant that we might be lost in time
forever. Fran's parents were missing in some other timeline or
maybe even this one. We hadn't actually gotten that far though,
to be honest. I had no idea if our actions would affect the future,
but I really didn't think we were that important. Also, I hadn't
had any sleep for fifteen hours. And to tie it all up, I think that
we are about to be bombed.
Eek. ~ Sophie Wilkinson

The other thing I said is the great irony is you will be back fighting against your own weapons. Had [Bashar] Assad been bombed when he used chemical weapons two years ago, ISIS would be in charge of all of Syria now. ~ Rand Paul

The Leningrad Public Library remained open throughout the siege and became a place for people to congregate. People came to the library to read, even when weak from cold and exhaustion ... Some died in their places, with a book propped in front of them ... In the course of the war, the librarians greatly expanded the collection, purchasing books from the starving, who were desperate to sell anything for food. Some of the city's librarians scoured bombed ruins for volumes, scrabbling over the piles of brick with their backpacks full of salvaged books. ~ M T Anderson

There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of work for the tempestuous Lucretia Stewart, then editor of the American Express travel magazine, Departures. Together, we evolved a harmless satire of the slightly driveling style employed by the journalists of tourism. 'Land of Contrasts' was our shorthand for it. ('Jerusalem: an enthralling blend of old and new.' 'South Africa: a harmony in black and white.' 'Belfast, where ancient meets modern.') It was as you can see, no difficult task. I began to notice a few weeks ago that my enemies in the 'peace' movement had decided to borrow from this tattered style book. The mantra, especially in the letters to this newspaper, was: 'Afghanistan, where the world's richest country rains bombs on the world's poorest country.'

Poor fools. They should never have tried to beat me at this game. What about, 'Afghanistan, where the world's most open society confronts the world's most closed one'? 'Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women.' 'Where the world's most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world's most accurate ones.' 'Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime.' I could go on. (I think number four may need a little work.) But there are some suggested contrasts for the 'doves' to paste into their scrapbook. Incidentally, when they look at their scrapbooks they will be able to re-read themselves saying things like, 'The bombing of Kosovo is driving the Serbs int ~ Christopher Hitchens

One of the reasons they [the Japanese] have bad eyesight is probably these microscopic characters [furigana] which have many lines and strokes to them.& We wonder why they went mad and bombed Pearl Harbor when they knew they couldn't win. That [the Japanese language] would be a reason. ~ L. Ron Hubbard

Born in 1936, I experienced the Second World War as a child in the city of Gelsenkirchen-Buer. This area was heavily bombed, but fortunately, all members of my family survived the war and post-war period. ~ Harald Zur Hausen

The bastards have never been bombed like they're going to be bombed this time. ~ Richard M. Nixon

I've got a better idea," says my mother. "Tell me about what you did today. Tell me about New York." So I do, I tell the lifelong New Yorker who chucked it for the woods about the streets of the city: how the subway was so crowded this morning I had to let four trains pass in a row and I was a half hour late to work; how I had a meeting in Times Square and I saw an army of painted topless women posing with tourists for money; how I saw two people dressed up as Disney characters get into a fistfight; how I ate a hot dog from a stand after my client meeting bombed and when I finished it I ate another, on one of the chairs scattered in Bryant Park. A string quartet was playing nearby, under a sponsor banner. "The music part was the part that saved me," I say. "All of it would have saved me," says my mother. ~ Jami Attenberg

The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world. ~ Gore Vidal

On Friday night, it was fun [to know] that if you bombed, or whatever was going on, that you'd be on TV at 11. It was a cool feeling, and you'd get a couple hundred dollars. ~ John Mulaney

Nor would he care what the target was. If they bombed Chile, it would be the same as bombing New York. ~ Ken Follett

They had bombed and burned,killed and maimed,plundered and looted.Now they had come to claim the land. ~ Susan Abulhawa

I think there's a certain level of trust that I have with women. I've always been honest, even when I haven't had good times in my life or my movie bombed or I've had great success. I've owned up to all of it. ~ Halle Berry

People will say a movie bombed at the box office but I couldn't care less. ~ Johnny Depp