Desertion Quotes

Padmé insists: "There's always a choice." Does Anakin hear the echo of her voice decades later, when he decides to save their son from the Emperor? I like to think so.

"YOU GET MANY OPPORTUNITIES TO KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN"

Here's Leia, speaking of Han's apparent desertion of the rebellion in A New Hope: "A man must follow his own path. No one can choose it for him." Here's Obi-Wan to Luke, again in A New Hope: "Then you must do what you think is right, of course." Here are Lucas's own words: "Life sends you down funny paths. And you get many opportunities to keep your eyes open." He was talking about his own life, but he might as well have been talking about Star Wars and the characters who populate it. ~ Cass R. Sunstein

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us. ~ George Bernard Shaw

For many women today, on a personal level, the problem is not male dominance so much as male desertion. ~ Nancy Pearcey

It was the strain of a forsaken lady, who after bewailing the perfidy of her lover, calls her pride to her aid, desires her attendant to deck her in her brightest jewels and richest robes and resolves to meet the false one that night at the ball, and prove to him, by the gaiety of her demeanor, how little his desertion has affected her. ~ Charlotte Bronte

The desertion of Jesus, by his followers, furnishes an argument in support of the supposition that he attempted to be king of the Jews, rather than that he was a superior being. ~ Lysander Spooner

For the first time in his life, sex is located away from all danger, away from conflict and drama, away from persecution, away from any accusation, away from worries; he has nothing to take care of, love is taking care of him, love as he's always wanted it and never had it: love-repose; love-oblivion; love-desertion; love-carefreeness; love-meaningless. ~ Milan Kundera

The news that she had gone of course now spread rapidly, and by lunch time Riseholme had made up its mind what to do, and that was hermetically to close its lips for ever on the subject of Lucia. You might think what you pleased, for it was a free country, but silence was best. But this counsel of perfection was not easy to practice next day when the evening paper came. There, for all the world to read were two quite long paragraphs, in "Five o'clock Chit-Chat," over the renowned signature of Hermione, entirely about Lucia and 25 Brompton Square, and there for all the world to see was the reproduction of one of her most elegant photographs, in which she gazed dreamily outwards and a little upwards, with her fingers still pressed on the last chord of (probably) the Moonlight Sonata. . . . She had come up, so Hermione told countless readers, from her Elizabethan country seat at Riseholme (where she was a neighbour of Miss Olga Bracely) and was settling for the season in the beautiful little house in Brompton Square, which was the freehold property of her husband, and had just come to him on the death of his aunt. It was a veritable treasure house of exquisite furniture, with a charming music-room where Lucia had given Hermione a cup of tea from her marvellous Worcester tea service. . . . (At this point Daisy, whose hands were trembling with passion, exclaimed in a loud and injured voice, "The very day she arrived!") Mrs. Lucas (one of the Warwickshire Smythes by birth) was, as ~ E.F. Benson

HOW CONCISE THAT YOU CAN CRY FROM
AWFUL WOUNDS, DESERTION, HAPPINESS,
MEMORIES, HUMILIATION,
DISAPPOINTMENT OR GRANDEUR. ~ Jenny Holzer

They stopped at one of these half-tank houses ... where they were greeted by a young girl, who herself seemed like no more than a child.
- We have come to enquire after Absalom ... Have you heard nothing from him?
Nothing, she said.
When will he return? he asked.
I do not know, she said.
Will he ever return? he asked, indifferently, carelessly.
I do not know she said. She said it tonelessly, hopelessly, as one who is used to waiting, to desertion. She said it as one who expects nothing from her seventy years upon the earth. No rebellion will come out of her, no demands, no fierceness. Nothing will come out of her at all save the children of men who will use her, leave her, forget her. ~ Alan Paton

When he had ended, the holy hermit was a moment silent, then said: My son, I have attended to thy story and I know the maiden. I have myself seen her, as have many. Know, then, that she is capricious for she imposeth conditions that man cannot fulfill, and delinquency is punished by desertion. She cometh only when unsought, and will not be questioned. One manifestation of curiosity, one sign of doubt, one expression of misgiving, and she is away! ~ Ambrose Bierce

Know then that the arbitrary appropriation by the government of men's property results in the loss of all incentive to gain, when men realize that what they have accumulated will be taken away firom them. A loss of incentive will lead to a slackening in enterprise, the slackening being proportional to the extent and degree of confiscation. Thus if confiscation is widespread, covering all forms of economic activity, there will be a general slackening, owing to the feeling that no branch offers any longer any hope of gain. If however confiscation be mild, there will be only a relatively slight falling off in economic activity.

Now the state of a society and the prosperity of business depend on the intensity of human efforts and the search for gain; should, therefore, men slacken in their economic activity the markets would slump and the state of society deteriorate. People would forsake that country and migrate elsewhere in search of gain, the result being a general depopulation and the desertion of cities. And this deterioration in society would be followed by a weakening of the State, for the State is as the Form whose condition follows that of its Matter, Society. . .

Oppression ruins society, while the ruin of society leads to the weakening and destruction of the State. ~ Ibn Khaldun

When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't
and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown. ~ Rebecca Solnit

A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two. ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

While at Colonel Niel's marquee I saw a detail of soldiers bring out a man by the name of Rowland, whom they were going to shoot to death with musketry, by order of a court-martial, for desertion. He was being hauled to the place of execution in a wagon, sitting on an old gun box, which was to be his coffin. When they got to the grave, which had been dug the day before, the water had risen in it, and a soldier was baling it out. Rowland spoke up and said, 'Please hand me a drink of that water, as I want to drink out of my own grave so the boys will talk about it when I am dead, and remember Rowland. ~ Sam R. Watkins

Lovecraft says he knows about tentacles
but that motherfucker never bedded a girl from
West Chester
and survived
She was a toothache
that one
and she tasted like crack
the best thing about her
was if I was ever hungry
I could always make a meal out of whatever
was making rest at the corners of her mouth
I can't remember her name
as is the case with most of them
then again I can't remember
how many donuts I ate this morning
or how many beers I'll drink tonight,
tomorrow ~ Dave Matthes

Bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fire-side. ~ Herman Melville

The new captain looked up. Oh, good grief, Vimes thought. It's bloody Rust this time round!
And it was indeed the Hon. Ronald Rust, the god's gift to the enemy, any enemy, and a walking encouragement to desertion.
The Rust family had produced great soldiers, by the undemanding standards of 'Deduct your own casualties from those of the enemy, and if the answer is a positive number, it was a glorious victory' school of applied warfare. But Rust's lack of any kind of military grasp was matched only by his high opinion of the talent he in fact possessed only in negative amounts. ~ Terry Pratchett

The flight from self is concealed beneath the flight from one's setting and way of life. It will be better elsewhere; it used to be better back then. In short, the here and now become unbearable. Alone and confronting himself, beneath the noonday sun, the monk can no longer see or hear himself; he no longer tolerates himself. His illusory salvation lies in desertion.1 This ~ Jean-Charles Nault

The toddler craves independence, but he fears desertion. ~ Dorothy Corkille Briggs

Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me
("The Circus Animal's Desertion") ~ W.B.Yeats

And, most vivid of all, there was the dramatic epic of the rats - the scampering army of obscene vermin which had burst forth from the castle three months after the tragedy that doomed it to desertion - the lean, filthy, ravenous army which had swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless human beings before its fury was spent. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

The fundamentalist violence is, so is it, an attempt to increase the stakes, i.e. to discourage the potential desertions by showing that defection will cost them dear, that those who adopt other values will be persecuted or even killed. ~ Pascal Boyer

This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth. ~ Virginia Woolf

... what he could or couldn't say to them. Everything he had to say: I love you, it's hell, I walk on corpses and breathe death, it's only a matter of time before I prove a coward, and I don't want to be a coward, but I don't understand, either I kill people, or I'm a coward, that's the choice, someone somewhere set it up and I get no vote, I can't say, 'I don't accept that' – and I have accepted it, for a year I've accepted it, this is the situation but I don't understand how I got here, how it is just going on and on, and nobody mentions it, and if you don't like it they think you're mad, and you get shot, for cowardice, desertion . . . and your own men, your companions, your brothers, have to shoot you . . . and I'm so fucking scared out there every day, every night - and now they've made me a fucking officer - What the fuck could he say to any of them? Well, there'll be none of that swearing for a start. ~ Louisa Young

And suddenly, after weeks of thinking about desertion, Sharpe realized that what he had just said was true. He did want to go back to the army, and that knowledge surprised him. The army had bored Richard Sharpe, then done its best to break his spirits. It had even flogged him, but now, standing on Seringapatam's battlements, he missed the army.
For at heart, as Richard Sharpe had just discovered for himself, he was a soldier. ~ Bernard Cornwell

[W]hich category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely? [T]hose against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax. ~ Murray Rothbard

You think death is any better an excuse for desertion than any other? ~ Judith Martin

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail ... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion ~ Marcel Proust

The year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too they would never forget. ~ David McCullough

It's all like me; and any song for this would just be bullshit. This is a thing, where they stopped trying, they deserted it, and desertion itself is the only possible song. ~ Alice Notley

You can't walk away from someone you love, leave them drowning in your desertion. If love has no more meaning than that, you can keep it. I don't want it now or ever again. Don't want to hear the word or wear its scars. ~ Ellen Hopkins

Had a note from Mr Cherry asking me when I can resume my paper round. I sent a note back to say that due to my mother's desertion I am still in a mental state. This is true. I wore odd socks yesterday without knowing it. One was red and one was green. I must pull myself together. I could end up in a lunatic asylum. ~ Sue Townsend

When desertion is not an option, sabotage is a must. ~ Curious George Brigade

Perhaps I shouldn't call it shit. That's a bit crude. I don't really despise Christianity or even the Roman Church, and certainly not the incontrovertible glory of the Middle Ages. What I do despise is the contemporary inclination to flop to the knees and crawl back into the past, to shy from what seem like impossible problems in order to bury the head, asshole aloft and twitching, in the Sands of Time. Cowardice, I calls it. Illusion-seeking. Womb-crawling. And treason. Desertion in the face of the enemy.
Strong words indeed. But I've always been rather a blunt, tough, plain-spoken type ... ~ Edward Abbey

Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one. ~ Samuel Butler

My brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. ~ William Wordsworth

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble. ~ Graham Greene

It is right," said the abbess. "It isn't kind ... What else did our Lord show us, Sister?" she asked, "in this Paschal time? I expect, like you, after all the suffering, betrayal, desertion, intolerable disappointment, and being hurt, he would have liked to have taken refuge with his Father, but he stayed on earth and what did he do> He didn't try then to teach us, bring us up
that was left to the Holy Spirit. He did simple ordinary loving things: loving things, Sister, like consoling Mary Magdalene, walking and talking with the disciples, breaking bread with them, cooking their breakfast. Didn't you," asked the Abbess Catherine, "come here to try and follow him? ~ Rumer Godden

She talks of the desertion. How each time it broke her heart. How with each break it became harder to heal. ~ James Frey

If I have fully diagnosed the cause and nature of your condition, you are wasting away in pining and longing for your former good fortune. It is the loss of this which, as your imagination works upon you, has so corrupted your mind. I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune, and the extent to which she seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion ~ Boethius

But women can bear anything better than desertion. Cruelty is bad, but neglect is worse than cruelty, and desertion worse even than neglect. ~ Anthony Trollope

And no. I must not go on thinking. For the pain will never go away. You just go on and live. In the dust of desertion. Still falling where last I loved. ~ J.P. Donleavy

At the inception of this writing project, I considered the wisdom of executing a purposeful slaughtering of my egotistical self. If I do screw up the temerity to commence with an autopsy of a soulful self, I might lack the fortitude to stay the course to dissect the nature of my being. Without deep-seated faith, I risk faltering at the operating table and never rising again. Will I suffer from a desertion of boldness? Alternatively, will a stunning lack of talent and criminal absence of cognitive insight, perception, and discernment along with a paucity of intellectual and practical acumen betray me when I attempt to whisk up incomplete mental fragments previously abandoned to simmer in the deepest recesses of my animalistic being? Overwrought by a hovering sense of terror concerning what filthy rubbish I might discover lurking within the hallways of my afflicted soul, I am hesitant to descend into the labyrinth of the unknown. I might not endure to write about what fate awaits me when I attempt to harpoon protean personal thoughts steeped in fear and disgust. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

It was always the same; other people gave up loving before she did. They got spoilt, or else they went away; in any case, they were partly to blame. Why did it happen so? She herself never changed; when she loved anyone, it was for life. She could not understand desertion; it was something so huge, so monstrous that the notion of it made her little heart break. ~ Emile Zola

The theory of exodus proposes that the most effective way of opposing capitalism and the liberal state is not through direct confrontation but by means of what Paolo Virno has called "engaged withdrawal,"mass defection by those wishing to create new forms of community. One need only glance at the historical record to confirm that most successful forms of popular resistance have taken precisely this form. They have not involved challenging power head on (this usually leads to being slaughtered, or if not, turning into some - often even uglier - variant of the
very thing one first challenged) but from one or another strategy of slipping away from its grasp, from flight, desertion, the founding of new communities. ~ David Graeber

so this desertion was nothing more than the last rebellion of the doomed, like the lambs that stagger back on their feet after their throats have been cut. In ~ Laila Lalami

It was not fear of ridicule,
to which everyday life as a winged red person had accommodated Geryon early in life,
but this blank desertion of his own mind
that threw him into despair. ~ Anne Carson

Great joys,why do they bring us sadness? Because there remains from these excesses only a feeling of irrevocable loss and desertion which reaches a high degree of negative intensity. At such moments, instead of a gain, one keenly feels loss. sadness accompanies all those events in which life expends itself. its intensity is equal to its loss. Thus death causes the greatest sadness. ~ Emil Cioran