Life Torn Apart Quotes

I want my life back.
-Dear Blue Sky ~ Mary Sullivan

And it was like being torn apart and put back together, all at once. He hated her pain, but he adored that she wasn't hiding herself from him, and that she was letting him be there for her. ~ Laura Kaye

In the process of my evolution, I became a victim of domestic war, an emotional casualty for a major portion of my life, entwined, entrapped and emotionally involved, until I learned how to become free.
Sara Niles
Torn From the Inside Out ~ Sara Niles

A bird painted not with beauty but with all the dirt and wounds collected in a long hard life, in battle, in love, with torn feathers and a busted leg and a chipped beak and one of its eyes half closed; and yet a bird of deeper loveliness for all of that. ~ Jeff Noon

But this isn't their God, she decided. It's my God. This is a God I have found through sacrificing my own life, through my flesh being cut, my skin ripped off, my blood sucked away, my nails torn, all my time and hopes and memories being stolen from me. This is not a God with a form. No white clothes, no long beard. This god has no doctrine, no scripture, no precepts. No reward, no punishment. This God doesn't give, and doesn't take away. There is no heaven up in the sky, no hell down below. When it's hot, and when it's cold, God is simply there. ~ Haruki Murakami

Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness- this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad conscience'. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Thought - he told himself quietly - is a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one's purpose and the way to reach it. In the matter of his life being torn piece by piece out of him, he was to have no voice, no purpose, no way, no defense. ~ Ayn Rand

In his youth when he was poor and had difficulty in earning his bread, he preferred to go hungry and in torn clothes rather than endanger his narrow limit of independence. He never sold himself for money or an easy life or to women or to those in power; and had thrown away a hundred times what in the worlds eyes was his advantage and happiness in order to safeguard his liberty. No prospect was more hateful and distasteful to him than that he should have to go to an office and conform to daily and yearly routine and obey others. ~ Hermann Hesse

Aubade"

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows ~ Philip Larkin

For the rest of his life, he realized, he would be torn like this, aware of Phoebe's awkwardness, the difficulties she encountered in the world simply by being different, and ye propelled beyond all this by her direct and guileless love. By her love, yes, and, he realized ... by his own new and strangely uncomplicated love for her. ~ Kim Edwards

In a world so torn apart by rivalry, anger, and hatred, we have the privileged vocation to be living signs of a love that can bridge all divisions and heal all wounds. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

We want to avoid suffering, death, sin, ashes. But we live in a world crushed and broken and torn, a world God Himself visited to redeem. We receive his poured-out life, and being allowed the high privilege of suffering with Him, may then pour ourselves out for others. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

Reading Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë after Jane Eyre is a curious experience. The subject of the biography is recognisably the same person who wrote the novel, but the effect of the two books is utterly different. The biography is indeed depressing and painful reading. It captures better, I believe, than any any
subsequent biography the introverted and puritan pessimist side of Charlotte Brontë, and conveys the real dreariness of the world of privation, critical discouragement and limited opportunity that
so often made her complain in her letters that she felt marked out for suffering.
Jane Eyre, on the other hand, is exhilarating reading, partly because the reader, far from simply pitying the heroine, is struck by her resilience, and partly because the novel achieves such an imaginative transmutation of the drab. Unlike that of Jane Austen's Fanny Price or Dickens's Arthur Clennam or John Harmon, Jane
Eyre's response to suffering is never less than energetic. The reader is torn between exasperation at the way she mistakes her resentments and prejudices for fair moral judgements, and admiration at the way she fights back. Matthew Arnold, seeking 'sweetness and light' was repelled by the 'hunger, rebellion and rage' that he
identified as the keynotes of the novel. One can see why, and yet feel that these have a more positive effect than his phrase allows. The heroine is trying to hold on to her sense of self in a world that gives it little en ~ Ian Gregor

We shall meet, but as strangers. It is the end of an era. A whole part of my life is torn away. ~ Iris Murdoch

I was torn apart. But you, my knight, you found all the pieces and put me back together. ~ Juliette Cross

Being sucked into a black hole would pretty much be the coolest way to die. It's not like anyone has firsthand experience, and scientists can't decide if you would spend week floating past the event horizon before being torn apart or soar into a kind of maelstrom of particles and be burned alive. I like to think of what it would be like if we were swallowed, just like that. Suddenly none of this would matter. No more worrying about where we're going or what's to become of us or if we'll ever disappoint another person again. All of it-just ... gone. ~ Jennifer Niven

Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us. ~ J.G. Ballard

A woman can always get some practical use from a torn-up life ... She likes mending and patching it, making sure the edges are straight. She spreads the last shred out and takes its measure: 'What can I do with this remnant? How long does it need to last?
A man puts on his life ready-made. If it doesn't fit, he will try to exchange it for another. Only a fool of a man will try to adjust the sleeves or move the buttons; he doesn't know how. ~ Mavis Gallant

Everything was all right. That which had been and that which was still to come. It was enough. If it were the end, it was all right so. He had loved somebody and lost her. He had hated another and killed him. Both had freed him. One had brought his feelings to life again; the other had eradicated his past. Nothing remained behind unfulfilled. No desire was left; no hatred, nor any lament. If this were a new beginning, then that was what it was. One would start without expectation, prepared for many things, with the simple strength of experience which had strengthened and not torn asunder. The ashes had been cleared away. Paralyzed places were alive again. Cynicism had turned into strength. It was all right. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. Well, they were going to destroy it again, were they - this garden Earth, civilized and knowing, to be torn apart again that man might hope again in wretched darkness. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

If we are pack, then conquest is our sustenance, sister.
He plunged his hand into the coywolv's frame. With a wet tearing, the heart came out, glistening and full of blood, veins and arteries torn. The muscle of life. Tool held it out to her. "Our enemies give us strength." Blood ran from his fist. Mahlia saw the challenge in the half-man's eye.
She limped over to the battle-scarred monster and held out her hand. The heart was surprisingly heavy as Tool poured it into her palm. She lifted the muscle to her lips and bit deep.
Blood ran down her chin. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

A 'social justice' society is a conflict which locks beneficiaries and victims alike in a struggle without end. It becomes a society torn apart by resentment over the wealth of capitalists. ~ Hans F. Sennholz

Therefore the Way that is sagely within and kingly without has fallen into darkness and is no longer clearly perceived, has become shrouded and no longer shines forth. The men of the world all follow their own desires and make these their "doctrine." How sad! - the hundred schools going on and on instead of turning back, fated never to join again. The scholars of later ages have unfortunately never perceived the purity of Heaven and earth, the great body of the ancients, and "the art of the Way" in time comes to be rent and torn apart by the world. ~ Zhuangzi

When someone is crying and her heart is torn,
Be an angel of kindness and help her to carry on. ~ Debasish Mridha

Life is like a thunderstorm, Sunny. You will lay in happiness one second, be torn asunder the next. What makes you who are is what you do when that thunderstorm arrives. You must gaze into that thunderstorm and stand up to it no matter where it takes you.
For they will see you as I see you, a hero. ~ Laura-Louise Slattery

Inman guessed Swimmer's spells were right in saying a man's spirit could be torn apart and cease and yet his body keep on living. They could take deathblows independently. He was himself a case in point, and perhaps not a rare one, for his spirit, it seemed, had been about burned out of him to fear that the mere existence of the Henry repeating rifle or the éprouvette mortar made all talk of spirit immediately antique. His spirit, he feared, had been blasted away so that he had become lonesome and estranged from all around him as a sad old heron standing pointless watch in the mudflats of a pond lacking frogs. It seemed a poor swap to find that the only way one might keep from fearing death was to act numb and set apart as if dead already, with nothing left of you but a hut of bones. ~ Charles Frazier

Lift your head to me ... '
His is the kiss of a timorous lover. Feel his inhuman lips on the throat, the heat of it. The bite, when it comes, is cold. Begin to sink as the blood flows into his mouth; it is almost soothing. No pain. No pain at all. His teeth grind into the muscles; ecstasy and torment. Life, the very being, is flowing out. Unholy nourishment. Holy nourishment. Drained slowly.
The trauma of it feels like being torn, but it is no more than suddenly having the ability to experience reality in a different way. Waiting for the end ... for what? Cannot foretell. No longer flesh, no longer blood. Soul. Free. ~ Storm Constantine

I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated. ~ James Nachtwey

A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They're on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority's blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there's cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I'm easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I'll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs. ~ Ian McEwan

Try to remember some details. For the world
is filled with people who were torn from their sleep
with no one to mend the tear,
and unlike wild beasts they live
each in his lonely hiding place and they die
together on battlefields
and in hospitals.
And the earth will swallow all of them,
good and evil together, like the followers of Korah,
all of them in their rebellion against death,
their mouths open till the last moment,
praising and cursing in a single
howl. Try, try
to remember some details. ~ Yehuda Amichai

[ELLA] Oh! You know what Wes?

[WESLEY] What?

[ELLA] That story your father used to tell about that eagle. You remember the whole thing?

[WESLEY] Yeah.

[ELLA] I remember he keeps coming back and swooping down on the shed roof and then flying off again. What else?

[WESLEY] I don't know.

[ELLA] You remember. What happens next?

[WESLEY] A cat comes.

[ELLA] That's right. A big tomcat comes. He jumps up on top of that roof to sniff around in all the entails or whatever it was.

[WESLEY] And that eagle comes down and picks up that cat in his talons and carries him screaming off into the sky.

[ELLA] And they fight. They fight like crazy in the middle of the sky. The cat's tearing his chest out, and the eagle's trying to drop him, but the cat won't let go because he knows if he falls he'll die.

[WESLEY] And the eagle's being torn apart in midair. The eagle's trying to free himself from the cat, and the cat won't let go.

[ELLA] And they come crashing down to earth. Both of them come crashing down. Like one whole thing. ~ Sam Shepard

It is the branch that bears the fruit, That feels the knife, To prune it for a larger growth, A fuller life. Though every budding twig be trimmed, And every grace Of swaying tendril, springing leaf, May lose its place. O you whose life of joy seems left, With beauty shorn; Whose aspirations lie in dust, All bruised and torn, Rejoice, though each desire, each dream, Each hope of thine Will fall and fade; it is the hand Of Love Divine That holds the knife, that cuts and breaks With tenderest touch, That you, whose life has borne some fruit, Might now bear much. Annie Johnson Flint ~ Lettie B. Cowman

The middle way is still driving on the wrong side of the road; it still permits the killing of the fox for pleasure. One cannot kill half a fox. Like Monty Python parrot, a fox torn apart by hounds remains dead, deceased and off its perch for ever. Before the fox has been dispatched - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly - it will have suffered the agonies of the pursuit by animals four times its size and four times its strength. The middle way is a compromise that still seriously compromises the welfare of the fox. ~ Lyndon Harrison, Baron Harrison

One of my fears would be getting torn apart by a great white shark. I love the ocean, but I always have this deep fear of getting torn apart by a great whitey. ~ Theo James

Ye who have laid your love to rest,
And wept above their lifeless clay,
Know not the anguish of that breast,
Whose lov'd are rudely torn away.

Ye may not know how desolate,
Are bosoms rudely forced to part,
And how a dull and heavy weight,
Will press the life-drops from the heart. ~ Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

My world has been torn apart and stitched back together too many times, and now I exist only as a tattered patchwork of myself - unable to think, unable to feel anything other than numbness. ~ Amie Kaufman

Honor from death," I snap, "is a myth. Invented by the war torn to make sense of the horrific. If we die, it will be so that others may live. Truly honorable death, the only honorable death, is one that enables life. ~ Rae Carson

She had never felt so relieved to say something that had torn her apart at the seams. ~ Lindsay Chamberlin

Even when your torn apart, you can still be put back together. ~ Iman Abukamail

Souls bound together can't be forever torn apart by distance and neither by death. ~ Patti Callahan Henry

No one knows what it means to be born and to live on the brink, between two worlds....to love and hate both, to hesitate and waver all one's life. To have two homelands and yet have none. To be everywhere at home and to remain forever a stranger. In short, to be torn on a rack, but as both victim and torturer at once. ~ Ivo Andric