Ravaged Quotes

They never reminisced about the time they had to drive halfway back to Indianapolis because I'd left Dexter Poindexter, my terry-cloth penguin (threadbare, ravaged by love - as who amongst us is not) ~ Karen Joy Fowler

If they survive, today's children will inherit a world that our fathers and grandfathers have ravaged, where the seas are acidic cesspools that the whales have fled, where rain forests are Indian memories never to return, and where human greed has plundered Mother Earth's innards and turned human genes into factories for profit. They will inherit a diminished planet where fresh water is increasingly rare, and where fresh air is a commodity ... We live in a world that fears and hates its young. How else can one explain the bequest of such a foul, polluted, and hollow inheritance? ~ Mumia Abu-Jamal

The light was crude. It made Artaud's eyes shrink into darkness, as they are deep-set. This brought into relief the intensity of his gestures. He looked tormented. His hair, rather long, fell at times over his forehead. He has the actor's nimbleness and quickness of gestures. His face is lean, as if ravaged by fevers. His eyes do not seem to see the people. They are the eyes of a visionary. His hands are long, long-fingered.
Beside him Allendy looks earthy, heavy, gray. He sits at the desk, massive, brooding. Artaud steps out on the platform, and begins to talk about " The Theatre and the Plague."
He asked me to sit in the front row. It seems to me that all he is asking for is intensity, a more heightened form of feeling and living. Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous works of art and theater came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out an agony. "La Peste" in French is so much more terrible than "The Plague" in English. But no word could describe what Artaud acted out on the platform of the Sorbonne. He forgot about his conference, the theatre, his ideas, Dr. Allendy sitting there, the public, the young students, his wife, professors, and directors.
His face was ~ Anais Nin

In his fitful eastward progress through Belgium and Germany that winter, my grandfather had shared all manner of billets: with dogfaces and officers, in misery and in comfort, in attack and in retreat, and pinned down by snow or German ordnance. He had bedded down under a bearskin in a schloss and in foxholes flecked pink with the tissue of previous occupants. If an hour's sleep were to be had, he seized it, in the bedrooms or basements of elegant townhouses, in ravaged hotels, on clean straw and straw that crawled with vermin, on featherbeds and canvas webbing slung across the bed of a half-truck, on mud, sandbags, and raw pine planks. However wretched, accommodations were always better or no worse than those on the enemy side. ~ Michael Chabon

The doctors and nurses at the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital are saving lives every day and helping improve health care in the DRC which has been ravaged by more than a decade of war and disease. ~ Dikembe Mutombo

Perhaps, the answer is that my ravaged mind rails against the idea of God, but something deeper in me calls out as if God might answer. 'There are not foxholes,' I guess, and depression is the deepest and deadliest foxhole I've been in. It may be the 'dark night of the soul' that the mystics talk about but in depression it is not so much that one becomes lost in the dark as one becomes the dark. ~ Parker J. Palmer

They had lied. Time was not a friend that healed all wounds ;it was the enemy that ravaged and murdered youth. ~ Sidney Sheldon

To rich people it must seem that the ordinary little people..experience human emotions with less intensity and greater indifference ... The fact that we might be going through hell like any other human being, or that our hearts might be filling with rage as Lucien's suffering ravaged our lives, or that we might be slowly going to pieces inside, in the torment of fear and horror that death inspires in everyone, did not cross the mind of anyone on these premises. ~ Muriel Barbery

It's a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art. ~ Elizabeth Alexander

Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn't any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you're taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sign posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever and yeah they might have been trying to kill you too, so you say, What are you goona do?, but really it doesn't matter because by the end you failed at the one good thing you could have done, and the one person you promised would live is dead, and you have seen all things die in more manners than you'd like to recall and for a while the whole thing fucking ravaged your spirit like some deep-down shit, man, that you didn't even realize you had until only the animals made you sad, the husks of dogs filled with explosives and old arty shells and the fucking guts of everything stinking like metal and burning garbage and you walk around and the smell is deep down into you now and yo ~ Kevin Powers

Certain folks start playing Sindh Card despite having ravaged the life of the common Sindhi. ~ Imran Khan

Craving a physical connection, I slide my finger along the back of Rachel's hand. She's asleep. Has been for a while. Curled in the fetal position in the middle of my bed, Rachel wears the mask of a ravaged person. Somehow, I missed the signs: dark circles under her eyes, the clothes that once fit perfectly now hang, her skin so pale it's translucent. ~ Katie McGarry

Rousseau's tormented and tortured nature made him look with eyes of hatred upon people like Diderot, d'Alembert, Helvétius in Paris, who seemed to him fastidious, sophisticated and artificial, incapable of understanding all those dark emotions, all those deep and torturing feelings which ravaged the heart of a true natural man torn from his native soil. ~ Isiah Berlin

Serial killers were hopped-up eyeball fuckers and ravaged inner children. They were scary in the moment and as dismissible as an empty box of popcorn. ~ James Ellroy

If the body were to take the soul to court for the pains and suffering it had endured throughout its life, then if he were to be on the jury for the case he would gladly cast his vote against the soul inasmuch as it had destroyed some parts of the body by negligence or dissipated them by drunkenness, and had ruined and ravaged other parts by its pursuit of pleasures - just as he would blame the careless user if a tool or utensil were in a bad condition. ~ Democritus

I felt ravaged, and with both hands in a fantasy I reached out for her figure as we ran together through the meadow which belonged only to us and to which these others could never be admitted.
"Oh, inocent love," she said even as she drank from me, "oh, innocent innocent love. ~ Anne Rice

It shouldn't make any difference, but Friday and Saturday nights are the worst. They're the worst because the loneliness is magnified. The best you can do is hope that there is someone else like you out there, but if there is, you will never meet this person because she doesn't get out either.
So, you're left with your thoughts, and your thoughts are living people in your brain who call and hang up and lounge around like armed security guards who happen to be beautiful. In between these thoughts, you think about what's going on out there. The girl of your dreams is being ravaged by a man who doesn't have a care in the world. Just to hear her voice would make you happy for a week, but he gets to spend the day and night with her and thinks nothing of it. (…), there are boyfriends and girlfriends, people in love, wide awake. They hang out. They hang out. They hang out. They do nothing worthwhile except each other. Friends, friends, friends. Fiends. Inside jokes. There are so many stupid conversations going on right now. You could be having a meaningful conversation with a taxi driver. You could talk to him about how Travis Bickle's taxi was a metaphor for loneliness. (…) You have a gray tint on your contact lenses. But you have your work. They don't have that. They are cowards. Everyone seems so afraid to be alone. It takes strength to lie there alone and take it. They just want to copulate, and that's their biggest concern of the night. You want a tragedy. An assassination ~ Joey Goebel

Miss Wigglesworth gave him an assessing look out of her remarkable blue eyes.
"You're a libertine? How very unique."
She gave a small fake yawn. She was, in that heartbeat, so perfect and so pure and so very dangerous indeed that all he could do was frighten her away.
"Have you been listening at keyholes, Lazuli? I assure you, they have always been willing, even when I ask that they pretend otherwise."
She blushed deep pink at that – an appealing thing, the blood high under her cheeks, warm and subtle and alive. He wanted to delve into her, with teeth and body until she was ravaged and supine and wrecked and bleeding and his. She did not, as he had expected, break away from him mid-step. The blush was there, to be sure, but she was made of sterner stuff. Any true innocent would be repulsed by the intent in his tone. A woman without experience would fear the implication of his preferences – the certain acknowledgment that there was wolf, nothing but wolf, underneath all his icy indifference. Faith was intrigued. She tilted her head and looked hard at him, her lovely eyes flinty.
"So, you're just a beast who enjoys the chase, nothing else?"
"Exactly so."
She threw it all at him. Like a piece of warm fresh meat, cut and dripping temptation, enough to make him salivate, to bait her trap.
"You can't catch me."
The waltz ended. ~ Gail Carriger

Comeback records always worry me, especially when they're made by one of my heroes, and I'd heard stories about Gil Scott-Heron recently, about drug arrests and prison terms and other troubles. I wasn't prepared for the ravaged shakiness of his voice on this record or the raw spoken word pieces or the dark electronic backgrounds. ~ Will Hermes

You spoke about things they couldn't see and so they laughed. Yet to row up the dark river against the current, to take the unknown road blindly, stubbornly, and to search for words rooted like the knotted olive tree- let them laugh. And to yearn for the other world to inhabit today's suffocating loneliness, this ravaged present- let them be. ~ Giorgos Seferis

To love women, to love our vaginas, to know them and touch them and be familiar with who we are and what we need. To satisfy ourselves, to teach our lovers to satisfy us, to be present in our vaginas, to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humor, to make them visible so they cannot be ravaged in the dark without great consequence, so that our center, our point, our motor, our dream, is no longer detached, mutilated, numb, broken, invisible, or ashamed. ~ Eve Ensler

I am death; I am this blood, these ravaged lands, and this wanton destruction.
– Panchali Draupadi ~ Krishna Udayasankar

Do you want me, Shea?" This time his voice was hesitant, as if for all his strength, for all his power, one word from her would bring him crashing down. He was kneeling at her feet, his beloved face - so ravaged by torment, so beautifully male, so sensually Carpathian - staring up at her. He was lost without her; it was there for her to see. Raw. Stark. His total vulnerability. For just one moment the wind seemed to cease, and the storm held itself still as if the very skies were awaiting her answer.
"You can't possibly know how much I want you, Jacques, even if you're reading my mind. ~ Christine Feehan

I have become my own island state. A ravaged, war-torn land where nothing grows and the horizons are bleak. Yes, that's me. I can interact impersonally at work, but that's it. ~ E.L. James

His face was so ravaged, it was like looking at death itself. Except for the smooth, silvered part of it. By creeping degrees, his human hand lifted. He turned it over, showing a bloody palm. His cracked lips moved.

Beloved.

He could not say the word, but I knew it.

So did his Fool. ~ Robin Hobb

Vasectomy
After the steaming bodies swept
through the hungry streets of swollen cities;
after the vast pink spawning of family
poisoned the rivers and ravaged the prairies;
after the gamble of latex and
diaphragms and pills;
I invoked the white robes, gleaming blades
ready for blood, and, feeling the scourge
of Increase and Multiply, made
affirmation: Yes, deliver us from
complicity.
And after the precision of scalpels,
I woke to a landscape of sunshine where
the catbird mates for life and
maps trace out no alibis - stepped
into a morning of naked truth,
where acts mean what they really are:
the purity of loving
for the sake of love. ~ Philip Appleman

When it shall be desired to enlighten man, let him always have truth laid before him. Instead of kindling his imagination by the idea of those pretended goods that a future state has in reserve for him, let him be solaced, let him be succoured; or, at least, let him be permitted to enjoy the fruit of his labour; let not his substance be ravaged from him by cruel imposts; let him not be discouraged from work, by finding all his labour inadequate to support his existence, let him not be driven into that idleness that will surely lead him on to crime: let him consider his present existence, without carrying his views to that which may attend him after his death: let his industry be excited; let his talents be rewarded; let him be rendered active, laborious, beneficent, and virtuous, in the world he inhabits; let it be shown to him that his actions are capable of having an influence over his fellow men, but not on those imaginary beings located in an ideal world. ~ Paul Henri Thiry D'Holbach

Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, it has been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households. ~ Wendell Berry

For indeed, what is more dire than the evils which today afflict the world? What is more terrible for the discerning than the unfolding events? What is more pitiable and frightening for those who endure them? To see a barbarous people of the desert overrunning another's lands as though they were their own; to see civilization itself being ravaged by wild and untamed beasts whose form alone is human. ~ Maximus The Confessor

He undressed, lay down, put out the light. Two names he whispered into his pillow, the few chaste northern syllables that meant for him his true and native way of love, of longing and happiness; that meant to him life and home, meant simple and heartfelt feeling. He looked back on the years that had passed. He thought of the dreamy adventures of the senses, nerves, and mind in which he had been involved; saw himself eaten up with intellect and introspection, ravaged and paralysed by insight, half worn out by the fevers and frosts of creation, helpless and in anguish of conscience between two extremes, flung to and fro between austerity and lust; raffiné, impoverished, exhausted by frigid and artificially heightened ecstasies; erring, forsaken, martyred, and ill -- and sobbed with nostalgia and remorse. ~ Thomas Mann

One interesting side-effect of the fire in Ankh-Morpork concerns the inn-sewer-ants policy, which left the city through the ravaged roof of the Broken Drum, was wafted high into the discworld's atmosphere on the ensuing thermal, and came to earth several days and a few thousand miles away on an uloruaha bush in the beTrobi islands. The simple, laughing islanders subsequently worshipped it as a god, much to the amusement of their more sophisticated neighbours. Strangely enough the rainfall and harvests in the next few years were almost supernaturally abundant, and this led to a research team being despatched to the islands by the Minor Religions faculty of Unseen University. Their verdict was that it only went to show. * ~ Terry Pratchett

What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn
And tied her with fences and dragged her down ~ Jim Morrison

On the mainland of America, the Wampanoags of Massasoit and King Philip had vanished, along with the Chesapeakes, the Chickahominys, and the Potomacs of the great Powhatan confederacy. (Only Pocahontas was remembered.) Scattered or reduced to remnants were the Pequots, Montauks, Nanticokes. Machapungas, Catawbas, Cheraws, Miamis, Hurons, Eries, Mohawks, Senecas, and Mohegans. (Only Uncas was remembered.) Their musical names remained forever fixed on the American land, but their bones were forgotten in a thousand burned villages or lost in forests fast disappearing before the axes of twenty million invaders. Already the once sweet-watered streams, most of which bore Indian names, were clouded with silt and the wastes of man; the very earth was being ravaged and squandered. To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature - the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, the soil, and the air itself. ~ Dee Brown

It's hard to believe now, Johanna, but love gets easier once the heart is broken. It's a casting away of the shell. Of course it hurts. It's meant to. But broken things are always the beginning of better things. A plant could not grow without first the ground being broken. The most plentiful yields come from a field ravaged by a plow. ~ Michelle Griep

Harrowing
The plow has savaged this sweet field
Misshapen clods of earth kicked up
Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view
Last year's growth demolished by the blade.
I have plowed my life this way
Turned over a whole history
Looking for the roots of what went wrong
Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scared.
Enough. The job is done.
Whatever's been uprooted, let it be
Seedbed for the growing that's to come
I plowed to unearth last year's reasons
The farmer plows to plant a greening season. ~ Parker J. Palmer

Violence ravaged my life. I was a victim of hatred, and I have dedicated my life to reversing that hatred. ~ Michelle Bachelet

I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, poisoned in the bushes,
blown out on the trail; hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn,
"Come in," she said, "I'll give ya shelter from the storm." ~ Bob Dylan

Those who seek to glorify biblical womanhood have forgotten the dark stories. They have forgotten that the concubine of Bethlehem, the raped princess of David's house, the daughter of Jephthah, and the countless unnamed women who lived and died between the lines of Scripture exploited, neglected, ravaged, and crushed at the hand of patriarchy are as much a part of our shared narrative as Deborah, Esther, Rebekah, and Ruth. ~ Rachel Held Evans

Description which is given by the prophet Isaiah of the king of Babylon, when he went down to hell, and all the kings whom he had destroyed, and whose countries he had ravaged, were lying on their beds of fire; and as they saw their great conqueror enter, instead of trembling, they hissed out, Art thou also become weak as we? art thou become like unto us? How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

During good times, it's easy to deride "big government" and talk about the inevitability of cutbacks. But during disasters, most everyone loses their free market religion and wants to know that their government has their backs. And if there is one thing we can be sure of, it's that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods - disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many thousands - are going to keep coming. ~ Naomi Klein

Thus, he had thrust his hands and sex into her, ransacked and ravaged her mouth and rear, but condescended only to place his lips upon her fingertips. ~ Pauline Reage

We are running out of time, the earth is ravaged, our bodies are indefinite; Lorraine reminds us to make use of each moment. ~ Imani Perry

At every new torment which is too hard to bear we feel yet another vein protrude, to unroll its sinuous and deadly length along our temples or beneath our eyes. And thus gradually are formed those terrible ravaged faces, of the old Rembrandt, the old Beethoven, at whom the whole world mocked. And the pockets under the eyes and the wrinkled forehead would not matter much were there not also the suffering of the heart. But since strength of one kind can change into a strength of another kind, since heat which is stored up can become light and the electricity in a flash of lightning can cause a photograph to be taken, since the dull pain in our heart can hoist above itself like a banner the visible permanence of an image for every new grief, let us accept the physical injury which is done to us for the sake of the spiritual knowledge which grief brings; let us submit to the disintegration of our body, since each new fragment which breaks away from it returns in a luminous and significant form to add itself to our work, to complete it at the price of sufferings of which others more richly endowed have no need, to make our work at least more solid as our life crumbles away beneath the corrosive action of our emotions. ~ Marcel Proust

As a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, I understood all too well the despair my colleagues - Republican and Democrat alike - were feeling as Hurricane Sandy ravaged their communities. ~ Cedric Richmond

Venice is a Dorian Gray city. Somewhere up there in the world's attic, there's another place with the haggard, poxed and ravaged face of unspeakable evil. And I suspect it's Cardiff. ~ A.A. Gill

Fire would barrel along that chain like a bullet train, he knew. It surged and jumped and gorged itself. It raced like an animal. It ravaged with inhuman efficiency. ~ Jane Harper

(She) says that she's finding it especially hard to take when these earnest ravaged folks at the lectern say they're `Here But For the Grace of God,' except that's not the strange thing she says, because when Gately nods hard and starts to interject about `It was the same for--' and wants to launch into a fairly standard Boston AA agnostic-soothing riff about the `God' in the slogan being just shorthand for a totally subjective and up-to-you `Higher Power' and AA being merely spiritual instead of dogmatically religious, a sort of benign anarchy of subjective spirit, Joelle cuts off his interjection and says that but that her trouble with it is that `But For the Grace of God' is a subjunctive, a counterfactual, she says, and can make sense only when introducing a conditional clause, like e.g. `But For the Grace of God I would have died on Molly Notkin's bathroom floor,' so that an indicative transposition like `I'm here But For the Grace of God' is, she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it's meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange at the thought that Substances have brought her to the sort of pass where this is the sort of language she has to have Blind Faith in. ~ David Foster Wallace

I hear what they're saying about faith, about the priests at our church and how they relate to women, about the bishops and cardinals above the priests and how they ignore women, about the things they are reading and thinking about. And I realize several things in rapid succession: you can be Catholic and feminist. You can be Catholic and lesbian. You can be Catholic and a straight female and not have kids. You can be Catholic and have children but wonder if they should be Catholic. You can be Catholic and believe in better access to birth control, especially in impoverished and AIDS-ravaged communities. You can be Catholic and female and not be a nun and still be a leader in the church. Women, as it turns out, are part of the priestly class. It's just that they aren't allowed to minister publicly. They do it in places like here, and in hospitals, classrooms, homeless shelters, and in any room, really, where there is someone who needs healing. ~ Kaya Oakes

There are other special problems connected with the discovery of ancient cities. Alexandria was ravaged by fires and street fighting, and its ancient waterfront is underwater. Some discoveries at Pompeii were not revealed for many decades, because the wall paintings are so pornographic. ~ Norman F. Cantor

What ravaged my mind was the thought.

The thought of you. ~ Sreesha Divakaran

As she spoke, I realized that the Reign of Terror had ravaged - still ravaged - generations. A great-grandson of Henry Roan's once spoke of the legacy of the murders: "I think somewhere it is in the back of our minds. We may not realize it, but it is there, especially if it was a family member that was killed. You just have it in the back of your head that you don't trust anybody. ~ David Grann

I am trapped somewhere between consciousness and sleep; a waif-like creature who could easily be carried off by a strong wind, and who would welcome the distraction from her ravaged heart. ~ Kristen Darling

I was an exotic bird traversing an earth ravaged by humanity's poverty of spirit. I ~ Paulo Coelho

I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets
the seventeen who got away. ~ Edward Abbey

I ripped the sketch from the wall.
"Liar."
Edward looked more ravaged than usual. "That is a terrible word, coming from you."
"Yup."
"And not entirely fair."
"You had an affair with this...Woman number 6...Were there five others? Seven, eight, and onward? ~ Melissa Jensen

Since I'm presuming you don't mean you finally bought him a leash, let me say simply that there is a big difference between allowing an animal to ravage you and allowing yourself to be ravaged. One is common. The other is art. It is planned. Crafted, even. Only capable of being done by a master. ~ Richelle Mead

Homo sapiens! The name itself was an irony. They had not been wise at all, but incredibly stupid. Lords of the Earth with their great gray brains, their thinking minds had placed them above all other forms of life. Yet it had not been thought that compelled them to act, but emotion. From the dawn of their evolution they had killed, and conquered, and subdued. They had committed atrocities on others of their kind, ravaged the land, polluted and destroyed, left millions to starve in Third World countries, and finished it all with a nuclear holocaust. The mutants were right. Intelligent creatures did not commit genocide, or murder the environment on which they were dependent. ~ Louise Lawrence

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it. ~ Willa Cather

There are still many souls to be won for Christ," she answered with quiet dignity, eyes downcast - but not, he figured, in humility. "Even here. Perhaps, especially here. Where better to spread his love, than a country just recently ravaged by war?"
"Where better to be kidnapped and sold into slavery, than a country just recently ravaged by war?" with a discernible sneer. ~ V.S. Carnes

That this tragic war that's been waged in and around each of us, this battle that's gone on in our souls - that's ravaged us and beaten us down and clawed away our humanity - has simply been evil trying to destroy who we are. Because evil knows what we will become: Stronger. Wiser. Unstoppable. Don't let him take who you are. Make him fear who you will become. ~ Mary Weber

Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent. A system that denies the poor the legal help they need, that makes wealth and status more important than culpability, must be changed. Walter's case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous. I reflected on how mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities with our hopeless willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us. ~ Bryan Stevenson

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth's ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar. ~ Brad Leithauser

Without ever exactly putting his mind to it, he's come to believe that loss is the standard trajectory. Something new appears in the world-a baby, say, or a car or a house, or an individual shows some special talent-with luck and huge expenditures of soul and effort you might keep the project stoked for a while, but eventually, ultimately, its going down. This is a truth so brutally self-evident that he can't fathom why it's not more widely percieved, hence his contempt for the usual public shock and outrage when a particular situation goes to hell. The war is fucked? Well, duh. Nine-eleven? Slow train coming. They hate our freedoms? Yo, they hate our actual guts! Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity. ~ Ben Fountain

Lust for possession and greed has ravaged the soul of humanity like a great cancer, metastasizing throughout society in the form of a nouveau post-human, consumer hedonism. ~ Bryant McGill

There once were four sisters
Who were exceptionally ordinary,
But desired more than a maiden should desire

Ravaged by their shameful wants
Their loving hearts never bloomed

Instead four wicked brambles
Grew in their place
Each tainted
With poisonous magic ~ Elissa Sussman

His impression was that he had been imprisoned in a shelter deep down in the underworld of his personality, listening and biding his time while insanity rushed like spring flood through the upper layer of his soul, roaring and crashing, leaving terrible destruction in its wake, a deserted, ravaged country. No, he hadn't been crazy, but something inside him had been crazy. ~ Christer Kihlman

It was stuck in a state of collapse, this pit - a tiny, organ-shaped singularity, sucking down the bleeding ravaged bits of who she used to be. ~ Claire Legrand

In the dying embers and blackened twigs of a ravaged forest, who could distinguish where the first spark was lit? Only the arsionist knows the exact location where that match was struck. ~ Lang Leav

In a city once ravaged by storms, where the destitute victimized by ferocious wind and rain and by the collapse of levees - which were inadequately engineered and no warning was given that they might not hold - and where the only crime attributed to those people was that they were too poor to flee and were consequently fired upon and two of them shot dead - not by looters, not by warring gangs, not by manic throngs of frightened or disoriented people like themselves, but by the very men charged to protect them - ~ John Farrow

Gavin had thought tragedy suited her: a young Miss Havisham, wearing the moth-eaten tatters of her frayed hopes like a ravaged bride. She had thought at first that it was the chase he craved, or the thrill of conquest, but while both of those might have been true, it was her humiliation that got him off. Physical, psychological, sexual - his favorite games were the ones he played with her head. ~ Nenia Campbell

Isana stared at Gaius for a moment. Then she said, "How can you live with yourself?"

The First Lord stared at her for a moment, his eyes cold. Then he spoke in a very quiet, precise, measured voice. "I look out my window each day. I look out my window at people who live and breathe. At people who have not been devoured by civil war. At people who have not been ravaged by disease. At people who have not starved to death, who have not been hacked apart by enemies of humanity, at people who are free to lie and steal and plot and complain and accuse and behave in all manner of repugnant ways because the Realm stands. Because law and order stands. Because something other than simple violence shapes the course of their lives. And I look, wife of my son, mother of my heir, at a very few decent people who have had the luxury of living their lives without being called upon to make hideous decisions I would not wish upon my worst enemies, and who consequently find such matters morally appalling when they consider them--because they have not had to be the ones who dealt with them." He took a short, hard swallow of wine. "Feh. Aquitaine thinks me his enemy. The fool. If I truly hated him, I'd give him the Crown. ~ Jim Butcher

God. He was beautiful. A beautiful, troubled man forged by the fires of hell, ravaged by monsters. ~ Christine Feehan

The Girl Guides kept up their activities as well, giving Elizabeth an unexpectedly democratic experience when refugees from London's bomb-ravaged East End were taken in by families on the Windsor estate and joined the troop. The girls earned their cooking badges, with instruction from a castle housekeeper, by baking cakes and scones (a talent Elizabeth would later display for a U.S. president) and making stew and soup. With their Cockney accents and rough ways, the refugees gave the future Queen no deference, calling her Lilibet, the nickname even daughters of aristocrats were forbidden to use, and compelling her to wash dishes in an oily tub of water ~ Sally Bedell Smith

Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work. A land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending. ~ James Howard Kunstler

Some sample lyrics I think I catch: "My engine races up to seventh gear; wrap your legs around my engine, dear ... The tunnel's dark, but the ground is wet; I lubricate it with my dripping sweat!"
Or, something vaguely disturbing and gross like that; it's hard to tell with the wailing guitars and the front man screaming through his ravaged vocal chords. ~ Rusty Fischer

Wherever there was a scrap of soil amongst the ravaged crags, emaciated trees struggled to cling on: a poignant metaphor for the way so many Nepalis eke out an existence, defiantly surviving on less than nothing. ~ Jane Wilson-Howarth

... of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines ... Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred ... As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God, but the face of his enemy. It is ... a faith that ... has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. ~ David Bentley Hart

I'll never walk again, will I?" I asked, looking woefully down at my ravaged feet.
"You will," Jesse said. "Just not for a day or two. Those burns look very painful. They'll need butter."
"Butter?" I wrinkled my nose.
"The best treatment for burns like those is butter," Jesse said.
"Uh," I said. "Maybe back in 1850. Now we tend to rely on the healing power of Neosporin. There's a tube of it in my medicine cabinet behind you. ~ Meg Cabot

The Forty Rules of Love is a wise, joyous page-turner ... and one that speaks urgently to our war-ravaged times. ~ Thrity Umrigar

Libraries were a solace in the Depression. They were warm and dry and useful and free; they provided a place for people to be together in a desolate time. You could feel prosperous at the library. There was so much there, such an abundance, when everything else felt scant and ravaged, and you could take any of it home for free. Or you could just sit at a reading table and take it all in. ~ Susan Orlean

were being ravaged by her brother. In their agreement Amadeus ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

As a woman ravaged by intense pain and the loss of virtually all my life's goals, I have been transformed by suffering and love. And brought to a higher place. ~ Cynthia Toussaint

The Civil War ravaged the Southern states, while leaving the North untouched. ~ Eustace Mullins

Further, Dr. Gold said with a straight face, the pill at optimum dosage could have the side effect of impotence. Until that moment, although I'd had some trouble with his personality, I had not thought him totally lacking in perspicacity; now I was not all sure. Putting myself in Dr. Gold's shoes, I wondered if he seriously thought that this juiceless and ravaged semi-invalid with the shuffle and the ancient wheeze woke up each morning from his Halcion sleep eager for carnal fun. ~ William Styron

He's pressing me to his chest. I melt. Oh, this is where I want to be
I rest my head against him, and he kisses my hair repeatedly. This is home. He smells of linen, fabric softener, body wash, and my favourite smell - Christian. For a moment, I allow myself the illusion that all will be well, and it soothes my ravaged soul ~ E.L. James

Individuals for whom no orthodox cure is available surely are entitled to select a health care approach ... This right (is) specifically within,,,the 1st, 4th, 5th, 9th, and 14th amendments to the (US) Constitution ... To be insensitive to the very fundamental civil liberties ... ( the choice ... of the person whose body is being ravaged (by disease), is to display slight understanding of the essence of our free society and its constitutional underpinnings. ~ Luther L. Bohanon

His angelic wings blackened when the dark fury assailed his mind. Summoning new strength from the unholy power that ravaged his soul, grieved to drastic levels of desperation by the tainting of the holy light within him, he combated ally and enemy alike, bent on destroying both sides in order to ensure the quelling of the dark energies there and then. For days and nights, the lone warrior bathed himself in the blood of angels and demons. And when it was over, he stood alone on contaminated land, with a contaminated soul. He was banned forever from Heaven and not even Hell had space for a creature which seemed to cherish Oblivion over Pandemonium. The dark angel, not so far removed from his former self as his superiors seemed to believe, died on the edge of the cliffs, of utter loneliness and despair. ~ T.A. Miles

I could envision it all to clearly: Stuart or Debbie finding the dented door off its hinges, lying in the snow. "She came in, ravaged the boy, stole plastic bags, and ripped off the door in her escape," the police would say in the APB. "Probably making her way to bust her parents out of jail. ~ Maureen Johnson

She saw it in her mind's eye like a movie playing, the haunting memories from her childhood she couldn't seem to shake blending together into one raw, aching image. Her mother lying in a darkened room for days, her face swollen with tears. The inevitable ashtray overrun with ashes, the acrid scent of pot smoke in the air. The bed or couch or futon may have been different from year to year as Evie moved them around from apartment to commune to funky cottage, but her mother was always the same. Falling hard for some man, immersing herself in romantic fantasies that were crushed when the guy left. And the guy always left. Her mother's inability to get a grasp on reality had too often left Mischa to care for her younger sister, to care for her mother, from too young an age. She remembered shaking Evie awake, trying to get her to eat. To get up and take a shower, take her and Raine to school. No kid should have to do that. No kid should have to witness the way Evie had allowed herself to be ravaged by love. No woman should allow that to happen. ~ Eve Berlin

On clear days we trudged through White Forest, a man-made woods of metal trees and plastic leaves constructed in the boon years of Brezhnev when the party boss's wife had grown nostalgic for the birches of her youth. By the time we trudged beneath them, however, the years had ravaged both the forest and the party boss's wife, and the plastic leaves above were as sagging and liver-spotted as her face. We went on. The mud was a mustard we plodded through. On the forest's far side we looked across the expanse of sulfurous waste stretching to the horizon. We shouted. We proclaimed. We didn't need to whisper out here. For a few short weeks in July, red wildflowers pushed through the oxidized waste and the whole earth simmered with apocalyptic beauty. ~ Anthony Marra

O Dionysus, we feel you near,
stirring like molten lava
under the ravaged earth,
flowing from the wounds of your trees
in tears of sap,
screaming with the rage
of your hunted beasts. ~ Euripides

She was like some kind of balm that made all the ravaged and torn pieces of my soul feel less raw. ~ Jay Crownover

I often think of the words of the great Buddhist master Padmasambhava: "Those who believe they have plenty of time get ready only at the time of death. Then they are ravaged by regret. But isn't it far too late?" What more chilling commentary on the modern world could there be than most people die unprepared for death, as they have lived, unprepared for life? ~ Sogyal Rinpoche

Deep in the heart of the hot, wet African rainforest, there lives a tribe of peacemakers who share a multiplicity of pleasures and make a very special kind of love. South of the sprawling Congo River, in the midst of war-ravaged territory, some 2,000 miles from the arid Ethiopian desert where the oldest human fossils have been found, lies this lush and steamy jungle paradise, the only natural habitat of the bonobo. ~ Susan Block

It is not aloofness, superiority. It's a protection. Who in this ravaged battlefield doesn't want to gather close her comrades? ~ Megan Abbott

Once upon a time black male "cool" was defined by the ways in which black men confronted hardships of life without allowing their spirits to be ravaged. They took the pain of it and used it alchemically to turn the pain into gold. That burning process required high heat. Black male cool was defined by the ability to withstand the heat and remain centered. It was defined by black male willingness to confront reality, to face the truth, and bear it not by adopting a false pose of cool while feeding on fantasy; not by black male denial or by assuming a "poor me" victim identity. It was defined by individual black males daring to self-define rather than be defined by others. ~ Bell Hooks

Pathetic Earthlings ... There's not enough makeup in the universe to cover those hideous, age-ravaged potato sacks that you call faces. ~ Mary Kay Ash

You see a virus very differently when it's caught and suspended on a slab of glass than when you're observing how it's ravaged a fellow human being. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

More than 35 percent of the children exposed to a single traumatic event will develop serious mental health problems .. The real crisis of Katrina is the hundreds of thousands of ravaged, displaced and traumatized children. ~ Bruce D. Perry

I'm here, Papa," she whispered, saying the words she had longed to say for her entire life. "I'm here, and I'm never going to leave you again."
He made a sound of contentment and closed his eyes. Just as Evie thought he had fallen asleep, he murmured, "Where shall we walk first today, lovey? The biscuit baker, I s'pose..."
Realizing that he imagined this was one of her long-ago childhood visits, Evie replied softly, "Oh, yes." Hastily she knuckled away the excess moisture from her eyes. "I want an iced bun... and a cone of broken biscuits... and then I want to come back here and play dice with you."
A rusty chuckle came from his ravaged throat, and he coughed a little. "Let Papa take forty winks before we leaves... there's a good girl..."
"Yes, sleep," Evie murmured, turning the cloth over on his forehead. "I can wait, Papa. ~ Lisa Kleypas