The Wasteland Quotes

The wasteland that is your memory now comes under the absolute dictatorship of idols too terrible to mention. ~ Jack Henry Abbott

When I reflect that one man, armed only with his own physical and moral resources, was able to cause this land of Canaan to spring from the wasteland, I am convinced that in spite of everything, humanity is admirable. But when I compute the unfailing greatness of spirit and the tenacity of benevolence that it must have taken to achieve this result, I am taken with an immense respect for that old and unlearned peasant who was able to complete a work worthy of God. ~ Jean Giono

No Arturo, there never was a sea. You dream and you wish, but
you go on through the wasteland. You will never see the sea again. It was a
myth you once believed.-But, I have to smile, for the salt of the sea is in my
blood, and there may be ten thousand roads over the land, but they shall never
confuse me, for my heart's blood will ever return to its beautiful source. ~ John Fante

He keeps going, going, going on; his people groan and fall one after the other, but he keeps on going, going and in the end, perishes himself, but still remains the despot and tsar of the desert because the cross over his grave is visible to caravans thirty-forty miles away and reigns over the wasteland. ~ Anton Chekhov

If we cannot relate anymore to the world that we live in, we are bound to remain like orphans, forlorn in the wasteland of our desires. ("Non mais, t'as vu l'heure !") ~ Erik Pevernagie

The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men. The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by men because it offered them nothing. There was nothing to attract them. There was nothing to exploit. The desert was the region in which the Chosen People had wandered for forty years, cared for by God alone. They could have reached the Promised Land in a few months if they had traveled directly to it. God's plan was that they should learn to love Him in the wilderness and that they should always look back on the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone. The desert was created simply to be itself, not to be transformed by men into something else. ~ Thomas Merton

Paul Brunton was surely one of the finest mystical flowers to grow on the wasteland of our secular civilization. What he has to say is important to us all. ~ Georg Feuerstein

Behind me on the road through the wasteland lies the corpse of an imprisoned child. ~ James Broughton

Eventually we will all wither and die in the wasteland of logic and science. ~ Julie Kagawa

When my father died and was buried in a chapel overlooking Portsmouth - the same chapel in which General Eisenhower had prayed for success the night before D-Day in 1944 - I gave the address from the pulpit and selected as my text a verse from the epistle of Saul of Tarsus, later to be claimed as "Saint Paul," to the Philippians (chapter 4, verse 8): Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report: if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. I chose this because of its haunting and elusive character, which will be with me at the last hour, and for its essentially secular injunction, and because it shone out from the wasteland of rant and complaint and nonsense and bullying which surrounds it. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Insofar as I think about postmodernism at all, and it doesn't exactly keep me awake at nights, I think of it as something that happens to one, not a style one affects. We're postmoderns because we're not modernists. The modernist writers-Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams-spoke with a kind of vatic authority: they were really the last of the Romantics, for whom authorship itself was like being a solitary prophet in the wasteland. ~ Jonathan Raban

[The Internet,] A Superhighway through the Wasteland? ~ Mitchell Kapor

I asked Raghav, as we were looking over the wasteland, if the Muslims they burnt would beg for their lives. "Yes they would say, Have mercy on us. But we were filled with such hate; we had Radhabi Chawl on our minds. And even if there was one who said, Let him go, there would be ten others saying, No kill him. And so we had to kill him.

"But what if he was innocent?"

Raghav looked at me. "His biggest crime was that he was Muslim. ~ Suketu Mehta

Listen for somebody trying to talk to you ...
(Silence)
This from that very pit of night, naked in the wasteland, the ice-wind moaning his only covering, alone in the freezing darkness under a sky of chill obsidian
Whoever tried to talk to me? When did I ever listen? When was I ever other than just myself, caring only for myself? ~ Iain M. Banks

Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend ... when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that's present - love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure - the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience Heaven on earth. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

Lost in the wasteland, Ashbery was found by a light flickering up from between the fractured paving stones. Its beams were bitterly cold, and sticky in a way light had no right to be, adhering to his sleeve and hand before fading away. Intrigued, he tracked its source from one eruption to another, each point brighter than the one before. ~ Clive Barker

As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests' worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development was laid on the wasteland of Midtown West like slabs of gold bullion. ~ Carolyn Jess-Cooke

The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as 'the wasteland.' The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer ... It's the world of people living inauthentic lives - doing what they are supposed to do. ~ Joseph Campbell

Waste is unveiling, because it persists in showing itself as waste, and as our waste. If waste is the result of our indifference to nature, it is also the way we experience the indifference of nature. Waste is therefore a reminder that society is a species of culture. Looking about at the wasteland into which we have converted our habitation, we can plainly see that nature is not whatever we want it to be; but we can also plainly see that society is only what we want it to be. ~ James P. Carse

I will carefully stand guard and if anyone tries to hurt someone in the camp again, I will carefully spill their guts across the wasteland floor and carefully wait for the vultures to feast on the remains. ~ C.J. Redwine

Free will was the greatest gift ever offered. God is not responsible for what we did with it. We are. - The Old Man And The Wasteland ~ Nick Cole

She pivoted right, and sensed the vast, open space of the wasteland stretching before her under the opaque sky, a darkness as thin and final as the velvet lining of a shroud (360-361). ~ Caragh M. O'Brien

In the wasteland of metro Boston, at thirteen, fourteen, his big dream had been of a gun to his own head, putting him out of his misery - a misery that by sophomore year of college was indistinguishable from everybody else's. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Ahead of them, the tunnel was lit by a narrow hole in the ceiling that led to the wasteland above. Fireheart could see many cats huddled together in the gray light - warriors and elders, queens and kits, all pitifully thin. A cold breeze blew relentlessly through the hole in the roof, stirring the thin fur on the skinny bodies. Fireheart shuddered, for the breeze carried to him the stench of sickness and crowfood. ~ Erin Hunter

T. S. Eliot taught us you can write about your nervous breakdown, but call it 'The Wasteland' and make it big and crazy enough to hide behind. ~ Mary Jo Bang

... you know that Sunday-night feeling, where the dread of reality sinks in, that you've mismanaged your time and now the anxiety of homework and the wasteland of early mornings and school stretches ahead of you? Well, I hope he has that feeling every minute of every day of his entire life. ~ Emery Lord

A sullied green "S" stood out on a graying backdrop that made for a road marker up there. We called it the wasteland. ~ Katherine McIntyre

Suck it up! A foolish grumble of advice. Why would I want to suck it up? Why draw it in to let it fester and rot internally until it cankers my insides?

I dare offer wiser words―spit it out! Weep, wail, and raise your voice to the heavens as fresh wounds bleed dry! And then cast it all to the wasteland of dead concerns to be consumed by vultures and maggots. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Knowledge is awareness, and to it there are many paths, not all of them paved with logic. But sometimes one is guided through the maze by intuition. One is led by something felt in the wind, something seen in the stars, something that calls from the wasteland to the spirit.
To receive the message, the mental pores must be open. And we white men in striving for our success, in seeking to build a new world from what lies around us, sometimes forget that there are other ways, sometimes forget the Lonesome Gods of the far places, the gods who live on the empty sea, who dance with the dust devils and who wait quietly in the shadows under the cliffs where ancient men once marked their passing with hands. ~ Louis L'Amour

Burning, Burning! Fire in the sky.
No way from the wasteland and we all gonna die. ~ Nick Mad

When you don't hear others, you don't imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters. ~ Rebecca Solnit

And yet
to wine, to opium even, I prefer
the elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;
and in the wasteland of desire
your eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst. ~ Charles Baudelaire

Trust me, this whole freakout is probably just hormonal. You only gave birth, what, a week ago? Your body's still, like, a wasteland of chemical imbalance. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

In this rural wasteland I feel I am not myself. ~ Abigail George

I am in a constant cycle of selling my clothes at Wasteland and buying from Goodwill. Once or twice a year, I go through my closet and donate everything to Goodwill. It feels like I am recycling my fashion. ~ Jenny Lewis

Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing. ~ Henry Rollins

Whoever debases others is debasing himself. ~ James Baldwin

Television is a vast wasteland. ~ Newton N. Minow

A wasteland of embarrassment and social upheaval can be neatly avoidedby following a single precept in life:
Do not lie ~ Sam Harris

Mars is a barren wasteland and I am completely alone here. I already knew that, of course. But there's a difference between knowing it and really experiencing it. ~ Andy Weir

She had always looked for sparks of competence, like a diamond prospector in an unpromising wasteland. ~ Ayn Rand

Even if such beauty wasn't meant to be in a world so fallen as ours, that didn't take away from its beauty. It only made it more beautiful. ~ Kyle West

There was no In-N-Out in Connecticut, because clearly that state was an inhospitable wasteland. ~ Morgan Matson

Iran--this strange and depressing place. This Ayatollah wasteland is where I gather with friends and watch their eyes scream, Let me out! ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

Don't cry
Don't raise your eye
Its only teenage wasteland. ~ Pete Townshend

He does not exist here, with me, but flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken. ~ Haruki Murakami

One day you will have vengeance, little half-blood. You will stand upon a wasteland littered with your dead kin and you will be free. ~ Pippa DaCosta

I've got no other home to go to, not anymore. When I look at England now I see a dead place, Rupert. A wasteland. I won't live in a wasteland. I'd rather die in paradise. ~ Lev Grossman

Out of abysses of Illiteracy, Through labyrinths of Lies, Across wastelands of Disease ... We advance Out of dead-ends of Poverty, Through wilderness of Superstition, Across barricades of Jim Crowism ... We advance. ~ Melvin B. Tolson

I will show you fear in a handful of dust. ~ T. S. Eliot

I'm really looking forward to seeing what life brings to me. ~ Rihanna

But I feel alive with a life that's not mine
Your law is a stream in this wasteland; my lifeline. ~ Citizens