Tornadoes Quotes

I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don't think I'd be waving those flags [gay pride flags] in God's face if I were you, This is not a message of hate , this is a message of redemption. But a condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It'll bring about terrorist bombs; it'll bring earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor. ~ Pat Robertson

Many Christians do not believe God sends tornadoes. But they do believe that God walks with His children through the storms, that He sends His people to help after the storms, and that with and through God, there is always hope. ~ Adam Hamilton

Out here in the Pacific, they have typhoons and hurricanes that blow over 200 miles an hour. We have tornadoes and hurricanes back home, but I don't worry about them. The mortgage on my house is so heavy that nothing could budge it. ~ Bob Hope

A nation that spends billions to fix international problems will not have much left over for the victims of tornadoes in Oklahoma. ~ Deacon Jones

Nurtured by negative circumstances, braiding raging tornadoes in her hair, she held her head high, wearing her weathered poetry with pride. ~ Curtis Tyrone Jones

They did a lot of cleaning in their house, which I considered to be a sign of immoral parenting. The job of parents, as I saw it, was to watch television and step into a child's life only when absolutely necessary, like in the event of a tornado or a potential kidnapping. ~ Haven Kimmel

Six Seconds should be Rick Mofina's breakout thriller. It moves like a tornado. ~ James Patterson

The widest cause of secularization may be the steady change of thinking so that there is the expectation that reason and a consideration of cause and effect will help with explanations. Supernatural power began to be removed from explanations of the process of life or society in the seventeenth century, and although there may be a nod towards astrology or the crossed finger today, superstition is not seriously used in decision making ...
Scientific thinking, which similarly developed in the seventeenth century, has been influential in bringing this change. We now see that tornadoes and earthquakes have rational explanations in terms of climatology and seismology rather than as divine punishments. Most people when deciding whether to take a new job, embark on a divorce, or simply plan a holiday will not seek divine guidance, but rather discuss with themselves or others the issues of cause and effect. ~ Jim Herrick

You might be a redneck if ... you've been on TV more than times describing the sound of a tornado. ~ Jeff Foxworthy

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination. ~ Edward Dahlberg

The Weather Channel is not about weather; it is about the world! It is about how weather affects us all, our entire global economy, health, happiness, spirit. The channel delves with great detail into weather phenomena of all different kinds - hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, monsoons, hail, rain, lightning storms - and they especially delight in the confluence of multiple phenomena. ~ Garth Stein

But I'm going to prove there's a link between storms that rapid-cycle and ones that produce tornadoes because I'm a rapid cycler myself. ~ Jenna Blum

As a young girl, I saw commitment in my grandmother, who helped Grandpa homestead our farm on the Kansas prairie. Somehow they outlasted the Dust Bowl, the Depression, and the tornadoes that terrorize the Great Plains. ~ Sheri L. Dew

So confident am I that the number of deaths from violent storms will continue to decline that I challenge Mr. McKibben - or Al Gore, Paul Krugman, or any other climate-change doomsayer - to put his wealth where his words are. I'll bet $10,000 that the average annual number of Americans killed by tornadoes, floods and hurricanes will fall over the next 20 years. Specifically, I'll bet that the average annual number of Americans killed by these violent weather events from 2011 through 2030 will be lower than it was from 1991 through 2010. ~ Donald J. Boudreaux

Claire believed she was teetering literally on the edge of sanity. A strong wind was all it would take to blow her one way or the other. Iowa had its share of storms, strong winds and tornadoes, they were all unpredictable. It made an ironic parallel for her life. ~ Aleatha Romig

We prefer to imagine brutal wars and atrocities as events that "just happen" every now and then, much like tornadoes or lightning strikes; this metaphor suggests that we can't generalize from them, since they are radically discontinuous with ordinary life. But wars and atrocities do not "just happen": societies and individuals slide into them, little by little, one tiny decision or omission at a time. (p214) ~ Rosa Brooks

Here am I, a little animal called a man--a bit of vitalized matter, one hundred and sixty-five pounds of meat and blood, nerve, sinew, bones, and brain,--all of it soft and tender, susceptible to hurt, fallible, and frail. I strike a light back-handed blow on the nose of an obstreperous horse, and a bone in my hand is broken. I put my head under the water for five minutes, and I am drowned. I fall twenty feet through the air, and I am smashed. I am a creature of temperature. A few degrees one way, and my fingers and ears and toes blacken and drop off. A few degrees the other way, and my skin blisters and shrivels away from the raw, quivering flesh. A few additional degrees either way, and the life and the light in me go out. A drop of poison injected into my body from a snake, and I cease to move--for ever I cease to move. A splinter of lead from a rifle enters my head, and I am wrapped around in the eternal blackness.

Fallible and frail, a bit of pulsating, jelly-like life--it is all I am. About me are the great natural forces--colossal menaces, Titans of destruction, unsentimental monsters that have less concern for me than I have for the grain of sand I crush under my foot. They have no concern at all for me. They do not know me. They are unconscious, unmerciful, and unmoral. They are the cyclones and tornadoes, lightning flashes and cloud-bursts, tide-rips and tidal waves, undertows and waterspouts, great whirls and sucks and eddies, earthquakes and volcanoes, ~ Jack London

Horror grows impatient, rhetorically, with the Stoic fatalism of Ecclesiastes. That we are all going to die, that death mocks and cancels every one of our acts and attainments and every moment of our life histories, this knowledge is to storytelling what rust is to oxidation; the writer of horror holds with those who favor fire. The horror writer is not content to report on death as the universal system of human weather; he or she chases tornadoes. Horror is Stoicism with a taste for spectacle. ~ Michael Chabon

Every day, it seems, a new extreme weather catastrophe happens somewhere in America, and the media's all over it, profiling the ordinary folks wiped out by forest fires, droughts, floods, massive sinkholes, tornadoes. ~ Jane Velez-Mitchell

You know how it feels right before a tornado hits? I mean when the sky's still clear, but the wind's starting to cool off and change direction. You know something's coming, but you don't always know what. That's how things feel to me right now. -Zoey Redbird ~ P.C. Cast

This tornado is in Oklahoma so clearly it has been ordered to only target conservatives. ~ Lizz Winstead

Like a tornado swirling around you, you are the eye of the storm. A front row seat to the destruction of everything you worked so hard to build. But like all tornadoes, the rain will halt and the winds will calm. The pieces that remain from the cataclysmic destruction of your former self, will soon dissolve and you will find that the only thing that was destroyed was the illusion, the attachment. Allowing for you to rebuild a new, a stronger, a more mature, and spiritually evolved you, that you didn't even know existed. So have faith, this too shall pass. ~ L.J. Vanier

Just listen, okay?" He grabs my shoulders before I can move past him, and I know, I know that something huge is happening, the kind of thing that takes worlds apart and remakes them. Hurricanes and tornadoes and boys with blue eyes. ~ Lauren Oliver

I honestly don't think about myself; it's more about my kids. They were both born in L.A., and they're like little beams of sun, little tornadoes, and they can't be in a confined space. And one of the things I love most about L.A. is the freedom there. ~ Liberty Ross

Since everyone around you agrees ever since there were people on earth that land is value, or labor is value, or learning is value, or title, degree, necklaces, murex shells, the ownership of slaves. Everyone knows bees sting and ghosts haunt and giving your robes away humiliates your rivals. That the enemies are barbarians. That wise men swim through the rock of the earth; that houses breed filth, airstrips attract airplanes, tornadoes punish, ancestors watch, and you can buy a shorter stay in purgatory. The black rock is holy, or the scroll; or the pangolin is holy, the quetzal is holy, this tree, water, rock, stone, cow, cross, or mountain--and it's all true. The Red Sox. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows. ~ Annie Dillard

So far this spring, 59 American communities have been flattened by tornadoes. Nobody has helped. ~ Gordon Sinclair

The biggest challenge has been simulating a tornado with wind machines and dirt and debris. Right when you walk on the set, you feel the energy of a tornado. But the hardest thing is trying to get dialogue out in all of that. ~ Mark-Paul Gosselaar

I have little compassion for people in trailer parks who refuse to move after getting tornado warnings. How hard is it for them to relocate? Their houses have wheels. ~ Carlos Mencia

While devastation created by nature, such as wildfire, tornadoes, and hurricanes, can be far reaching and cause cataclysmic losses, the trauma that haunts our dreams and is the most feared is man-made. Acts of violence and depravity committed by one human being on another are personal in nature and leave those affected by them asking the questions, "Why did it happen to me?" or "Why did it have to happen at all?" With the advent of technology, the general public can view a new atrocity every day on the nightly news somewhere close to their community. ~ Karen Rodwill Solomon

Bring the pure wine of
love and freedom.
But sir, a tornado is coming.
More wine, we'll teach this storm
A thing or two about whirling. ~ Rumi

How does a person exist after their world has been torn to pieces? It must be possible. People do it all the time. After all the floods and tornadoes and wars that have hit the world with inexorable violence, people somehow scrape up their lives and begin again. ~ R.L. Martinez

I learned to move silently in the background, a dirty, neglected little kid with no voice, no wants, and who made no trouble so as not to call the wrath of the eight or so tweaking adults who lived there down on me. I drifted, faded, and became a listless, ghostlike scavenger who took what she could get. I lived mostly in my head and for a while actually convinced myself that I was a survivor of one of those catastrophic earthquakes or tornadoes I used to see on the Weather Channel,a dazed, bewildered, and emotionless girl picking her way through an endless landscape of foul and stinking rubble to try and come out on the other side. ~ Laura Wiess

Global warming creates volatility. I feel it when I'm flying. The storms are more volatile. We are paying the price in more hurricanes and tornadoes. ~ Debbie Stabenow

I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain. I believe this is how Thomas Stone materialized in my life. If that's not the explanation, then I must invoke a disinterested God who leaves us to our own devices, neither causing nor preventing tornadoes or pestilence, but a God who will now and then stick his thumb on the spinning wheel so that a father who put a continent between himself and his sons should find himself in the same room as one of them. ~ Abraham Verghese

We are tornadoes that pick up fragments with the most varied historical and biological origins. This makes of us -- thankfully -- fickle agglomerations that maintain a fragile equilibrium, that are inconsistent and complex, that can't be reduced to any fixed framework that does not inevitably leave out a great deal. Which is why the more effective stories resemble ramparts from which one can gaze out at everything that has been excluded. ~ Elena Ferrante

Tornadoes are so unpredictable that you never know what's going to happen. From the distance they are an amazing piece of nature. Up close they are deadly. ~ Jessica Madden

Some people are born with tornadoes in their lives, but constellations in their eyes. Other people are born with stars at their feet, but their souls are lost at sea. ~ Nikita Gill

Strokes cause almost twice as many deaths as all accidents combined, but 80% of respondents judged accidental death to be more likely. Tornadoes were seen as more frequent killers than asthma, although the latter cause 20 times more deaths. Death by lightning was judged less likely than death from botulism even though it is 52 times more frequent. Death by disease is 18 times as likely as accidental death, but the two were judged about equally likely. Death by accidents was judged to be more than 300 times more likely than death by diabetes, but the true ratio is 1:4. The lesson is clear: estimates ~ Daniel Kahneman

Seasons are like life. Some seasons are better than others. Some have more sun and rainbows. Others have storms and tornadoes. Some have both. You have to accept that, and bring colour and light to the season you're in as best you can, and always look forward to the next season. ~ Cathy Lamb

I ate sitting in the kitchen in silence, thinking about future. I saw tornadoes, hurricanes, tidal waves, fire. Then I washed the frying pan, plate and silverware, brushed away the crumbs and unbolted the door to the courtyard. Before I left, I turned out the light. ~ Roberto Bolano

The population of his feelings
Could not be governed
By the authorities

He had reasons why
Reason disobeyed him
And voted him out of office

Anxiety
His constant companion
Made it difficult to rest

Unruly party of one
Forget about truces or compromises
The barricades will be stormed

Every day was an emergency
Every day called for another emergency
Meeting of the cabinet

In his country
There were scenes
Of spectacular carnage

Hurricanes welcomed him
He adored typhoons and tornadoes
Furies unleashed

Houses lifted up
And carried to the sea
Uncontained uncontainable

Unbolt the doors
Fling open the gates
Here he comes

Chaotic wind of the gods
He was trouble
But he was our trouble ~ Edward Hirsch

I do not use airplanes. They strike me as unsporting. You can have an automobile accident-and survive. You can be on a sinking ship-and survive. You can be in an earthquake, fire, volcanic eruption, tornado, what you will-and survive. But if your plane crashes, you do not survive. And I say the heck with it. ~ Isaac Asimov

If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?
In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of any meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Just about every scientist outside the White House believes climate change is real, is serious, and is accelerated by the continue release of carbon dioxide. If the prospect of melting ice caps, rising sea levels, changing weather patterns, more frequent hurricanes, more violent tornadoes, endless dust storms, decaying forests, dying coral reefs, and increase in respiratory illness and insect-borne diseases - if all that doesn't constitute a serious threat, I don't know what does. ~ Barack Obama

Your dynamic with everyone will change when you graduate high school. High school is a pit of despair. It's a swirling tornado of insecurities and there's really nothing good about it. ~ Kristen Bell

I wonder if we might pledge ourselves to remember what life is really all about - not to be afraid that we're less flashy than the next, not to worry that our influence is not that of a tornado, but rather that of a grain of sand in an oyster! Do we have that kind of patience? ~ Fred Rogers

Failure is not always a bad thing. You just have to be smart while you're in the middle of it. You're in the eye of the tornado of like disappointment to know that it's just a storm and it'll pass. ~ Pharrell Williams

My grandmother was the greatest cook in the world. She could just go in there, the whole kitchen would look like a tornado hit it and then she'd come out with the best food. Then she'd sit at the table and she wouldn't eat! ~ Edie Brickell

There is a safe spot within every tornado. My job is to find it. ~ David Copperfield

There are two big forces at work, external and internal. We have very little control over external forces such as tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, disasters, illness and pain. What really matters is the internal force. How do I respond to those disasters? Over that I have complete control. ~ Leo Buscaglia

It can hit at any time [anxiety/panic attack]. You feel like you're in an open field, and there's a tornado coming at you. And you're just consumed by it. ~ Kim Basinger

What man's life is not overtaken by one or more of those tornadoes that send us out of the course, and fling us on rocks to shelter as best we may? ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

I was very focused, driven, rigid, work-oriented. I didn't care about having a family or making a home. I didn't think about kids. It's not that I didn't want those things; I just didn't think about them. ~ Susan Downey

We understand tornadoes scientifically, but it still feels supernatural. The randomness makes it feel supernatural. ~ Michael Koryta

There is something about nature out of control that touches a primal terror. We are used to believing that we're the masters of our domain, and that God has given us this earth to rule over. We need this illusion like a good night-light. The truth is more fearsome: we are as frail as young trees in tornadoes, and our beloved homes are one flood away from driftwood. We plant our roots in trembling earth, we live where mountains rose and fell and prehistoric seas burned away in mist. We and the towns we have built are not permanent; the earth itself is a passing train. When you stand in muddy water that is rising toward your waist and you hear people shouting against the darkness and see their figures struggling to hold back the currents that will not be denied, you realize the truth of it: we will not win, but we cannot give up. ~ Robert McCammon

[Belafonte] was a good teacher and looked after me. He said, 'You have such great talent, you must try not to be a tornado - be like a submarine. It was good advice when I found myself speaking at the UN Committee Against Apartheid and then the UN General Assembly. ~ Miriam Makeba

For home had a way of shifting, of changing shape and temperature. Home was homeless. It could exist anywhere, because its only substance was familiarity. If it was broken by long journeys or tornadoes it emerged again, reinvented itself with new decor, new idiosyncrasies of morning, noon and dusk, and old routines. ~ Diana Evans

There is that unpredictability of the seasons that I enjoy. I like the threat of a tornado. I like the threat of four feet of snow. ~ Paul Westerberg

We have become a force of nature Not long ago, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought, forest fires, even earthquakes and volcanic explosions were accepted as "natural disasters or "acts of God." But now, we have joined God, powerful enough to influence these events. ~ David Suzuki

Somewhere a woman is praying her toddler wins a beauty pageant. I say this because sometimes people wonder why God lets tornadoes happen. ~ Dana Gould

Guys like Henry and his buddies were an accident waiting to happen; the little kids' version of floods or tornadoes or gallstones. ~ Stephen King

And how deeply do I let business considerations affect [screenwriting] choices that might otherwise be more or less esthetic? ... Do I choose the upbeat rather than the downer ending because I know it will score better at the preview? Can the idea be sold in a single sentence? Can it compete with space aliens and tornadoes and missions impossible? ~ Edward Zwick

Growth is a lot like Mother Nature. She can be very good and she can be very bad: think hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and earthquakes. ~ Edward D. Hess

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo. ~ Sylvia Plath

I'm happier than a tornado in a trailer park. ~ Larry The Cable Guy

There are tornadoes in my head sometimes"…
"I know," he said as his lips met mine. "But your storms, they don't scare me. ~ Kate Canterbary

Come on! Come on!" Leo urged. He made the mistake of glancing back. Only a stone's throw away, the first Maenad appeared out of the woods. Her eyes were pure red. She grinned with a mouth full of fangs, then slashed her talon fingernails at the nearest tree and sliced it in half. Little tornadoes of leaves swirled around her as if even the air were going crazy. "Come, demigod!" she called. "Join me in the revels!" Leo knew it was insane, but her words buzzed in his ears. Part of him wanted to run toward her. Whoa, boy, he told himself. Golden Rule for Demigods: Thou shalt not Hokey Pokey with psychos. Still, he took a step toward the Maenad. ~ Rick Riordan

MOTHER – By Ted Kooser

Mid April already, and the wild plums
bloom at the roadside, a lacy white
against the exuberant, jubilant green
of new grass and the dusty, fading black
of burned-out ditches. No leaves, not yet,
only the delicate, star-petaled
blossoms, sweet with their timeless perfume.

You have been gone a month today
and have missed three rains and one nightlong
watch for tornadoes. I sat in the cellar
from six to eight while fat spring clouds
went somersaulting, rumbling east. Then it poured,
a storm that walked on legs of lightning,
dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.

The meadowlarks are back, and the finches
are turning from green to gold. Those same
two geese have come to the pond again this year,
honking in over the trees and splashing down.

They never nest, but stay a week or two
then leave. The peonies are up, the red sprouts,
burning in circles like birthday candles,
for this is the month of my birth, as you know,
the best month to be born in, thanks to you,
everything ready to burst with living.

There will be no more new flannel nightshirts
sewn on your old black Singer, no birthday card
addressed in a shaky but businesslike hand.

You asked me if I would be sad when it happened
and I am sad. But the iris I moved from your house
now hold in the dusty dry fists of the ~ Ted Kooser

The only thing more destructive than a tornado is a family. ~ Reynolds Price

I sometimes wish we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening-you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth-that would get people very concerned about climate change. ~ Thomas Schelling

It was really special for Bass Pro Shops to take Tracker off the side and put Joplin, Missouri on there. They have helped me a lot this past week with putting together ways to raise money to help rebuild Joplin. It's my hometown. It was heartbreaking to see the tornado and see all the people that lost their homes and the ones that lost their lives. It is really special that Johnny let us put that on there. Hopefully we made some people proud tonight. ~ Jamie McMurray

Hurricanes, tornadoes and volcanoes are all Natural Disasters. We can't fit Global Warming into that category. We have only us to blame ~ Veronica White