Disasters Quotes

“Is there anything more frightening than people?”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“Don't look so worried. Most successful missions are just a series of barely averted disasters.”
― Sabaa Tahir, A Torch Against the Night

“Disasters work like alarm clocks to the world, hence God allows them. They are shouting, 'Wake up! Love! Pray!”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning.… Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life.… They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“A tornado of thought is unleashed after each new insight. This in turn results in an earthquake of assumptions. These are natural disasters that re-shape the spirit.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“It's a shame there has to be a tragedy before the best in people will finally shine.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“The witch who claims to forbear her magick for fear of causing the next Indian tsunami is really saying that she is powerful enough to kill thousands of innocent strangers when all she meant to do was water her mugwort. She can't be challenged to produce evidence of this, because doing could provoke earthquakes and Africanized bee attacks.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be.”
― Toni Morrison

“Here's a new 'Blessing' for our time --

'May Anderson Cooper never be sent to report on your town!”
― Vera Nazarian

“I've always been proud of how much my daughter cared about the world. After school she’d study the news, comb the internet for disasters, wars and hate and injustice, write it all down in these color-coded journals. Once, I asked her what she was doing, and she said she was just trying to keep track of it all because it didn’t seem like anybody else noticed or cared that we kept making the same mistakes, that hate in a neighborhood or injustice in a state ran like poison through veins, until another ice shelf collapsed or another animal went extinct. Everything is connected, she’d say. And I’d tell her, You’re only one person and you only have one life.”
― Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark

“The Earth is God's pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“After many trials the God and his love end happily—tho' not all remember this conclusion—which is less memorable than the moment when everything was lost. Happy endings are all alike; disasters may be unique.”
― John Crowley, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land

“Now he turned the radio on to the news. As we did our separate chores, we listened and commented idly to each other on what we heard—the politics, the plane crashes and crimes, the large disasters of the day, which we all use to keep the smaller, more long-term sorrows at bay.”
― Sue Miller, While I Was Gone

“The challenge of creation reduces us to the inevitable. Our lives are full of tiny disasters.”
― Floriano Martins

“Humanity must have a speed of advance higher than the speed of advance of cosmic disasters or big global catastrophes!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Being along with the Nature your soul is stronger than all disasters.”
― Esat Durak

“Florida has made hurricane storm surge one of the most feared natural disasters!”
― Steven Magee

“Any of them could have a disaster before the school year is over. You could have a disaster an hour from now. Bending over. Something could hit you. People carry guns in glove compartments and lunch boxes. Cars spin out of control in minor drizzle. The more you know, really, the more you have to worry and fret about. It's a miracle anyone can sleep at all.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, There Is No Long Distance Now

“I am losing confidence in the reliability of air travel.”
― Steven Magee

“After every disaster, after every death, human beings always learn the same thing: Mankind has only one problem, to protect its existence! And after every disaster, after every death, human beings always and immediately forget the same thing: To take every precaution to protect both their own existence and the existence of others!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The August 2023 Maui wildfires were among the most devastating disasters to hit the Hawaiian islands.”
― Steven Magee

“A lot of people refuse to evacuate in disasters. They stay in their homes and hope for the best.”
― Steven Magee

“It is the ‘American Way’ to keep their masses in the dark.”
― Steven Magee

“Hurricanes Ian and Dora are both lessons that the government cannot be trusted.”
― Steven Magee

“The children were bilious for a few days, and inclined to dislike each other: but they accepted the change in their lives practically without noticing it. It is a fact that it takes experience before one can realize what is a catastrophe and what is not. Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“Sometimes the lethal power is in the form of the simplest elements of all, air and water, and occasionally in a lifetime it two, we witness grand and theatrical performances by Mother Nature.”
― Sara Niles, The Ice Storm: Nonfiction Short Story

“The loss of empathy is also the loss of humanity, and that's no small tradeoff.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson : Essays from Now or Never

“The only thing worse than being a disaster is being a disaster with a witness.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives