"Catastrophic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... face of the sea. If we once realize all this earth as it is, we should find ourselves in a land of miracles: we shall discover a new planet at the moment that we discover our own. Among all the strange things that men have forgotten, the most universal and catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have forgotten that they are living on ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... warning, the storm broke. Trees were turned up by roots, like weeds, the buildings rocked as if they had been houses of cards. It was a wild, catastrophic spectacle. ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... represented by the picture of a factory with a chimney which rose and fell with the population. From that diagram I took the figures for 1913, 1918 and 1919. These figures should be constantly borne in mind by any one who wishes to realize how catastrophic the shortage of labor in Russia actually is, and to judge how sweeping may be the changes in the social configuration of the country if that shortage continues to increase. Here ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... experience of the inward type, it is indescribable and incommunicable. That does not mean or imply any lessened value in the experience itself, it only means that it is very difficult to mint it into the universal coinage of the world. The recovery of faith, after some catastrophic bankruptcy of spiritual values, as with Job or Dante or Faust, cannot be described in analytic steps. The loss of faith in the rationality of the universe, the collapse of the "beautiful world" within, can ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... spoke of her husband. The name of Leonard Boyce was never mentioned between us. With her as with me, the weeks ate up the uneventful days and the months the uneventful weeks. In her humdrum life the falling away of Mrs. Tufton loomed catastrophic. ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... fiercely, the flames roaring high above the turret—but they burned only, they did not explode—as our enemy's cartridges had done—and that saved the ship! Still, the effect of the burning cartridges was catastrophic; the flames killed everything within their reach. Of the 78 men of the turret crew only five escaped, some badly wounded, by crawling out through the holes for expelling empty cartridge cases. The remaining ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... proceed more evenly, without any such catastrophic change. And yet, it is none the less true that in a very large proportion of lives there come, now and then, in the midst of routine and uniformity, certain flashes of clearer vision, disclosing the aims and ideals ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... "That's catastrophic decivilization. There is also decivilization by erosion, and while it's going on, nobody notices it. Everybody is proud of their civilization, their wealth and culture. But trade is falling off; fewer ships come in each year. So there ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... the silence, the catastrophic desolation of the place, were all the more impressive because of the relatively recent date of the buildings. As Moulay-Ismael had dealt with Volubilis, so time had dealt with his own Meknez; and the destruction which it had taken thousands ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... Severe volcanic activity, which began in July 1995, has put a damper on this small, open economy. A catastrophic eruption in June 1997 closed the airports and seaports, causing further economic and social dislocation. Two-thirds of the 12,000 inhabitants fled the island. Some began to return in 1998, but lack of housing limited the number. The ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... conversation was in the National Museum in Naples, in the rooms on the ground floor containing the famous collection of bronzes from Herculaneum and Pompeii: that marvellous legacy of antique art whose delicate perfection has been preserved for us by the catastrophic fury ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... not permit on the screen any suggestion that there is a physiological relation between a mother and a child. This method of protecting the race has its roots back in the primitive mind of mankind. When men really did not understand how children came about, births were catastrophic. A woman at a certain moment had to disappear into the wilderness; she came back having found a baby under a cabbage leaf. Any contact with her while she was making her discovery might bring pestilence and death ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... the situation, every one who can talk or write or echo, can do his utmost to spread his realization of the possibilities of a world congress and the establishment of world law and world peace that lie behind the monstrous agonies and cruelties and confusions of this catastrophic year. Given an immense body of opinion initiatives may break out effectively anywhere; failing it, they will ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... depression of land areas so that new sedimentary rocks might be deposited upon them. They shewed how air and water slowly crumbled away the hardest rocks, and how rivers deepened their beds steadily but excessively slowly; and they held that while great catastrophic changes might occasionally have occurred, there was ample evidence of the present operation of forces which, granted sufficient time for their operation, would have made the crust of the earth such as it is. This doctrine of Uniformitarianism, of ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... displayed to us; and secondly, that the igneous agency, before considered only as originating special formations, was recognized as a universal agency, but assumed to act in an unproved way. Werner's sole process Hutton developed from the catastrophic and inexplicable into the uniform and explicable; while that antagonistic second process, of which he first adequately estimated the importance, was regarded by him as a catastrophic one, and was not assimilated to known processes—not ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... subordinates knows that my experiments have been successful and that the United States is in a position to manufacture radite in almost unlimited quantities from the pitchblende ore deposits of Wyoming and Nevada. The effects of radite will be catastrophic on the unfortunate victim on whom it is first used. The only thing left to do was to develop a gun from which radite shells could be fired with safety ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... his opportunities at Edinburgh and Cambridge to obtain systematic and practical instruction in mineralogy and geology, will be mitigated, however, when we reflect on the danger which he would run of being indoctrinated with the crude "catastrophic" views of geology, which were at that time prevalent in ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others |
