#calamity

There were a lot of these middle-aged single types in the neighborhood, shipwrecked by every kind of catastrophe, but she was one of the few who didn't have children, who lived alone, who was still kinda young. Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind, a woman with no child could be explained only by vast untrammelled calamity. Maybe she just doesn't like children. Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them. ↗

— Junot Díaz

#childlessness #children #singles #women #age

A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened. ↗

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

#calamity #great #happened #hour #old

He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles. ↗

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

#calamity #characteristics #courage #faces #grow

These hands which stretch out, implore, beg, then rise to the head in a gesture of calamity. ↗

— Frederick Leboyer

#calamity #gesture #hands #head #implore

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another. ↗

— Joseph Addison

#aggravating #another #calamity #common #condition

Yield not to calamity, but face her boldly. ↗

— Virgil

#calamity #face #her #yield

The difference between a misfortune and a calamity is this: If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, that would be a calamity. ↗

— Benjamin Disraeli

#between #calamity #difference #dragged #fell

What remains constant for me, during the last 15 years, has been the conviction that the cold war was a calamity for the entire world, and that it can be justified by no consideration of theory, nor by any supposed national interest. ↗

— Earl Browder

#been #calamity #cold #cold war #consideration

Times of great calamity and confusion have been productive for the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace. The brightest thunder-bolt is elicited from the darkest storm. ↗

— Charles Caleb Colton

#brightest #calamity #confusion #darkest #furnace

A bad neighbor is as great a calamity as a good one is a great advantage. ↗

— Hesiod

#bad #calamity #good #great #great advantage