192 Quotes About Misfortune

The Bible, after all, repeatedly speaks of God as the special protector of the poor, the widow, and the orphan, withoutraising the question of how it happened that they became poor, widowed, or orphaned in the first place.

I had tried, as best I could, to forget the people who had said they loved me, and I had been able to do so only by replacing their memory with hatred for them and their crimes. Time is no healer. It scabs the wound until the injury is forgotten, but the infection festers, eating away, spreading.

Little by little they all gathered around him, entering through the cracks like moonbeams...[b]ut once the wind of misfortune blows, people disperse like little clouds around the moon when the wind blows off the mountains.

People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back. They know only too well that misfortune follows in their wake.

I was breathing life into the book through my hand, and the book was breathing back out through me into the world. And what was a book but leather? And what was leather but animal skin? And what was paper but a tree, and vellum but lamb? And what was I but an idea?

The exquisite sorrows with which they had been afflicted, made them think lightly of every succeeding woe. They had felt the sharpest darts in misfortune's quiver; Those which remained appeared blunt in comparison. Having weathered Fate's heaviest Storms, they looked calmly upon its terrors: or if ever they felt Afflictions casual gales, they seemed to them gentle as Zephyrs, which breathe over summer-seas.

And it’s not because I’m tortured Or by some delirium swayed That I conjure up misfortune: It is just my trade.

Misfortune simply is. And when you wall it off, you do not have a clear conscience, because perhaps you are supposed to dedicate all your efforts and all your attention to it. And all you can say in your own defense is 'I want to live.

During her life, Veronika had noticed that a lot of people she knew would talk about the horrors in other people's lives as if they were genuinely trying to help them, but the truth was that they took pleasure in the suffering of others, because that made them believe they were happy and that life had been generous with them.