Saw Washington Monument. Phallic. Appalling. A national catastrophe.
As a rule, anyone who can tell a good story can write one, so there really need be no mistake about his qualification; such a man will be careful not to be wearisome, and to keep his point, or his catastrophe, well in hand.
Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.
History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe.
Catastrophe and desire are linked in our lives as the moon is linked to that reflected light from the sun which enables the eye to see it.
It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe.
Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.
We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe, merely because those are the marching orders.
Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.
Americans learn only from catastrophe and not from experience.
Now the same mystery which often veils from our eyes the reason for a catastrophe envelops just as frequently, when love is in question, the suddenness of certain happy solutions, such as had been brought to me by Gilberte's letter. Happy, or at least seemingly happy, for there are few that can really be happy when we are dealing with a sentiment of such a kind that any satisfaction we can give it does no more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes a respite is granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion of being healed.
The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933. . . Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.
The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event - not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics - then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light.
Living things have been doing just that for a long, long time. Through every kind of disaster and setback and catastrophe. We are survivors.
Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self?
Sometimes a catastrophe is simply a course correction.
Know the difference between a catastrophe and an inconvenience.
Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe. The painter's art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by Painting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have.
I am not writing in metaphors. I am writing about catastrophes.
The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe