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a71c3a4
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Falling into ruin was a bit like falling in love: Both descents stripped you bare and left you as you were at your core. And both endings are equally painful.
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dark
endings
love
phury
ruin
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J.R. Ward |
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670b7b9
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This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.
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description
gothic
owl
purple
ruin
tower
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Mervyn Peake |
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ff6971d
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Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death and death will have his day.
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decay
destruction
ruin
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William Shakespeare |
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8bc795a
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I knew that I had turned my world back to cinders, sunk my lovely ship with my own stupid, wicked hands.
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nine-coaches-waiting
ruin
self-destruction
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Mary Stewart |
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af4af04
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The city defeated him. It refused to be bent into shape; it stayed a willful, sprawling, sinful place. It even told him as much. When he walked through the gutted wreck of old Saint Paul's, he tripped and fell over a piece of rubble -- a tombstone. When he got to his feet and dusted himself down he saw that it read, in Latin, 'Resurgam' -- 'I Will Rise Again.
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london
ruin
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Jonathan Barnes |
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74d28c8
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But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?
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ruin
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Margaret Atwood |
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6298c9c
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"[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. "The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned and towns deserted. The wrath of the Lord is upon us and He may be intending to destroy the whole of creation. People are without leaders and direction. They want to be given a reason for this, so they can be reassured, so they will return to their prayers and their obiediences. All this is going on, and you are concerned about the safety of two Jews?"
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civilization
decay
end-of-the-world
genocide
god-s-wrath
jews
mankind
panic
papal-authority
plague
pope
punishment
ruin
scapegoats
turmoil
victimization
victims
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Iain Pears |
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1b0a9c8
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Not all risks lead to ruin.
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ruin
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George R.R. Martin |
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38410de
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When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, the colors and patterns of what's left behind do not change,' wrote my neighbor and friend, the poet Jane Hirschfield, after she visited an old friend suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a nursing home. And so it was with my father. His mind did not melt evenly into undistinguishable lumps, like a dissolving sand castle. It was ravaged selectively, like Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian monastery in northern Wales suppressed in 1531 by King Henry VIII in his split with the Church of Rome. Tintern was turned over to a nobleman, its stained-glass windows smashed, its roof tiles taken up and relaid in village houses. Holy artifacts were sold to passing tourists. Religious statues turned up in nearby gardens. At least one interior wall was dismantled to build a pigsty. I've seen photographs of the remains that inspired Wordsworth: a Gothic skeleton, soaring and roofless, in a green hilly landscape. Grass grows in the transept. The vanished roof lets in light. The delicate stone tracery of its slim, arched quatrefoil windows opens onto green pastures where black-and-white cows graze. Its shape is beautiful, formal, and mysterious. After he developed dementia, my father was no longer useful to anybody. But in the shelter of his broken walls, my mother learned to balance her checkbook, and my heart melted and opened. Never would I wish upon my father the misery of his final years. But he was sacred in his ruin, and I took from it the shards that still sustain me.
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mind
misery
ruin
sacred
tintern-abbey
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Katy Butler |