Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

When the flood cometh it sweepeth away grain as well as chaff.

It's scary when one day the city is there and the next day it's gone. To see the water actual kill people, I couldn't believe it. I never fathomed it could bury a city.

The first light of day today revealed what we had feared. The devastation is greater than our worst fears. It's just totally overwhelming.

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.

I am mountains that crush. I am waves that crash. I am storms that shatter. I am the end.

Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.

Being here, it is just impossible to imagine what that was like, when the tsunami hit.

War is the easiest photography in the business. Just get close, be lucky, know how your camera works. There are subjects everywhere. Everyplace you go, there is something to photograph in a war, like being in the middle of a hurricane or a train crash or an earthquake. You can't miss it.

The pictures we saw before we got down here didn't even touch the reality of what it is like being here. We can be right on the beach with all the devastation and still not be able to imagine what it was like when the wall of water actually came up.

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

In the eye of the tornado, there's no more high and low, no floor and sky.

This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path.

I want an explosion the size of Cleveland.

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.

As a 9-year-old child, I vividly remember the day Hurricane Andrew touched down in 1992. My family was living in the Upper Florida Keys at the time, and we soon realized its utter devastation to South Florida, with entire blocks leveled by Andrew's vicious winds.

I've covered tornadoes and other natural disasters. I wasn't on the ground for Katrina. But as our helicopter descended toward Mexico Beach, I just saw an entire town gone. Leveled, with the exception of a condo still standing here and there.

A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze?

In the same way that a tornado rips the roof off a double-wide trailer, leaving the occupants dazed and staring at the clouds from the splinters of what used to be their living room, it was over.

Ten thousand people died, an entire town destroyed.

War is an unpredictable beast. Once unleashed, it runs like a rabid dog, ravening friend or foe alike. It can drag on for years, a slow attrition of nerve and fortitude, or be over in one brilliant flash, an extravagant conflagration of flame and blood and waste.

I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.

One sound blow will serve to undo us all.

The world was floods above and fire below

The typhoon came out of the sea first as a deep hollow roar. ... I was surrounded by the madness, the unreason, of uncontrolled, undisciplined energy. None of this made any sense. It was worse than useless - it was nature destroying its own creation - its own self. To create by the long process of growth and then to destroy by a fit of wild emotion - was this not madness, was this not unreason?

The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the childlike cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into silence. Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we are still alive.