#disillusionment

It had been an awful thing to lose Henry the first time, to matrimony, but to discover what a false front he was capable of was another kind of blow, and it had left her almost speechless. Then there was the fury with herself—for she had known what Henry’s love was, and still she had gone back to suffer a little more at his hands. ↗

— Anna Godbersen

#falsehood #fury #pain #love

Love may precede respect but it cannot survive the loss of it. ↗

— Joe L. Wheeler

#grief #loss #love #love

When you lose your parents as a child, you are indoctrinated into a club, you re taken into life's severest confidence. You are undeceived. ↗

— Hilary Thayer Hamann

#orphans #life

Legends are best left as legends and attempts to make them real are rarely successful ↗

— Michael Moorcock

#legends #life #life

Well, sorry pet, I don't want to be fixed. Whatever your little schoolgirl brain told you about men is absurdly wrong. This isn't a romance. You're not a damsel-in-distress and I'm not the handsome prince come to save you. ↗

— C.J. Roberts

#fairytales #happy-endings #love #love

The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment. ↗

— Ralph A. Cram

#great #great war #progressive #revelation #war

Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial. ↗

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#dreams

I can't really criticize the Tea Party people, because I came into the White House pretty much on the same basis that they have become popular. That is dissatisfaction with the way things are going in Washington and disillusionment and disencouragement about the government. ↗

— Jimmy Carter

#basis #because #become #came #criticize

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandora's box. Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining ediface that he had reared in his mind came crashing down. That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#empire-state-building #farewells #new-york-city #beauty

We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends. ↗

— Kim Stanley Robinson

#dreams #knowledge #learning #dreams