Desertion Quotes:

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.

- Graham Greene

source: Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

topic: Sound, Noble, Desertion

There used to be two kinds of kisses: First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there's a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he'd kissed a girl, everyone knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same, everyone knows it's because he can't kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

source: F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.234, e-artnow

topic: Girl, Kissing, Men, Desertion

But mayn't desertion be a brave thing? A fine thing? To desert a thing we've gone beyond - to have the courage to desert it and walk right off from the dead thing to the live thing - ?

- Susan Glaspell

topic: Brave, Desert, Gone, Desertion, Fine Things

A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two.

- Seneca the Elder

topic: Party, Two, Battle, Desertion

You can’t walk away from someone you love, leave them drowning in your desertion. If love has no more meaning than that, you can keep it. I don’t want it now or ever again. Don’t want to hear the word or wear its scars.

- Ellen Hopkins

topic: Someone You Love, Want, Scar, Desertion

my brain Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts There hung a darkness, call it solitude Or blank desertion.

- William Wordsworth

source: William Wordsworth (1994). “The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth”, p.638, Wordsworth Editions

topic: Thoughtful, Thinking, Darkness, Desertion

I have seldom known a person who deserted the truth in trifles and then could be trusted in matters of importance.

- Babe Paley

topic: Truth, Trust Issues, Matter, Desertion

To seduce the enemies soldiers from their allegiance and encourage them to surrender is of special service, for an adversary is more hurt by desertion than by slaughter.

- Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus

topic: Hurt, Military, Soldier, Desertion

For many women today, on a personal level, the problem is not male dominance so much as male desertion.

- Nancy Pearcey

topic: Males, Levels, Male Dominance, Desertion

Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination.

- Christian Nestell Bovee

topic: Imagination, Worry, Anxiety, Desertion

Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.

- Samuel Butler

topic: Divorce, Religion, Church, Desertion

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

- George Bernard Shaw

source: George Bernard Shaw (2015). “The Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw (Illustrated): Including Renowned Titles like Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, The Inca Of Perusalem, Macbeth Skit, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion”, p.1777, e-artnow

topic: Class, Good Enough, Denied, Desertion, Lower Class

You think death is any better an excuse for desertion than any other?

- Judith Martin

topic: Thinking, Excuse, Desertion

The dream of reason produces monsters

- Francisco Goya

source: Francisco Goya, Janis A. Tomlinson, Francisco Calvo Serraller, Museo del Prado (2002). “Goya: images of women”, Natl Gallery of Art

topic: Dream, Monsters, Reason, Deserted, Desertion

This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.

- Virginia Woolf

source: Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1446, Delphi Classics

topic: Echoes, Self, Sea, Death Of A Friend, Desertion

The Lord Jesus died for the ungodly. He was obedient at all costs : He bore everything, and went down into the dust of death, man's hatred, God's desertion, and Satan's power ; we find Him there at the cost of everything. Everything that was against us was done away. By one man's obedience many are made righteous.

- John Nelson Darby

source: Walter Thomas Turpin, John Nelson Darby, Some Authors Unknown, W. H. Broom (2015). “The Christian's Friend and Instructor: Christian Magazine Volume 3, 1876 Edition”, p.42, Irving Risch

topic: Jesus, Men, Dust, Desertion

So she doesn't call desertion, poverty, and hard work troubles? She's a brave little girl, and I shall be proud to know her.

- Louisa May Alcott

source: Louisa May Alcott (2015). “Louisa May Alcott Premium Edition - 16 Novels in One Volume: Little Women Trilogy & Other Novels (Illustrated): Moods, The Mysterious Key and What It Opened, An Old Fashioned Girl, Work, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Under the Lilacs, Jack and Jill, Behind a Mask, The Abbot's Ghost, A Modern Mephistopheles…”, p.2170, e-artnow

topic: Girl, Hard Work, Brave, Desertion

Leave your bed upon the first desertion of sleep; it being ill for the eye's to read lying, and worse for the mind to be idle; since the head during that laziness is commonly a cage for unclean thoughts.

- Frances Osborne

topic: Lying, Sleep, Eye, Desertion

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.

- Samuel Beckett

topic: Art, World, Crafts, Desertion, Good Housekeeping

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion

- Marcel Proust

topic: Artist, World, Failing, Desertion, Arts And Crafts

The desertion of Jesus, by his followers, furnishes an argument in support of the supposition that he attempted to be king of the Jews, rather than that he was a superior being.

- Lysander Spooner

source: Lysander Spooner (1971). “The collected works of Lysander Spooner”

topic: Jesus, Kings, Support, Supposition, Desertion

Bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fire-side.

- Herman Melville

source: Herman Melville (2016). “Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories”, p.148, Penguin

topic: Travel, Fire, Touching, Desertion

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats…these are the facts.

- Alexander Trocchi

topic: Betrayal, Writing, Journey, Loose Ends, Desertion

[W]hich category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely? [T]hose against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax.

- Murray Rothbard

topic: Soldier, Enemy, Contentment, Lexicon, Desertion

The year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too they would never forget.

- David McCullough

topic: Country, Fighting, Years, Desertion

Time would not change what I was feeling--or not feeling. I'd had time, and though the ache from his desertion hadn't disappeared, it was decreasing. My future was blurry, yes, but I was beginning to imagine a future when I would no longer miss him at all.

- Tammara Webber

topic: Missing, Feelings, Blurry, Desertion

Sorry, but retirement offends me. You don’t just stop fighting in the middle of a war because your legs hurt. So why do you get to stop working in the middle of your life just because your prostate hurts? That’s desertion.

- Stephen Colbert

topic: Retirement, Hurt, Sorry, Desertion, Prostate

The little I have seen of the world teaches me to look upon the errors of others in sorrow, not in anger. When I take the history of one poor heart that has sinned and suffered, and represent to myself the struggles and temptations it has passed through, the brief pulsations of joy, the feverish inquietude of hope and fear, the pressure of want, the desertion of friends, I would fain leave the erring soul of my fellow-man with Him from whose hand it came.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

topic: Struggle, Heart, Men, Desertion, Clemency

The fundamentalist violence is, so is it, an attempt to increase the stakes, i.e. to discourage the potential desertions by showing that defection will cost them dear, that those who adopt other values will be persecuted or even killed.

- Pascal Boyer

topic: Violence, Cost, Stakes, Desertion

It was always the same; other people gave up loving before she did. They got spoilt, or else they went away; in any case, they were partly to blame. Why did it happen so? She herself never changed; when she loved anyone, it was for life. She could not understand desertion; it was something so huge, so monstrous that the notion of it made her little heart break.

- Emile Zola

topic: Heart, Loving Life, People, Desertion, Spoilt

And no. I must not go on thinking. For the pain will never go away. You just go on and live. In the dust of desertion. Still falling where last I loved.

- J. P. Donleavy

source: J. P. Donleavy (2007). “The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B”, p.299, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

topic: Pain, Lost Love, Fall, Desertion

When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.

- Rebecca Solnit

source: Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.175, Canongate Books

topic: Believe, Worry, People, Desertion, Abduction

The humility of Jesus can be seen in the crib, in the exile to Egypt, in the hidden life, in the inability to make people understand Him, in the desertion of His apostles, in the hatred of His persecutors, in all the terrible suffering and death of His Passion, and now in His permanent state of humility in the tabernacle, where He has reduced Himself to such a small particle of bread that the priest can hold Him with two fingers. The more we empty ourselves, the more room we give God to fill us.

- Mother Teresa

topic: Jesus, Passion, Humility, Suffering And Death, Desertion

To my son Hugh, in return for the care and sorrow he has caused me all the days of his life, for his dissolute career and his desertion, I do give and bequeath the sum of one thousand dollars and the memory of his misspent youth.

- Hallie Erminie Rives

topic: Memories, Son, Careers, Misspent Youth, Desertion