For the briefest of instants, a miles-wide hole appeared from the middle of the Earth to the top of the sky. The Moho rang like a tuning fork in harmonic response to the billion megaton impact. Seismic waves propagated in all directions, some dampening as normal, others amplified harmonically as Earth’s interior quivered like a bowl of pudding. Seismometers spiked wildly, their needles bouncing back and forth like pin-balls.A billion megatons exploded outward from the depths of the quivering Moho blasting a crater eighty-five miles in diameter and spewing billions of tons of superheated rock twelve hundred miles into space. In the blink of an eye the Earth grew a tail, as a mushroom cloud visible from Mars formed and spread, black as the Devil's eye.

~ Raymond Dean White

Raymond Dean White Action Adventure Apocalypse Cataclysm Catastrophe Dystopian Earthquakes Fire Flood Impact Winter Plague Survival Story Tsunamis War

It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic--love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men just wanted to focus on one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up.

~ Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell Bruce Willis Bureaucracy Cataclysm Focus Men Women

People generally don’t suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who’ve endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive cataclysm of the soul.The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

~ David Brooks

David Brooks Cataclysm Child Abuse Combat Combat Ptsd Depraved Guilt Immoral Act Military Moral Atrocities Moral Responsibility Morality Morals Natural Disasters Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Ptsd Rape Sexual Abuse Sexual Assailed Shame Soldiers Soul Survivor Guilt Trauma Veterans War War Trauma Warfare

Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor. Perhaps, in a way, that's where humanity is now: about to discover we're not as smart as we thought we were, will be forced by life to surrender our attacks and defenses which avail us of nothing, and finally break through into the collective beauty of who we really

~ Marianne Williamson

Marianne Williamson Beauty Cataclysm Change Humanity Humility Life Perseverance Revelation Of Self Tragedy Transformation

It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Cataclysm Disaster Euphoria Guilt