Quotes About Nadir

“I'm not concerned with paid assassins ... mindless, soulless animals who excel at nothing else. But you, Erik ... you love all the beauty in this world ... you are a genius in so many different fields. Why do you set yourself beyond the pale of humanity by such a despicable crime?"
He took off the mask and turned slowly to let me see.
"This face which has denied me all human rights also frees me of all obligation to the human race," he said quietly. "My mother hated me, my village drove me from my home, I was exhibited like an animal in a cage until a knife showed me the only way to be free. The pleasures of love will always be forbidden to me ... but I am young, Nadir. I have all the desires of any normal man.”

— Susan Kay

“Ah, well ... hell is full of burning boats, did you know that, Nadir? I daresay that's what makes it so bloody hot.”

— Susan Kay

“The following twenty years would be the nadir of American Indian history, as the total Indian population between 1890 and 1910 fell to fewer than 250,000. (It was not until 1917 that Indian births exceeded deaths for the first time in fifty years.)”

— Kenneth C. Davis

“The zenith is just a little farther away from the nadir”

— Uzoma Ezeson

“There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir-especially at night-I felt despair. The wor's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously.”

— David Foster Wallace

“This was the nadir, surely. They had no further to fall.”

— Clive Barker

“Skulduggery placed both hands on the table and leaned over. "You've heard about me. You've heard about the things I've done."
The smirk faded a little. "So?"
"So the stories you've heard are nothing compared to the truth, and the truth is nothing compared to what I'll do to you if something happens to Valkyrie. I'm the worst enemy you could ever make, Silas. Look at me and answer honestly, do you believe me?"
Nadir swallowed. "Yeah.”

— Derek Landy

“The Dordogne in 1984 was the nadir. Diarrhea, moths like flying hamsters, the blowtorch heat. Awake at three in the morning on a damp and lumpy mattress. Then the storm. Like someone hammering sheets of tin. Lightning so bright it came through the pillow. In the morning sixty, seventy dead frogs turning slowly in the pool. And at the far end something larger and furrier, a cat perhaps, or the Franzetti's dog, which Katie was poking with a snorkel. (pg 53)”

— Mark Haddon

“I can never forget the indescribably crafty shadow that passed over Flatfish's face as he laughed at me, his neck drawn in. It resembled contempt, yet it was different: if the world, like the sea, had depths of a thousand fathoms, this was the kind of weird shadows which might be found hovering here and there at the bottom. It was a laugh that enabled me to catch a glimpse of the very nadir of adult life.”

— Osamu Dazai

“For in the works of Robert Burns we see the whole cosmos of man's experience and emotion, from zenith to nadir, from birth until death.”

— Len G. Murray

“As a young man he had shared a room with a painter whose paintings had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art.[ ... ]The swollen events of the night of the crescent knives reminded Nadir Khan of his room-mate, because life had once again, perversely, refused to remain life-sized.”

— Salman Rushdie

“As the blackness of the night recedes so does the nadir of yesterday. The child I am forgets so quickly.”

— Sylvia Ashton-Warner

“Are there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former and dread to be accused of the latter. One is held to be the apogee of man's character, the other its nadir. An yet, to me the two sit side by side on the circle of life, removed from each other by the merest degree of arc. (MARCH - Chapter 11 - page 168)”

— Geraldine Brooks

“What we call "the laws of nature" merely reflect the normal way in which God sustains or governs the natural world. Perhaps the most wicked concept that has captured the minds of modern people is the belief that the universe operates by chance. That is the nadir of foolishness. Elsewhere, I have written more extensively on the scientific impossibility of assigning power to chance, because chance is simply a word that describes mathematical possibilities.* Chance is not a thing. It has no power. It cannot do anything, and therefore it cannot influence anything, yet some have taken the word chance, which has no power, and diabolically used it as a replacement for the concept of God. But the truth, as the Bible makes clear, is that nothing happens by chance and that all things are under the sovereign government of God, which is exceedingly comforting to the Christian who understands it.”

— R.C. Sproul

“Failure is a chastening to do it more better , think more intelligently and restart the whole course from the nadir .”

— Osunsakin Adewale

“I think 1973 was the nadir of fashion. When you watch the coverage from that era, you're struck by the astonishing ugliness of the clothes.”

— John Malkovich

“Evil people relate more to the black pole. It's - this is not exact, of course, as the science of magic is as complex as the magic of electronics - it's like traveling past a mountain. The white pole is at the apex, and it is an exhilarating height, but it takes a lot of work and few missteps to ascend it. The black pole is at the nadir, and it is easy to walk downhill; sometimes you can just sit down and slide or roll and, if you fall, you can get there very fast indeed. If you don't pay attention to where you're going, you'll tend to go down, because it is the course of least resistance. Since the average person has only the vaguest notion where he is going and tends to shut out awareness of the consequence of evil, he inevitably drifts downward. There is much more space at the base of the mountain than at the peak!”

— Piers Anthony

“My next book is also set in the eighteenth century. It's about the Revolution, with the focus on the year 1776. It's about Washington and the army and the war. It's the nadir, the low point of the United States of America.”

— David McCullough

“Los Angeles is often described as the nadir of vapidity, a smog-choked space cradle.”

— Diablo Cody

“He felt good for once, he really did. Maybe the deal was that life had to break your body down before you could see it. Maybe there wasn't any other racket in town except this one that brought you to your nadir and challenged you to build yourself back up from it, then showed you that what you'd done at least meant something to someone.”

— Chris Cleave

“Nal had begun to sense that his life had jumped the rails-and then right at his nadir, he'd agreed to an "avant" haircut performed by Cousin Steve.”

— Karen Russell

“It is by the nadir that we come, said Watt, and it is by the nadir that we go, whatever that means. And the artist must have felt something of this kind too, for the circle did not turn, as circles will, but sailed steadfast in its white skies, with its patient breach for ever below.”

— Samuel Beckett

“The election of the nationalist Chen Shui-bian as president in 2000 and his re-election in 2004 was a nadir in the relationship between Taiwan and the mainland.”

— Martin Jacques

“It is the profoundest of cosmic ironies. The divine power, our true spiritual essence, does not achieve perfection until it hits the 'rock' bottom of the cosmos - the dense and crude earth. It remains imperfect until the moment of entombment for the simple reason that until that dark nadir is reached the experiential adventure of existence remains incomplete, and Self is not yet endowed with the entire spectrum of the light of consciousness - from spirit to matter - from the highest high to the lowest low.”

— Lon Milo DuQuette

“The whole of history is the history of murderers. If you become a murderer, fame will be very easy. You can become a prime minister, you can become a president-but these are all masks. Behind them you will find very violent people, terribly violent people hiding, smiling. Those smiles are political, diplomatic. If the mask slips, you will always see Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadir Shah, Napoleon, Alexander, Hitler, hiding behind.”

— Osho

“In the field of marketing ... the trend toward selling [has] reached something of a nadir with the unveiling ... of so-called subliminal projection. That is the technique designed to flash messages past our conscious guard.”

— Vance Packard

“Every man's first declaration of love is bathos
the zenith of his passion connoting perhaps the nadir of his intelligence.”

— William John Locke

“We are left with the feeling that the church has overdone it, no matter how you cut it, and that homosexuals have certainly suffered more wrong than they have committed, and that there must be flaws in whatever theology of nature or hierarchy of sins has made homosexuality be viewed as the nadir of depravity ... This feeling increases when one becomes acquainted with responsible, Christian, homosexual people.”

— Paul King Jewett

“Being fat is the absolute nadir of the misfit. You're a misfit because nothing fits. You don't fit in. You're not fit. You're fat. Fat doesn't have the poetic cachet of alcohol, the whiff of danger in the drug of choice. You're just fat. Being fat is so un-American, so unattractive, unerotic, unfashionable, undisciplined, unthinkable, uncool. It makes you invisible. It makes you conspicuous.”

— Claudia Shear

“Liberty is only valued when it is threatened, therefore it is the threat that highlights the value. We should be grateful to the Nadir, since they heighten the value of our liberty.”

— David Gemmell

“Despair is good. Despair can be the nadir of one life and the starting point of an ascent into another, better one.”

— Dean Koontz

“The term "godawful" should be used sparingly in connection with motion pictures. With Angels & Demons , however, it seems oddly appropriate. Not only does this prequel-turned-sequel to The Da Vinci Code make its predecessor seem like a masterwork of pacing and plotting, but it may represent a nadir for director Ron Howard and is probably the worst instance of acting from star Tom Hanks since back in the days when he was struggling out from under the shadow of Bosom Buddies .”

— James Berardinelli

“Man is at the nadir of his stregth when the Earth, the seas, the mountains are not in him, for without them his soul is unsourced, and he has no images by which to abide.”

— Edward Dahlberg

“The obvious liberal rejoinders come to mind: What about the child whose home is hit by a bomb? Did she have some bomb-shaped thoughtform that brought ruin down on her head? And did my [fired white-collar workers] boot-camp mates cause the layoffs that drove them out of their jobs by "vibrating" at a layoff-related frequency? It seems inexcusably cruel to tell people who have reach some kind of personal nadir that their probem is entirely of their own making ...”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“Man, if he compare himself with all that he can see, is at the zenith of power; but if he compare himself with all that he can conceive, he is at the nadir of weakness.”

— Charles Caleb Colton