Tornado Life Quotes

Some people are born with tornadoes in their lives, but constellations in their eyes. Other people are born with stars at their feet, but their souls are lost at sea.

Endless moons, an opaque universe, thunder, tornadoes, the quaking earth. Rare moments of peace; forehead up against my knees, arms around my head, I thought, I listened, I longed not to exist. But life was there, a transparent pearl, a star revolving slowly on its own axis.

Nothing in her life had ever been neat or ordered. She slammed through the world, a tornado in the form of a girl, and left a trail of destruction behind her.

The absence of violence is not love.

You’ll end up with a man whose name starts with E. And he’ll rip through your life like a tornado. Then again, a tornado can handle a volcano.

She’d touched down in my life like a tornado, gotten my drink wrong during her first shift at Valhalla, and hadn’t left my thoughts since.

nothing about her pain is remotely original —and yet it still hurts

Yes It could happen any time, tornado, earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen. Or sunshine, love, salvation. It could, you know. That's why we wake and look out - no guarantees in this life. But some bonuses, like morning, like right now, like noon, like evening.

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains—flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado’s intensity doesn’t abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and everything, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be 17 years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a woman. This is where it all began, and where it all ended. Almost.

It's like I'm a little me inside the big me and I'm holding an umbrella and the rain is bullshit and I am the rain and I am the bullshit.

I’ve committed every part of you to memory, did you know that? You’re so fucking beautiful that sometimes I can’t see straight. I want you so bad, I can’t take this shit. The first night we met was like being hit by a tornado all over again. You entering my life was a huge event and you shook and shifted everything for me. I want you to be mine and I want to be yours.

Even though I know that breaking your brain is the same as breaking your arm, I'm still ashamed that my brain is broken.

Pretty much nobody on Earth takes me seriously. And yet, on the inside I know there is something wrong enough that someone should be taking it seriously. Maybe it starts with me. Maybe I have to take it seriously first.

Claire believed she was teetering literally on the edge of sanity. A strong wind was all it would take to blow her one way or the other. Iowa had its share of storms, strong winds and tornadoes, they were all unpredictable. It made an ironic parallel for her life.

They did a lot of cleaning in their house, which I considered to be a sign of immoral parenting. The job of parents, as I saw it, was to watch television and step into a child's life only when absolutely necessary, like in the event of a tornado or a potential kidnapping.

War did not come like a hurricane, Rorimer realized, destroying everything in its path. It came like a tornado, touching down in patches, taking with it one life while leaving the next person unharmed.

Save the world. What a thought. Was this asteroid really speeding toward Earth on a collision course? Would it really wipe out everything? Could humans really do anything to stop it? It was just too incredible. As she considered the circumstances of her life right now, she felt like she’d just stuck her face into the middle of a tornado. But Jeremy wasn’t the tornado. He was an anchor for her heart, and a piece of her she knew she had been missing all her life. He was the kind of guy little girls dream of when they wish to grow up and marry a wonderful prince— strong, sensitive, smart, kind, the list just went on. She smiled at herself. It seems that it’s difficult to focus on the end of the world when you’ve just found love.    

But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.

But the small cloud which appeared in the northwest four months ago had blown up into a mighty storm and then into a screaming tornado,sweeping away her world, whirling her out of her sheltered life,and dropping her down in the midst of this still,haunted desolation.

Trauma. It doesn't eke itself out over time. It doesn't split itself manageably into bite-sized chunks and distribute itself equally throughout your life. Trauma is all or nothing. A tsunami wave of destruction. A tornado of unimaginable awfulness that whooshes into your life - just for one key moment - and wreaks such havoc that, in just an instant, your whole world will never be the same again.

You can't change people with love. It doesn't work that way.

You can be doing great for months, maybe even years, and then boom, something happens, something triggers an episode. Then your life spirals into one big tornado of emotions that has swept you up right out from under yourself, and you lose control of everything, and you just spin around and around inside a dark, twisty, cloud, while everything flies out of control.

Then they fake smile at each other, but I’m starting to understand that smiling is really just another way of baring one’s teeth.

Sarah. Sarah. Sarah. I can't get away from myself.

I wonder if we might pledge ourselves to remember what life is really all about—not to be afraid that we're less flashy than the next, not to worry that our influence is not that of a tornado, but rather that of a grain of sand in an oyster! Do we have that kind of patience?

What is the world? What is it for? It is an art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. Assess it like prose, like poetry, like architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, delta blues, opera, tragedy, comedy, romance, epic. Assess it like you would a Faberge egg, like a gunfight, like a musical, like a snowflake, like a death, a birth, a triumph, a love story, a tornado, a smile, a heartbreak, a sweater, a hunger pain, a desire, a fufillment, a desert, a waterfall, a song, a race, a frog, a play, a song, a marriage, a consummation, a thirst quenched. Assess it like that. And when you're done, find an ant and have him assess the cathedrals of Europe.

Grandfather used to call the rain 'the erotic ritual between heaven and Earth.' The rain represented the seeds sown in the Earth’s womb by heaven, her roaring husband, to further life. Rainy encounters between heaven and Earth were sexual love on a cosmic scale. All of nature became involved. Clouds, heaven’s body, were titillated by the storm. In turn, heaven caressed the Earth with heavy winds, which rushed toward their erotic climax, the tornado. The grasses that pop out of the Earth’s warm center shortly after the rain are called the numberless children of Earth who will serve humankind’s need for nourishment. The rainy season is the season of life. Yes, it had rained the night before.

Oh, honey," she says when I'm done with my wallowing, "it's like my grandma used to say: Just when you think life's got you in a gutter, a tornado will come along and destroy your house." "And then you rebuild?" I ask. "Well, she never mentioned that part, but I suppose it could happen." I am not cheered up.

I'm sixteen years old and this is the main idea the adults in my life have given me. Whether it's seaweed in Mexico, missing art projects, or Dad shrugging, the message is clear: The older people get, the less they can do about things.

I am as blank as a piece of white paper in a world with no pencils.

I remembered all our interactions in vivid detail, whether I wanted to or not. She’d touched down in my life like a tornado, gotten my drink wrong during her first shift at Valhalla, and hadn’t left my thoughts since.

The world's natural calamities and disasters-its tornados and hurricanes, volcanoes and floods-its physical turmoil-are not created by us specifically. What is created by us is the degree to which these events touch our life

I am the barrier between the bullshit that falls from the sky and the humans who do not want bullshit on their pantsuits. In eight days of riding around, that's what I've discovered. It's raining bullshit. Probably all the time.

Tearing through the room like an F5 tornado of hyperactive joy was Taylor Hawkins, my brother from another mother, my best friend, a man for whom I would take a bullet. Upon first meeting, our bond was immediate, and we grew closer with every day, every song, every note that we ever played together. I am not afraid to say that our chance meeting was a kind of love at first sight, igniting a musical “twin flame” that still burns to this day. Together, we have become an unstoppable duo, onstage and off, in pursuit of any and all adventure we can find. We are absolutely meant to be, and I am grateful that we found each other in this lifetime.

the wind is scary.. during a tornado or in life in general.. never know when a gust is going to come in your direction and change everything

Teach your girl to shoot, because a restraining order is just a piece of paper. -Life

People pleasers make the best victims. I see it all the time at work.

But who’s to say what’s stupid and what’s not stupid when your life falls apart? Some people fall apart over TV shows. Some people fall apart over a breakup. Some people fall apart over someone eating the last bowl of Apple Jacks. I fell apart because of the annual art show. No one noticed I was falling apart before then. I

Seasons are like life. Some seasons are better than others. Some have more sun and rainbows. Others have storms and tornadoes. Some have both. You have to accept that, and bring colour and light to the season you're in as best you can, and always look forward to the next season.

In the great tornado of life, things sometimes seem out of control, and we can’t see where we are going. But sometimes, when the storm passes and the dust settles, things have landed into place beautifully.

You don’t have to move mountains. Simply fall in love with life. Be a tornado of happiness, gratitude, and acceptance. You will change the world just by being a warm, kind-hearted human being. —Anita Krizzan

But how do you know when you are nearing a true end instead of a dead end? How do you finish the experiment? What do you do when, years into your life, you figure out that the yellow brick road you’ve been easing down leads you directly into the eye of the tornado?

Horror grows impatient, rhetorically, with the Stoic fatalism of Ecclesiastes. That we are all going to die, that death mocks and cancels every one of our acts and attainments and every moment of our life histories, this knowledge is to storytelling what rust is to oxidation; the writer of horror holds with those who favor fire. The horror writer is not content to report on death as the universal system of human weather; he or she chases tornadoes. Horror is Stoicism with a taste for spectacle.

MOTHER – By Ted Kooser Mid April already, and the wild plums bloom at the roadside, a lacy white against the exuberant, jubilant green of new grass and the dusty, fading black of burned-out ditches. No leaves, not yet, only the delicate, star-petaled blossoms, sweet with their timeless perfume. You have been gone a month today and have missed three rains and one nightlong watch for tornadoes. I sat in the cellar from six to eight while fat spring clouds went somersaulting, rumbling east. Then it poured, a storm that walked on legs of lightning, dragging its shaggy belly over the fields. The meadowlarks are back, and the finches are turning from green to gold. Those same two geese have come to the pond again this year, honking in over the trees and splashing down. They never nest, but stay a week or two then leave. The peonies are up, the red sprouts, burning in circles like birthday candles, for this is the month of my birth, as you know, the best month to be born in, thanks to you, everything ready to burst with living. There will be no more new flannel nightshirts sewn on your old black Singer, no birthday card addressed in a shaky but businesslike hand. You asked me if I would be sad when it happened and I am sad. But the iris I moved from your house now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner, as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that. Were it not for the way you taught me to look at the world, to see the life at play in everything, I would have to be lonely forever.

There is something about nature out of control that touches a primal terror. We are used to believing that we’re the masters of our domain, and that God has given us this earth to rule over. We need this illusion like a good night-light. The truth is more fearsome: we are as frail as young trees in tornadoes, and our beloved homes are one flood away from driftwood. We plant our roots in trembling earth, we live where mountains rose and fell and prehistoric seas burned away in mist. We and the towns we have built are not permanent; the earth itself is a passing train. When you stand in muddy water that is rising toward your waist and you hear people shouting against the darkness and see their figures struggling to hold back the currents that will not be denied, you realize the truth of it: we will not win, but we cannot give up.

Look. This isn't a temper tantrum. I'm not some teenager you can blow off because you made a myth about teenagers being dramatic.

The paintings here were mystifying. In the reds and greens of the canvases, maidens danced with animals, a goat or something carried a violin in its mouth, and a man and a woman embraced under a gigantic blazing bouquet. This swarm of unrelated images was like a glimpse into a dream. But not a good one. The joy I saw there was ferocious, and the sadness suffocatingly cold. Blues thrown onto the canvas warred with yellows approaching like tornadoes. People gathered round aghast to watch a circus spin to life.

But does a hurricane ask for a background check on all the people it kills? Does a tornado? Does an earthquake? No, because they're forces of nature. They don't have to. So you need to decide how you want to live life, Emma. You can either take the easy way out, or you can be a force of nature

Bad weather’s moving in,” the old bird said, finally handing me a check. Never seen so many tornadoes in my life. We don’t need no more of those,” I agreed. “Last time one went through, the wind blew so hard I had to have my butt cheeks sewn back together.

Expert Pamela Rutledge explained in an article for Psychology Today that taking selfies is indicative of the tornado of narcissism. The selfie is the appropriate snapshot of the state of identity in the West. Paranoia that people don’t see us, understand us, or find us essential is pushing, pushing, pushing self-expression to the center of our daily life.

I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain. I believe this is how Thomas Stone materialized in my life. If that's not the explanation, then I must invoke a disinterested God who leaves us to our own devices, neither causing nor preventing tornadoes or pestilence, but a God who will now and then stick his thumb on the spinning wheel so that a father who put a continent between himself and his sons should find himself in the same room as one of them.

Nurtured by negative circumstances, braiding raging tornadoes in her hair, she held her head high, wearing her weathered poetry with pride.

I’m scared of walking out of this room, and never feeling the rest of my whole life, the way I feel when I’m with you.

I want a mission. Not someone else’s mission, either. I want my own mission. Something I think up myself. Something I actually want to do. Something that makes me jump up and down. •

Before I’d signed on with Caldswell, my life had followed a pattern: obey orders, climb the ladder, keep my eyes on the prize. It was a good gig, dangerous and exciting with glory as my reward. Most of all, though, it was simple. A path of my own choosing where I did what I loved, knew where I fit, and understood where I was going. Now, though, I felt like a dollhouse in a tornado.

I wish I could talk to twenty-three-year-old Sarah again. Ten-year-old Sarah doesn’t understand my struggle. She hasn’t come to this yet. She hasn’t come to the place where my present means nothing but my future is all everyone talks about. Twenty-three-year-old

So why are you skipping school? Can you tell me that?" "Nothing ever really happens," I say. "Meaning?" "Meaning nothing original or new ever really happens and school is just a place where we all pretend like we're new and original and we're not. We're all the same.

I work Cold Cases. When we bring witnesses in, they want to believe this doesn’t count: not really a murder investigation, not a proper one with guns and cuffs, nothing that’ll slam through your life like a tornado. Something old and soft, instead, worn fuzzy round the edges.

I’d like to think that the day I realize we will always be miserable will differ from every other. I hope it will so obnoxiously stand out from the monotonous cycle of my days, that I wouldn’t forget that sorrowful moment of comprehension. But, when that breeze of reality comes by, it wont be a memorable hurricane, nor a momentous tornado. It will be the same, sad, soft wind that I felt the day before, and the day before that. Because the moment you understand your inevitable misery in life, may also be the day you see you are to always be dejected.

There is something about nature out of control that touches a primal terror. We are used to believing that we’re the masters of our domain, and that God has given us this earth to rule over. We need this illusion like a good night-light. The truth is more fearsome: we are as frail as young trees in tornadoes, and our beloved homes are one flood away from driftwood. We plant our roots in trembling earth, we live where mountains rose and fell and prehistoric seas burned away in mist. We and the towns we have built are not permanent; the earth itself is a passing train.

Everyday I rewrite her name across my ribcage so that those who wish to break my heart will know who to answer to later She has no idea that I’ve taught my tongue to make pennies, and every time our mouths are to meet I will slip coins to the back of her throat and make wishes I wish that someday my head on her belly might be like home like doubt to doubt resuscitation because time is supposed to mean more than skin She doesn’t know that I have taught my arms to close around her clocks so they can withstand the fallout from her Autumn She is so explosive, volcanoes watch her and learn terrorists want to strap her to their chests because she is a cause worth dying for Maybe someday time will teach me to pick up her pieces put her back together and remind her to click her heels but she doesn’t need a wizard to tell her that I was here all along Lady let us catch the next tornado home let us plant cantaloupe trees in our backyard then maybe together we will realize that we don’t like cantaloupe and they don’t grow on trees we can laugh about it then we can plant things we’ve never heard of I’ve never heard of a woman who can make flawed look so beautiful the way you do The word smitten is to how I feel about you what a kiss is to romance so maybe my lips to yours could be the penance to this confession because I am the only one preaching your defunct religion sitting alone at your altar, praising you out of faith I cannot do this hard-knock life alone You are all the softness a rock dreams of being the mistakes the rain makes at picnics when Mother Nature bears witness in much better places So yes I will gladly take on your ocean just to swim beneath you so I can kiss the bends of your knees in appreciation for the work they do keeping your head above water

You were the colors to my monochrome life. My morning light and my midnight dream. Flawed, yet whole. You used to think that you weren’t enough – but you were enough for me. You were my first everything. My fire. My tornado. You were the eye of my storm. The moment I saw you, I knew you were going to destroy my life. But I let it happen. There was just something magical and outlandish about playing with fire that I couldn’t resist. I wanted to be as close as I could to the idea of destroying myself. It didn’t happen out of the blue. Day by day – moment by moment, I started to lose myself. With every kiss, you took away a part of me. Until one day, I woke up and I wasn’t myself anymore. I never thought that a disaster could be so damn beautiful. I don’t regret it. But I regret waking up next to an empty bed and how unceremoniously you left when the damage was done. I saw your picture today, holding someone else’s hand. And it made me realize that some disasters don’t make a sound. Not every destruction stands still. Some of them might walk right past you.

Maybe she woke up. Maybe she's happier now.

They’re in the presence of the beast now, an enormous incisor sunk into the horizon.

It's one thing to reach for a bottle and become a monster, a mean drunk, but it's another thing to have that bottle inside you. A rage organ.

My scars will tell stories until the day I stop breathing. Thick

I was over forty years old and I felt like I hadn’t been born yet. I had spent my whole life studying and reading literature, dissecting and analysing the emotions of others while feeling nothing myself. I was vulnerable, ripe, hanging low and alone, yearning with all my being to be picked for something special. I had lived my life in a steady, British drizzle. I wanted tornadoes, hurricanes, whirlwinds and earthquakes. I wanted disasters and triumphs, highs and lows, peaks and troughs; I wanted every extreme of every feeling I’d never known.

If parents cared as much about raising kids as the chef cared about making this cake, the world would be a completely different meat grinder. Bruce can’t take a bite of his cake without

There is something in the room with us. It's familiar. It's a feeling I've known my whole life but never talked about. It's an invisible man or monster under the bed. History. That's what it is. History is in the room with us. You absorb it even if it's not happening right in front of you. You absorb the feeling of it. It's there even though it's not there. It's in your skin.

In the first, a tornado approached and I led her and others up a fire escape that ultimately dead-ended against a brick wall. In the second dream she and I were taking an examination and neither of us knew the answers. I welcomed these dreams because they informed the patient of my limits, my humanness, my having to grapple with the same fundamental problems of life that she did.

Relationships fail because of trust issues, commitment issues and communication issues. Without communication there is no relationship. Without respect there is no LOVE. Without trust there is no reason to continue. Stay grounded to the one you love. Respect him or her to the utmost. Respect the relationship. If the relationship is healthy, then keep on keeping on and never let a Hurricane, Tornado, or Tsunami tear your house down. Life's to short for broken hearts. Life's to short for betrayal or back stabbing. Life's to short to live with the thoughts of "What if's". Life's to short to waste a perfectly good heart. Adhere to the truth, if not Karma has no deadline. She could strike whenever you're in a relationship or married, then you look back on years ago wondering "What if...

It's like my grandma used to say: Just when you think life's got you in a gutter, a tornado will come along and destroy your house." "And then you rebuild?" I ask. "Well, she never mentioned that part, but I suppose it could happen.

His face ends up on a 1992 cover of the local alt weekly Westword, which contains profiles of him and a few other Denver storm geeks. “Some call it a hobby, some call it an addiction,” Tim tells the reporter. “I think it’s more of an obsession with me.

This land spawned a tornado that killed Emmy’s mother. You call that tender?” “Tragic, that’s what I call it. But don’t blame the land. The land’s what it’s always been, and tornadoes have been a part of that from the beginning. Drought, too, and grasshoppers and hail and wildfire and everything that’s ever driven folks off or killed ’em. The land is what it is. Life is what it is. God is what God is. You and me, we’re what we are. None of it’s perfect. Or, hell, maybe it all is and we’re just not wise enough to see it.

She came here because I made her feel better or because she wanted to talk to me about it. Because she was spinning in a tornado and the only time she feels still is when she’s with me. And then it occurred to me. I was her person. Me. I couldn’t adequately put into words the way this made me feel. It wasn’t in her DNA to let someone else take care of her. I knew because it wasn’t in mine either. We were the rocks in our family, always putting the needs of everyone else before our own, so I knew what it meant that she let me be there for her.

His room was a sickly dual-tone of crimson and charcoal, like an Untitled Rothko, the colours bleeding into each other horribly and then rather serenely. The overall effect was overwhelmingly unapologetic but it grew on you like a wart on your nose you didn't realise it was a part of your identity until one day it simply was. His room was his identity. Fiercely bold, avant-garde but never monotonous. He was red, he was black, he was bored, and he was fire. At least to me he seemed like fire. A tornado of fire that burned all in its wake leaving only the wretched brightness of annihilation. His room was where he charmed and disarmed us. We were his playthings. Nobody plays with fire and leaves unscarred. The fire soon seeps into chard and soot. The colours of his soul, his aura, and probably his heart if he didn't stop smoking.

I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain. I believe this is how Thomas Stone materialized in my life. If that's not the explanation, then I must invoke a disinterested God who leaves us to our own devices, neither causing nor preventing tornadoes or pestilence, but a God who will now and then stick his thumb on the spinning wheel so that a father who put a continent between himself and his sons should find himself in the same room as one of them.

There is something about nature out of control that touches a primal terror. We are used to believing that we're the masters of our domain, and that God has given us this earth to rule over. We need this illusion like a good night-light. The truth is more fearsome: we are as frail as young trees in tornadoes, and our beloved homes are one flood away from driftwood. We plant our roots in trembling earth, we live where mountains rose and fell and prehistoric seas burned away in mist. We and the towns we have built are not permanent; the earth itself is a passing train.

The turning points in life, the really important decisions, are rarely dramatic. The first time someone tries heroin isn’t life-altering, but the three-hundredth time, the time their heart stops, sure is. Every human is an unwieldy vessel, weighed down with hopes and dreams. We turn so slowly that we don’t even realise we are moving at all. We creatures of habit, our momentum is all-consuming. For every action there are consequences we could never anticipate; it’s how we grow, each of us, from worms into butterflies, flapping our wings and making tornadoes on the other side of the world.

I want to impart on you some wisdom that I’ve learned. The world is not a very nice place. There are people in this world who will constantly bring you down. However, there are also people in this world that will help raise you up. Make you a person that you are proud to be. You will find, many times in your life, things do not go your way. During those times, I want you to take a step back, and analyze the situation. I want you to notice, not only with your eyes, but also with all your other senses, the root of the situation. I want you to be aware. I want you to be prepared. And I want you to be forgiving. The world can use more forgiveness.

These words I speak to you are not incidental additions to your life, homeowner improvements to your standard of living. They are foundational words, words to build a life on. If you work these words into your life, you are like a smart carpenter who built his house on solid rock. Rain poured down, the river flooded, a tornado hit—but nothing moved that house. It was fixed to the rock. But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don’t work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards.” — MATTHEW 7:24-27 (THE MESSAGE

It was the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, he reminded himself. He had heard many people say that on TV and on the outré video clips floating in cyberspace, which added a further, new-technology depth to his addiction. There were no rules any more. And in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, well, anything could happen. Old friends could become new enemies and traditional enemies could be your new besties or even lovers. It was no longer possible to predict the weather, or the likelihood of war, or the outcome of elections. A woman might fall in love with a piglet, or a man start living with an owl. A beauty might fall asleep and, when kissed, wake up speaking a different language and in that new language reveal a completely altered character. A flood might drown your city. A tornado might carry your house to a faraway land where, upon landing, it would squash a witch. Criminals could become kings and kings be unmasked as criminals. A man might discover that the woman he lived with was his father’s illegitimate child. A whole nation might jump off a cliff like swarming lemmings. Men who played presidents on TV could become presidents. The water might run out. A woman might bear a baby who was found to be a revenant god. Words could lose their meanings and acquire new ones. The world might end, as at least one prominent scientist- entrepreneur had begun repeatedly to predict. An evil scent would hang over the ending. And a TV star might miraculously return the love of a foolish old coot, giving him an unlikely romantic triumph which would redeem a long, small life, bestowing upon it, at the last, the radiance of majesty.

The glee of it. The ecstasy of It. I can't speak about this It because I know no word. It is just there, It is always there, like death in life. In this instant I know that something terrible is rising that must be seized and turned back upon itself before it twists outward into violence. But that knowing always comes too late, a wild unraveling is under way and I am caught up in it like a coyote seen late one afternoon in an Arkansas tornado-a toy dog spinning skyward, struck white by a ray of sun against black clouds, then black, then white, then gone and lost forever. The wind dies. A dead stillness. Mirror water. That ecstasy that shivered every nerve replaced by the precise knowing that what this self perpetrated is as much a part of the universal will as erupting lava that subsides once more into the inner earth.

The widest cause of secularization may be the steady change of thinking so that there is the expectation that reason and a consideration of cause and effect will help with explanations. Supernatural power began to be removed from explanations of the process of life or society in the seventeenth century, and although there may be a nod towards astrology or the crossed finger today, superstition is not seriously used in decision making. ... Scientific thinking, which similarly developed in the seventeenth century, has been influential in bringing this change. We now see that tornadoes and earthquakes have rational explanations in terms of climatology and seismology rather than as divine punishments. Most people when deciding whether to take a new job, embark on a divorce, or simply plan a holiday will not seek divine guidance, but rather discuss with themselves or others the issues of cause and effect.

I could take one wrong step off a curb and be crushed by a bus. I could choke on a piece of bread. The arteries around my heart might be clogging right now. I probably already have cancer. Someone in my apartment building might burn a frozen pizza tonight and fry me to death in my sleep. A mosquito could give me malaria. I don’t know how to tell if I’m inhaling carbon monoxide. I could be struck by lightning. I could have an aneurysm. I could starve to death. A tornado could tear me from my seat and pitch me into the sky. I could have a stroke. I could be crushed in a tsunami or an earthquake. I could get rabies. I could drown in an undertow. I could catch the plague. The earth could open up a sinkhole and swallow me. I could get typhoid… and a psychopath could kill me? The fact that a person could deliberately end another person’s life is hard for me to wrap my mind around. Given all the ways to die that are already looming over me, I have to worry about psychopaths, too?

...[M]ost of us have figured out that we have to do what's in front of us and keep doing it. We clean up beaches after oil spills. We rebuild whole towns after hurricanes and tornadoes. We return calls and library books. We get people water. Some of us even pray. Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice. The equation is: life, death, resurrection, hope. The horror is real, and so you make casseroles for your neighbor, organize an overseas clothing drive, and do your laundry. You can also offer to do other people's laundry if they have recently had any random babies or surgeries. We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we'd pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. That's not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears.

You really don’t believe that anything can have a value of its own beyond what function it serves for human beings?” Resaint said. “Value to who?” Resaint asked Halyard to imagine a planet in some remote galaxy—a lush, seething, glittering planet covered with stratospheric waterfalls, great land-sponges bouncing through the valleys, corals budding in perfect niveous hexagons, humming lichens glued to pink crystals, prismatic jellyfish breaching from the rivers, titanic lilies relying on tornadoes to spread their pollen—a planet full of complex, interconnected life but devoid of consciousness. “Are you telling me that, if an asteroid smashed into this planet and reduced every inch of its surface to dust, nothing would be lost? Because nobody in particular would miss it?” “But the universe is bloody huge—stuff like that must happen every minute. You can’t go on strike over it. Honestly it sounds to me to like your real enemy isn’t climate change or habitat loss, it’s entropy. You don’t like the idea that everything eventually crumbles. Well, it does. If you’re this worried about species extinction, wait until you hear about the heat death of the universe.” “I would be upset about the heat death of the universe too if human beings were accelerating the rate of it by a hundred times or more.” “And if a species’ position with respect to us doesn’t matter— you know, those amoebae they found that live at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, if they’re just as important as Chiu Chiu or my parents’ dog, even though nobody ever gets anywhere near them—if distance in space doesn’t matter, why should distance in time? If we don’t care about whether their lives overlap with our lives, why even worry about whether they exist simultaneously with us? Your favorite wasp—Adelo-midgy-midgy—” “Adelognathus marginatum—” “It did exist. It always will have existed. Extinction can’t take that away. It went through its nasty little routine over and over again for millions and millions of years. The show was a big success. So why is it important that it’s still running at the same time you are? Isn’t that centering the whole thing on human beings, which is exactly what we’re not supposed to be doing? I mean, for that matter—reality is all just numbers anyway, right? I mean underneath? That’s what people say now. So why are you so down on the scans? Hacks aside. Why is it so crucial that these animals exist right now in an ostensibly meat-based format, just because we do? My point is you talk about extinction as if you’re taking this enlightened post-human View from Nowhere but if we really get down to it you’re definitely taking a View from Karin Resaint two arms two legs one head born Basel Switzerland year of our lord two-thousand-and-when-ever.” But Resaint wasn’t listening anymore.

Here am I, a little animal called a man--a bit of vitalized matter, one hundred and sixty-five pounds of meat and blood, nerve, sinew, bones, and brain,--all of it soft and tender, susceptible to hurt, fallible, and frail. I strike a light back-handed blow on the nose of an obstreperous horse, and a bone in my hand is broken. I put my head under the water for five minutes, and I am drowned. I fall twenty feet through the air, and I am smashed. I am a creature of temperature. A few degrees one way, and my fingers and ears and toes blacken and drop off. A few degrees the other way, and my skin blisters and shrivels away from the raw, quivering flesh. A few additional degrees either way, and the life and the light in me go out. A drop of poison injected into my body from a snake, and I cease to move--for ever I cease to move. A splinter of lead from a rifle enters my head, and I am wrapped around in the eternal blackness. Fallible and frail, a bit of pulsating, jelly-like life--it is all I am. About me are the great natural forces--colossal menaces, Titans of destruction, unsentimental monsters that have less concern for me than I have for the grain of sand I crush under my foot. They have no concern at all for me. They do not know me. They are unconscious, unmerciful, and unmoral. They are the cyclones and tornadoes, lightning flashes and cloud-bursts, tide-rips and tidal waves, undertows and waterspouts, great whirls and sucks and eddies, earthquakes and volcanoes, surfs that thunder on rock-ribbed coasts and seas that leap aboard the largest crafts that float, crushing humans to pulp or licking them off into the sea and to death--and these insensate monsters do not know that tiny sensitive creature, all nerves and weaknesses, whom men call Jack London, and who himself thinks he is all right and quite a superior being.

i am something very gentle, very jealous of the selfless way my heart pumps blood for my ungrateful body, of how the bones in my spine uplift my head, despite how i insist we're crumbling, we're crumbling, always crying over spilled milk, when i could be strong like stainless steel or spider silk, when i could be kevlar instead of the honeycombed human digging out bullets, when i could be the tornado instead of Dorothy missing Kansas, when i could be a bone-dry Martini instead of the one retching, when i could be something like you, the shoulder to lean on and not the one reeling, the one picking up eggshells and never the one breaking.

breath, life after seven decades plus three years is a lot of breathing. seventy three years on this earth is a lot of taking in and giving out, is a life of coming from somewhere and for many a bunch of going nowhere. how do we celebrate a poet who has created music with words for over fifty years, who has showered magic on her people, who has redefined poetry into a black world exactness thereby giving the universe an insight into darkroads? just say she interprets beauty and wants to give life, say she is patient with phoniness and doesn’t mind people calling her gwen or sister. say she sees the genius in our children, is visionary about possibilities, sees as clearly as ray charles and stevie wonder, hears like determined elephants looking for food. say that her touch is fine wood, her memory is like an african roadmap detailing adventure and clarity, yet returning to chicago’s south evans to record the journey. say her voice is majestic and magnetic as she speaks in poetry, rhythms, song and spirited trumpets, say she is dark skinned, melanin rich, small-boned, hurricane-willed, with a mind like a tornado redefining the landscape. life after seven decades plus three years is a lot of breathing. gwendolyn, gwen, sister g has not disappointed our expectations. in the middle of her eldership she brings us vigorous language, memory, illumination. she brings breath. (Quality: Gwendolyn Brooks at 73)

I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that man, that Franco-Hungarian writer... I would rather not dwell upon him at all, but I cannot help it— he is surging up from under my pen. Today one does not hear much about him; and this is good, for it proves that I was right in resisting his evil spell, right in experiencing a creepy chill down my spine whenever this or that new book of his touched my hand. The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates. Lean and arrogant, with some poisonous pun ever ready to fork out and quiver at you, and with a strange look of expectancy in his dull brown veiled eyes, this false wag had, I daresay, an irresistible effect on small rodents. Having mastered the art of verbal invention to perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words, a title he valued higher than that of a writer; personally, I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books, of penning things that had not really happened in some way or other; and I remember once saying to him as I braved the mockery of his encouraging nods that, were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one’s personal truth. I had known his books before I knew him; a faint disgust was already replacing the aesthetic pleasure which I had suffered his first novel to give me. At the beginning of his career, it had been possible perhaps to distinguish some human landscape, some old garden, some dream- familiar disposition of trees through the stained glass of his prodigious prose... but with every new book the tints grew still more dense, the gules and purpure still more ominous; and today one can no longer see anything at all through that blazoned, ghastly rich glass, and it seems that were one to break it, nothing but a perfectly black void would face one’s shivering soul. But how dangerous he was in his prime, what venom he squirted, with what whips he lashed when provoked! The tornado of his passing satire left a barren waste where felled oaks lay in a row, and the dust still twisted, and the unfortunate author of some adverse review, howling with pain, spun like a top in the dust.

When the Nautilus returned to the surface of the ocean, I could take in Reao Island over its whole flat, wooded expanse. Obviously its madreporic rocks had been made fertile by tornadoes and thunderstorms. One day, carried off by a hurricane from neighboring shores, some seed fell onto these limestone beds, mixing with decomposed particles of fish and marine plants to form vegetable humus. Propelled by the waves, a coconut arrived on this new coast. Its germ took root. Its tree grew tall, catching steam off the water. A brook was born. Little by little, vegetation spread. Tiny animals – worms, insects – rode ashore on tree trunks snatched from islands to windward. Turtles came to lay their eggs. Birds nested in the young trees. In this way animal life developed, and drawn by the greenery and fertile soil, man appeared. And that’s how these islands were formed, the immense achievement of microscopic animals.

Everyone knows the great energies running amok cast terrible shadows, that each of the so-called senseless acts has its thread looping back through the world and into a human heart. And meanwhile the gold-trimmed thunder wanders the sky; the river may be filling the cellars of the sleeping town. Cyclone, fire, and their merry cousins bring us to grief — but these are the hours with the old wooden-god faces; we lift them to our shoulders like so many black coffins, we continue walking into the future. I don't mean there are no bodies in the river, or bones broken by the wind. I mean everyone who has heard the lethal train-roar of the tornado swears there was no mention ever of any person, or reason — I mean the waters rise without any plot upon history, or even geography. Whatever power of the earth rampages, we turn to it dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever the name of the catastrophe, it is never the opposite of love.

Many potential readers will skip the shopping cart or cash-out clerk because they have seen so many disasters reported in the news that they’ve acquired a panic mentality when they think of them. “Disasters scare me to death!” they cry. “I don’t want to read about them!” But really, how can a picture hurt you? Better that each serve as a Hallmark card that greets your fitful fevers with reason and uncurtains your valor. Then, so gospeled, you may see that defeating a disaster is as innocently easy as deciding to go out to dinner. Remove the dread that bars your doors of perception, and you will enjoy a banquet of treats that will make the difference between suffering and safety. You will enter a brave new world that will erase your panic, and release you from the grip of terror, and relieve you of the deadening effects of indifference —and you will find that switch of initiative that will energize your intelligence, empower your imagination, and rouse your sense of vigilance in ways that will tilt the odds of danger from being forever against you to being always in your favor. Indeed, just thinking about a disaster is one of the best things you can do —because it allows you to imagine how you would respond in a way that is free of pain and destruction. Another reason why disasters seem so scary is that many victims tend to see them as a whole rather than divide them into much smaller and more manageable problems. A disaster can seem overwhelming when confronted with everything at once —but if you dice it into its tiny parts and knock them off one at a time, the whole thing can seem as easy as eating a lavish dinner one bite at a time. In a disaster you must also plan for disruption as well as destruction. Death and damage may make the news, but in almost every disaster far more lives are disrupted than destroyed. Wit­ness the tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011 and killed 158 people. The path of death and destruction was less than a mile wide and only 22 miles long —but within thirty miles 160,000 citizens whose property didn’t suffer a dime of damage were profoundly disrupted by the carnage, loss of power and water, suspension of civic services, and inability to buy food, gas, and other necessities. You may rightfully believe your chances of dying in a disaster in your lifetime may be nearly nil, but the chances of your life being disrupted by a disaster in the next decade is nearly a sure thing. Not only should you prepare for disasters, you should learn to premeditate them. Prepare concerns the body; premeditate concerns the mind. Everywhere you go, think what could happen and how you might/could/would/should respond. Use your imagination. Fill your brain with these visualizations —run mind-movies in your head —develop a repertoire —until when you walk into a building/room/situation you’ll automatically know what to do. If a disaster does ambush you —sure you’re apt to panic, but in seconds your memory will load the proper video into your mobile disk drive and you’ll feel like you’re watching a scary movie for the second time and you’ll know what to expect and how to react. That’s why this book is important: its manner of vivifying disasters kickstarts and streamlines your acquiring these premeditations, which lays the foundation for satisfying your needs when a disaster catches you by surprise.

Similarly, when you see a character jumping from a 100 story building and landing without hurting a bone, then believe that this is an example of special effects.   Special effects are provided by a few companies that use specialized software to add these effects. Many of these companies are located in India, in Bangalore and Mumbai. Movies like Avatar, Jurassic Park, and many others were sent to India for providing special effects.   Similarly, in Thor, when the main character rotates his hammer and generates a tornado, be rest assured that this is only an example of special effects. In reality, nothing like this happens.   And if you are able to do it, you are a superhuman, like Superman. You have got super-powers to do whatever you want and you can generate such a tornado by rotating your hand, even without a hammer.   So, my sincere advice to you is not to even attempt this. You will end up with a torn muscle, or a fractured hand, or maybe you may even suffer a heart malfunction and eventual death.   Let me not get into the science behind how this happens, but if you are educated enough, you will heed my advice and not attempt this anytime in your life.

right now my mind is full of images, an overwhelming flood of memories and ideas—you have any idea how many memories are buried in the mind? Fishing for bluegill on Lake Argyle with my father, the hook caught in his thumb, forcing it through the other side and cutting it off with wirecutters, the severed barb flying dangerously into the air spinning its cut facet gleaming in the sun and I jerking back for fear it would plunge into my eye, squinting protectively, opening my eyes again it is mud, all mud, a universe of mud and the mortar shell has just taken flight, my fingers jammed into my ears, the smell of the explosion penetrating my sinuses making them clench up and bleed, the shell exploding in the trees, a puff of white smoke but the trees are still there and the gunfire still raining down like hailstones on the cellar door on the day that the tornado wrecked our farmhouse and we packed into my aunt’s fruit cellar and I looked up at the stacked mason jars of rhubarb and tomatoes and wondered what would happen to us when the glass shattered and flew through the air like the horizontal sleet of Soldier Field on the day that I caught five for eighty-seven yards and put such a hit on Cornelius Hayes that he took five minutes to get up. God, I can see my entire life!

Ryder’s heart beats madly against my ear as we cling to each other, holding on for dear life. Adrenaline races through my veins, making my breath come in short gasps. I can feel Ryder’s fingers in my hair, his nails digging into my scalp as he presses me tightly against his body, his muscles bunched and rigid. I know I’m supposed to hate him, but all I can think right now is how glad I am he’s here--glad that I’m not alone. I’ve never been so scared in all my life, but I know it would be worse without him. It’s over in a matter of seconds. The freight-train roar quiets, the rain returning with a vengeance. I don’t need Jim Cantore to tell me it’s a rain-wrapped tornado. I’ve watched enough Storm Chasers to recognize it, even from my little hidey-hole under the stairs. If we had been outside, we probably wouldn’t have seen it coming, not till it was too late. Ryder releases his grip on my head, and I pull away slightly, peering up at him. His deep brown eyes are slightly wild-looking, but otherwise he looks okay. His face isn’t a shade of green, at least. I lean back against him, my head resting on his shoulder now. We’re still holding hands, our fingers intertwined. Somehow, it doesn’t seem at all weird. It just feels…safe. Neither of us says a word, not till the sirens are silenced a few minutes later. “I guess we should give it a few minutes,” I say, my voice slightly hoarse. “You know, just to make sure that’s it. No point in going out just to climb right back in.” He nods. “Besides, it’s perfectly comfortable in here.” “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.” “Okay, let me rephrase. It’s not uncomfortable.” I swallow hard. “I hope it’s not bad out there. I’m afraid of what we’re going to find.” “No matter how bad it is, we’re fine; the dogs and cats are fine. That’s what matters, Jemma. Anything else is replaceable.” “You sound like my dad, you know that? Have you been studying at the Bradley Cafferty School of Platitudes or something?” “Your dad’s a smart guy,” he says with a shrug.

Man’s destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he’s done — almost. He hasn’t quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man’s conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we’ve attained, we don’t have enough mastery to stop devastating the world — or to repair the devastation we’ve already wrought. We’ve poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit — and we go on pouring our poisons into the world. We’ve gobbled up irreplaceable resources as though they could never run out — and we go on gobbling them up. It’s hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody’s really doing anything about it. It’s a problem our children will have to solve, or their children. Only one thing can save us. We have to increase our mastery of the world. All this damage has come about through our conquest of the world, but we have to go on conquering it until our rule is absolute. Then, when we’re in complete control, everything will be fine. We’ll have fusion power. No pollution. We’ll turn the rain on and off. We’ll grow a bushel of wheat in a square centimeter. We’ll turn the oceans into farms. We’ll control the weather — no more hurricanes, no more tornadoes, no more droughts, no more untimely frosts. We’ll make the clouds release their water over the land instead of dumping it uselessly into the oceans. All the life processes of this planet will be where they belong—where the gods meant them to be—in our hands. And we’ll manipulate them the way a programmer manipulates a computer. And that’s where it stands right now. We have to carry the conquest forward. And carrying it forward is either going to destroy the world or turn it into a paradise — into the paradise it was meant to be under human rule. And if we manage to do this — if we finally manage to make ourselves the absolute rulers of the world — then nothing can stop us. Then we move into the Star Trek era. Man moves out into space to conquer and rule the entire universe. And that may be the ultimate destiny of man: to conquer and rule the entire universe. That’s how wonderful man is.

It takes me nearly a half hour to make what should be a ten-minute trip, and by the time I pull up in front of my house, my hands are cramped from my death grip on the steering wheel. It’s not until I step out of the car, my legs feeling like they’re made of Jell-O, that I notice Ryder’s Durango parked in front of me. “Where the hell have you been?” he calls out from the front porch, just as I make a mad dash to join him there. His face is red, his brow furrowed over stormy eyes. “They let us out an hour ago!” I am really not in the mood for his crap. “Yeah, so?” “So I was worried sick. A tornado touched down over by the Roberts’ place.” “I know! I mean, I didn’t know it touched down, but I was still at school when the sirens went off.” I drop my ridiculously heavy backpack and shake the rain from my hair. “Is everyone okay over there?” He runs a visibly trembling hand through his hair. “Yeah, it just tore up their fence or something. Jesus, Jemma!” “What is wrong with you? Why are you even here?” “I’m supposed to stay over here, remember?” “What…now?” I look past him and notice an army-green duffel bag by the front door. He’s got a key--he could’ve just let himself in. “I figured now’s as good a time as any. We need to put sandbags in front of the back door before it gets any worst out, and then we’ve got to do something about the barn. It’s awful close to the creek, and the water’s rising fast.” “Well, what do you propose we do?” “Don’t you keep your guns out there? We should move them inside. And your dad has some expensive tools in his workshop--we should get those, too.” I let out a sigh. He’s got a point. “Can I at least go inside first? Put my stuff away?” “Sure?” He moves to the edge of the porch and gazes up at the sky. “It looks like we might get a break in a few minutes, once this band moves through. Might as well wait for it.” I dig out my keys and unlock the door. I can hear the dogs howling their heads off the minute I step inside. “I’ve gotta let Beau and Sadie out,” I say over my shoulder as I head toward the kitchen. “Take your stuff to the guest room and get settled, why don’t you?” That’s my attempt at reestablishing the fact that I’m in charge here, not him. This is my house. My stuff. My life.

Nevertheless, it would be prudent to remain concerned. For, like death, IT would come: Armageddon. There would be-without exaggeration-a series of catastrophes. As a consequence of the evil in man...-no mere virus, however virulent, was even a burnt match for our madness, our unconcern, our cruelty-...there would arise a race of champions, predators of humans: namely earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, tornados, typhoons, hurricanes, droughts-the magnificent seven. Floods, winds, fires, slides. The classical elements, only angry. Oceans would warm, the sky boil and burn, the ice cap melt, the seas rise. Rogue nations, like kids killing kids at their grammar school, would fire atomic-hydrogen-neutron bombs at one another. Smallpox would revive, or out of the African jungle would slide a virus no one understood. Though reptilian only in spirit, the disease would make us shed our skins like snakes and, naked to the nerves, we'd expire in a froth of red spit. Markets worldwide would crash as reckless cars on a speedway do, striking the wall and rebounding into one another, hurling pieces of themselves at the spectators in the stands. With money worthless-that last faith lost-the multitude would riot, race against race at first, God against God, the gots against the gimmes. Insects hardened by generations of chemicals would consume our food, weeds smother our fields, fire ants, killer bees sting us while we're fleeing into refuge water, where, thrashing we would drown, our pride a sodden wafer. Pestilence. War. Famine. A cataclysm of one kind or another-coming-making millions of migrants. Wearing out the roads. Foraging in the fields. Looting the villages. Raping boys and women. There'd be no tent cities, no Red Cross lunches, hay drops. Deserts would appear as suddenly as patches of crusty skin. Only the sun would feel their itch. Floods would sweep suddenly over all those newly arid lands as if invited by the beach. Forest fires would burn, like those in coal mines, for years, uttering smoke, making soot for speech, blackening every tree leaf ahead of their actual charring. Volcanoes would erupt in series, and mountains melt as though made of rock candy till the cities beneath them were caught inside the lava flow where they would appear to later eyes, if there were any eyes after, like peanuts in brittle. May earthquakes jelly the earth, Professor Skizzen hotly whispered. Let glaciers advance like motorboats, he bellowed, threatening a book with his fist. These convulsions would be a sign the parasites had killed their host, evils having eaten all they could; we'd hear a groan that was the going of the Holy Ghost; we'd see the last of life pissed away like beer from a carouse; we'd feel a shudder move deeply through this universe of dirt, rock, water, ice, and air, because after its long illness the earth would have finally died, its engine out of oil, its sky of light, winds unable to catch a breath, oceans only acid; we'd be witnessing a world that's come to pieces bleeding searing steam from its many wounds; we'd hear it rattling its atoms around like dice in a cup before spilling randomly out through a split in the stratosphere, night and silence its place-well-not of rest-of disappearance. My wish be willed, he thought. Then this will be done, he whispered so no God could hear him. That justice may be served, he said to the four winds that raged in the corners of his attic.