apocalypse

The visage of Lucifer mushroomed into hideousness above the cloudbank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after ages of imprisonment in the Earth.

I learned the Norse gods came with their own doomsday: Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, the end of it all. The gods were going to battle the frost giants, and they were all going to die.Had Ragnarok happened yet? Was it still to happen? I did not know then. I am not certain now.

Is the music broke, Mommy?

Poets can't march in protest or do that sort of thing. I feel that's against the rules, and pointless. If mankind wants a great big final bang, that's what it'll get. One should never protest against anything unless it's going to have an effect. None of those marches do. One should either be silent or go straight to the top.

At the round earth's imagined corners blowYour trumpets, angels, and arise, ariseFrom death, you numberless infinitiesOf souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyesShall behold God, and never taste death's woe.But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;For, if above all these my sins abound,'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,Teach me how to repent, for that's as goodAs if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

Civilization is held together by duct tape and spit, and I'm worried about the duct tape.

The only easy day was yesterday!

Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?""I don't know. Maybe. Yes.""Of course not. Imagine how many there'd be.""Yes," Kirsten said, "that's exactly it.

But if you write a version of Ragnarok in the twenty-first century, it is haunted by the imagining of a different end of things. We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world we were born into. Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short-sightedness.

This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.

CHEERS, CARTER. At least you have the sense to hand me the microphone for important things.Honestly, he drones on and on about his plans for the Apocalypse, but he makes no plans at all for the school dance. My brother's priorities are severely skewed.Sadie Kane

That's where all of us are standing now, he thought. On the fat kindling of past sins.

Living on through loss seems by contrast as bad or worse; it means experiencing environmental deterioration, steady decline in human well-being, and increasing constraint on future human action consciously and slowly while realizing that they are likely to continue for generations after one is gone.

The stranger smiled at her. "Humanity has found a cure to a disease they never new existed.

The country has turned its loyal inhabitants into wanderers similar to the survivors of an apocalypse.

The light was everywhere. He would tell me later I looked like an angel... but he just looked like the same devil to me

Some people think the devil is one being. I think the devil is when many beings come together to do terrible things. You are looking at the Terrible.