Loss of Stability Quotes

When I was in college, the bell tolled for us. Just as my grandmother, the woman who had cared for me all my life, started needing me to care for her, we were told our home was being torn down, and we would need to find another place to live.

And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you’d read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor.

Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas, and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow.

Once the world was pulled out from beneath your feet, did you ever get to stand on firm ground again?

I thought at the time of my parents' divorce that I was upset by deeper, more profound things and I was just taking it out on the joint custody agreement. But that disruption was bad enough. That was a huge deal for a teenager.

I think it is really sad that when people lose their homes they kind of lose their minds too.

The world that we all knew before, could wake up in feeling safe... now it seems that everything has been turned upside down.

Losing my parents really set me adrift in more ways than one. It's not just losing them. It's losing the possibility of family.

We are losing our living systems, social systems, cultural systems, governing systems, stability, and our constitutional health, and we're surrendering it all at the same time.

the anchor man thrown overboard has simply rooted us in history's repeating cycle

After my parents' divorce when I was 4, I spent weekends with my dad before we finally moved to California. By the time Sunday rolled around, I was incapable of enjoying the day's activities, of being in the moment, because I was already dreading the inevitable goodbye of Sunday evening.

You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.

I had gone from being married with a kid, two cars, garage, nice house in a nice neighborhood to all of it gone.

Exile is like death. You cannot understand it until it happens to you.

At the heart of any terror is the fear of losing what we find meaningful.

Everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common ground, has crumbled into dust and has been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.

Even as a full-grown adult, it can still feel destabilizing when your family goes through changes.

You know, the fact that every morning you get a script in your mailbox, that's going to stop. All these little pedestrian, mundane things. And the cash.

If you've ever come across a tree that you've lived with for many years and then one day it's blown over, there's incredible shock and violence about that.

My parents split when I was 13. For a youngster, it's quite devastating. One minute you're all happy families, then everything changes.

If you just catalog the effects eviction has on people's live and neighborhoods, it's pretty troubling.