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Collapse Quotes

“Winter arrived with December, and the world continued to suffer the loss of the Internet and most forms of communication. Supply chains were disrupted. The only mass form of personal communication was the letter, and postal workers were having their worst year ever, as they were actually meeded. Food was becoming scarcer and more expensive, as was fuel for vehicles and heating. Major cities experienced riots on a regular basis, spurred on by religious fervor and want. Civilization was on the brink of collapse.”

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Book:The Fridgularity
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“And any room that I enter may become a sideshow tent where I must take my place upon a rickety old bench on the verge of collapse. Even now the Showman stands before my eyes. His stiff red hair moves a little toward one shoulder, as if he is going to turn his gaze upon me, and moves back again; then his head moves a little toward the other shoulder in this never-ending game of horrible peek-a-boo. I can only sit and wait, knowing that one day he will turn full around, step down from his stage, and claim me for the abyss I have always feared. Perhaps then I will discover what it was I did - what any of us did - to deserve this fate.”

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Book:Teatro Grottesco
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“That’s the thing about the collapse of civilization, Blake. It never happens according to plan – there’s no slavering horde of zombies. No actinic flash of thermonuclear war. No Earth-shuddering asteroid. The end comes in unforeseen ways; the stock market collapses, and then the banks, and then there is no food in the supermarkets, or the communications system goes down completely and inevitably, and previously amiable co-workers find themselves wrestling over the last remaining cookie that someone brought in before all the madness began.”

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Book:The Fridgularity
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“Hard to describe what those next years felt like to live through. Except as a hollowing out, a loss beyond repair...even as it kept begging to be repaired. While the promise of what had been so very close haunted me. In so many ways. "So much in motion, such energy, it disguised the decay of things, the incremental rot. How much was hollowed out." Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories. You couldn't figure out if collapse was a cliff or a gentle slope because all the mental constructs obscured it. Multinationals kept their monopolies, shed jobs or even their identities, but most did not go under. Governments became more autocratic, on average. Here was fine, there was a disaster. But here was just a different kind of disaster. A thick mist drenched in the smoke of flares that kept curling back on us. Why fight a mist if all that lay ahead was more of the same? Those of us who survived the pandemic, and all the rest, passed through so many different worlds. Like time travelers. Some of us lived in the past. Some in the present, some in an unknowable future. If you lived in the past, you disbelieved the conflagration reflected in the eyes of those already looking back at you. You mistook the pity and anger, how they despised you. How, rightly, they despised you. So we stitched our way through what remained of life. The wounds deeper. The disconnect higher. The shock that shattered our bones yet left us standing.”

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Book:Hummingbird Salamander
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“Like tiny gods, all that we say and do holds a power so great that any one of us in any given moment can be responsible for the birth of a new civilization or the collapse of our own.”

PeopleImportantCareActionChoicesResponsibilityPowerAwarenessGreatnessBirthMoralityEthicsImportanceSelf AwarenessCarefulProtectionSignificantChoiceSignificancePotentialCollapseSelf ControlActionsPreservationCautionActOthersPursuitsMass InfluenceTiny Gods
Book:Rise of the Morningstar
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“If people feel lost and alone and helpless and broken and hopeless today, what will it be like if the world really begins to come apart at the hinges?”

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Book:And Then the End Will Come!: But Five Things You Need to Know in the Meantime
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“Any system that values profit over human life is a very dangerous one indeed.”

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Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“Any system that values profit over human life is a very dangerous one indeed. Simply put, it lacks values, and such a system will eventually collapse once its true light is discovered by the masses. Though some say that capitalism is a modern system, corruption has been the source for the demise of every great civilization.”

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Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“The world economy would collapse if a significant number of people were to realize and then act on the realization that it is possible to enjoy many if not most of the things that they enjoy without first having to own them.”

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Book:The Use and Misuse of Children
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“But on a deeper level, collapse was an option. Letting my business fall apart was a real possibility. Beyond the surface of managing bills and trying to stay on top of the daily grind, I made a choice, a conscious choice, that even though my world had turned upside down, the girls and I were going to survive this. Because, for me, letting my family fall apart was not on the table. I would not run, move, or give up, like many urged or predicted. I went back to my Thoughtfully Fit training plan. Guided by the sticky notes and years of success in making other people’s lives work, I became ground zero to test-drive my new model, to help me be Thoughtfully Fit through this crisis.”

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Book:Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success
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“Fear and anxiety affect decision making in the direction of more caution and risk aversion... Traumatized individuals pay more attention to cues of threat than other experiences, and they interpret ambiguous stimuli and situations as threatening (Eyesenck, 1992), leading to more fear-driven decisions. In people with a dissociative disorder, certain parts are compelled to focus on the perception of danger. Living in trauma-time, these dissociative parts immediately perceive the present as being "just like" the past and "emergency" emotions such as fear, rage, or terror are immediately evoked, which compel impulsive decisions to engage in defensive behaviors (freeze, flight, fight, or collapse). When parts of you are triggered, more rational and grounded parts may be overwhelmed and unable to make effective decisions.”

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Book:Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists
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“He tans into burning while the opening fanfare to "Peaches en Regalia" flows over him, the bugle call for a hippie army that marched at the peak of the American parabola, that moment when physics held its breath to allow levitation, a small reward before the descent. The hippies knew it then, Maggot Boy Johnson thinks; they couldn't build it into words but they could feel it; a floating in the stomach as history shifted direction. They stopped, hey, what's that sound, and knew that the spiny skyscrapers reflected in the river, the chasms of concrete, the wide streets and sidewalks, the power lines cutting into the hills and mountains above missile silos, the highways drawing lines across the blank plains under enormous skies, the pupil of God's eye, would be the ruins that their grandchildren wandered among, the reminders that once there was always water in the faucet, there was electricity all the time, and America was prying off the shackles of its past. The vision opened up to them and winked out again, and those it blinded staggered through their lives unable to see anything else, while the rest of them wondered if they had only dreamed it.”

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Book:Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America
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“My thoughts are free to roam back to the way she leaned her head on my arm for a split second, as if wishing she could let herself go, let herself lean farther. But she didn't, and I can’t help but respect her for that, even I know her strength is false, propped up by the shaky girders of Old Man Jack. One day soon, those girders will collapse, and her world will crumble, and I know I have to be there when that happens.”

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Book:Falling Into You
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“Already on that highway Las Vegas felt like a dream, fleeing from my memory, growing fuzzier and more unreal with every passing mile of creosote basin rimmed by jagged hills. Will what we call civilization go like that too, a brutal, gleaming, plasticized absurdity that we will recall less with nostalgia than with befuddlement and wonder that a whole species could consent to live that way? There are other ways. It's not too late to find them. One way or another, we will have to.”

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Book:Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
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“There exists a culture shared even by those who are dissatisfied with mass culture, and it is among the most dangerous precisely because it is dazzling—deceptive. It is a culture that belongs to those who are "dissatisfied with the world as it is." This manifests in the following ways: They still carry a certain belief and hope in humanity. If they suffer, they might dream that their suffering will one day “be heard by everyone.” Through their works, they may fantasize about becoming popular. They might romanticize the psychiatric term "trauma." They might aim to "fix and recover" things or people. They might set their minds on leaving a "meaningful impact" and become activists. They might frequently “discuss” on philosophy forums. They might be aiming at “dark vibes.” They might cling to mottos like “forever alone.” They might refer to themselves as "just a random book lover.” They might have interests in “just some random weird stuff.” They might still be screaming into the void. They might try to “prove their depth” publicly. They might refer to themselves as "lost souls" to the point of weariness, even internalizing this very term—coined by the system to reduce by classifying them—implying a form of domesticated rebellion. And so on. These supposed outsiders are actually on the inside, worshipping at the altar of visibility, validation, and vague worldly hope. Their beliefs—“art-as-cure,” “literature-as-refuge,” “activism-as-purpose”—are not radical to the point of exile but packaged and predictable. They don't reject the system; they only ask to be understood within its boundaries. They weep, but with an eye to applause. They write, but always with a publisher in mind. They compose, but just to make money. They mourn, but only to be noticed. They claim detachment, but still speak as if begging to be liked and heard. They imagine themselves as “wild,” but only within the categories that subcultures and language allow. After all, there are two ends to the ruins: on one end, these kinds of “loners” who are still tied to conventional wisdom; and on the other, the utterly unknown, mystic, cosmic, and free spirits who have transcended everything human.”

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Author:Sov8840
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“If economies collapse and lawlessness rules and resources are scarce, many people who claim with their mouths that they follow Jesus... will abandon him with their lives.”

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Book:And Then the End Will Come!: But Five Things You Need to Know in the Meantime
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“The nation was cracking under the weight of bloated modernity and all the patches pasted onto its excessive and malfunctioning hypercomplexity, and people were bewildered by the strange glitches, failures and shortages. Going forward, nothing would really work anymore as it was designed to, yet the hope and expectation that it would all magically recover dominated the chatter in the rare moments when people could step back from their frantic lives and share a meal or a drink.”

CollapsePeak OilJames Howard Kunstler
Book:The Harrows of Spring
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“A 24,000-year sequence recorded in a marine core from the Santa Barbara Basin, off the coast of California, exhibits the highest peak in biomass burning precisely at the onset of the Younger Dryas. ... This anomalously high peak correlates with intense biomass burning documented from the nearby Channel Islands. ... The peak also coincides with the extinction of pygmy mammoths on the islands and with the beginning of an apparent 600-800-year gap in the archaeological record, suggesting a sudden collapse in island human populations.”

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Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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