Bleak Quotes - Page 2

• Life was very simple. My parents had come from the North of England, which is a fairly rugged, bleak, hard-working part of England, and so there was not the expectation of luxury.

  Roger Bannister

  Sports, Hard Work, Athlete

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• Forget the grand plan. Forget the master scheme. Forget control. That is the bleak but true basis of independent cinema. Inch by motherfuking inch we must, because we have no other choice.

  Oliver Stone

  Independent, Choices, Cinema

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• The world men inhabit is rather bleak. It is a world full of doubt and confusion, where vulnerability must be hidden, not shared; where competition, not co-operation, is the order of the day; where men sacrifice the possibility of knowing their own children and sharing in their upbringing, for the sake of a job they may have chosen by chance, which may not suit them and which in many cases dominates their lives to the exclusion of much else.

  Anna Ford

  Jobs, Children, Sacrifice

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• Silent rushes the swift Lord
  Through ruined systems still restored,
  Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless,
  Plants with worlds the wilderness;
  Waters with tears of ancient sorrow
  Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow.
  House and tenant go to ground,
  Lost in God, in Godhead found.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  God, Eden, Apples

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1854). “Poems”, p.158

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• The future looks a bit bleak to me.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Looks, Bits

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

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• I know for sure that everything will work out. No matter how crazy or bleak the situation is, it will work out. Everything passes, good and bad.

  Xosha Roquemore

  Crazy, Work Out, Matter

  "The Mindy Project’s Xosha Roquemore: Just Being Herself". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• Beautifully Bleak. I likened the hills encircling Canberra to the sea. They, like the sea, could be a sunny beguiling blue, or deep and inky. They could be distant and mysterious, or beautifully bleak as the wind tore across the plains from their snowy peaks. The hills were ever changing like the sea.

  Hazel Hawke

  Nature, Blue, Wind

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• Painters aren't expected to paint bleak pictures, are they?

  Alexander McCall Smith

  Paint, Painter, Expected

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• And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Dying, Ghost, Embers

  "The Raven" l. 7 (1845)

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• I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

  Charles Dickens

  Freedom, Butterfly, Liberty

  Bleak House ch. 6 (1853)

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• The one great principle of English law is to make business for itself.

  Charles Dickens

  Law, Principles, Bleak House

  Bleak House ch. 39 (1853)

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• Women always try to see the one good part of The Weird Guy because the dating landscape is so bleak. Women will say, 'He's very odd, but he likes to cook. He's creepy, but he makes good pancakes!'

  Zoe Lister-Jones

  Dating, Guy, Creepy

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• I don't think we are here for anything. We're just products of evolution. You can say, "Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose." But I'm anticipating a good lunch.

  James D. Watson

  Thinking, Lunch, Mindfulness

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• O that our souls could scale a height like this, A mighty mountain swept o'er by the bleak Keen winds of heaven; and, standing on that peak Above the blinding clouds of prejudice, Would we could see all truly as it is; The calm eternal truth would keep us meek.

  Robinson Jeffers

  Clouds, Wind, Heaven

  Robinson Jeffers, Tim Hunt (1988). “The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: Poetry 1903-1920, prose, and unpublished writings”, p.6, Stanford University Press

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• Philip Galanes has fashioned a novel both bleak and funny about a young man's struggle to sort out his troubled love: the too-strong love for his mother, the too-weak love for his suicidal father, and the all-consuming love of anonymous sexual encounters. Pointed and acute, this story tells of the narrator's many betrayals of others and their many betrayals of him. It exists in an uncomfortable moral space where the humor of terrible things sometimes outweighs, but never obscures, their poignancy.

  Andrew Solomon

  Mother, Strong, Betrayal

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• The only good thing about religion is the music. Because nature is filled with balances and opposites, there are always exceptions to the overall rules, whether the overall rules are bleak or otherwise. If you propound a joyous theory of existence, I will find an exception to that. If I propound a bleak theory, someone will find a joyous exception. That's just nature being nature, I think, and I don't think it offers a lot of hope. It's sort of a respite along the way.

  George Carlin

  Thinking, Opposites, Balance

  "George Carlin: The Lost Interview". Interview with Rick Cusick, standard-progress.com. June 27, 2018.

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• It is at this moment, when things appear so bleak that we must redouble our efforts and not give up. We must believe that we can remake the world in a more peaceful reality.

  Cynthia McKinney

  Giving Up, Believe, Reality

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• 'Tis Liberty that crowns Britannia's isle, and makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile... 'Tis Britain's care to watch o'er Europe's fate, and hold in balance each contending state, To threaten bold presumptuous kings with war, and answer her afflicted neighbours' prayer... Soon as her fleets appear their terrors cease.

  Joseph Addison

  Kings, Prayer, War

  Joseph Addison, “A Letter From Italy”

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• When we think of his lone effort to live and its bleak reward, the mind turns to the myth "for His mercy endureth forever," with confiding revulsion.

  Emily Dickinson

  Thinking, Forever, Effort

  Emily Dickinson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Emily Dickinson (Illustrated)”, p.2349, Delphi Classics

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• Kamby Bolongo Mean River is an original and fearless fiction. It bears genetic traces of Beckett and Stein, but Robert Lopez's powerful cadences and bleak, joyful wit are all his own.

  Sam Lipsyte

  Powerful, Mean, Rivers

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• History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.

  Jill Lepore

  Art, Writing, Past

  Jill Lepore (2012). “The Story of America: Essays on Origins”, p.15, Princeton University Press

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• Ah, passing few are they who speak,
  Wild, stormy month! in praise of thee;
  Yet though thy winds are loud and bleak,
  Thou art a welcome month to me.
  For thou, to northern lands, again
  The glad and glorious sun dost bring,
  And thou hast joined the gentle train
  And wear'st the gentle name of Spring.

  William C. Bryant

  Art, Spring, Wind

  William Cullen Bryant, “March”

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• We laughed a lot. That's one thing we forgot about for a few years - laughing. When we went through all the lawsuits, it looked as if everything was bleak, but when I think back to before that, I remember we used to laugh all the time.

  George Harrison

  Thinking, Years, Laughing

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• The future is always fairyland to the young. Life is like a beautiful and winding lane, on either side bright flowers, and beautiful butterflies and tempting fruits, which we scarcely pause to admire and to taste, so eager are we to hasten to an opening which we imagine will be more beautiful still. But by degrees, as we advance, the trees grow bleak; the flowers and butterflies fail, the fruits disappear, and we find we have arrived--to reach a desert waste.

  George Augustus Henry Sala

  Beautiful, Flower, Future

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