Bleak Quotes - Page 4

• Places: a cold, bleak, lonely day on the rim at Muley Point, Utah. And the heart-cracking loveliness of the blood-smeared, bitter, incomprehensible slaughterhouse of a world.

  Edward Abbey

  Lonely, Heart, Blood

  "A Voice Crying in the Wilderness".

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• A religion is a source of happiness and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong--and you are strong. The great trouble with religion--any religion--is that the religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge these propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason--but one cannot have both.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Strong, Fire, Judging

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• I love him for his sake;
  And yet I know him a notorious liar,
  Think him a great way fool, solely a coward;
  Yet these fix'd evils sit so fit in him
  That they take place when virtue's steely bones
  Looks bleak i' th' cold wind; withal, full oft we see
  Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly.

  William Shakespeare

  Liars, I Love Him, Thinking

  William Shakespeare, Thomas Bowdler (1850). “The Family Shakspeare, in One Volume: In which Nothing is Added to the Original Text, But Those Words and Expressions are Omitted which Cannot with Propriety be Read in a Family”, p.217

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• January cold and desolate;
  February dripping wet;
  March wind ranges;
  April changes;
  Birds sing in tune
  To flowers of May,
  And sunny June
  Brings longest day;
  In scorched July
  The storm-clouds fly,
  Lightning-torn;
  August bears corn,
  September fruit;
  In rough October
  Earth must disrobe her;
  Stars fall and shoot
  In keen November;
  And night is long
  And cold is strong
  In bleak December.

  Christina Rossetti

  Strong, Stars, Spring

  Christina Rossetti (2014). “Rossetti: Poems”, p.128, Everyman's Library

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• I just was not going to subject my record to the bleak prospects of a primary election.

  Arlen Specter

  Records, Election, Subjects

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• Think of the moment you count
  most foul in your life;
  conjure it,
  supplicate,
  pray to it;
  your face is bleak, you retract,
  you dare not remember it.

  Hilda Doolittle

  Fear, Thinking, Faces

  Hilda Doolittle (1924). “Heliodora: And Other Poems”

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• A cold and searching wind drives away all contagion, and nothing can withstand it but what has a virtue in it, and accordingly, whatever we meet with in cold and bleak places, as the tops of mountains, we respect for a sort of sturdy innocence, a Puritan toughness. All things beside seem to be called in for shelter, and what stays out must be part of the original frame of the universe, and of such valor as God himself.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Winter, Wind, Mountain

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.1007, Delphi Classics

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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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• 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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• Death looms large I guess because it should. It's the one thing that we as human beings from birth have a right to. It's the only thing we've really got, and I don't mean to sound bleak about this, but it's a unifying factor amongst us all.

  Nick Cave

  Mean, Sound, Birth

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• Envy is the coward side of Hate, And all her ways are bleak and desolate.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Hate, Envy, Coward

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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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• There may be times in my life where a situation looks bleak or doesn't make sense, but having faith in God allows me to know that He will take me through that situation and make me better off than I was before.

  Dan Ellis

  Looks, May, Have Faith

  "A conversation with Carolina Hurricanes goalie Dan Ellis". Interview with Chad Bonham, www.beliefnet.com. March 2013.

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• The reason I'm interested in alternative worlds and near-future settings is that it allows us to look at our own limitations in our worldviews. These settings allow me to explore how our world might evolve if we allow individualistic kinds of success to remain our primary value. I'm not trying to be overly bleak, and I don't feel bleak or sad about our world. I want empowered and educated people who understand a lot about the world's challenges to strive to be noble, rather than cynical. I think we still need more champions out there.

  Jennifer Phang

  Thinking, Our World, People

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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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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• No terrain is too bleak, no distance too far that it will stop God from rescuing His own.

  Lynn Austin

  Distance, Terrain

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• These European White Men, then, with civilization in their blood and in their destiny, crossed the Atlantic and set up a new civilization on a bleak and rock bound coast. It was the White Men who drove north to Alaska and west to California; the men who opened up the tropics and subdued the Arctics; the men who mastered the African Veldts; the men who peopled Australia and seized the gates of the world at Suez, Gibraltar and Panama.

  Ben Klassen

  Destiny, Men, Alaska

  "Nature's Eternal Religion" by Ben Klassen, (Ch. 2, Paragraph 3), 1973.

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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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• Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.

  Anna Quindlen

  Inspirational Life, Writing, Wrinkles

  Anna Quindlen (2009). “Being Perfect”, p.36, Random House

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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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• The beginnings of a forest is one of the ugliest things on the planet. It's bleak and your neighbours hate you.

  Felix Dennis

  Hate, Forests, Planets

  "This much I know: Felix Dennis". Interview with Alice Fisher, www.theguardian.com. September 4, 2010.

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• Two days like icebergs bleak, blank, half-melting, all frigid, mainly out of sight, and definitely a threat to peace of mind drifted by and were good to put behind.

  Roger Zelazny

  Sight, Two, Mind

  Roger Zelazny (2009). “Threshold”, Nesfa Press

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• The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.

  Gary Larson

  Gentleman, Brain, Mammals

  Gary Larson (1989). “The PreHistory of the Far side: a 10th anniversary exhibit”, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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• If you turned the fabric of our lives over, I imagined the design on the backside would be woven in the bleak grays of doubt and fear.

  Stephenie Meyer

  Fear, Design, Doubt

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