Dreary Quotes - Page 6

• You are not an encapsulated bag of skin dragging around a dreary little ego. You are an evolutionary wonder, a trillion cells singing together in a vast chorale, an organism – environment, a symbiosis of cell and soul.

  Jean Houston

  Cells, Ego, Soul

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• When a sudden ray of sun or a moonbeam falls on a dreary street, it makes no difference what it illumines-a broken bottle on the ground, a fading flower in a field, or the flaxen blonde hair of a child's head. The object is transformed and the viewer is transfixed. Celebrate that moment of beauty and take it with you in your memory. It is God's gift to you.

  Luci Swindoll

  Beauty, Children, Memories

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• The profession of shaman has many advantages. It offers high status with a safe livelihood free of work in the dreary, sweaty sense. In most societies it offers legal privileges and immunities not granted to other men. But it is hard to see how a man who has been given a mandate from on High to spread tidings of joy to all mankind can be seriously interested in taking up a collection to pay his salary; it causes one to suspect that the shaman is on the moral level of any other con man. But it is a lovely work if you can stomach it.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Men, Joy, Lovely

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Time Enough for Love”, p.325, Penguin

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• There's nothing that builds up a toil-weary soul
  Like a day on a stream,
  Back on the banks of the old fishing hole
  Where a fellow can dream.
  There's nothing so good for a man as to flee
  From the city and lie
  Full length in the shade of a whispering tree
  And gaze at the sky.
  . . . .
  It is good for the world that men hunger to go
  To the banks of a stream,
  And weary of sham and of pomp and of show
  They have somewhere to dream.
  For this life would be dreary and sordid and base
  Did they not now and then
  Seek refreshment and calm in God's wide, open space
  And come back to be men.

  Edgar Guest

  Dream, Lying, Men

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• Male religion entombs women in sepulchres of silence in order to chant its own eternal and dreary dirge to a past that never was.

  Mary Daly

  Past, Order, Silence

  Mary Daly (2015). “Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation”, p.150, Beacon Press

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• If, as an actor, you allow yourself to be cocooned from the boring pin-pricks of day-to-day existence - like standing in a queue at the butcher's or any of the other dreary little events that we all have in our daily lives - you begin to lose your lifeline to what people are. And if you lose that, you eventually lose the ability to act.

  Glenda Jackson

  People, Actors, Littles

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• Love is the only real patriation, and without one's dear one sits in a dreary and boring exile.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Real, Love Is, Dear Ones

  Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, Susanna Pinney (1998). “I'll stand by you: selected letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland : with narrative by Sylvia Townsend Warner”, Random House (UK)

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• The cruelest foe is a masked benefactor. The wars which make history so dreary have served the cause of truth and virtue.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  War, Causes, Virtue

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2762, Delphi Classics

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• I drink out of desperation. Life is too dreary to endure. The misery, loneliness, crampedness - they're heartbreaking.[...] What feelings do you suppose a man has when he realizes that he will never know happiness or glory as long as he lives? Hard work. All that amounts to is food for the wild beasts of hunger.

  Osamu Dazai

  Loneliness, Hard Work, Men

  Osamu Dazai (1968). “The Setting Sun”, p.150, New Directions Publishing

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• Perfection. Excellence. What a passionate lover. But once having tasted the lips of excellence, once having given oneself to its perfection, how dreary and burdensome and filled with anomie are the remainder of one's waking hours trapped in the shackled lock-step of the merely ordinary, the barely acceptable, the just okay and not a stroke better.

  Harlan Ellison

  Perfection, Excellence, Waking

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• There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a bright-winged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that stretches its dreary length behind us.

  George Eliot

  Morning, Blessed, Angel

  George Eliot (2016). “Complete Works Of George Eliot”, p.133, ShandonPress

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• Oh the long and dreary Winter! Oh the cold and cruel Winter!

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Winter, Long, Cold

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Illustrated)”, p.579, Delphi Classics

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• Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too - the terms with which they are connected to other people.

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Mean, People

  Interview with Studs Terkel (1961), as quoted in "Conversations With James Baldwin" edited by Fred R. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, May 1, 1989.

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• There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.

  Jaron Lanier

  Theory, Gray

  "The New Humanists: Science at the Edge". Book edited by John Brockman, 2003.

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• The cold blast at the casement beats;The window-panes are white;The snow whirls through the empty streets;It is a dreary night!

  Epes Sargent

  Night, Window Panes, White

  Epes Sargent (1849). “Songs of the sea, with other poems”, p.119

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• Life without laughing is a dreary blank.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Laughter, Laughing, Blank

  William Makepeace Thackeray (1872). “The Book of Snobs: Sketches of Life and Character, Etc., Etc”, p.226

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• The loss of a mother is always keenly felt, even if her health be such as to incapacitate her from taking an active part in the care of the family. She is the sweet rallying-point for affection, obedience, and a thousand tendernesses. Dreary the blank when she is withdrawn!

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Mother, Sweet, Loss

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• Rash combat oft immortalizes man; if he should fall, he is renowned in song; but after-ages reckon not the ceaseless tears which the forsaken woman sheds. Poets tell us not of the many nights consumed in weeping, or of the dreary days wherein her anguished soul vainly yearns to call her loved one back.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Song, Fall, Night

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• There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.

  Honore de Balzac

  Book, Thinking, Skeletons

  Honore de Balzac (2009). “Eugenie Grandet”, p.5, The Floating Press

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• On rolls the stream with a perpetual sigh;
  The rocks moan wildly as it passes by;
  Hyssop and wormwood border all the strand,
  And not a flower adorns the dreary land.

  William C. Bryant

  Flower, Rocks, Land

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• During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was - but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Country, Book, Autumn

  Edgar Allan Poe (1927). “Tales by Edgar Allan Poe”, p.128, Dimitrios Spyridon Chytiris

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• O Earth, so full of dreary noises!
  O men, with wailing in your voices!
  O delved gold, the wader's heap!
  O strife, O curse, that o'er it fall!
  God makes a silence through you all,
  And "giveth His beloved, sleep.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Death, Fall, Sleep

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• The moan of the whip-poor-will from the hillside; the boding cry of the tree-toad, that harbinger of storm; the dreary hooting of the screechowl.

  Washington Irving

  Tree, Storm, Toads

  Washington Irving (2009). “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories: Or, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.”, p.11, Modern Library

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• Mountains are nature's testimonials of anguish. They are the sharp cry of a groaning and travailing creation. Nature's stern agony writes itself on these furrowed brows of gloomy stone. These reft and splintered crags stand, the dreary images of patient sorrow, existing verdureless and stern because exist they must.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Writing, Agony, Sorrow

  Harriet Beecher Stowe (1854). “Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands”, p.300

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• A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.

  Erica Jong

  Book, Self, Censorship

  Erica Jong (1994). “The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller”, p.36, Grove Press

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