Ghastly Quotes - Page 3

• things are never so indescribably ghastly that they can't get worse.

  Alice Thomas Ellis

  Trouble

  Alice Thomas Ellis (1988). “Home Life Three”, Gerald Duckworth

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• Innocents, the meat in a ghastly sandwich between an uncaring society and a vengeful state.

  Bryce Courtenay

  Meat, Sandwiches, States

  Bryce Courtenay (1989). “The Power of One”, Random House LLC

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• If one's honest about it, spending time in a car with children is pretty ghastly.

  Arabella Weir

  Children, Car, Honest

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• A club there is of smokers--dare you come
  To that close, clouded, hot, narcotic room?
  When, midnight past, the very candles seem
  Dying for air, and give a ghastly gleam;
  When curling fumes in lazy wreaths arise,
  And prosing topers rub their winking eyes.

  George Crabbe

  Eye, Past, Air

  George Crabbe, John Crabbe (1834). “The poetical works of the Rev. George Crabbe: in eight volumes”, p.180

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• By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally
  and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists?

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Men, Issues

  The American Mercury, February 1926.

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• Newish friends, if they get ghastly, can be weighed and found wanting, but you'd never do a thing like that to old ones; their terrible habits are just part of the universe.

  Katharine Whitehorn

  Friends, Habit, Found

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• We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Morning, Sea, Earthquakes

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1859). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: The conduct of life”, p.262

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• A lot of the buildings [in Toronto] around Yonge and Bloor is the architectural equivalent of Kipper Ties and 8" collar points. It's ghastly and no amount of street-level retail glitz can lift it.

  William Gibson

  Ties, Retail, Toronto

  Source: craphound.com

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• Perspective is a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress.

  Georges Braque

  Mistake, Taken, Perspective

  Karen Wilkin, Georges Braque (1991). “Georges Braque”

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• May is a pious fraud of the almanac A ghastly parody of real Spring Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind.

  James Russell Lowell

  Spring, Real, Wind

  James Russell Lowell (1871). “The poetical works of James Russell Lowell”, p.372

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• You would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.

  Samuel Beckett

  Looks, Misery, Speechless

  Samuel Beckett (2009). “Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable”, p.9, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• And we'd drink huge amounts of scotch and coke, which is a ghastly sweet drink... And now people don't drink nearly as much, for good reason. We're all a little wiser.

  Bill Bruford

  Sweet, Scotch, People

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• If I did not believe, if I did not make what is called an act of faith (and each act of faith increases our faith, and our capacity for faith), if I did not have faith that the works of mercy do lighten the sum total of suffering in the world, so that those who are suffering on both sides of this ghastly struggle somehow mysteriously find their pain lifted and some balm of consolation poured on their wounds, if I did not believe these things, the problem of evil would indeed be overwhelming.

  Dorothy Day

  Pain, Believe, Struggle

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• The moment at which two people, approaching from opposite ends of a long passageway, recognize each other and immediately pretend they haven t. This is to avoid the ghastly embarrassment of having to continue recognizing each other the whole length of the corridor.

  Douglas Adams

  Opposites, Two, Long

  Douglas Adams, John Lloyd (2005). “The Deeper Meaning of Liff: A Dictionary of Things There Aren't Any Words for Yet--But There Ought to Be”, p.58, Crown Archetype

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• Racism is a human problem and a crime that is absolutely so ghastly that a person who is fighting racism is well within his rights to fight against it by any means necessary until it is eliminated.

  Malcolm X

  Mean, Fighting, Rights

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• Marriage is a ghastly public confession of a strictly private intention.

  John Hay Beith

  Marriage, Intention, Confession

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• I know nothing about pistols and revolvers, which is why I usually kill off my characters with a blunt instrument or better with poisons. Besides, poisons are neat and clean and really exciting... I do not think I could look a really ghastly mangled body in the face. It is the means that I am interested in. I do not usually describe the end, which is often a corpse.

  Agatha Christie

  Character, Mean, Thinking

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• Oh, I have passed a miserable night, so full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams!

  William Shakespeare

  Dream, Night, Sight

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• The whole Renaissance tradition is antipethic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cezanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this. Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.

  Georges Braque

  Art, Mistake, Taken

  Article by John Richardson, December 01, 1957.

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• I wrote Rick before I was published, and I had no vision of it, really. It was just a story that occurred to me, and that put its little claws in my brain, and I wrote it, and I showed it to a couple people, and they all said, "This is ghastly."

  Daniel Handler

  Couple, People, Brain

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. November 16, 2005.

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• I think it's something that dawns on you with the most ghastly, inexorable sense. I didn't suddenly wake up in my pram one day and say 'Yippee, I - ', you know. But I think it just dawns on you, you know, slowly, that people are interested in one, and slowly you get the idea that you have a certain duty and responsibility.

  Prince Charles

  Responsibility, Thinking, Ideas

  "The Prince of Wales: Full text of replies in radio debut". "The Times" Newspaper, March 3, 1969.

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• We ought not to tolerate for a minute the ghastly and grievous thought that God will not answer prayer.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Prayer, Answers, Minutes

  Spurgeon, Charles, Delmarva Publication, Inc. (2015). “The Complete Works of Charles Spurgeon, Volume 78”, p.96, Delmarva Publications, Inc.

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• If I were to believe in a god l would believe in gods. I think monotheism is the really ghastly thing. That is the absolutely staggering to me misapprehension.

  Stephen Fry

  Believe, Thinking, Staggering

  "The Importance of Unbelief". Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. December 8, 2009.

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• The glass of your life is darkened, and darkly through it you see distorted and ghastly fragments of duty and destiny.

  George Arnold

  Destiny, Glasses, Life Is

  George Arnold (1866). “Drift: A Sea-shore Idyl : and Other Poems”, p.45

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• Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Abhorrent, Rising, Consciousness

  H. P. Lovecraft (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft (Illustrated)”, p.187, Delphi Classics

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