Ghastly Quotes - Page 4

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

David Foster Wallace

Writing, Want, Way

4 Copy quote
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, Argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew,
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue.

Alfred the Great

Rain, Twilight, Eye

"Locksley Hall" l. 123 (1842)

61 Copy quote

Show source
As soon as you know the voice and understand what it is, the whole scene changes. The same world which was the ghastly battlefield of maya is now changed into something good and beautiful.

Swami Vivekananda

Inspirational, Motivational, Beautiful

Swami Vivekananda (2015). “Jnana Yoga: The Yoga of Knowledge”, p.46, editionNEXT.com

10 Copy quote

Show source
Women have been a ghastly nuisance in my life.

George Bernard Shaw

Women, Nuisance, Has Beens

4 Copy quote
His blood is black and boiling hot, he gurgles ghastly groans. He'll cook you in his dinner pot, your skin, your flesh, your bones.

Jack Prelutsky

Halloween, Blood, Black

4 Copy quote
...it was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral. I have cross-examined these men, one of them a hard-headed countryman, one a farrier, and one a moorland farmer, who all tell the same story of this dreadful apparition, exactly corresponding to the hell-hound of the legend. I assure you that there is a reign of terror in the district, and that it is a hardy man who will cross the moor at night.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Halloween, Night, Men

5 Copy quote
Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

Tony Kushner

Artist, Accomplishment, Ineptitude

"Tony Kushner At The School Of Visual Arts: ‘Artists Know That Diligence Counts As Much, If Not More, As Inspiration’". www.huffingtonpost.com. June 12, 2010.

14 Copy quote

Show source
For me Oliver Twist is a political novel. It is a furious critique of the treatment of orphans and poor children who were forced to spend their early lives in ghastly institutions.

Henning Mankell

Children, Widows And Orphans, Political

7 Copy quote
My father belonged to a commune, and the food was ghastly. My idea of food hell is the salad cream they'd pour all over bits of lettuce, cucumber and tomato. It was just disgusting.

Marianne Faithfull

Father, Ideas, Tomatoes

"Marianne Faithfull: 'My father belonged to a commune, and the food was always ghastly" by John Hind, www.theguardian.com. March 12, 2011.

13 Copy quote

Show source
Marriage is a ghastly public confession of a strictly private intention.

John Hay Beith

Marriage, Intention, Confession

4 Copy quote
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

5 Copy quote
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

13 Copy quote

Show source
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

4 Copy quote
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

10 Copy quote
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

7 Copy quote
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.

4 Copy quote

Show source
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

4 Copy quote

Show source
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”

8 Copy quote

Show source
The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.

George Bernard Shaw

Beauty, Beautiful, Party

"Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence". Book by Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw, Preface, 1931.

4 Copy quote

Show source
And many more Destructions played In this ghastly masquerade, All disguised, even to the eyes, Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Eye, Spy, Bishops

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1840). “The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.231

8 Copy quote

Show source
To live when you do not want to is dreadful, but it would be even more terrible to be immortal when you did not want to be. As things are, however, the whole ghastly burden is suspended from me by a thread which I can cut in two with a penny-knife.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Cutting, Knives, Two

4 Copy quote
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.

D. H. Lawrence

World, Intricacy, Mechanism

D. H. Lawrence (2016). “D. H. Lawrence: The Complete Novels (Book House)”, p.2638, Book House

6 Copy quote

Show source
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

4 Copy quote

Show source
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

13 Copy quote

Show source
Only some ghastly dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the Routemaster.

Ken Livingstone

Want, Moron

"Livingstone and the 'morons' have killed off the Routemaster" by Philip Johnston, www.telegraph.co.uk. October 24, 2005.

4 Copy quote

Show source