Grim Quotes - Page 7

• The rhinoceros stood ... about five hundred yards away ... not a twentieth-century animal at all, but an odd, grim straggler from the Stone Age.

  Winston Churchill

  Animal, Age, Yards

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• It is taken care of. Nothing will not break into my Pit or the Far Reaches! I cannot speak for the other parts of the House, but we have Nothing well in hand here. I understand Nothing as no one else does! - Grim Tuesday

  Garth Nix

  Taken, Hands, Tuesday

  Garth Nix (2010). “The Keys to the Kingdom #2: Grim Tuesday”, p.11, Scholastic Inc.

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• Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front;
  And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
  To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
  He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
  To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

  William Shakespeare

  Love, War, Soul

  'Richard III' (1591) act 1, sc. 1, l. 9

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• His face set in grim determination, Richard slogged ahead, his fingers reaching up to touch the tooth under his shirt. Loneliness, deeper than he had never known, sagged his shoulders. All his friends were lost to him. He knew now that his life was not his own. It belonged to his duty, to his task. He was the Seeker. Nothing more. Nothing less. Not his own man, but a pawn to be used by others. A tool, same as his sword, to help others, that they might have the life he had only glimpsed for a twinkling. He was no different from the dark things in the boundary. A bringer of death.

  Terry Goodkind

  Determination, Loneliness, Dark

  Terry Goodkind (2015). “Wizard's First Rule”, p.211, Head of Zeus

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• I remember when the Titanic sank in 1912, it was the ship that was supposed to be unsinkable. The only thing it ever did was sink. When it took off from England, all kinds of passengers were aboard - millionaires, celebrities, people of moderate means, and poor folks down in the steerage. But a few hours later when they put the list in the Cunard office in New York, it carried only two categories - lost and saved. Grim tragedy had leveled all distinctions.

  Vance Havner

  Christian, New York, Mean

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• In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter.

  Azar Nafisi

  Art, Betrayal, Lying

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• The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches.

  Lorrie Moore

  Character, Self, Play

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• We were the only black family in an estate with 1,000 white families. Liverpool being quite racist in the Sixties, it was a bit grim growing up.

  Craig Charles

  Growing Up, White, Black

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• How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Lonely, Home, Boys

  Hunter S. Thompson (2010). “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream”, p.9, Vintage

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• It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.

  Joseph Conrad

  Men, Self, Shadow

  Joseph Conrad (1905). “Lord Jim”, p.73, McClure, Phillips & Company

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• Life is inherently disturbing. That's why we've created the myths-to help us overcome, defend or deny, to transcend the grim reality of what here seems to be.

  Laurence Overmire

  Reality, Overcoming, Helping

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• It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. How the artist captured the light, the details of my mother's dimples, the joy in my father's eyes, all through gentle strokes from his palette. The artist made me look alive when I felt lonely and grim inside. That's the way this man saw me. I decided then that that's what I wanted to do

  Ellen Schreiber

  Beautiful, Mother, Lonely

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• You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.

  James Joyce

  Example, Free Thought, Said

  James Joyce (2016). “James Joyce The Dover Reader”, p.403, Courier Dover Publications

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• Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all. I'm cold,' Snowden said. 'I'm cold.

  Joseph Heller

  Fall, Men, Fire

  Joseph Heller (1999). “Catch-22: A Novel”, p.404, Simon and Schuster

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• ..."Fun?" you ask. "Weren't feminists these grim-faced, humorless, antifamily, karate-chopping ninjas who were bitter because they couldn't get a man?" Well, in fact the problem was that all too many of them HAD gotten a man, married him, had his kids, and then discovered that, as mothers, they were never supposed to have their own money, their own identity, their own aspirations, time to pee, or a brain. And yes, some women indeed became bad-tempered as a result. After all, no anger, no social change.

  Susan J. Douglas

  Mother, Fun, Kids

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• You give all your life to doing this one thing. It sounds grim, it sounds frightening - it isn't - it has a great gaiety at times and a great wonder.

  Martha Graham

  Life, Giving, Sound

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• The beachcomber goes looking for trouble, everything he finds is a sign of trouble. The writer is the same; without trouble he has nothing to work with, so he picks over the tide line, over the bits and pieces of people's lives with grim fascination.

  Tim Winton

  Beach, Nature, People

  Tim Winton (2012). “Land's Edge: A Coastal Memoir”, p.66, Penguin UK

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• The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.

  Douglas Adams

  Car, Ballet, Toasters

  Douglas Adams (2009). “Mostly Harmless”, p.74, Pan Macmillan

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• Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.

  E. M. Forster

  Taken, Heart, Eye

  E. M. Forster (2016). “Howards End: England Literature”, p.86, 谷月社

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• (Speaking of the Cistercian monks) A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had made so bright! Strange that Nature's voices all around them--the soft singing of the waters, the wisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind--should not have taught them a truer meaning of life than this. They listened there, through the long days, in silence, waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not.

  Jerome K. Jerome

  Sweet, Night, Wind

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• So many people are walking around looking so grim all the time. I just never understand why.

  Lindy Boggs

  Walking Away, Alaska, People

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• When news of the crash came, probably a lot of people in small towns and farms across America felt a sense of grim satisfaction that the sinners had finally been punished for their wicked ways.

  Ron Chernow

  America, People, Wicked

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• Do you know, every time I've seen you you've been like the Grim Reaper of goodwill and cheer. You should find another profession.

  Lora Leigh

  Cheer, Grim Reaper, Should

  Lora Leigh (2013). “Elite Ops Complete Series”, p.590, Macmillan

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• Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village".

  David James Duncan

  Spiritual, Lonely, Couple

  David James Duncan (2007). “God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right”, p.99, Triad Institute, Inc.

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• It's hard to maintain a reputation for being grim and mysterious when you're accompanied by a brightly clad young thing, skipping merrily along at your side, holding your hand, and smiling sweetly on one and all.

  Simon R. Green

  Hands, Your Side, Sides

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