Sullen Quotes

• Everybody sees me as this sullen and insecure little thing. Those are just the sides of me that I feel it's necessary to show because no one else seems to be showing them.

  Fiona Apple

  Insecure, Littles, Sides

  "New Again: Fiona Apple". Interview with Colleen Kelsey and Tracey Pepper, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 28, 2012.

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• The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.

  Julia Kristeva

  Atheist, Depressed Person, Radical

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• What does it mean to love someone with all your heart? It means to love with all your emotional feelings and with all your devotion. Surely when you love your wife with all your heart, you cannot demean her, criticize her, find fault with her, or abuse her by words, sullen behavior, or actions.

  Ezra Taft Benson

  Mean, Heart, Emotional

  Ezra Taft Benson (1990). “Come, Listen to a Prophet's Voice”, Shadow Mountain

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• How often, in this cold and bitter world, is the warm heart thrown back upon itself! Cold, careless, are we of another's grief; we wrap ourselves in sullen selfishness.

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon

  Grief, Heart, Selfishness

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1841). “Life and literary remains of L.E.L. [ed.] by L. Blanchard”

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• The heart which finds life in material wealth is usually certain to go farther and seek for more in the satisfaction of base and sullen appetites.

  George A. Smith

  Heart, Satisfaction, Wealth

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• Usually the modest person passes for someone reserved, the silent for a sullen person

  Horace

  Literature, Modesty, Silent

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• Tell me not of joy: there's none Now my little sparrow's gone; He, just as you, Would toy and woo, He would chirp and flatter me, He would hang the wing awhile, Till at length he saw me smile, Lord! how sullen he would be!

  William Cartwright

  Smile, Wings, Joy

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• There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

  Edward Hoagland

  Summer, Cities, Age

  Edward Hoagland (1995). “The Tugman's Passage”

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• Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.

  Robert E. Howard

  Hands, Feet, Black

  Robert E. Howard (2007). “The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 1: Volume 1: The Shadow Kingdom”, p.473, Del Rey

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• We cannot pass our guardian angel's bounds, resigned or sullen, he will hear our sighs.

  Saint Augustine

  Philosophical, Character, Angel

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• Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

  Willa Cather

  Country, Lying, Winter

  1918 My Antonia, bk.2, ch.7.

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• Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance - the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it; better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Strength, Happiness, Power

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• A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Heart, Mean, Sleep

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “The English Patient”, p.104, A&C Black

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• All that philosophy can teach is to be stubborn or sullen under misfortunes.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Philosophy, Stubborn, Teach

  Oliver Goldsmith (1835). “The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, M.B.: With a Life and Notes”, p.83

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• Let the winds blow! a fiercer gale
  Is wild within me! what may quell
  That sullen tempest? I must sail
  Whither, O whither, who can tell!

  Edmund Clarence Stedman

  Blow, Wind, May

  Edmund Clarence Stedman (1873). “The Poetical Works of Edmund Clarence Stedman”, p.80

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• A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street. When the Boys are in a good mood, the market thrives; when they get scared or sullen, it is time for each one of us to look into the retail apple business.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Boys, Men, Apples

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• 'The Queen Is Dead' is not merely the Smiths' best album, but it is one of those timeless, perfect, inexhaustible artifacts that could only have been made by a gang of sullen, sun-deprived rock & roll boys fighting off adulthood tooth and nail.

  Rob Sheffield

  Queens, Fighting, Boys

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• Nature in darkness groans and men are bound to sullen contemplation in the night: restless they turn on beds of sorrow; in their inmost brain feeling the crushing wheels, they rise, they write the bitter words of stern philosophy and knead the bread of knowledge with tears and groans.

  William Blake

  Crush, Philosophy, Writing

  William Blake (1966). “Complete Writings: With Variant Readings”, p.379, Oxford University Press, USA

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• For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
  That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

  William Shakespeare

  Sweet, Kings, Love You

  Sonnet 29

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• Grieve not the Christ of God, who redeems us; and remember that we grieve Him most when we will not let Him pour His love upon us, but turn a sullen, unresponsive unbelief towards His pleading grace, as some glacier shuts out the sunshine from the mountain-side with its thick-ribbed ice.

  Alexander MacLaren

  Sunshine, Grieving, Ice

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 82), 1895.

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• No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.

  William Shakespeare

  Sad, Giving, Warning

  Sonnet 71

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• The universe is based on sullen entropy;
  It falls apart as it goes on

  Robyn Hitchcock

  Fall, Goes On, Entropy

  Song: The Devil's Coachman

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• Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye--with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad.

  Jack Kerouac

  Country, Crazy, Eye

  Jack Kerouac (1957). “On the Road”, Viking Press

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• In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.

  Margaret Atwood

  Weather, Evening, Thunder

  Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”, p.48, Anchor

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• I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable.

  T. S. Eliot

  Strong, Thinking, Rivers

  Four Quartets "The Dry Salvages" pt. 1 (1941)

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