Top 100 Bleak Quotes
#1. He wasn't good or evil or cruel or extreme in any way but one, which was that he had elevated grayness to the status of a fine art and cultivated a mind that was as bleak and pitiless and logical as the slopes of Hell.
Terry Pratchett
#2. Needy knife-grinder! whither are ye going? Rough is the road, your wheel is out of order; Bleak blows the blast-your hat has got a hole in it. So have your breeches.
George Canning
#3. Places: a cold, bleak, lonely day on the rim at Muley Point, Utah. And the heart-cracking loveliness of the blood-smeared, bitter, incomprehensible slaughterhouse of a world ...
Edward Abbey
#4. Oh Gertrud,' I cried, intolerably stirred by the bare mention of that
bed, 'this is a bleak and mischievous world, isn't it? Do you think we
shall ever be warm and comfortable and happy again?
Elizabeth Von Arnim
#5. If you can get by with quotes from The Godfather and nothing you say matters, that's pretty bleak, don't you think? Don't we want what we say to matter?
Joshua Ferris
#6. The science is crystal clear: we humans are the primary cause of global warming, and we face a bleak future if we fail to act quickly.
Joseph J. Romm
#7. For a time, all was still: for the yards there, like the grounds, are desperately bleak, all dirt and gravel - there is not so much as a blade of grass to be shivered by the breezes, or a worm or a beetle for a bird to swoop for.
Sarah Waters
#8. It doesn't really matter whether we reflect the light through our authentic gifts or whether our authentic calling is to spread it. What matters is that tonight is that the world is dark, cold, and bleak. Your flame burns so brightly. Share your Love and warmth with others. Watch the Light return.
Sarah Ban Breathnach
#9. When you do well in school as a young person you can foresee a bountiful future for yourself. When you don't do well, the future you see is bleak. It's tough to find an honour student in trouble with the law. We have to feel that we're of value and we get that from people reacting to our prudence.
George Chuvalo
#10. Now '90210' is returning with an all-new cast of slightly more plausible teens. I'll be honest: I wish the old cast was back. Ideally, this spin-off would be an Ice Storm-esque exploration of the West Beverly gang's bleak adult lives.
Diablo Cody
#11. Wyoming, to Annie, was represented by a blank, bleak space in her imagination. It was a place she could hide. The worst that could happen would be that she would sleep with Daniel and then get eaten by a wolf. She could live with that.
Kevin Wilson
#12. Apt and poetic though this was, it was simply too bleak to read at a funeral. Instead I settled on Rumfoord's farewell speech on page 2007, which starts: "I am not dying. I am merely taking my leave of the solar system," and ends: "I shall always be here. I shall always be wherever I've been.
Gavin Extence
#13. Half-baked effort is almost as good as no effort put in at all. Always seek to do your best. Good things always have a way of finding those who put forth their best even when their situation seems bleak.
Chris Erickson
#14. If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension of the final size of things.
Don DeLillo
#15. Imagine that you traveled all over the world, looking for happiness, looking for thrills to pass the time. Imagine seeing everything there is to see and still not finding happiness. Well, that would give you a very bleak outlook on life, would it not?
Tricia Levenseller
#16. This, without a doubt, is neoliberalism's single most damaging legacy: the realization of its bleak vision has isolated us enough from one another that it became possible to convince us that we are not just incapable of self-preservation but fundamentally not worth saving.
Naomi Klein
#17. By ten o'clock, the Sunday-night blues set in. The bleak wasteland of an entire week of stupefyingly boring school stretched ahead of me like an endless desert highway.
J.M. Steele
#18. Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?
Bill Watterson
#19. O Luke, I would not lose thee as I lost
Darth Vader. His betrayal made my life
A bleak and tragic thing. Thy loss unto
The dark would make my death a hellish, cold
Eternity.
Ian Doescher
#20. What came to me later in those dark, dreaming hours put paid to that though and as always my mind led me treacherously back to the bleak and inescapable truth.
There was no cure for what one had seen or done.
Hannah Blatchford
#21. We really feel happier when things look bleak. Hope is endurance. Hope is holding on and going on and trusting in the Lord.
Michael Novak
#22. I'm not trying to write a bleak and blistering screed against American civilization. I'm writing something that I hope is fun and satirical and full of possibility.
Mark Russell
#23. I dreamt of the Sun's demise, awoke to a bleak morning.
Anathema
#24. It was a cold, bleak December morning in Alaska, a place so far north on planet Earth that if there were such things as popsicle people, they could live there quite comfortably.
Dew Pellucid
#25. Give a man the secure possession of bleak rocks," Arthur Young said in Travels in 1787, "and he will turn it into a garden; give him nine years of lease of a garden, and he will convert it to a desert ...
Bernd Heinrich
#26. Roy, the guy I play in 'The Grifters,' is a guy who had a very bleak life. His mother had him at 13, and then when she was 17 or 18 and he was 4 or 5, they were trapped in a small Texas town somewhere, and she was ready to do anything to get out.
John Cusack
#27. There have been bleak nights along my way, many of my own making, but life is all the brighter for them now. To the human eye, without the darkness there are no stars.
Sumangali Morhall
#28. I tend not to reread books, because there's always something new to discover, but Dorothy Sayers is a comfort grab for me - there's no mood so bleak or cold so bad that Lord Peter and Bunter can't make it right.
Laura Anne Gilman
#29. The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying, And the Year On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead, Is lying ...
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#30. For many minutes, for many hours, for a bleak eternity, he lay awake, shivering, reduced to primitive terror, comprehending that he had won freedom, and wondering what he could do with anything so unknown and so embarrassing as freedom.
Sinclair Lewis
#31. When everything around you seems bleak, sick and empty - the antidote is forgiveness and love of yourself, and others, plus a dollop of gratitude.
Jan Hellriegel
#32. What does the future look like if the heads of society ask our young people to risk their lives for questionable causes? I think it looks rather bleak.
Tracy Chapman
#33. Lizzie Harris's Stop Wanting is an unflinching book about a girlhood filled with violence, doubt, vulnerability, and loss. These gorgeously crafted and hauntingly memorable poems are a bleak place full of life, prayer, and the kind of answers only poems like these can provide.
Rachel Zucker
#34. As even a democracy like the United States has shown, waging war can benefit a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country's elites.
Samantha Power
#35. Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play.
Nick Hornby
#36. No terrain is too bleak, no distance too far that it will stop God from rescuing His own.
Lynn Austin
#37. Sometimes, during those same bleak middle-of-the-nights, he held secret fears he never said aloud. Demons had come in the dark, come with the famous Dryden fog that rolled through the town, and taken possession of his lovely, smart, kindhearted wife. And next they'd come for his daughter too.
Megan Abbott
#38. If you come at the record feeling really happy and optimistic, it can be incredibly beautiful and uplifting, and if you come at it in a bleak moment, it can feel like a very dark place to share. It's all down to the listener.
PJ Harvey
#39. I try to give people hope. Even though life is bleak, there's hope out there.
Danielle Steel
#40. I get mistaken for Amanda Holden; I've had that since I was 12. I get Carey Mulligan, too. We look quite similar, and she does 'Bleak House' and I do 'Cranford,' so people mix us up. I'm sure we'll play sisters at some point.
Kimberley Nixon
#42. Watson retorted: 'Well I don't think we're for anything.
We're just products of evolution. You can say, "Gee, your life must
be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose." But I'm anticipating having a good lunch.' We did have a good lunch, too.
Richard Dawkins
#43. Fiction is able to encompass books that are bleak and which dwell on the manifold and terrible problems of our times. But I don't think that all books need to have that particular focus.
Alexander McCall Smith
#44. Look round and round upon this bare bleak plain, and see even here, upon a winter's day, how beautiful the shadows are! Alas! It is the nature of their kind to be so. The loveliest things in life ... are but shadows; and they come and go, and change and fade away, as rapidly as these.
Charles Dickens
#45. I started to cry. And I looked up and saw the bleak pines by the bleak mills of Roanoke Rapids with one final despair, like the despair of a man who has nothing left to do but leave the earth forever.
Jack Kerouac
#46. The simple act of trusting God can be defined as acting as if God were going to keep His promises, however bleak the current circumstances may appear.
Robert J. Morgan
#47. We have a system that works fabulously well for products. But the one we have for people stinks. This is the lesson we've got to learn - or the human future on this planet is going to be a very bleak one indeed.
Daniel Quinn
#48. In the street, your mouth's a beak, big like a bird, and your future's bleak.
Kool Moe Dee
#49. The winter will be long and bleak. Nature has a dismal aspect.
Charles Nodier
#50. Death looms large I guess because it should. It's the one thing that we as human beings from birth have a right to. It's the only thing we've really got, and I don't mean to sound bleak about this, but it's a unifying factor amongst us all.
Nick Cave
#51. I have become my own island state. A ravaged, war-torn land where nothing grows and the horizons are bleak. Yes, that's me. I can interact impersonally at work, but that's it.
E.L. James
#52. Give a man secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him nine years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert.
Arthur Young
#53. It's a tough job to tell a story when the audience already knows the ending, and the ending is bleak.
Walter Jon Williams
#54. The variety within Mann's fiction is impressive and fascinating. But Joyce is even more various and many-sided. He begins his career with a wonderful sequence of bleak studies about the ways in which human lives can go awry - in my view, Dubliners is underrated.
Philip Kitcher
#55. We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'.
Nick Harkaway
#56. The whistle of the old steam trains ... could conjure up visions of bleak distances with one solitary wail.
M.C. Beaton
#57. Tuvalu's future at current levels of global warming is already bleak. Any further temperature increase will spell its total demise.
Enele Sopoaga
#58. In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen,
Snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago.
Christina Rossetti
#59. Sometimes bleak is good. Sometimes bleak is necessary. Some part of life is always bleak.
Claire Denis
#60. I don't think we are here for anything. We're just products of evolution. You can say, "Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose." But I'm anticipating a good lunch.
James D. Watson
#61. After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#62. This is one of those perfect moments, the kind I need to save up and remember for when things get bleak.
Pittacus Lore
#63. Doubtless Catherine marked the difference between her friends, as one came in and the other went out. The contrast resembled what you see in exchanging a bleak, hilly, coal country for a beautiful fertile valley; and his voice and greeting were as opposite as his aspect.
Emily Bronte
#64. Keep on going, even when things look bleak.
Ed Catmull
#65. For there are fashions in myth, and the world-conquering West of the nineteenth century needed a philosophy of life in which realpolitik - victory for the tough people who face the bleak facts - was the guiding principle. Thus the bleaker the facts you face, the tougher you seem to be.
Alan W. Watts
#66. Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?
Ian McEwan
#67. In spite of Mr. Poe's fame, the pair made me feel out of sorts, and sad. In one of the busiest cities in the world, they seemed to exist on a bleak island of their own making, their backs turned against the social tide lapping at the battered door.
Lynn Cullen
#68. Enough generations of socialist policies have now passed for us to judge their effects. They are bleak. Socialism undermines the character of a nation and of its citizens. In simpler words, socialism makes people worse.
Dennis Prager
#69. Some prospects for success seems bleak but are not with hard work
Sunday Adelaja
#70. She didn't want to go far, just out of the trees so she could see the stars. They always eased her loneliness. She thought of them as beautiful creatures, burning and cold; each solitary, and bleak, and silent like her.
Kristin Cashore
#71. The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence.
One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason - but one cannot have both.
Robert A. Heinlein
#72. I honestly don't know, but if America continues to refuse to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, I see a bleak future not only for American society, but for the world as a whole. This is a global problem that is not going away, and the United States is an obstacle to solving it.
Peter Singer
#73. Life is a bleak place. Sometimes you have to learn how to shoot first.
Tahereh Mafi
#74. Yes, memories do haunt. Memories of a happy past, in the expectation of a bleak future, in a sad present. - Anita
Nilesh Sakpal
#75. I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality.
John Kennedy Toole
#76. I told him I loved him," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "And he just said it wasn't enough." Her eyes were wide and bleak . "How am I supposed to live with that?
Jojo Moyes
#78. Don't blame me. That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution.
Haruki Murakami
#79. We live in a pretty bleak time. I feel that in the air. Everything is uncertain. Everything feels like its on the precipice of some major transformation, whether we like it or not.
Sean Lennon
#80. With its vastly complicated plot and its immense cast of characters swirling around the case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce that has been grinding away in the Court of Chancery for decades, 'Bleak House' is, for many readers, Dickens's greatest novel.
Robert Gottlieb
#81. A lot of dramas get a bad name commercially because they are unremittingly bleak.
Tom Hooper
#82. Do not allow the profession of which you are a member to induce you to take a bleak view of humanity. You will encounter all sorts of bad behavior but do not judge everybody by the standards of the lowest. If you
Alexander McCall Smith
#83. A while ago, I did a television adaptation of 'Bleak House,' and the character I played, as far as I was concerned, had no redeeming features whatsoever. I wasn't about to try to find any; I didn't need to.
Charles Dance
#84. Nothing that's ever happened has taken away the optimist in me. It's always, "Whatever-let's go to Disneyland." Yes, I have my bleak, tortured-artist moments, but you have to hold on to what's positive.
Mariah Carey
#85. Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting ... By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.
Marilynne Robinson
#86. The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen ... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.
Gary Larson
#87. 'In the Wake' was a very bleak book. This relationship was not too good, the father and son. This time around, I wanted a father and a son who really loved each other, which would be visible on the first page and would still be there on the last page.
Per Petterson
#88. In his bleak mercy, Death forever strips The soul of light and memory, rendering blind Our vision, lest surmounted deeps appal, As when on mountain-heights a glance behind Betrays with knowledge, and the climber slips Down gulfs of fear to some enormous fall.
Clark Ashton Smith
#89. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void.
Cormac McCarthy
#90. Theses bleak skies I hail, for they are kinder to me than ur fellow creatures .
Mary Shelley
#91. Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#92. Siberia: it fills one twelfth of the land-mass of the whole Earth, yet this is all it leaves for certain in the mind. A bleak beauty, and an indelible fear.
Colin Thubron
#93. I don't really find things funny unless they're deeply tragic at the same time. I think if you're funny just for the sake of being funny, it's just frivolous nonsense. To me, all the best comic plays have been written about really serious and rather bleak things.
Lee Hall
#95. People say 'The Wire's bleak, y'know, but I see it as a love letter to Baltimore, and it's one written in a very strange and complex way.
Aidan Gillen
#96. As I'm sure you know, to be in one's own room, in one's own bed, can often make a bleak situation a little better.
Lemony Snicket
#97. He had come to know quite thoroughly the world in which he lived. His outlook was bleak and materialistic. The world as he saw it was a fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a world in which caresses and affection and the bright sweetness of spirit did not exist.
Jack London
#98. President Obama is one of the great political knife-fighters in modern history. He is a failed president - his economy is bleak, his foreign policy bleaker, his vision for American even bleaker still. But he wins.
Ben Shapiro
#99. The hell with her; I wouldn't go back. But wouldn't I? What about later on? Keeping the thought of her out of that bleak hotbox of a room was going to be like trying to dam a river with a tennis racket.
Charles Williams
#100. Two days like icebergs bleak, blank, half-melting, all frigid, mainly out of sight, and definitely a threat to peace of mind drifted by and were good to put behind.
Roger Zelazny
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