Top 100 Bleak Quotes
#1. Now the tea began to do its work- as it always did- and the world that only a few minutes previously had seemed so bleak started to seem less so.
Alexander McCall Smith
#2. Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore.
Edgar Allan Poe
#3. Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.
Mark Twain
#4. Only God is able. It is faith in Him that we must rediscover. With this faith we can transform bleak and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of joy and bring new light into the dark caverns of pessimism.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#6. There's a version of the future in my head where I stay here forever....Bleak, I know. But, still, there's a lot of comfort that comes with knowing how your life is going to turn out. I've never had a surprise turn out in my favor.
Julie Murphy
#7. O that our souls could scale a height like this, A mighty mountain swept o'er by the bleak Keen winds of heaven; and, standing on that peak Above the blinding clouds of prejudice, Would we could see all truly as it is; The calm eternal truth would keep us meek.
Robinson Jeffers
#8. She is the harbinger of nightmares as well as death, destruction, and insanity. Said to reign in an alternate dimension, a bleak and desertlike twilight version of reality, Lilith has long been hailed as the queen of mental darkness.
Kelly Creagh
#10. Suddenly angry, I cut off my bleak thoughts. No. I would not accept that. This was my story( ... )
Julie Kagawa
#12. When you have lost hope, you have lost everything. And when you think all is lost, when all is dire and bleak, there is always hope.
Pittacus Lore
#13. I was shocked by the reaction I got for Bleak House. It was very intensive but one of the best jobs of my life. It was a chance to play a character that grows and develops and I was very enmeshed in it. But I didn't realise how stylish it was and how much people would love it.
Anna Maxwell Martin
#14. There are men who love to gaze with the mind at things that can never be seen, feel at least the throb of a beauty that will never be known and hear over immense, bleak reaches the echo of that which is no celestial music but only their heart's vain cries.
A.E. Coppard
#15. You're right, Halt,' she said, and he nodded acklowledgement of her backing down.
'Nice to hear someone else saying that for a change,' Will said cheerfully. 'Seems like I've said those words an awful lot in my time.'
Halt turned a bleak gaze on him. 'And you've always been right.
John Flanagan
#16. I'm not very popular, because they're bleak and they're mournful and all the rest of it and I get censorious reviews. But I'm only writing fiction. I'm not making munitions, so I think it's acceptable.
Anita Brookner
#17. Has been argued with some justification that it is Anna's growing sense of bleak isolation that is the essence of her tragedy. There
Leo Tolstoy
#18. Negative emotions, such as the feelings of hatred, meanness, low self-esteem and confidence, and pessimism, create an unpleasant person and a bleak destiny.
Auliq Ice
#19. Your attitude is like a box of crayons that color your world. Constantly color your picture gray, and your picture will always be bleak. Try adding some bright colors to the picture by including humor, and your picture begins to lighten up.
Allen Klein
#20. The world, however bleak I have found it in the last few weeks, must nonetheless be formed of goodness, if but a few moments in Nature's company may suffice to renew one's health and mental aspect.
Stephanie Barron
#21. If Democrats start consistently winning Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada, the electoral outlook for Republicans in the future is mighty bleak.
Mark McKinnon
#22. I've had very bleak experiences in hospitals, but they were also sometimes very funny.
Peter Capaldi
#23. When we think of his lone effort to live and its bleak reward, the mind turns to the myth "for His mercy endureth forever," with confiding revulsion.
Emily Dickinson
#24. Inanimate objects have a life of their own, especially when they are the daily companions of a living soul. Without that life, they take on a bleak, desolate appearance, like furniture piled up in a warehouse.
Jennifer Worth
#25. Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers - pity lighthouse-keepers - pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon ...
Graham Swift
#26. I'm fine, she said. But her smile was bleak, without light or warmth. And for the first time I thought of what it must be like to know that you were going to die, that the trees would bud, flower, leaf, dry, die, and you would not be there to see any of it.
Anna Quindlen
#27. Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
Flash, like a Love-thought, thro'me, Death
And take a Life that wearies me.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#28. The people who change the world never lose hope no matter how bleak the outcome might appear to be.
Laurence Overmire
#29. Silent rushes the swift Lord
Through ruined systems still restored,
Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless,
Plants with worlds the wilderness;
Waters with tears of ancient sorrow
Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow.
House and tenant go to ground,
Lost in God, in Godhead found.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#30. Do you wander and wonder? Do you start at your own shadow, or awaken to rattling disbelief that this is all you are, prospects bleak, bereft of the proof of your ambition?
Steven Erikson
#31. A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective; they are that.
Toni Morrison
#32. Shetland has always been a place of sanctuary for me. I visited when I dropped out of university, and I just loved it from the minute I got there. It's a bleak but very beautiful place.
Ann Cleeves
#33. Her despair may have gone, but it had left its heaviness draped over her, thick and bleak.
Laini Taylor
#34. Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.
Susan Sontag
#35. To not have any hope is where things start to get really bleak. Things are possible. The impossible can be possible.
Sarah Paulson
#36. Hear me now, o thou bleak and unbearable world
Thou art base and debauched as can be.
And a knight with his banners all bravely unfurled
Now hurls down his gauntlet to thee
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#37. I walked to the bookcase and examined the storybooks inside. As a girl, I had dreamed of having stacks of books at my disposal
stories to get lost in, other worlds to live in when mine was so bleak.
Sarah Jio
#38. We laughed a lot. That's one thing we forgot about for a few years - laughing. When we went through all the lawsuits, it looked as if everything was bleak, but when I think back to before that, I remember we used to laugh all the time.
George Harrison
#39. I'm not a pessimist by nature. I'm not someone who sees things in a bleak way.
Nouriel Roubini
#40. I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.
Audre Lorde
#41. Picture the rest of your life without Del and give me a one word description of it."
"I can't decide between bleak or pathetic," Tyler admitted finally. "There you go.
Shayla Black
#42. Winter was gray and mean upon the city and every night was a package of cold bleak hours, like the hours in a cell that had no door.
David Goodis
#43. But, Isobel thought with a bleak and sad smile, what better place to bury what was dead than in a cemetery?
Kelly Creagh
#44. That's what's so gorgeous about humanity. It doesn't matter how bleak our daily lives are, we still fight for the light. I think that's our divinity. We lean into love, even in the most hideous circumstances. We manage to hope.
Mary Karr
#45. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, 'Well, so-and-so will like this,' which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
Gore Vidal
#46. No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
#47. And you, being a good man, can pass it as such, and forgive and pity the dreamer, and be lenient and encouraging when he wakes?"
Rick
"Indeed I can. What am I but another dreamer, Rick?"
Guardian
Charles Dickens
#48. Life was very simple. My parents had come from the North of England, which is a fairly rugged, bleak, hard-working part of England, and so there was not the expectation of luxury.
Roger Bannister
#49. We all need a story. It just turns out that the story we have been told for years - that people are naturally and primarily competitive and self-interested and that life is best shaped around that bleak fact - is bunkum
Ed Mayo
#50. What if Park realized that all the things he thought were so mysterious and intriguing about her were actually just ... bleak?
Rainbow Rowell
#51. What's sometimes really overwhelming in Sweden is the uniformity. People kind of disappear by all looking the same and wearing the same clothes. There are a lot of great individuals, but it can become a very blank and bleak picture.
Neneh Cherry
#52. Because you "love" people so much no matter how bleak things are you will never give up on this world.
Hotaru Odagiri
#53. I wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was, Frisco - long, bleak streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog and whiteness. I stumbled around a few blocks. Weird bums (Mission and Third) asked me for dimes in the dawn.
Jack Kerouac
#54. Donald Trump is writing a different theme, which is it's midnight in America and that things are bad, and they're bleak, and they're gloomy and they're doomy, and the only thing that is going to save you is someone with the authority and power of somebody like me.
Mark Shields
#55. Humanity was awful; humanity made you hurt. Humanity was a weakness that would kill everyone, one way or another.
Andrea Speed
#56. There may be times in my life where a situation looks bleak or doesn't make sense, but having faith in God allows me to know that He will take me through that situation and make me better off than I was before.
Dan Ellis
#57. Negativity is an addiction to the bleak shadow that lingers around every human form ... you can transfigure negativity by turning it toward the light of your soul.
John O'Donohue
#58. From the hour when the Puritan baby opened his eyes in bleak New England, he had a Spartan struggle for life.
Alice Morse Earle
#59. There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor which is far different from the bleak and terrible silence of grief in a widower's lonely bedroom.
Dean Koontz
#60. No matter how bleak, there is still chance of love in hatred but none in indifference
Kiran Joshi
#61. Yet after night fall most any layover here, it seemed that they ended up cruising the bleak arterials of dismal L.A. backwaters, seeking out of some helpless fatality the company of lowlifes of opportunity.
Thomas Pynchon
#62. The leaves were half-gone now. The Norway maples still hung on to their yellow, but most of the orangey-red of the sugar maples had found their way to the ground, leaving behind the stark branches that seemed to hang like stuck-out arms and tiny fingers, skeletal and bleak.
Elizabeth Strout
#63. I don't walk around chuckling all the time. My outlook is very bleak. It's worse than bleak, it's apocalyptic.
Mark Leyner
#64. I stared up at the black chiffon and tried to imagine my eternity. It looked very bleak. Hopefully, insanity would claim me quickly.
Abbi Glines
#65. No-one is going to sit down and read Bleak House to the family any more, but they can all huddle up happily in front of Charles Bronson.
Martin Amis
#67. Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt 'safe' there.
Robert Cormier
#68. Magical?" "Non." "Magnificent?" "Don't be absurd." "Less bleak than anything else we have seen?" "Now truly you are speaking French," the ambassador said approvingly.
Neal Stephenson
#69. Rebellion without truth is like spring in a bleak, arid desert.
Khalil Gibran
#70. The wind was picking up off the ocean now and the whole coastal scene had a bleak, abandoned look, as though Maine in November really belonged to the ragged gulls who wheeled over the sun-worn pier, and the humans had just gotten the news and taken a powder.
Jonathan Lethem
#71. No matter how bleak and black her existence became, the familiar sight of the moon restored something within her, small as it was - like tiny fluttering wings of flame beating back the darkness.
Shona Moyce
#72. Without a quest, life is quickly reduced to bleak black and wimpy white, a diet too bland to get anybody out of bed in the morning. A quest fuels our fire. It refuses to let us drift downstream gathering debris.
Charles R. Swindoll
#73. If a 25-year old can't read and write and he or she isn't gaining marketable skills, it doesn't matter if a Republican or a Democrat is in the White House. His or her future will be bleak.
J. C. Watts
#74. Because no matter how much money we spend there [in Iraq], as long as the people there see this money as ... as assistance that is unwelcome, as long as they continue to be humiliated in their own country by us ... I mean, the future looked bleak, and the future after that was in fact very bleak.
Yaroslav Trofimov
#75. What most people find festive - a weekend at a beach shack with friends, a boat trip down a river, a crackling bonfire on a summer night - I see as a bleak nightmare to be grimly endured. I would sooner put lit cigarettes in my eyes than share a vacation house with a crowd.
Jancee Dunn
#76. Alack, the night comes on, and the bleak winds
Do sorely ruffle; for many miles about
There's scarce a bush.
William Shakespeare
#77. What'll be your biography? "At that point, life seemed pretty bleak. Then (insert your name) did a surprising thing...
Richard Bach
#78. There's and entire world outside these bleak pages, one full of SUNRISES and KITTY-CATS and late-night BURRITO RUNS and the horrible, creaking amble of us all towards DEATH. It is to that world that I am afraid I must release you to now.
David Malki
#79. This is a man in need. His fear is naked and obvious, but he's lost ... Somewhere in his darkness.
His eyes wide and bleak and tortured. I can soothe him. Join him briefly in the darkness and bring him into the light.
E.L. James
#80. I don't think that there's necessarily a side to drama that has to be completely bleak. You have to have a flicker of humor 'cause everyone has a flicker of humor, something they find funny in life.
Amy Seimetz
#81. We are as gods on our little rock in the vast bleak cosmos and it's way past time we started getting good at that instead of just posing on Olympus and photoshopping our zits out. The future is more than an Instagram filter.
Warren Ellis
#82. Fear of Tunisia's democracy led Isis to launch an attack on its tourist economy The nation's future will be bleak if the cruise ships don't return to disgorge their passengers
Anonymous
#83. It is a much easier and less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fireside than to occupy a cold bleak hill and sleep under frost and snow without cloaths or blankets.
George Washington
#84. If you turned the fabric of our lives over, I imagined the design on the backside would be woven in the bleak grays of doubt and fear.
Stephenie Meyer
#85. I had seen cancer at a more cellular level as a researcher. The first time I entered the cancer ward, my first instinct was to withdraw from what was going on - the complexity, the death. It was a very bleak time.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#86. The main idea in golf as in life, I suppose is to learn to accept what cannot be altered and to keep on doing one's own reasoned and resolute best whether the prospect be bleak or rosy.
Bobby Jones
#87. I don't think I can write a book as nihilistic as some of my early ones. They're so bleak. I don't think I would enjoy that as much anymore. You really become fixated on ways out.
Daniel Woodrell
#88. Somebody finally has to get out an ad, often after hours. Somebody has to stare at a blank piece of paper. Probably nothing was ever more bleak. This is probably the very height of lonesomeness. He is one person and he is alone
Fairfax M. Cone
#89. Life was beautiful, everyone knew that, but it was also bitter and bleak and unfair as hell and where did that leave a person? On the outs with the rest of the world. Someone who sat alone in the cafeteria, reading, escaping from his hometown simply by turning the page.
Alice Hoffman
#90. I had heard about the nightcrawling world, and I'm very aware that there are tens of millions of young people around the world who are facing bleak employment prospects.
Dan Gilroy
#91. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.
Azar Nafisi
#92. You know," she murmured, "we're all heading straight to hell."
"Yes," said Masako, giving her a bleak look. "It's like riding downhill with no brakes."
"You mean, there's no way to stop?"
"No, you stop all right - when you crash.
Natsuo Kirino
#93. 'Family Life' is a blueprint of my life. It was horrible and physically gruesome in a way the book doesn't attempt to capture. It was emotionally very bleak.
Akhil Sharma
#95. The largest two books I've ever read more than once are 'Bleak House' by Charles Dickens and 'The Stand' by Stephen King, about 1,200 pages each.
Simon Toyne
#96. T is liberty crowns Britannia's Isle,
And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile.
Joseph Addison
#97. I think sci-fi films have become rather bleak, and understandably so - I think we've made some big mistakes globally with how we're developing, and we deal with that guilt by creating these very dystopian futures in films.
Maggie Grace
#98. I wonder whether my bleak-o-meter is set differently from other people's.
Andrea Arnold
#99. You do not know what all around you see in Esther Summerson, how many hearts she touches and awakens, what sacred admiration and what love she wins.
Mr. Woodcourt
Charles Dickens
#100. The imagination can be a kind of wilderness, too, in fact a wasteland, if you allow it to take you into one bleak and grotesque place after another, for you can imagine yourself into all kinds of paranoid delusions and even into madness.
Dean Koontz
