Bleak Quotes
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Imagine being unable to escape as the bully relentlessly pursues them online in a form accessible 24/7. Imagine how bleak that must be; imagine how lonely it must be.
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More Bleak Quotes
Yet now, as he roared across the night sky toward an unknown destiny , he found himself facing that bleak and ultimate question which so few men can answer to their satisfaction. What have I done with my life , he asked himself, that the world will be poorer if I leave it.
arthur c. clarke— Glide Path (1963) Chapter 27
I know him a notorious liar, Think him a great way fool, solely a coward; Yet these fix'd evils sit so fit in him, That they take place, when virtue's steely bones Look bleak i' the cold wind.
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well (1600s), Act I, scene 1, line 111.
In the bleak mid-winter 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 mid-winter Long ago.
christina rossetti— Christina Rossetti, Mid-Winter (1872), st. 1.
In the bleak mid-winter 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 mid-winter, Long ago.
— 1875 'Mid-Winter'.
These European White Men, then, with civilization in their blood and in their destiny, crossed the Atlantic and set up a new civilization on a bleak and rock bound coast. It was the White Men who drove north to Alaska and west to California; the men who opened up the tropics and subdued the Arctics; the men who mastered the African Veldts; the men who peopled Australia and seized the gates of the world at Suez, Gibraltar and Panama.
ben klassen— Nature's Eternal Religion (1973), Ch. 2, Paragraph 3
When true hearts lie wither'dAnd fond ones are flown,Oh, who would inhabitThis bleak world alone?
thomas moore— The Last Rose of Summer.
In the bleak mid-winterFrosty wind made moan,Earth stood hard as iron,Water like a stone;Snow had fallen, snow on snow,Snow on snow,In the bleak mid-winterLong ago.
christina rossetti— Mid-Winter, st. 1 (1872).
The university is well structured, well tooled, to turn out people with all the sharp edges worn off, the well-rounded person. The university is well equipped to produce that sort of person, and this means that the best among the people who enter must for four years wander aimlessly much of the time questioning why they are on campus at all, doubting whether there is any point in what they are doing, and looking toward a very bleak existence afterward in a game in which all of the rules have been made up, which one cannot really amend.
mario savio— "An End to History," Humanity (December 1964)
Or were I in the wildest waste,Sae bleak and bare, sae bleak and bare,The desert were a paradiseIf thou wert there, if thou wert there.
Robert Burns— Robert Burns, Oh! Wert Thou in the Cold Blast.
I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read . The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy , and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.
james baldwin— "Autobiographical Notes" (1952); republished in Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Some people didn't like the novel, it is in some ways extremely bleak. But if you are dealing with the kind of subjects I am trying to demystify the delusions we have about ourselves, to get a more accurate fix on human nature then people are unsettled. And the easiest way to deal with that is to say it's weird or it's cold.
j. g. ballard— On his novel Crash, as quoted in "The benign catastrophist" by Susie Mackenzie in The Guardian (6 September 2003)
White is the wold, and ghostly The dank and leafless trees; And 'M's and 'N's are mostly Pronounced like 'B's and 'D's: 'Neath bleak sheds, ice-encrusted, The sheep stands, mute and stolid: And ducks find out, disgusted, That all the ponds are solid.
charles stuart calverley— Dirge, from Verses and Translations (1862).
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— A Hill-Top View (1904); This is one of his earliest poems, printed in the the Aurora, a student publication of Occidental College.
Water has its moods, flowing or still; it can lure you like a lover, or look as bleak as a broken heart.
patricia a. mckillip— Chapter 7 (p. 64)
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
edgar allan poe— Stanza 2. (The Raven (1844))
But as the wave expended its force and the waters withdrew, the bleak rocks remained; there was no arguing with fate; neither his despair nor Lyra’s had moved them a single inch.
philip pullman— Ch. 37 : The Dunes
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— The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth (1965)
Or were I in the wildest waste, Sae bleak and bare, sae bleak and bare, The desert were a paradise If thou wert there, if thou wert there.
Robert Burns— Robert Burns, Oh! Wert Thou in the Cold Blast.
Thomas is not a Wordsworthian poet, and his “ nature ” is not Wordsworth ’s; it is history , rather than divinity, which he responds to most, in the bleak beauty of Wales. In Christian terms, Thomas is not a poet of the transfiguration, of the resurrection, of human holiness ... He is a poet of the cross, the unanswered prayer , the bleak trek through darkness .
— A.E. Dyson, in Yeats, Eliot, and R.S. Thomas : Riding the Echo (1981), p. 296
And from the prayer of Want, and plaint of Woe, O never, never turn away thine ear! Forlorn, in this bleak wilderness below, Ah! what were man, should Heaven refuse to hear!
james beattie— James Beattie, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Book I, Stanza 29.
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— Robinson Jeffers, Aurora, (1904), "A Hill-Top View".
No. Don't give up hope just yet. It's the last thing to go. 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— I Am Number Four
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— The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder.
bleak are our shores with the blasts of December, Fettered and chill is the rivulet's flow; Throbbing and warm are the hearts that remember Who was our friend when the world was our foe.
Holmes, Sr., Oliver Wendell— Welcome to the Grand Duke Alexis, Dec. 6, 1871. Referring to the fleet sent by Russia in Sept., 1863, an act with mixed motives, but for which we were grateful.
Givea manthesecure possessionof a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years' lease on a garden, and he will convert it into a desert? The magic ofturns sand to gold.
— PROPERTY1787 Journal entries, 30 Jul and 7 Nov, published in Travels in France and Italy (1794).
On a bleak wintry morning some years ago I was summoned to the office of our naval attache at the American embassy in Kabul.
james a. michener— Caravans (1963) First lines
Tonight, I should watch the sun set, and think of the impending darkness as a metaphor for my wasted life: once it was bright, and full of potential, and now it is dark and hopeless and bleak. I should not make the mistake of thinking that the moon and the stars represent slim glimmers of hope, or evidence that there is light on the other side. Even if there is light somewhere I will never walk in it again.
john s. hall— March 25 (Royal Lunch (2004))
