Bad News After Bad News Quotes & Sayings

Here is an all-too-brief summary of Buffett's approach: He looks for what he calls "franchise" companies with strong consumer brands, easily understandable businesses, robust financial health, and near-monopolies in their markets, like H & R Block, Gillette, and the Washington Post Co. Buffett likes to snap up a stock when a scandal, big loss, or other bad news passes over it like a storm cloud - as when he bought Coca-Cola soon after its disastrous rollout of "New Coke" and the market crash of 1987. He also wants to see managers who set and meet realistic goals; build their businesses from within rather than through acquisition; allocate capital wisely; and do not pay themselves hundred-million-dollar jackpots of stock options. Buffett insists on steady and sustainable growth in earnings, so the company will be worth more in the future than it is today. — Benjamin Graham

Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz's Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. Depressives in grim situations handed down their genes, however despairingly, while the self-improvers converted to Christianity or moved away to sunnier locales. — Jonathan Franzen

Okay, it's like this. You wake up, you watch TV, and you get in the car and you listen to the radio. You go to your little job or your little school, but you're not going to hear about that on the 6:00 news, since guess what. Nothing is really happening. You read the paper, or if you're into that sort of thing you read a book, which is just the same as watching only even more boring. You watch TV all night, or maybe you go out so you can watch a movie, and maybe you'll get a phone call so you can tell your friends what you've been watching. And you know, it's got so bad that I've started to notice, the people on TV? Inside the TV? Half the time they're watching TV. Or if you've got some romance in a movie? What to they do but go to a movie? All those people, Marlin," he invited the interviewer in with a nod. "What are they watching?"
After an awkward silence, Marlin filled in, "You tell us, Kevin."
"People like me. — Lionel Shriver

If anything good came out of 9/11, to me, was that people were so cynical about the world - all you hear about on the news is all the bad stuff everyday, but what was refreshing to me was after that, you saw how many good people there are out there. For every one bad one, there's a thousand good ones. — Alan Jackson

Bad news should always come after lunch.. first thing in the morning everything left a bruise. — Stephen King

Democratic Senator Harry Reid is expected to make a full recovery after he was exercising with a resistance band that snapped, causing him to fall. The good news is he's fine. The bad news is there's no video of it. — Jimmy Fallon

Sometimes the news so shocks the mind that the brain suffers an electrical short. This phenomenon is known as a "psychogenic" syndrome, a severe version of the swoon some experience after hearing bad news. — Paul Kalanithi

I have got this letter which actually goes out the day after I die. It has already been written. And it says that: "Yesterday I died". And then it says: "That's bad news for me, but it's not bad news for you, the shareholders of Berkshire". And then I go on and explain what is going to happen. I know that is one time when they will be really interested in hearing from me. — Warren Buffett

If you ask any police officer what the worst part of the job is, they will always say breaking bad news to relatives, but this is not the truth. The worst part is staying in the room after you've broken the news, so that you're forced to be there when someone's life disintegrates around them. Some people say it doesn't bother them - such people are not to be trusted. — Ben Aaronovitch

After rare beef and wine, when the lobes turn red, was the time to ask favours or tell bad news. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

I've got good news and bad news for you, Ryan. The bad news is that you're the only one in the world who can activate the Doomsday Machine, and Foe and his gang are never going to stop coming after you. The good news is that with myself and Valkyrie protecting you, you stand a very good chance of emerging from this relatively unscathed."
Valkyrie looked at the back of Skulduggery's head. "You said they'd probably try to cut his hand off."
"I said relatively," Skulduggery reminded her. — Derek Landy

Durzo cleared his throat. "I've got bad news ... Life being unfair and all that ... "
"Oh, great. What is it?" [replied Kylar]
"Luc Graesin? Kid you died on the wheel to save?"
"It was more for Logan than for Luc, but what about Luc?"
"Hanged himself," Durzo said.
...
"Are you joking? After what I did for him? That asshole! — Brent Weeks

Girls like her, my grandfather once warned me, girls like her turn into women with eyes like bullet holes and mouths made of knives. They are always restless. They are always hungry. They are bad news. They will drink you down like a shot of whisky. Falling in love with them is like falling down a flight of stairs. What no one told me, with all those warnings, is that even after you've fallen, even after you know how painful it is, you'd still get in line to do it again. — Holly Black

But finally, into the world came a baby girl, just as, I'm very, very sorry to say, her mother, and my sister, slipped away from the world after a long night of suffering - but also a night of joy, as the birth of a baby is always good news, no matter how much bad news the baby will hear later. — Lemony Snicket

The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one
in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that
as if that weren't enough
but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know. — Philip K. Dick

Click. Everyone briefly gathered and posed and smiling at their future selves. Beaches and cathedrals, bumper cars and birthday parties, glasses raised around a dining table. Each picture a little pause between events. No tantrums, no illness, no bad news, all the big stuff happening before and after and in between. The true magic happening only when the lesser magic fails, the ghost daughter who moved during the exposure, her face unreadable but more alive than all her frozen family. Double exposures, as if a little strip of time had been folded back on itself. Scratches and sun flares. Photos torn postdivorce, faces scratched out or Biroed over. The camera telling the truth only when something slips through its silver fingers. — Mark Haddon

My mother smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. Before she smoked her first cigarette, she was free to choose whether or not she would smoke. After awhile, her freedom reverted to Satan - so it would seem. The choice was no longer hers - so it would seem. Her mind and body were attacked with nicotine cravings that got so bad she would sometimes sacavage through garbage cans for butts when she'd run short on full cigarettes.
I watched, baffled at how something so small and so disgusting to me could have such power over my mother. That's the thing about addiction - it binds us one choice at a time. That's also the good news about addition - you can unravel the hold it has on you - one choice at a time. — Toni Sorenson

I have friends who are still looking, friends who are married, and friends who are divorced. The difference, I've come to see, is largely due to chance, rather than character. Because after all those years of self-doubt, my late-marrying friends and I found men who love us even though we're still cranky and neurotic, even though we still haven't got our careers together, even though we sometimes talk too loud or drink too much or swear at the TV when the news is on. We have gray hairs and unfashionable clothes and bad attitudes. They love us anyway.

What's wrong with me? What's wrong with any of us? If we're honest, the answer probably is 'plenty.' But that's not the point. — Sara Eckel

The sort of resilient personality who can bounce back quickly after a major setback, does so largely because they quickly generate positive emotions which serve as a physical and psychological antidote to bad news. — Nick Baylis

William clapped to gain everyone's attention. "All right, listen up. I've got good news and bad news. Because I'm such a positive person, we'll start with the good. Ashlyn survived the birthing, and so did her personal horde."
The hallway echoed with breathy sighs of relief ... none louder than Maddox's own.
"So what's the bad?" someone demanded.
After a dramatic pause, the warrior said, "I'm out of conditioner. I need someone to flash out of here and get me some. Hint, I'm looking at you, Lucien. And, yeah, you're welcome for my amazing contrib to your happy family. Little terrors clawed me up but good. — Gena Showalter

Depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship [ ... ] feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibrating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news [ ... ] Grim situations were Katz's niche the way murky water was a carp's [ ... ] he might well have started making music again, had it not been for the accident of success. He flopped around on the ground, heavily carplike, his psychic gills straining futilely to extract dark sustenance from an atmosphere of approval and plenitude. — Jonathan Franzen

The argument had been in full swing when Matthew's father telephoned with the news that a funny turn Matthew's mother had suffered the previous week had been diagnosed as a mini-stroke. After this, she and Matthew felt that squabbling about Strike was in bad taste, so they went to bed in an unsatisfactory state of theoretical reconciliation, both, Robin knew, still seething. It was — Robert Galbraith

It's common in the middle of a drought . . . to forget that rain is the norm. Or in the middle of a flood to forget that floods rarely happen. Or when bad news comes from the doctor to forget that, for most of us, this comes after many years of relatively good health. — Mark Mittelberg

The most damaging example of the systems archetype called "drift to low performance" is the process by which modern industrial culture has eroded the goal of morality. The workings of the trap have been classic, and awful to behold. Examples of bad human behavior are held up, magnified by the media, affirmed by the culture, as typical. This is just what you would expect. After all, we're only human. The far more numerous examples of human goodness are barely noticed. They are "not news." They are exceptions. Must have been a saint. Can't expect everyone to behave like that. And so expectations are lowered. The gap between desired behavior and actual behavior narrows. Fewer actions are taken to affirm and instill ideals. The public discourse is full of cynicism. Public leaders are visibly, unrepentantly amoral or immoral and are not held to account. Idealism is ridiculed. Statements of moral belief are suspect. It is much easier to talk about hate in public than to talk about love. — Donella H. Meadows

For writers - even sportswriters - bad news is always easier than good, since it is, after all, more familiar. — Richard Ford

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you'll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.
Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they're 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn't meet their life expectancy.
I'm here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy. — Adrian Tan

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worse had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. — Jonathan Franzen