Quotes & Sayings About Bleakness

People persuade themselves they deserve easy lives, that being human makes us somehow exempt from pain. The theory works fine until we face the inevitable challenges. Our conditioning of denial in no way equips us to deal with the difficult times that not one of us escapes.
Cleo's motto seemed to be: Life's tough and that's okay, because life is also fantastic. Love it, live it - but don't be fooled into thinking it's not harsh sometimes. Those who've survived periods of bleakness are often better at savoring good times and wise enough to understand that good times are actually great. — Helen Brown

She tried to sound casual and upbeat but in her heart she felt a sudden bleakness. — Katie Fforde

Now her smile was like the bleakness of the sun in a cold winter sky. It gave light but no warmth, perhaps because there was no matching warmth in her eyes. — Margaret Weis

Everyone seems to see bleakness and despair in my books. I don't read them that way. I see myself as writing comic books, books about ordinary people trying to live ordinary, dull, happy lives while the world is falling to pieces around them. — J.M. Coetzee

The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels. — John Steinbeck

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness. — Nick Hornby

Riose laughed suddenly. He foresaw that? Then he foresaw wrong, my good scientist. I suppose you call yourself that. Why, the Empire is more powerful now than it has been in a millennium. Your old eyes are blinded by the cold bleakness of the border. Come to the inner worlds some day; come to the warmth and the wealth of the center. — Isaac Asimov

He feels the bleakness crawling into his skull; Franco breaths in steadily, trying to tune in all out, that pressure on your brain, eroding focus, diverting the flow of thought down old ruinous canals... — Irvine Welsh

I have spent years of my life sitting in my room, creating defenses of cynicism, darkness, and bleakness. Jed's friendship is the skeleton key to my fortress. He disarms me every time. — David Levithan

I grew silent and reserved as the nature of the world in which I lived became plain and undeniable; the bleakness of the future affected my will to study. Granny had already thrown out hints that it was time for me to be on my own. But what had I learned so far that would help me to make a living? Nothing. I could be a porter like my father before me, but what else? And the problem of living as a Negro was cold and hard. What was it that made the hate of whites for blacks so steady, seemingly so woven into the texture of things? What kind of life was possible under that hate? How had this — Richard Wright

the bleakness of life takes many forms, and that none of those forms should be permitted to obscure the central mission, which is to record it honestly, powerfully, and continuously. — Ben Greenman

There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one expected certainty. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Snow fell. Carolers moved among the mansions of Prairie Avenue, pausing now and then to enter the fine houses for hot mulled cider and cocoa. The air was scented with woodsmoke and roasting duck. In Graceland Cemetery, to the north, young couples raced their sleighs over the snow-heaped undulations, pulling their blankets especially tight as they passed the dark and dour tombs of Chicago's richest and most powerful men, the tombs' bleakness made all the more profound by their juxtaposition against the night-blued snow [ ... ]
Outside the snow muffled the concussion of passing horses. Trains bearing fangs of ice tore through the crossing at Wallace. — Erik Larson

When some of the neural "lights" in question have been switched off by injury, the outcome can be connected to a form of generalized depression, or what Dr. Jim Pfaus of Concordia University calls "anhedonia" - a state of pleasurelessness, bleakness, or grayness, in perceptions of the world. — Naomi Wolf

He had little sympathy...for Mirabel, and little for what I have called the New Sensibility of the early 'twenties, for its flat bleakness, its lawless versification, its unheroic tone, its unintelligible images, its 'modernity' in short. — Jocelyn Gibb

The chief characteristics of my childhood were an aching loneliness and the daily struggle to avoid a bleakness of spirit that unrelieved loneliness can foment. — Dean Koontz

The bleakness of what faces us is difficult to swallow. As long as we engage in happy platitudes and a false kind of vision of the possible, it may empower you over the short term, but it is eventually, because of the reality in front of us, going to lead to despair and cynicism and apathy. It's better to swallow hard the bitter pill of what we're up against. — Chris Hedges

I'm falling apart, one part after another. Falling down on the world like snow. Half of me is already on the ground, watching from below. — Ashly Lorenzana

At the Moor
Wanderer in the black wind; quietly the dry reeds whisper
In the stillness of the moor. In the gray sky
A flock of wild birds follows;
Slanting over gloomy waters.
Turmoil. In decayed hut
The spirit of putrescence flutters with black wings.
Crippled birches in the autumn wind.
Evening in deserted tavern. The way home is scented all around
By the soft gloom of grazing herds;
Apparition of the night; toads plunge from brown waters. — Georg Trakl

Under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed — Siri Hustvedt

we are tired - tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression. There comes a time my friends when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, when they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glimmering sunlight of last July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an Alpine November. — Ann Patchett

Just so. And wonder, my friend, is the intellect's most feared foe. Its path is love, and love is the language of humility. The rational mind would stand over it with a bloodstained sword, and in the empty bleakness of its eyes you will see its triumph. — Steven Erikson

It was the very bleakness of winter that made spring possible. — Kristin Hannah

Her voice had become sharp with overtones of bleakness as her soul congealed and she ceased to move, as the instinctive, omnipresent film of great weight, of an almost absolute inertia, settled over her. — Philip K. Dick

We are children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe. — Peter Atkins

Who on Earth could read a Vonnegut book and think that he was a grandfatherly bundle of warm fuzzy happiness? I mean, I read Vonnegut first as a ten year old, and it was shocking because he could joke in the face of such blackness and bleakness, and I'd never seen an author do that before. Everything was pointless, except, possibly, a few moments of love snatched from the darkness, a few moments in which we connect, or fail to. — Neil Gaiman

With all his soul he wanted to sweep her to him and tell her everything was going to be all right. To erase that awful bleakness from her face and with his two strong arms reshape the world for her, to make everything all right. But he had learned long ago the futility of racing from the truth. — Leigh Bristol

She was the only antidote for the bleakness that lived inside of me. My goddess. My deity. I wasn't a believer in any religion, but I'd make an exception in this case. I'd get down on my knees and worship at her alter every day if it brought her back to me. — A. Zavarelli

I feel compelled not to pass on a vision of bleakness, destruction or cynicism. I want to tell the truth as I see it, but I also have to believe that individuals - my kids, your kids, whoever - can do something about it, and I want to show the ways in which they can do something about it. — John Edgar Wideman

To salve the pains of consciousness, some people anesthetize themselves with sunny thoughts. But not everyone can follow their lead, above all not those who sneer at the sun and everything upon which it beats down. Their only respite is in the balm of bleakness. Disdainful of the solicitations of hope, they look for sanctuary in desolate places - a scattering of ruins in a barren locale or a rubble of words in a book where someone whispers in a dry voice, I too am here. — Thomas Ligotti

They say you only really appreciate a garden once you reach a certain age, and I suppose there is a truth in that. It's probably something to do with the great circle of life. There seems to be something miraculous about seeing the relentless optimism of new growth after the bleakness of winter, a kind of joy in the difference every year, the way nature chooses to show off different parts of the garden to its full advantage. — Jojo Moyes

Don't look at the present storm, but look to the Son coming. — Anthony Liccione

I'm really impotent against the overwhelming bleakness of the universe and the only thing I can do is my little gift [filmmaking] and do it the best I can, which is cold comfort. — Woody Allen

Each of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. ... When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. — John O'Donohue

Grace is the permanent climate of divine kindness; the perennial infusion of springtime into the winter of bleakness. — John O'Donohue

The bleakest situations bring out the hospitality in all of us, but it's during the harshest we find out how strong we really are. — Evan Meekins

There's a kind of activism that's more about bolstering identity than achieving results, one that sometimes seems to make the left the true heirs of the Puritans. Puritanical in that the point becomes the demonstration of one's own virtue rather than the realization of results. And puritanical because the somber pleasure of condemning things is the most enduring part of that legacy, along with the sense of personal superiority that comes from pleasure denied. The bleakness of the world is required as contrasting backdrop to the drama of their rising above. — Rebecca Solnit

An eye for beauty instead of bleakness might have lightened some of his load. — John Piper

Courage to me means ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life-not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things ... My courage is faith-faith in the eternal resilience of me-that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does, I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide — F Scott Fitzgerald

To this, John offered a smile of singular bleakness. He's not the only one. — Stephen King

The average cooking in the average hotel for the average Englishman explains to a large extent the English bleakness and taciturnity. Nobody can beam and warble while chewing pressed beef smeared with diabolical mustard. Nobody can exult aloud while ungluing from his teeth a quivering tapioca pudding. — Karel Capek

The mix in our rooms is so touching: the clutter and the cracks in the wall belie a bleakness or brokenness in our lives; while photos and a few rare objects show our pride, our rare shining moments ... these rooms are future ruins — Anne Lamott

You know my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time. — Martin Luther King Jr.

And just for a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, wiht a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. - Sal Paradise — Jack Kerouac

Their only respite is in the balm of bleakness. Disdainful of the solicitations of hope, they look for sanctuary in desolate places - a scattering of ruins in a barren locale or a rubble of words in a book where someone whispers in a dry voice, "I, too, am here." However, — Thomas Ligotti

There are times when the evil seems so impenetrable, the wickedness so victorious, you don't even know how to hope. But then the good news bursts in, as impossible to deny as it is to believe. — Heather Day Gilbert

When I think of Hungarian films, I think of despair and bleakness, and what's more, despair and bleakness of indefensible duration. — Tibor Fischer

His grin eased the bleakness in her heart. "You're my friend, Merry. Bloody — Eloisa James

And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life
not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar. — George Saunders

Before there was light there was only darkness. Before there was light there was only what the Greek poet Hesiod called the "yawning nothingness," and from within this perfect eclipse the uncaused First Cause moved, constructively interfering with a portion of that eternal void which existed before space and time were named with a temperature. This unending, infinite bleakness - a blackness that the authors of the Vedas collectively identified as a type of swirling chaos, a darkness concealed in darkness - is the Creator's ancestral home. It is where He resides, within what human minds can only comprehend as the deepest of detestable disorders. That, to Him, is home. — John Zande