Dismal Quotes & Sayings

From what Natalie could observe, by middle age, every person's life had rolled some distance downhill, even if it was a very gentle slope, coming to rest at a place of disappointment. Some spheres of an individual's life might have gone spectacularly well but there would always be an obstinate slab of disappointment in another department - a stalled career, inability to have kids, a dismal marriage, whatever. — Debra Oswald

That street was like a dismal gash, endless, with us at the bottom of it, filling it from side to side, advancing from sorrow to sorrow, toward an end that is never in sight, the end of all the streets in the world. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

thinking of us, our struggles and pain, grieves in me a song more dismal than the sparrows' protest to the morning rain — John J. Geddes

He seemed to hasten the retreat of departing light by his very presence; the setting sun dipped sharply, as though fleeing before our nigger; a black mist emanated from him; a subtle and dismal influence; a something cold and gloomy that floated out and settled on all the faces like a mourning veil. The circle broke up. The joy of laughter died on stiffened lips. — Joseph Conrad

When you are lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is tabooed by anxiety, I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in without impropriety. — W.S. Gilbert

It came to me then, I am sure, for the first time, how promiscuous, how higgledy-piggledy was the whole of that jumble of mines and homes, collieries and potbanks, railway yards, canals, schools, forges and blast furnaces, churches, chapels, allotment hovels, a vast irregular agglomeration of ugly smoking accidents in which men lived as happy as frogs in a dustbin. Each thing jostled and damaged the other things about it, each thing ignored the other things about it; the smoke of the furnace defiled the potbank clay, the clatter of the railway deafened the worshipers in church, the public-house thrust corruption at the school doors, the dismal homes squeezed miserably amidst the monstrosities of industrialism, with an effect of groping imbecility. Humanity choked amidst its products, and all its energy went in increasing its disorder, like a blind stricken thing that struggles and sinks in a morass. — H.G.Wells

constitute a horror story wherein the villains of the piece stole power from a stable governance system in order to cast the population of the world into an ongoing lab experiment with no plan or boundary. A dismal science. — Warren Ellis

Most lives are not distinguished by great achievements. They are measured by an infinite number of small ones. Each time you do a kindness for someone or bring a smile to his face, it gives your life meaning. Never doubt your value, little friend. The world would be a dismal place without you in it. (tweaked version of a passage from Scandal in Spring) — Lisa Kleypas

It has become something to her, that memory - something she can take out in dismal times and stare into like a crystal ball disclosing not presages but reminders. She holds it in her palm like a captured ladybug and thinks, Well ain't I been some places, ain't I partook in some glorious happenings wanderin my way between heaven and earth. And if I ain't seen everything there is to see, it wasn't for lack of lookin.
Blind is the real dead. — Alden Bell

A part of me looks at life from a dismal perspective, not unlike Woody Allen and Larry David. But I don't want to look at life like that. It's bad enough that I have to think it. What works for me is writing against that view. There is God, there is love, there is greatness, there is a plan, and there is beauty. — Corbin Bernsen

Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems. — George Packer

That's the thing with the young these days, isn't it? They watch too many happy endings. Everything has to be wrapped up, with a smile and a tear and a wave. Everyone has learned, found love, seen the error of their ways, discovered the joys of monogamy, or fatherhood, or filial duty, or life itself. In my day, people got shot at the end of films, after learning only that life is hollow, dismal, brutish, and short. — Nick Hornby

It was a dark, dismal afternoon, like they all seem to be
these days, when I got this call. I could hear the rain
battering the windowpane of my office when the phone rang. — C.S. Woolley

All through the crowd were men in uniform, sailors from the great fleet anchored in the Hudson, soldiers with divisional insignia from Massachusetts to California, wanting fearfully to be noticed, and finding the great city thoroughly fed up with soldiers unless they were nicely massed into pretty formations and uncomfortable under the weight of a pack and rifle. Through this medley Dean and Gordon wandered; the former interested, made alert by the display of humanity at its frothiest and gaudiest; the latter reminded of how often he had been one of the crown, tired, casually fed, overworked, and dissipated. To Dean the struggle was significant, young, cheerful; to Gordon it was dismal, meaningless, endless. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The dream was in fact a lot like the Vancouver weather - a dismal sort of longing, a rainy dreamy sadness, a weight that shifted round the heart. — Alice Munro

Tipping confounds me because it is not a reward but a travel tax, one of the many, one of the more insulting. No one is spared. It does not matter that you are paying thousands to stay in the presidential suite in the best hotel: the uniformed man seeing you to the elevator, inquiring about your trip, giving you a weather report, and carrying your bags to the suite expects money for this unasked-for attention. Out front, the doorman, gasconading in gold braid, wants a tip for snatching open a cab door, the bartender wants a proportion of your bill, so does the waiter, and chambermaids sometimes leave unambiguous messages, with an accompanying envelope, demanding cash. It is bad enough that people expect something extra for just doing their jobs; it is an even more dismal thought that every smile has a price. — Paul Theroux

The sky was gray, always a dismal gray that lightened and darkened as the day wore on. He had never known anything else. — A.M. Daily

No,' said the priest, 'we must not accept everything is true, we must only accept it is necessary.'
'A dismal thought,' said K., 'it makes untruth into a universal principle. — Franz Kafka

The moods of sadness that come over anyone who takes up art ... these dismal moods have very little compensation. — Edgar Degas

For the night-wind has a dismal trick of wandering round and round a building of that sort, and moaning as it goes; and of trying, with its unseen hand, the windows and the doors; and seeking out some crevices by which to enter. — Charles Dickens

Ten minutes of careful searching later, Maelyn faced the dismal truth - she was bookless. — Anita Valle

I find it funny that people who didn't think there was any inflation in the pipeline are now talking about stagflation. This is nothing like the 1970's, which was a pretty dismal period and not just because of polyester and disco. — Barry Ritholtz

It was Monday morning. Swaminathan was reluctant to open his eyes. he considered Monday specially unpleasant in the calendar. After the delicious freedom of Saturday and Sunday, it was difficult to get into the Monday mood of work and discipline. He shuddered at the very thought of school: the dismal yellow building; the fire-eyed Vedanayagam, his class teacher, and headmaster with his thin long cane ... — R.K. Narayan

A journey is a dismal thing when there can be no homecoming. — Stanislaw Lem

This is a paradise of rising to the occasion that points out by contrast how the rest of the time most of us fall down from the heights of possibility, down into diminished selves and dismal societies. Many now do not even hope for a better society, but they recognize it when they encounter it, and that discovery shines out even through the namelessness of their experience. Others recognize it, grasp it, and make something of it, and long-term social and political transformations, both good and bad, arise from the wreckage. The door to this ear's potential paradises is in hell. — Rebecca Solnit

It has been said that if you aim at nothing in life, you are likely to hit nothing! I have never had anyone come to me and say, 'Venita, I plan to fail.' Yet I have observed many who failed to plan and who unfortunately met with the same dismal results. — Venita VanCaspel

While he was at Lichfield, in the college vacation of the year 1729, he felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he never afterwards was perfectly relieved; and all his labours, and all his enjoyments, were but temporary interruptions of its baleful influence. — Samuel Johnson

I admired Margaret Thatcher - while abhorring much of what she offered - because she was so clearly a leader of huge substance. Blair was the dismal opposite. — Martin Jacques

Statistics show that diversity in the media is pretty dismal. Critical voices from women and people of color are missing from many important conversations. — Cameron Russell

If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place ... Most, probably all, human beings get to do awful things and believe things that other human beings think they should be burned for believing, and they get to do and believe wonderful things too, and artists, writers, musicians, creators, actors, are nothing if not human beings. — Neil Gaiman

In winter, when the dismal rain
Comes down in slanting lines,
And Wind, that grand old harper, smote
His thunder-harp of pines. — Alexander Smith

Women's liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful. — Rebecca Solnit

While a lot of people want to join the left to react against the mainstream or right, I in many ways react against the left - not a lot of its fundamental commitments, but its often dismal tone, righteousness, defeatism, etc. — Rebecca Solnit

Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned!
to the earth art thou not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations?
and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven? — Edgar Allan Poe

It was called 'We Wear the Mask', by Paul Laurence Dunbar. I transcribed the first stanza and then started jotting down my reaction to it.

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, -
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

I used to wear masks so subtle I barely noticed them. A compliment to my mother after a dismal meal, a smile at my best friend when she sang out of tune, a forced laugh at my uncle's bad jokes. I wore small masks that came and went, like fleeting expressions.

I am stuck inside the mask I wear now. I want to rip it off. I want to show my scars to the world, to unveil the ugliness that breathes inside me. I want to be unashamed. I want to be unafraid. But every day the mask gets tighter, and I suffocate a little more.

I stopped writing. — Catherine Doyle

I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds. — Don DeLillo

The choices politicians make must be based on values - not an arbitrary, axe-wielding approach to public spending or a dismal exchange between Gordon Brown and David Cameron about percentages that sounds like an argument between different book-keepers. — Nick Clegg

I think the best thing about my short-lived political career was that I saw the interiors of Bihar and UP. That is the real India, and, being an Indian, it was really sad to see our own people living in such dismal conditions. It was a real eye-opener. — Sanjay Dutt

I now think that was distanced me from Tricia and from the Rape Crisis Center was their use of generalities. I did not want to be one of a group or compared with others. It somehow blindsided my sense that I was going to survive. Tricia prepared me for failure by saying that it would be okay if I failed. She did this by showing me that the odds out there were against me. But what she told me, I didn't want to hear. In the face of dismal statistics regarding arrest, prosecution, and even full recovery for the victim, I saw no choice but to ignore the statistics. I needed what gave me hope, like being assigned a female assistant district attorney, not the news that the number of rape prosecutions in Syracuse for that calendar year had been nil. — Alice Sebold

Because I have confidence in the power of truth and in the spirit, I believe in the future of mankind. Affirmation of the world and of life contains within itself an optimistic willing and hoping which can never be lost. It is, therefore, never afraid to face the dismal reality and to see it as it really is. — Albert Schweitzer

Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science. — Thomas Carlyle

The only trouble was, I wasn't with a group of my peers. Who are my peers? [ ... ] And there I was with a dismal coven of repentant soaks
a car salesman who had fallen from the creed of the Kiwanis, an Jewish woman whose family misunderstood her attempts to put them straight on everything, a couple of schoolteachers who can't ever have taught anything except Civics, and some business men whose god was Mammon, and a truck-driver who was included, I gather, to keep our eyes on the road and our discussions hitched to reality. Whose reality? Certainly not mine. So the imp of perversity prompted me to make pretty patterns of our discussions together, and screw the poor boozers up worse then they'd been screwed up before. For the first time in years, I was having a really good time. — Robertson Davies

The Secretary, working in the Dismal Swamp betimes next morning, was informed that a youth waited in the hall who gave the name of Sloppy. The footman who communicated this intelligence made a decent pause before uttering the name, to express that it was forced on his reluctance by the youth in question, and that if the youth had had the good sense and good taste to inherit some other name it would have spared the feelings of him the bearer. — Charles Dickens

Karl Marx, himself a denizen of one of the most congested of all London districts, was equally impressed by the dismal conditions of the new proletariat. he sent Darwin a copy of 'Das Kapital' (which was found unread after his death). — Steve Jones

Even the most dismal and hopeless-sounding Wilco music, to my ears, has always maintained a level of hope and consolation. — Jeff Tweedy

Perhaps sensing the dismal failure of its efforts to show that 'established by the State' means 'established by the State or the Federal Government,' the Court tries to palm off the pertinent statutory phrase as inartful drafting.' This Court, however, has no free-floating power 'to rescue Congress from its drafting errors.' — Antonin Scalia

It was such a dismal time in Japan. It almost seemed as if they were dying as a people, their economy in tatters, the population dwindling, the remaining citizens isolated and adrift. Had they been wrong about everything? Kenzo wondered. The power of consensus and obligation, the imperatives of racial purity and harmony? — Don Lee

He sat there, the master, the artist who had achieved his dignity, the author of "A Wretched Man," who, employing a form of exemplary purity, had renounced bohemianism and the dismal chasm, had broken with the abyss and reviled all vileness. He had risen high, transcending his knowledge and outgrowing all irony, he had adjusted his responsibilities toward the public and its trust in him-he, whose fame was official, whose name was ennobled, and whose style was a model for schoolboys. — Thomas Mann

Finally, it is also worth noting that nearly every institution of post-independence India has been spearheaded by Brahminical elites. Their dismal performance in delivering even basic social services to the majority of Indians - of education, health, water, sanitation, and electricity - says volumes about their 'merit' and argues against leaving them in control of these institutions. — Namit Arora

He suddenly began to look wretched, much as I had seen him look as a schoolboy: lonely: awkward: unpopular: odd; no longer the self-confident businessman into which he had grown. His face now brought back the days when one used to watch him plodding off through the drizzle to undertake the long, solitary runs across the dismal fields beyond the sewage farms: runs which were to train him for teams in which he was never included. — Anthony Powell

The history of fiat money is little more than a register of monetary follies and inflations. Our present age merely affords another entry in this dismal register. — Hans F. Sennholz

I have almost forgotten the taste of fears: The time has been, my senses would have cool'd to hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir as life were in't: I have supt full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, cannot once start me. — William Shakespeare

The winter will be long and bleak. Nature has a dismal aspect. — Charles Nodier

It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return. More troubling to him than his — Hanya Yanagihara

Seven thousand of them were indicted and arraigned, and then they entered the maw of the criminal justice system - right here - through the gateway into Gibraltar, where the vans were lined up. That was about 150 new cases, 150 more pumping hearts and morose glares, every week that the courts and the Bronx County District Attorney's Office were open. And to what end? The same stupid, dismal, pathetic, horrifying crimes were committed day in and day out, all the same. What was accomplished by assistant D.A.'s, by any of them, through all this relentless stirring of the muck? The Bronx crumbled and decayed a little more, and a little more blood dried in the cracks. The Doubts! One thing was accomplished for sure. The system was fed, and those vans brought in the chow. — Tom Wolfe

It was manifest that a malady of such horrors, stenches, and agonies, and especially one bringing the dismal despair that settled upon its victims before they died, was not a plague "natural" to mankind but "a chastisement from Heaven. — Barbara W. Tuchman

I tried so hard to fight the endless sobbing. I remember asking myself one night, while I was curled up in the same old corner of my same old couch in tears yet again over the same old repetition of sorrowful thoughts, "Is there anything about this scene you can change, Liz?" And all I could think to do was stand up, while still sobbing, and try to balance on one foot in the middle of my living room. Just to prove that - while I couldn't stop the tears or change my dismal interior dialogue - I was not yet totally out of control. At least I could cry hysterically while balanced on one foot. Hey, it was a start. — Elizabeth Gilbert

They have so smothered me in their middle-class refinement that I don't know how there can be any blood left in my veins. I lowered my eyes, put on a dismal, silly expression, just like them; I was just as dead-and-alive as they were. — Emile Zola

the color-matching company had to make up for their dismal mistake with 2015, which they'd dubbed the year of "marsala," which only ended up being true for mothers of the bride. All — Courtney Maum

Mysterious though the ghost may at first appear, he will always be more easily explained than the dismal story in which malevolent people have tried to picture two brothers killing each other who had worshiped each other all their lives. Believe me, etc. — Gaston Leroux

He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has. — Vladimir Nabokov

But whatever dismal appearance of things there may be in the world, we need not fear the ruin of the church by the most bloody oppositions. Former experiences will give security against future events. It is built on the rock, and those gates of hell shall not prevail against it. — John Owen

All knowledge has an ultimate goal. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but a dismal begging of the question. — Miguel De Unamuno

And that dismal cry rose slowly And sank slowly through the air, Full of spirit's melancholy And eternity's despair; And they heard the words it said,- "Pan is dead! great Pan is dead! Pan, Pan is dead!" — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse's pudgy face. — Geraldine Brooks

Thoughts swirled in my mind as I finally drifted off to sleep, my dreams full of darkness and shadows ... along with the face of a dismal Illusionist.
The Ending — Alexandra Lanc

You know, exams are like war
the birth rate of ideas goes up. Anything to keep from this dismal regimen, says poor mind, and hopefully tosses up another distraction. — James Tiptree Jr.

Iran has a dismal record on human rights. — Howard Berman

The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure. — George Bernard Shaw

Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same time, they are aggravating to more talented people who chafe at the restrictions that are placed on them. — Joel Spolsky

This diminished the entire joy, the pure joy, of the two notes sounding together, and let the sound die on her ear now with a dismal flatness. — Virginia Woolf

If the functions of the body are left to atrophy, the quality of life becomes merely adequate, and for some even dismal. But if one takes control of what the body can do, and learns to impose order on physical sensations, entropy yields to a sense of enjoyable harmony in consciousness. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Not being able to go outside upsets me more than I can say, and I'm terrified our hiding place will be discovered and that we'll be shot. That, of course, is a fairly dismal prospect. — Anne Frank

God often lays the sum of His amazing providences in very dismal afflictions; as the limner first puts on the dusky colors, on which he intends to draw the portraiture of some illustrious beauty. — Stephen Charnock

Within a quarter of an hour we came to Miss Havisham's house, which was of old brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were rustily barred. There was a courtyard in front, and that was barred; — Charles Dickens

The cold is waiting to ooze through the soles of your shoes. Maggot-damp, this city is festering: home to hollow faces of grey flesh. They stare from windows unclean, into the sun never reaches: dismal lives lived in dismal constriction. — Emmanuelle De Maupassant

The Missouri of his childhood was theoretically the inspiration for Main Street, U.S.A., though only in its halcyon summer vacation months and stripped of any dismal memories: no blizzards, no doctor's office, and no school-house. Almost no one has a dismal experience in Walt Disney's America, as a matter of fact, at least not that Walt noticed. — Eve Zibart

Now and then we hear the wilder voices of the wilderness, from animals that in the hours of darkness do not fear the neighborhood of man: the coyotes wail like dismal ventriloquists, or the silence may be broken by the snorting and stamping of a deer. — Theodore Roosevelt

Easter is not limited to the passion and death of Christ; it also includes the dismal tragedy of life unlived by the many, and all the loss of passion and truth that goes with it. — Michael Leunig

We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life. — Northrop Frye

If a military life was long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror - as one of her instructors had said - then civilian life seemed to be long periods of boredom interrupted by moments of dismal reflection. — Elizabeth Moon

The home is under siege. So many families are being destroyed ... If anyone can change the dismal situation into which we are sliding, it is you. Rise up, oh women of Zion, rise up to the great challenge which faces you. My message to you, my challenge to you, my prayer is that you will rededicate yourselves to the strengthening of your homes. — Gordon B. Hinckley

I realized at that moment - observing his form move further away without once turning back - that I'd already begun to rebuild the imaginary wall between us. I was shielding my heart with stone cold feelings again, the only way I knew to protect it. I still planned to try my hand at prayer. If God would grant me this one request, if I could keep my only friend, I would give anything in return, even the treasured books trapped beneath my arm. I'd tasted enough of a dismal life to know that a real, true friend was of greater worth than the collection of every imagined fairytale in the world. — Richelle E. Goodrich

From my bedroom window, I can see the sun peeping through the clouds. London certainly isn't a city noted for its climate, but I think, sooner or later, you get used to it, and live with the weather. For most of the year, everyone and everything seems to be tucked up cosily in grey cotton wool, but Dickens said that fog is a characteristic of London, didn't he? This climate could go hand in hand with my dismal humour. — Sarah Iles

Chemotherapy's success record is dismal. It can achieve remissions in about 7% of all human cancers; for an additional 15% of cases, survival can be "prolonged" beyond the point at which death would be expected without treatment. This type of survival is not the same as a cure or even restored quality of life. — John Diamond

As millions of Americans look for work, the Obama campaign and Democrats are attempting to distract attention away from this administration's dismal record. The attack they have launched against Mitt Romney shows just how worried they are about facing him in the general election. — Jeb Bradley

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations. — Christopher Hitchens

Bound for your distant home"

Bound for your distant home
you were leaving alien lands.
In an hour as sad as I've known
I wept over your hands.
My hands were numb and cold,
still trying to restrain
you, whom my hurt told
never to end this pain.

But you snatched your lips away
from our bitterest kiss.
You invoked another place
than the dismal exile of this.
You said, 'When we meet again,
in the shadow of olive-trees,
we shall kiss, in a love without pain,
under cloudless infinities.'

But there, alas, where the sky
shines with blue radiance,
where olive-tree shadows lie
on the waters glittering dance,
your beauty, your suffering,
are lost in eternity.
But the sweet kiss of our meeting ......
I wait for it: you owe it me ....... — Alexander Pushkin

It is always rather dismal work walking over the great snow plain when sky and surface merge in one pall of dead whiteness, but it is cheering to be in such good company with everything going on steadily and well. — Robert Falcon Scott

And my own affairs were as bad, as dismal, as the day I had been born. The only difference was that now I could drink now and then, though never often enough. Drink was the only thing that kept a man from feeling forever stunned and useless. Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought. God, they all had assholes and sexual organs and their mouths and their armpits. They shit and they chattered and they were dull as horse dung. The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun. I would certainly never be able to be happy, to get married, I could never have children. Hell, I couldn't even get a job as a dishwasher. — Charles Bukowski

The death agony of the barricade was about to begin.
For, since the preceding evening, the two rows of houses in the Rue de la Chanvrerie had become two walls; ferocious walls, doors closed, windows closed, shutters closed.
A house is an escarpment, a door is a refusal, a facade is a wall. This wall hears, sees and will not. It might open and save you. No. This wall is a judge. It gazes at you and condemns you. What dismal things are closed houses. — Victor Hugo

It's the tide. It's the dismal tide. It's not the one thing. — Cormac McCarthy

The clean clear colours were in my head. But one day as I looked at the brown burned wood of the Shanty, I thought 'I can paint one of those dismal-coloured paintings like the men. I think
just for fun I will try - all low-toned and dreary with the tree besides the door.' In my next show, 'The Shanty' went up. The men seemed to approve of it. They seemed to think that maybe I
was beginning to paint ... that was my only low-toned dismal-coloured painting. — Georgia O'Keeffe

The melancholy comes over me, the dismal misery of not knowing where I am, or perhaps losing any sense of who I am, as if the mist is bringing about an evaporation of identity, all the certainties of the self leaching away into the cloud. — Simon Armitage

The sea is as desolate and barren as it is fertile and life-giving. It is cold and dismal, yet bold and spirited. Sometimes imperious and conquering, other times gentle and meek. But it is always mysterious. Those mysteries hold many secrets. One has but to listen and watch to discover them — Jocelyn Murray

how dismal it is to have no one to go to in the morning to share one's griefs and joys; how hateful when something weighs on you and there's nowhere to lay it down. You know to what I refer. I often tell to my pianoforte what I want to tell to you. — Frederic Chopin

That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. — Dorothy L. Sayers

We are indeed miserable, my friends, but we don't have to be dismal about it. — Brian Herbert

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii. — Ross Macdonald

Trying to find answers to why and how my life got into such a dismal mess, I sought answers in the scriptures, in religion and philosophy, but it only confused me further. Stories, on the other hand, helped me cope, heal and recover. — Indu Muralidharan