Grimmest Quotes & Sayings

Something lived in there, all right. He could smell it, a stench that made him think of damp plaster and moldering sofas and ancient mattresses rotting beneath half-liquid coats of mildew. It was familiar, that smell. — Stephen King

The very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is a process they entrust daily to the butcher; and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them. — Lewis Mumford

I've never done acid, finding it hard to go willingly to a place that could be frightening, hellish, and totally beyond my control. A place much like high school. — Libba Bray

Through the darkest hours of the night
and through the dreamers realm I seek,
Far beyond the starry sky
and beyond galaxies I am free.
Through the grimmest memories
and past a seasons air I cannot breathe,
Far beyond this mortal world
in an afterlife we shall meet. — Lee Argus

I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending. — Isaac Asimov

Even in the grimmest of circumstances, a shift in perspective can create startling change. — Susan Griffin

Democracy, it appears, is a bit chancy. But its chances also depend on what we do ourselves. — Robert A. Dahl

I want everyone to feel as much as possible as if they inhabit the same space. They more fluid the relationship between actor and audience, the better. — Christine Jones

You can be covered and be very sexy. It's not what you show; it's what you have in mind, the way you cross your legs, the way you talk to people. — Carine Roitfeld

I think it's my job or the artist's job, to try and find some solution or some reason to accept things. But given the grimmest reality, I feel the grimmest facts are the real facts, the true facts: that you're born, you die, you suffer, it's to no purpose, and you're gone forever, ever, ever, and that's it. — Woody Allen

Perhaps the grimmest aspect of this great paradox is that the very nations that are chiefly responsible for starting and for maintaining the Disarmament Conference are also the nations that have begun a new arms race. — Arthur Henderson

Politically, Obama's amazing streak of self-destructing opponents who have lain beneath his feet during his unlikely political career appears to be holding. — Eric Alterman

The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth. — Marina Warner

I was a smart kid and I was not understood by my parents. — Woody Allen

In 10000 BC, all human beings were hunter-gatherers; by 1500 AD, 1 percent were hunter-gatherers. Less than .001 percent of people are hunter-gatherers today. — Robyn Davidson

Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians. — John Stuart Mill

Even in the grimmest of enterprises there are tension breakers. At one point, the tabloid National Enquirer ran a story headlined "Bush and Saddam Are Cousins" and offered genealogical "proof" that not only was George Bush related to the queen of England, but "Hussein and President Bush share a common ancestry dating back at least to the crusades." This news prompted the President to circulate a memo to the national security team that said, "No decisions I make will be affected by my relationship with Saddam Hussein. The Queen and I would have it no other way. — Colin Powell

Artemis grabbed her shoulders, for once abandoning his shell of icy composure. "Holly, Holly, speak to me. Your finger is it okay?"
Holly wiggled her fingers, then curled them into a fist.
"I think so," she said, and whacked Artemis right between the eyes. The surprised boy landed in a snowdrift for the third time that day.
Holly winked at an amazed butler.
"Now we're even," she said.
Commander Root didn't have many treasured memories. But in future days, when things were at their grimmest, he would conjure up this moment and have a quiet chuckle. — Eoin Colfer

in his mouth he had a holder of his own contrivance which enabled him to smoke two cigars at once. But undoubtedly the grimmest part of him was his iron claw. Let — J.M. Barrie

The grim portrait of Beethoven hanging over the piano ... was removed from its nail, and an equally grim portrait of Hitler was hung on the same nail ... Mama ... insisted that Beethoven be placed, if not over the sofa, at least over the sideboard. This resulted in the grimmest of confrontations: Hitler and the genius hung opposite each other, stared at each other, saw through each other, yet found no joy in what they saw. — Gunter Grass

I think that the worst unpleasantness of age is not its final fact ... but the tediousness of preparation, the accumulating number of defeats. — Freya Stark

There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself. Man was his own grimmest joke on himself. The very bedrock of humor was - Man is the animal who laughs, — Robert A. Heinlein

Life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility. — Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

The sea has formed the English character and the essential England is to be found in those who follow it. From blue waters they have learned mercifulness, and they have also learned - in the grimmest of schools - precision and resolution. The sea endures no makeshifts. If a thing is not exactly right it will be vastly wrong. — John Buchan

I like a twisted sense of humour. On 'A History of Violence,' David Cronenberg and I would be doing the grimmest scenes and laugh a lot. — Viggo Mortensen

Believe me. Sometimes when life looks to be at its grimmest, there's a light hidden at the heart of things.
Clive Barker, Abarat — Cornelia Funke

Aw, bugger it. Don't die wondering. — Kirsty Eagar

Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine-qua-non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people? — Karen Armstrong