Bleak Quotes

“For some, life may be a playground to undermine the brainwaves of others or simply a vainglorious game with an armory of theatrics, illustrating only bleak self-deception, haughty narcissism and dim deficiency in empathy. ("Another empty room")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“If we only see things through the cold-eyed lens of factuality and don’t listen to the yearning and screaming of unexpressed feelings, life may remain bleak in a mire of clinical hollowness, sodden in apathy and indifference. ("Morning after")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“finding easy scapegoats for complicated problems had been a human pastime since the first mob of cavemen struck someone down with a rock.”
― Neal Shusterman, Thunderhead

“All night I flee from someone. I lead the chase, I lead the fugue. I sing a song of mourning. Black birds over black shrouds. My brain cries.”
― Alejandra Pizarnik, The Galloping Hour: French Poems

“One went on and on, never dreaming of the sudden dreadful day when the coverings were going to be dropped and one would see it was death after all, that it had been death all the time, death pretending, death waiting”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Vera

“The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Separation shall not define
Beats getting weak in my heart
Instead
Be lull but me mine
Darling—stay bleak in my heart

Your lament mourned in storms
Some cries cling deep in my heart
It is who
Crossed leagues to die in my arms
Who has born to weep in my heart”
― Mirza Sharafat Hussain Beigh

“He walked down the street and crossed the railroad tracks. The redness of the evening in the glass of the buildings. Very high a small and trembling flight of geese. Fording the last of the day in the thin air. Following the shape of the river below. He stood above the bank of riprap. Rock and broken paving. The slow coil of the passing water. In the coming night he thought that men would band together in the hills. Feeding their small fires with the deeds and the covenants and the poetry of their fathers. Documents they’d no gift to read in a cold to loot men of their souls.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“That next week was one of the loneliest of my life. There seemed nothing left to look forward to.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Il n'y a rien à comprendre, dit l'allumeur. La consigne c'est la consigne.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (Illustré)

“It's a dangerous game Cherrycoke's playing here. Often he thinks the sheer volume of information pouring in through his fingers will saturate, burn him out...she seems determined to overwhelm him with her history and its pain, and the edge of it, always fresh from the stone, cutting at his hopes, at all their hopes. He does respect her: he knows that very little of this is female theatricals, really. She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there. And so each time has taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that's vanishingly small: he has to admire it, even if he can't accept her glassy wastes, her appeals to a day not of wrath but of final indifference...”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“The bleakness weighed heavy on her, yet Awa consoled herself with the knowledge that above the clouds, somewhere the sun still shone”
― Rehan Khan, A Tudor Turk

“That this world is a place of horror must affect every serious artist and thinker, darkening his reflection, ruining his system, sometimes actually driving him mad. Any seriousness avoids this fact at its peril, and the great ones who have seemed to neglect it have only done so in appearance.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Nowhere to go to tea.
Only gin here
and no god at any gate
and no goodness.”
― Deborah Landau, The Last Usable Hour

“It's a lonely life.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World

“Darkness does not describe the hell we live in waiting for our lifemates. The world is bleak, and we have only our honor to keep us from turning to the wrong path. Vampires are Carpathians who choose to give up their souls for the chance to feel a rush when they kill. That is how desperate it becomes, living in that raw, ugly world.”
― Christine Feehan, Dark Promises

“He didn't want to read the newspaper or listen to the radio anymore. He didn't want to be a grown-up. There are some people who are just no good at it.”
― Heather O'Neill, The Lonely Hearts Hotel

“We share this moment not through touch but our eyes, yours brilliant, shining, willing, wanting to know feel the pain, understand, mine dead to the world, a bleak history of empty files”
― Scott C. Holstad

“...Mellungeons… their entire lives appeared devoted to the production of the ragged line of scions which shoeless and tattered sat for hours at a time on the porch edges, themselves not unlike the victims of some terrible disaster, and stared out across the blighted land with expressions of neither hope nor wonder nor despair. They came and went, unencumbered as migratory birds, each succeeding family a replica of the one before and only the names on the mailboxes altered, the new ones lettered crudely in above a rack of paint smears that obliterated the former occupants back into the anonymity from which they sprang.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“I had succeeded in appearing mischievous. I had succeeded in escaping from being respected.”
― Osamu Dazai; Donald Keene [trans, No Longer Human

“A flock of fairy wrens could land
on grass stalks in the medieval garden.
Splendidly whistling their fine stories,
fluttering their wings before the Queen.

The golden pear could be their gift,
a very rare find in a world so bleak.
The pear could be placed into the lap
of the very tired and aged Queen.

[Seeing Life Through the Bleak]”
― Susan L. Marshall, Bare Spirit: The Selected Poems of Susan Marshall

“Some prospects for success seems bleak but are not with hard work”
― Sunday Adelaja

“What happened when there was no prospect of anything beyond this generation? What happened when...”
― Anne Corlett, The Space Between the Stars

“We're nothing. We're dust.”
― Aaron Dries, The Fallen Boys

“The days are very alike here, the hours of darkness long and bleak, and I am a stranger to myself.”
― Deanna Raybourn, Silent on the Moor

“The alternative rolled out like a bleak winter’s morning, a gray day that stretched on forever.”
― Katherine McIntyre, Forged Redemption

“you are floating alone
in the cold blue

these are the hours of blankness

all the walls are bare”
― Deborah Landau, The Last Usable Hour

“There is a world removed from the one that birthed me. It is a world unlike the one in which I grew and was molded. It is the real world," he told the dog, who twitched its ears. "And it is full only of ignorance and evil.”
― James Wade, All Things Left Wild

“It seemed that her prospects were bleak but often when things are at their most desperate they become progressively worse leading to a spiral of despair that ends in inevitable destruction.”
― Ben Aaronovitch

“Several weeks have passed since the incident at Lord Frisberts Hat Shop, and I’m saddened to say, I’ve yet to leave this hole. Rents due, and I could hear old Finby barking from down below, but my pockets run about as dry as the shavings on a chicken coop.
On a good day, I’d gather some lint off my trousers, but not today. No, sir, not today.”
― Marilyn Velez, Tundra: The Darkest Hour