Somber Quotes

• The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

  Joseph Conrad

  Heart, Clouds, Sky

  Joseph Conrad (2016). “Heart of Darkness”, p.84, Xist Publishing

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• This world is so full of care and sorrow that it is a gracious debt we owe to one another to discover the bright crystals of delight hidden in somber circumstances and irksome tasks.

  Helen Keller

  Gratitude, Sorrow, Tasks

  Helen Keller (2007). “My Religion”, p.169, Book Tree

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• It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Laughter, Laughing, Trying

  Malcolm Muggeridge, Ian Hunter (2003). “The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge”, p.133, Regent College Publishing

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• My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.

  Manuel Puig

  Humor, Thinking, Needs

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• Every life has dark tracts and long stretches of somber tint, and no representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light, and flings no shadows on the canvas.

  Alexander MacLaren

  Inspirational, Dark, Light

  Alexander MacLaren “MacLaren's Commentary- Expositions of Holy Scripture”, Delmarva Publications, Inc.

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• Even colors were important to me. If it was a somber scene, the colors were muted and dark. If it was a happy or seductive scene, the colors were brighter.

  Donna Mills

  Dark, Color, Seductive

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• The most important thing about a TV set is to get it back against something and not out in the middle of a room where it's like a somber fellow making electronic judgments on you.

  Bruce Jay Friedman

  Important, Rooms, Tvs

  Bruce Jay Friedman (1978). “The Lonely Guy: And, The Slightly Older Guy”, p.22, Grove Press

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• Thought itself needs words. It runs on them like a long wire. And if it loses the habit of words, little by little it becomes shapeless, somber.

  Ugo Betti

  Running, Ideas, Long

  Ugo Betti (1968). “Three Plays”

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• There is a collective as well as an individual humor inclining peoples to sadness or cheerfulness, making them see things in bright or somber lights. In fact, only society can pass a collective opinion on the value of human life; for this the individual is incompetent.

  Emile Durkheim

  Sadness, Light, Facts

  John A. Spaulding, George Simpson, Emile Durkheim (2010). “Suicide”, p.213, Simon and Schuster

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• Nothing beats a haunted moonlit night on All Hallows Eve.... And on this fatal night, at this witching time, the starless sky laments black and unmoving. The somber hues of an ominous, dark forest are suddenly illuminated under the emerging face of the full moon.

  Elizabeth Kim

  Halloween, Dark, Moon

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• The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.

  Sylvia Plath

  Struggle, Simple, Thinking

  Sylvia Plath (2011). “Letters Home”, p.301, Faber & Faber

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• Nature never quite goes along with us. She is somber at weddings, sunny at funerals, and she frowns on ninety-nine out of a hundred picnics.

  Alexander Smith

  Nature, Ninety Nine, Funeral

  Alexander Smith (2012). “Dreamthorp A Book of Essays Written in the Country”, p.102, tredition

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• Leisure for reverie, gay or somber, does much to enrich life.

  Mary Ritter Beard

  Gay, One Day, Doe

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• Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it's that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through-originality.

  Jack Kerouac

  Writing, Shining, Genius

  Jack Kerouac, Ann Charters (1995). “The portable Jack Kerouac”, Penguin Group USA

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• Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow.

  Charles Dickens

  Nature, Fall, House

  Charles Dickens (1853). “Bleak House”, p.282

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• Nature reserves some of her choice rewards for days when her mood may appear to be somber.

  Rachel Carson

  Nature, Choices, May

  Rachel Carson (2011). “The Sense of Wonder”, p.13, Open Road Media

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• It was one of those somber evenings when the sighing of the wind resembles the moans of a dying man; a storm was brewing, and between the splashes of rain on the windows there was the silence of death. All nature suffers in such moments; the trees writhe in pain and twist their heads; the birds of the fields cower under the bushes; the streets of cities are deserted.

  Alfred de Musset

  Pain, Rain, Men

  Alfred de Musset (2012). “The Confession of a Child of the Century”, p.45, tredition

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• Most people are surprised when they hear my somber figures: we know of 2 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms, and we can give them each a scientific name and a diagnostic description. We know, perhaps generously, more than just a little bit of the anatomy in no more than 10 percent. We have done thorough studies in fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent. And the total number of species on Earth is unknown to the nearest order of magnitude.

  E. O. Wilson

  Animal, People, Giving

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

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• Memento mori and obey the Lord.
  Art and religion love the somber chord.

  Robert Frost

  God, Art, Religion

  Robert Frost (1971). “The poetry of Robert Frost”

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• To watch this crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. While these clouds and this somber drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Clouds, Weather, Two

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.2012, Delphi Classics

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• A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then-the glory-so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished.

  John Steinbeck

  Song, Eye, Dark

  John Steinbeck (2002). “East of Eden”, p.106, Penguin

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• As we have said, robust souls are sometimes almost, but not entirely, overthrown by strokes of misfortune....Despair has steps leading upward. From total depression we rise to despondency, from despondency to affliction, from affliction to melancholy. Melancholy is a twilight state in which suffering transmutes into a somber joy....Melancholy is the enjoyment of being sad.

  Victor Hugo

  Twilight, Joy, Being Sad

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• Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Life, Glimpse, Aperture

  "The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857".

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• Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber as a word was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound but you couldn't fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer.

  Betty Smith

  Beautiful, Summer, New York

  Betty Smith (2009). “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”, p.5, Harper Collins

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• Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn't got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady's watch are revolving more purposely than he is.

  James Thurber

  Children, Men, Ideas

  James Thurber (1996). “Writings and Drawings”, Library of America

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