Quotes about gloom

A collection of quotes on the topic of gloom, light, lighting, likeness.

Quotes about gloom

“But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, ban, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows.”

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Source: The Glass Menagerie

World, Music, Sex, Dance

“With hue like that when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Revolt of Islam

Canto V, st. 23
The Revolt of Islam (1817)

“Each state of the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it; eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future destiny of the human race is prefigured in the dark oracular utterances of bodily creation.”

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright

Letter 4: Theosophy of Julius
The Philosophical Letters

Truth, Time, Sun, Future

“Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom.”

Edgar Allan Poe Ulalume

St. 8.
Ulalume (1847)

Kiss

“I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom. I mark only the happy hours, like the sundial, because otherwise I would have gone nuts. To quote from my script for The Dreamers, never expect justice in the world. That is not part of God's plan. Everybody thinks that if they don't get it, they're some kind of odd man out. And it's not true. Nobody gets justice — people get good luck or bad luck.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Quoted by Barbara Leaming, "Orson Welles: The Unfulfilled Promise". The New York Times, July 14, 1985.

God, Bad luck, People, World

“Nothing moves young people so much as to witness a sublime and virile gloom. Michelangelo's thinker staring down into the abyss of his own thoughts, Beethoven's poignantly drawn lips; these tragical masks of universal suffering touch the crude emotions of youth far more than Mozart's silver melodies or the crystalline light that radiates from Leonardo's figures. Being itself beauty, youth has no need of transfiguration. In the superabundance of its vital forces, it is allured by the tragical, and in its inexperience, is prone to accept the embraces of melancholy. That, too, is why youth is always ready for danger, and ever willing to extend a brotherly hand towards mental pain.”

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) Austrian writer

Confusion of Feelings or Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. Von D (1927)

Pain, People, Youth, Beauty

“Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home—
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet: I do not ask to see
The distant scene,—one step enough for me.”

John Henry Newman (1801–1890) English cleric and cardinal

The Pillar of the Cloud http://www.bartleby.com/236/75.html, st. 1 (1833).

Home, Light, Distant, Night

“Strange as these words may sound I often play with the idea that when all the social theories collapse and wars and revolutions leave humanity in utter gloom, the poet — whom Plato banned from his Republic — may rise up to save us all.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

Nobel lecture (1978)

War, Idea

“If religion be false, it is the basest imposition under heaven; but if the religion of Christ be true, it is the most solemn truth that ever was known! It is not a thing that a man dares to trifle with if it be true, for it is at his soul's peril to make a jest of it. If it be not true it is detestable, but if it be true it deserves all a man's faculties to consider it, and all his powers to obey it. It is not a trifle. Briefly consider why it is not. It deals with your soul. If it dealt with your body it were no trifle, for it is well to have the limbs of the body sound, but it has to do with your soul. As much as a man is better than the garments that he wears, so much is the soul better than the body. It is your immortal soul it deals with. Your soul has to live for ever, and the religion of Christ deals with its destiny. Can you laugh at such words as heaven and hell, at glory and at damnation? If you can, if you think these trifles, then is the faith of Christ to be trifled with. Consider also with whom it connects you—with God; before whom angels bow themselves and veil their faces. Is HE to be trifled with? Trifle with your monarch if you will, but not with the King of kings, the Lord of lords. Recollect that those who have ever known anything of it tell you it is no child's play. The saints will tell you it is no trifle to be converted. They will never forget the pangs of conviction, nor the joys of faith. They tell you it is no trifle to have religion, for it carries them through all their conflicts, bears them up under all distresses, cheers them under every gloom, and sustains them in all labour. They find it no mockery. The Christian life to them is something so solemn, that when they think of it they fall down before God, and say, "Hold thou me up and I shall be safe." And sinners, too, when they are in their senses, find it no trifle. When they come to die they find it no little thing to die without Christ. When conscience gets the grip of them, and shakes them, they find it no small thing to be without a hope of pardon—with guilt upon the conscience, and no means of getting rid of it. And, sirs, true ministers of God feel it to be no trifle. I do myself feel it to be such an awful thing to preach God's gospel, that if it were not "Woe unto me if I do not preach the gospel," I would resign my charge this moment. I would not for the proudest consideration under heaven know the agony of mind I felt but this one morning before I ventured upon this platform! Nothing but the hope of winning souls from death and hell, and a stern conviction that we have to deal with the grandest of all realities, would bring me here.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

Religion—a Reality part II. Secondly, "It is not a vain thing"—that is, IT IS NO TRIFLE. (June 22nd, 1862) http://www.biblebb.com/files/spurgeon/0457.HTM

Life, Death, God, Truth

“Knowst thou the land where the lemon trees bloom,
Where the gold orange glows in the deep thicket's gloom,
Where a wind ever soft from the blue heaven blows,
And the groves are of laurel and myrtle and rose?”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Bk. III, Ch. 1
Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786–1830)

Tree

“But still less should the gold of rich men lazily sleep its heavy sleep in the urns and gloom of treasuries. This so weighty metal, when it becomes the associate of a fancy, assumes the most active virtues of the mind. It has her restless nature. Its essence is to vanish. It changes into all things, without being itself changed. It raises blocks of stone, pierces mountains, diverts rivers, opens the gates of fortresses and the most secret hearts; it enchains men; it dresses, it undresses women with an almost miraculous promptitude. It is truly the most abstract agent that exists, next to thought. But thought exchanges and envelops images only, whereas gold incites and promotes the transmutations of all real things into one another; itself remaining incorruptible, and passing untainted through all hands.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Socrates, pp. 147–8
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

Women, Men, Secret, Mountain

“Much like postal service, demon hunters never sleep. 'Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these-'"
"You'd be in major trouble if gloom of night did stay you.”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Jace and Clary, pg. 306
The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)

Sleep, Night

“Forget the dead, the past? O yet there are ghosts that may take revenge for it, memories that make the heart a tomb, regrets which gild thro’ the spirit’s gloom, and with ghastly whispers tell that joy, once lost, is pain.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Pain, Revenge, Memory, Past

“I will call him Small Bob," said Bob. "He is a good monster."

End of discussion. The Titan hefted his spear and they continued marching into the gloom.”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

“The friend in my adversity I shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who have helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

Help

“Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud…”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi (2001), Chapter 1, p. 6
Context: The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity — it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.

Love, Life, Death, Beauty

“I try to have reasonably happy endings because I would hate any child to be cast down in gloom and despair; I want to show them you can find a way out of it.”

Jacqueline Wilson (1945) novelist

Hate, Way, Despair, Happiness

“I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.”

Gerald Durrell book My Family and Other Animals

Source: My Family and Other Animals

“There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

World

“Gloom is but a shadow of a cloud passing by”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

“It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself”

Nick Hornby book Songbook

Source: Songbook

Music, Nature

“Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,
When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,
And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,
Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom”

Charles Baudelaire book Le Spleen de Paris

Source: Paris Spleen

Fate, Way

“Look!" said Foaly, pointing with some urgency into the vast steel-gray gloom, "Someone who cares!”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Atlantis Complex

“And starward drifts the stricken world,
Lone in unalterable gloom
Dead, with a universe for tomb,
Dark, and to vaster darkness whirled.
(“The Testimony of the Suns”)”

George Sterling (1869–1926) American poet and playwright

Source: The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror

World, Universe, Sun, Dead

“War is not heroic. War is not exhilarating. War is full of despair. It is dark. It is dreadful. It is a thing of sorrow and gloom. That is why people fear war. That is why people choose to avoid it.
~Izuru Kira”

Tite Kubo (1977) Japanese manga artist

War, People, Fear, Despair

“Have you, in truth, ever seen something so heartbreakingly lovely? What are we to make of a world where stars shine bright in the midst of so much darkness and gloom?”

Kate DiCamillo The Magician's Elephant

Source: The Magician's Elephant

Love, Truth, World, Star

“I have left my book,
I have left my room,
For I heard you singing
Through the gloom.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

Books, Singing

“And from the midst of cheerless gloom
I passed to bright unclouded day.”

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) English novelist and poet

Stanza vi.
A Little While, a Little While (1846)
Context: Still, as I mused, the naked room,
The alien firelight died away;
And from the midst of cheerless gloom
I passed to bright, unclouded day.

“When people felt they had a right to seek out Christ before the torment, and in the fullness of his joy—it was too late; the cross had overcome Christ himself; it was Christ crucified that people continued to see and teach. And thus it is that religion came to plunge the world into gloom.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality (1964)

People, World, Religion, Joy

“Tombed in the solid night of starless space;
From nearest living orb so far removed,
That light, of all material things most swift,
Myriads on myriads of earth's years must speed,
Ere the mere outskirts of that Stygian gloom,
If ever, it might reach,-at rest eterne,
Lies the cold wreck of an extinguished sun.
Prime glory once of all heaven's radiant host;
Body, for soul of purest light most fit-
'Tween its first darkening, and eclipse complete,
Streamed years which might eternity appear;
While into ether, like the particles,
Invisible, which are the breath of flowers,
The mighty bulk its softer elements
Still ever was exhaling. As when flesh
And sinew of earth's monster Mastodon,
By the slow wasting of the elements,
All are dissolved, and hard, enduring bones
Alone remain,- even so, of this immense,-
When, by the ocean waves of centuries,
Millions succeeding millions, worn away,-
The adamantine skeleton alone,
In darkness, silence, utter solitude,
A ruin for eternity, was left.”

Edwin Atherstone (1788–1872) British writer

Israel in Egypt, Book the First (1861)

Soul, Flowers, Solitude, Light

“The street-lamps burn amidst the baleful glooms,
Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.”

James Thomson (B.V.) (1834–1882) Scottish writer (1834-1882)

Part I
The City of Dreadful Night (1870–74)

Solitude

“The way the anima initially manifests in an individual man usually bears the stamp of his mother's character. If he experienced her in a negative way, then his anima often takes the form of depressive moods, irritability, perpetual malcontent, and excessive sensitivity. If the man is able to overcome these, precisely these things can strengthen his manliness. Such a negative mother anima will endlessly whisper within a man: "I'm a nothing," "It doesn't make sense anyhow," "It's different for other people," "Nothing * gives me any pleasure," and so on. Continual fear of disease, impotence, or accidents are her work, and she constellates a general sense of gloom. Troubled moods like these can intensify to the point of temptations to suicide; thus the anima can become a demoness of death. She appears in this role in Cocteau's film Orpheus.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Anima as the Woman within the Man

Death, People, Pleasure, Fear

“One must build to the praise of a Being above, to build the noblest memorial of himself. Then, Angelo may verily " hang the Pantheon in the air." Then the unknown builder, whose personality disappears in his work, may stand an almost inspired mediator between the upward-looking thought and the spheres overhead. Each line then leaps with a swift aspiration, as the vast structure rises, in nave and transept into pointed arch and vanishing spire. The groined roof grows dusky with majestic glooms; while, beneath, the windows flame, as with apocalyptic light of jewels. Angelic presences, sculptured upon the portal, invite the wayfarer, and wave before him their wings of promise. Within is a worship which incense only clouds, which spoken sermons only mar. The building itself becomes a worship, a Gloria in Excelsis, articulate in stone; the noblest tribute offered on earth, by any art, to Him from whom its impulse came, and with the ineffable majesty of whose spirit all skies are filled.”

Richard Salter Storrs (1821–1900) American Congregational clergyman

Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 499.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Art, Angels, Light, Memory

“The writings on the wall at North Point
Speak to a silent room
They shut the bars down, leave you to the gloom…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Islands (1987)

“My difficulty with working class writers is that they don't make the working class come alive—Leslie Halward is an exception, but as you imply he is not very important. They give me information and they give their comrades gratification, but that's all; gloom, indignation, aspiration in plenty, and plenty of stains on the tablecloth and coal-dust in the mine—but no living beings to experience them.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Letter 350, to John Lehmann, 21 December 1940
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see much more distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals of Eden. Only, the priests are mistaken. These holy portals are before and not behind us.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Du fond de l'ombre où nous sommes et où vous êtes, vous ne voyez pas beaucoup plus distinctement que nous les radieuses et lointaines portes de l'éden. Seulement les prêtres se trompent. Ces portes saintes ne sont pas derrière nous, mais devant nous.
Letter To M. Daelli on Les Misérables (1862)

Distant

“Absence! is not the soul torn by it
From more than light, or life, or breath?
'Tis Lethe's gloom, but not its quiet,—
The pain without the peace of death!”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

"Absence", The poetical works of Thomas Campbell (1837)

Life, Death, Pain, Peace

“Like the dawn upon a dream
Slowly through the scented gloom
Crept once more the ruddy gleam
O'er the friendly nursery room.
There, before our waking eyes,
Large and ghostly, white and dim,
Dreamed the Flower that never dies,
Opening wide its rosy rim.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Part IV : The End of the Quest
The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), The Flower of Old Japan

Dreams, Flowers

“I am driving up '85 in the
Kind of morning that lasts all afternoon,
Just stuck inside the gloom.
4 more exits to my apartment but
I am tempted to keep the car in drive
And leave it all behind.Because I wonder sometimes
About the outcome
Of a still verdictless life.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

Why Georgia
Song lyrics, Room for Squares (2001)

Life, Cars

“I attended the Royal Opening of the Indian Conference yesterday…Our delegation is starting well, but Winston [Churchill] is in the depths of gloom. He wants the Conference to bust up quickly and the Tory Party to go back to pre-war and govern with a strong hand. He has become once more the subaltern of Hussars of '96.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to J. C. C. Davidson (13 November 1930), quoted in Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Memoirs of a Conservative: J. C. C. Davidson's Memoirs and Papers, 1910-1937 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 355.
1930

War, Strong

“Nor do we merely feel these essences
For one short hour; no, even as the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple’s self, so does the moon,
The passion poesy, glories infinite,
Haunt us till they become a cheering light
Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast,
That, whether there be shine, or gloom o’ercast,
They alway must be with us, or we die.”

John Keats Endymion

Bk. I, l. 25
Endymion (1818)

Feeling, Soul, Tree, Light

“As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Maypole of Merry Mount

"The Maypole of Merry Mount" (1836) from Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1851)

World, Sadness, Home

“Without religion, man is an atheist, woman is a monster. As daughter, sister, wife, and mother, she holds in her hands, under God, the destinies of humanity. In the hours of gloom and sorrow we look to her for sympathy and comfort. Where shall she find strength for trial, comfort for sorrow, save in that gospel which has given a new meaning to the name of "mother", since it rested on the lips of the child Jesus?”

Henry Benjamin Whipple (1822–1901) Bishop of Minnesota

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 618.

God, Religion, Sister, Daughters

“No royal palace was prepared for him;
No silken courtiers slid from room to room,
Gathering together in the gorgeous gloom
Of purple hangings, drooping rich and dim;”

John Stanyan Bigg (1828–1865) British writer

Ode to the Centenary of Burns http://www.gerald-massey.org.uk/massey/dmc_burns_centenary2.htm#7 (1858)

“The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much unintermittent gloom.”

Margaret Drabble (1939) Novelist, biographer and critic

The Realms of Gold (1975; New York: Ivy Books, 1989) p. 140

Reality

“[A]nd between this top-quality programming are the most miserable adverts in the world – former Mancunian top cop John Stalker trying to sell you sun awnings; trying to get you to blot out every ray of light from the world for those in the grip of manic depression – 'Hello, I'm John Stalker. Are you, like me, tired of the pitiless glare of an English summer; maddened by the relentless gaze of cruel Helios; sick of lurking in your house all summer long, like a mad bloke in a siege situation - such as I would have dealt with in my high-flying career? Well, suffer no longer. Install Gloom Master sun awnings - summer bang to rights!' Terrible! Then it all gets worse with those terrible loan adverts. These awful, tragic, hollow-eyed wraiths come on, telling you these awful stories - 'I'm up to my eyes in debt, and, curiously, no reputable company would give me another loan! Then I discovered Dodgy Bastards. They've given me a million pounds, and all they want in return are my kidneys.' No, don't do it! And then - worse than that - the accident insurance adverts - 'Where there's blame, there's a claim”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

when people who've had these accidents come on like medieval beggars, and wave their stumps at you for money with these outlandish stories - 'I slipped on a banana skin and successfully sued the Dominican Republic...' (Wrap up Warm tour, May 2004)
Stand-up

Money, People, World, Light

“My wind is turned to bitter north,
That was so soft a south before;
My sky, that shone so sunny bright,
With foggy gloom is clouded o’er
My gay green leaves are yellow-black,
Upon the dank autumnal floor;
For love, departed once, comes back
No more again, no more.”

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) English poet

A Song of Autumn http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/C/CloughArthurHugh/verse/poemsproseremains/songautumn.html.

Love, Autumn

“To bear adversity with meek submission to the will of God; to endure chastisement with all long-suffering and joyfulness; to appear cheerful amid surrounding gloom, hopeful amidst desponding circumstances, happy in God when there is nothing else to make us happy; he who does this has indeed made great advances in the divine life.”

John Angell James (1785–1859) British abolitionist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 565.

Life, God, Hope, Suffering

“The Channel is a slipper-bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order not to be infected by their gloom.”

Alan Bennett (1934) English actor, author

"Kafka in Las Vegas", p. 335 (1987).
Writing Home (1994)

“Ooh, the more I get of you,
Stranger it feels, yeah.
And now that your rose is in bloom,
A light hits the gloom on the grave.”

Seal (musician) (1963) British singer-songwriter

"Kiss from a Rose"
Seal (1994)

Feeling, Light

“Thinking we were safe-insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom…
…And who does not know that pair of shutters
With all the awkward hook on them
All screeching whispers?”

Rosemary Tonks (1928–2014) British poet

Story Of A Hotel Room

Love, Making love, Thinking

“No radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for her. In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or heard perfectly clear messages. Such truth as came to them was brought confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of unfailing wing and piercing vision—men who believed falsities as well as truths, and did the wrong as well as the right. The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of inaction and death.”

George Eliot book Romola

Volume II, Chapter XVI
Romola (1863)

Life, Death, Men, Truth

“It was the most terrible feeling. I'd had enough and I'd felt I'd lost something so very important to me. I thought it had died and gone away. And I was frightened it might not come back. I just didn't seem to be able to shake off this feeling of doom and gloom. I had to come home. But to what? I was tired. I missed New York and the show and the people. It was like a grieving process.”

Elaine Paige (1948) English singer and actress

Regarding finishing Sunset Boulevard; as quoted in "Getting to know me: Elaine Paige" by Richard Barber in The Daily Mirror http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4161/is_20000416/ai_n14507971 (16 April 2000)

People, Feeling, Home

“"Son!" cried the weeping sire, "the wish forego,
To learn what late must whelm thy house in woe.
Him shall the jealous Fates but show to earth:
A short bright flash between decease and birth.
Too high, ye Gods! our Roman power had grown,
Had this your precious gift been all our own.
How shall the field of Mars lament his doom!
Its plain reflecting the vast groan of Rome!
Tiber! what pomps of woe shall o'er thy wave
Gloom, as it murmurs by the recent grave!
No youth of Troy, thus rich in early praise,
So high the hope of Italy shall raise:
Nor shall our Rome, 'mid all her hero-host,
A son so bright in dawning glory boast.
O piety! O faith of ancient strain!
O hand, unconquer'd on the martial plain!
On foot, or spurring his impetuous steed,
The foe that met him had been sure to bleed.
Ah! could'st thou, hapless boy! through fate's decree
Break into age, thou should'st Marcellus be!"”

Charles Symmons (1749–1826) Welsh poet

Book VI, lines 1160–1179
The Æneis (1817)

God, Fate, Youth, Age

“Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 381 (17 May 1712).
The Spectator (1711–1714)

“Yet one arrow has a power
Lasting till life's latest hour--
Weary day and sleepless night,
Lightning gleams of fierce delight,
Fragrant and yet poisoned sighs,
Agonies and ecstasies;
Hopes, like fires amid the gloom,
Lighting only to consume!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Improvisatrice (1824)

Life, Hope, Light, Night

“Oh, hide me in your gloom profound,
Ye solemn seats of holy pain!
Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again;
Till free my thoughts before me roll,
Not chafed by hourly false control!”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (1855)

Pain, Soul, Falseness

“Blues. An American dance stemming from the Foxtrot, the speed of which it reduced and into which it brought a deliberately contrived dismal atmosphere. When Blues are sung their words seem to aim at attaining to the utmost depths of gloom and inanity.”

Eric Blom (1888–1959) Swiss-born British-naturalised music lexicographer, musicologist, music critic, music biographer and transl…

Article, Blues, p. 60
Everyman's Dictionary of Music (London: J. M Dent & Sons; 3rd ed. 1958)

Dance, Speed

“The night of the Middle Ages lasted for a thousand years. The first star that enriched the horizon of this universal gloom was Giordano Bruno. He was the herald of the dawn.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The Great Infidels (1881)

Age, Star, Universe, Night

“I've a one track mind, sir. Poverty and gloom. Never a joyous picture of mine you'll see. Always gloom. I never do a jolly picture.”

L. S. Lowry (1887–1976) British visual artist

Tynes Tees Television Interview 1968

“And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Tales of a Wayside Inn

Pt. I, The Landlord's Tale: Paul Revere's Ride, st. 8.
Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863-1874)

Fate, Light, Night

“Los Angeles is the home of self-expression, but the artists are middle-class and middling-minded; no passions will calcify here for years in the gloom to be revealed a decade later as the tessellations of hard and fertile work. … In this land of the pretty-pretty, the virility is in the barbarisms, the vulgarities, it is in the huge billboards, the screamers of the neon lighting, the shouting farm-utensil colors of the gas stations and monster drugstores, it is in the swing of the sports cars, hot rods, convertibles.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Angels, Cars, Color, Home

“"He is dead," we cried, and even amid that gloom
The wintry veil was rent! The new-born day
Showed us the Angel seated in the tomb
And the stone rolled away.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Resurrection
Collected Poems (1913)

Angels, Dead

“All these relics gave… Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine to memory. I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these retreats in the day; but I by no means coveted a night's repose on one of those wide and heavy beds: shut in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded, others, with wrought old-English hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings, — all which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight.”

Charlotte Brontë book Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 11)
Jane Eyre (1847)

Home, Flowers, Bird, Memory

“The advent of truth, like the dawn of day, agitates the elements, while it disperses the gloom.”

Elias Lyman Magoon (1810–1886) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 604.

Truth

“These in the robings of glory,
Those in the gloom of defeat,
All with the battle-blood gory,
In the dusk of eternity meet;—

Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day;—
Under the laurel the Blue,
Under the willow, the Gray.”

Francis Miles Finch (1827–1907) American judge

The Blue and the Gray, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Waiting

“There was Johnson (Lyndon) who had compromised too many contradictions and now the contradictions were in his face: when he smiled the corners of his mouth squeezed gloom; when he was pious, his eyes twinkled irony; when he spoke in a righteous tone, he looked corrupt; when he jested, the ham in his jowls looked to quiver. He was not convincing. He was a Southern politician, a Texas Democrat, a liberal Eisenhower; he would do no harm, he would do no good, he would react to the machine, good fellow, nice friend -- the Russians would understand him better than his own. … Johnson gave you all of himself, he was a political animal, he breathed like an animal, sweated like one, you knew his mind was entirely absorbed with the compendium of political fact and maneuver.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Smile, Understanding, Animals

“I imagine that as one penetrated out from some enormous forest of the tropics, the wild beasts would become fewer, the gloom would lighten, and the horror of the place would slowly lift. Yet as one emerges nearer to the edge of London, and nearer to the beautiful influence of the hills, the houses become uglier, the streets viler, the gloom deepens, the errors of civilisation stand bare to the scorn of the fields.
Where ugliness reaches the height of its luxuriance, in the dense misery of the place, where one imagines the builder saying, "Here I culminate. Let us give thanks to Satan," there is a bridge of yellow brick, and through it, as through some gate of filigree silver opening on fairyland, one passes into the country.”

Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) Irish writer and dramatist

A Dreamer's Tales http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8drem10.txt, The Field

Beauty, Error, Imagination, Housing

“Happiness flourishes where there is happiness, and love withers quickly in an atmosphere of constraint and gloom.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Loving

Love, Happiness

“No funeral gloom, my dears, when I am gone,
corpse-gazing, tears, black raiment, graveyard grimness.
Think of me as withdrawn into the dimness,
yours still, you mine.
Remember all the best of our past moments,
and forget the rest;
and so to where I wait, come gently on.”

William Allingham (1824–1889) Irish man of letters and poet

Poem: No funeral gloom - part of funeral of actress Ellen Terry 1928.

Thinking, Tear, Waiting, Past

“All are before me! I behold
The House, the Brotherhood austere!
— And what am I, that I am here? For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire,
Show'd me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
What dost thou in this living tomb?”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (1855)

Truth, Youth, Faith, Star

“He seemed to lose interest in the subject of his daughter, glooming at a yellow card of ancient railway regulations on the wall. But when the harbingers of the coming train were audible – porters trundling, a scrambled gabble from the station announcer, frantic blowing on hot tea – he became eager again and was out swiftly on to the platform. I followed him. The train slid in. I saw the driver look down disdainful from his cosy hell, sharing – like soldier and auxiliary – a mystique with the tea-room woman. Passengers, disillusioned with arrival, got out greyly amid grey steam; passengers, hungry for the illusion of getting somewhere, jostled their way on.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Way, Hell, Tea, Daughters

“And every bird I ever knew
Back and forth in the summer flew;
And breezes wafted over me
The scent of every flower and tree:
Till I forgot the pain and gloom
And silence of my darkened room”

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) Novelist, poet, writer, activist

from Shadow of Birds

Pain, Flowers, Bird, Tree

“For ages the world has been waiting and watching; millions, with broken hearts, have hovered around the yawning abyss; but no echo has come back from the engulfing gloom —silence, oblivion, covers all. If indeed they survive; if they went away whole and victorious, they give us no signals. We wait for years, but no messages come from the far-away shore to which they have gone.”

Randolph Sinks Foster (1820–1903) American bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 291.

Age, World, Silence, Waiting

“Welcome, kindred glooms!
Congenial horrors, hail!”

James Thomson (poet) The Seasons

Source: The Seasons (1726-1730), Winter (1726), l. 5-6.

“Beyond the cloud-wrapt chambers of western gloom and Aethiopia's other realm there stands a motionless grove, impenetrable by any star; beneath it the hollow recesses of a deep and rocky cave run far into a mountain, where the slow hand of Nature has set the halls of lazy Sleep and his untroubled dwelling. The threshold is guarded by shady Quiet and dull Forgetfulness and torpid Sloth with ever drowsy countenance. Ease, and Silence with folded wings sit mute in the forecourt and drive the blustering winds from the roof-top, and forbid the branches to sway, and take away their warblings from the birds. No roar of the sea is here, though all the shores be sounding, nor yet of the sky; the very torrent that runs down the deep valley nigh the cave is silent among the rocks and boulders; by its side are sable herds, and sheep reclining one and all upon the ground; the fresh buds wither, and a breath from the earth makes the grasses sink and fail. Within, glowing Mulciber had carved a thousand likenesses of the god: here wreathed Pleasure clings to his side, here Labour drooping to repose bears him company, here he shares a couch with Bacchus, there with Love, the child of Mars. Further within, in the secret places of the palace he lies with Death also, but that dread image is seen by none. These are but pictures: he himself beneath humid caverns rests upon coverlets heaped with slumbrous flowers, his garments reek, and the cushions are warm with his sluggish body, and above the bed a dark vapour rises from his breathing mouth. One hand holds up the locks that fall from his left temple, from the other drops his neglected horn.”
Stat super occiduae nebulosa cubilia Noctis Aethiopasque alios, nulli penetrabilis astro, lucus iners, subterque cavis graue rupibus antrum it uacuum in montem, qua desidis atria Somni securumque larem segnis Natura locavit. limen opaca Quies et pigra Oblivio servant et numquam vigili torpens Ignauia vultu. Otia vestibulo pressisque Silentia pennis muta sedent abiguntque truces a culmine ventos et ramos errare vetant et murmura demunt alitibus. non hic pelagi, licet omnia clament litora, non ullus caeli fragor; ipse profundis vallibus effugiens speluncae proximus amnis saxa inter scopulosque tacet: nigrantia circum armenta omne solo recubat pecus, et nova marcent germina, terrarumque inclinat spiritus herbas. mille intus simulacra dei caelaverat ardens Mulciber: hic haeret lateri redimita Voluptas, hic comes in requiem vergens Labor, est ubi Baccho, est ubi Martigenae socium puluinar Amori obtinet. interius tecti in penetralibus altis et cum Morte jacet, nullique ea tristis imago cernitur. hae species. ipse autem umentia subter antra soporifero stipatos flore tapetas incubat; exhalant vestes et corpore pigro strata calent, supraque torum niger efflat anhelo ore vapor; manus haec fusos a tempore laevo sustentat crines, haec cornu oblita remisit.

Statius book Thebaid

Source: Thebaid, Book X, Line 84 (tr. J. H. Mozley)

Love, Death, God, Pleasure

“O’er folded blooms
On swirls of musk,
The beetle booms adown the glooms
And bumps along the dusk.”

James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) American poet from Indianapolis

The Beetle.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“No man is quite so much a hero in the dark as in broad daylight, in solitude as in society, in the gloom of the churchyard as in the blaze of the drawing-room. The season and the place may be such as to oppress the stoutest heart with a mysterious awe, which, if not fear, is near akin to it.”

William H. Prescott (1796–1859) American historian and Hispanist

"Scottish Song" (1826), p. 588.
Biographical and Critical Miscellanies

Fear, Solitude, Heart, Drawing

“Light like the wan blue flames that wave
Their death-torch o'er the murderer's grave;
And flickering shapes beset the way,
Watching in gloom to seize their prey,
Most terrible, for that the eye
Wander'd in dim uncertainty;”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Golden Violet - The Broken Spell
The Golden Violet (1827)

Death, Way, Light

“Go! you may call it madness, folly;
You shall not chase my gloom away!
There's such a charm in melancholy
I would not if I could be gay.”

Samuel Rogers (1763–1855) British poet

To ———, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Madness

“Skirting the rocks at the forest edge
With a running flame from ledge to ledge,
Or swaying deeper in shadowy glooms,
A smoldering fire in her dusky blooms;
Bronzed and molded by wind and sun,
Maddening, gladdening every one
With a gypsy beauty full and fine,—
A health to the crimson columbine!”

Elaine Goodale Eastman (1863–1953) American novelist, poet

Columbine; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 124.

Health, Beauty, Sun

“I saw a worm, with many a fold;
It spun itself a silken tomb;
And there in winter time enrolled,
It heeded not the cold or gloom.”

Jones Very (1813–1880) American poet and essayist

From The Psyche

Winter, Time

“The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting — no more — and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth. Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind.”

Plutarch book Moralia

οὐ γὰρ ὡς ἀγγεῖον ὁ νοῦς ἀποπληρώσεως ἀλλ' ὑπεκκαύματος μόνον ὥσπερ ὕλη δεῖται ὁρμὴν ἐμποιοῦντος εὑρετικὴν καὶ ὄρεξιν ἐπὶ τὴν ἀλήθειαν. ὥσπερ οὖν εἴ τις ἐκ γειτόνων πυρὸς δεόμενος, εἶτα πολὺ καὶ λαμπρὸν εὑρὼν αὐτοῦ καταμένοι διὰ τέλους θαλπόμενος, οὕτως εἴ τις ἥκων λόγου μεταλαβεῖν πρὸς ἄλλον οὐχ οἴεται δεῖν φῶς οἰκεῖον ἐξάπτειν καὶ νοῦν ἴδιον, ἀλλὰ χαίρων τῇ ἀκροάσει κάθηται θελγόμενος, οἷον ἔρευθος ἕλκει καὶ γάνωμα τὴν δόξαν ἀπὸ τῶν λόγων, τὸν δ᾽ ἐντὸς: εὐρῶτα τῆς ψυχῆς καὶ ζόφον οὐκ ἐκτεθέρμαγκεν οὐδ᾽ ἐξέωκε διὰ φιλοσοφίας.
On Listening to Lectures, Plutarch, Moralia 48C (variously called De auditione Philosophorum or De Auditu or De Recta Audiendi Ratione)
Moralia, Others

Truth, Motivation, Thinking, Light

“Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It's not merely bad; it's unpleasant in a hostile way. The visuals are grubby and drab. The characters are unkempt and have rotten teeth. Breathing tubes hang from their noses like ropes of snot. The soundtrack sounds like the boom mike is being slammed against the inside of a 55-gallon drum. The plot. … Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive. I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/battlefield-earth-2000 of Battlefield Earth (12 May 2000) <br class="br">Reviews, Half-star reviews

Hostility, Way, Time, Training

“Then came the journey up to London through Birmingham and the Black District, another lesson, which needed much more to be rightly felt. The plunge into darkness lurid with flames; the sense of unknown horror in this weird gloom which then existed nowhere else, and never had existed before, except in volcanic craters; the violent contrast between this dense, smoky, impenetrable darkness, and the soft green charm that one glided into, as one emerged — the revelation of an unknown society of the pit — made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no idea that Karl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner or later the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his Satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Black District was a practical education, but it was infinitely far in the distance. The boy ran away from it, as he ran away from everything he disliked.
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Education, Boy, Idea, Sense

“If slaves make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong. But they won't make soldiers. As a class they are wanting in every qualification of a soldier. Better by far to yield to the demands of England and France and abolish slavery and thereby purchase their aid, than resort to this policy, which leads as certainly to ruin and subjugation as it is adopted; you want more soldiers, and hence the proposition to take negroes into the Army. Before resorting to it, at least try every reasonable mode of getting white soldiers. I do not entertain a doubt that you can, by the volunteering policy, get more men into the service than you can arm. I have more fears about arms than about men, For Heaven’s sake, try it before you fill with gloom and despondency the hearts of many of our truest and most devoted men, by resort to the suicidal policy of arming our slaves.”

Howell Cobb (1815–1868) American politician

Howell Cobb. "Letter to James A. Seddon", in: Encyclopædia Britannica] (1911), Hugh Chisholm, editor, 11th ed., Cambridge University Press.
Quote regarding suggestions that the Confederates turn their slaves into soldiers. Also quoted as 'You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong'.

Men, Fear, Suicide, Heart