Dreadful Quotes

“It is for your own good to love a dare-devil rather than a holy coward. A dare-devil is a unique devil, battling your fears, your pains, conquering your uncertainties, carrying you his arms, and flying out of the corrosive fire. The coward is a trickster serpent, which vanishes in your time of despair, and appears in time of equanimity.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“...this refinement and delicacy were what Cale adored; but Cale had been beaten into shape, hammered in dreadful fires of fear and pain. How could she be with him for long? A secret part of Arbell had been searching for some time for a way to leave her lover—although she was unaware of this, it is only fair to record. And so as Cale waited for her to save him while he worked out a way of saving her, she had already chosen the bitter but reasonable path of the good, of the many over the one...”
― Paul Hoffman, The Left Hand of God

“I saw that pain and disease existed and at the same time that they were void of sense and meaning. Among the men of the rabble I had become a creature of a strange, unknown race, so much so that they had forgotten that I had once been part of their world. I had the dreadful sensation that I was not really alive or wholly dead. I was a living corpse, unrelated to the world of living people and at the same time deprived of the oblivion and peace of death.”
― Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl

“It was the helplessness that scared the both of us.”
― Lois Lowry, A Summer to Die

“While he was still dreading having to eat the bastard, he was grateful that he wouldn’t be the first one to have to tear a strip of brain from its head”
― Matthew Bracey, Steel Dogs

“{Wells discussing his experiences with Christianity}

I realised as if for the first time, the menace of these queer shaven men in lace and petticoats who had been intoning, responding, and going through ritual gestures at me. I realised something dreadful about them. They were thrusting an incredible and ugly lie upon the world and the world was making no such resistance as I was disposed to make to this enthronement of cruelty. Either I had to come into this immense luminous coop and submit, or I had to declare the Catholic Church, the core and substance of Christendom with all its divines, sages, saints, and martyrs, with successive thousands of believers, age after age, wrong.

...I found my doubt of his essential integrity, and the shadow of contempt it cast, spreading out from him to the whole Church and religion of which he with his wild spoutings about the agonies of Hell, had become the symbol. I felt ashamed to be sitting there in such a bath of credulity.”
― H.G. Wells

“Lord have mercy upon mankind.
Deliver and save the world from the dreadful EBOLA VIRUS.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Wisdom is a dreadfully wonderful gift,giving you great insight but terrible pain that you learn from.”
― Royal Cromwell

“The things that kept them awake in the middle of the night, the things they did underneath the cover of darkness, both dreadful and beautiful, both attractive and repulsive, were revealed in stark clarity to their minds. A harsh reality that intensified sensations with each gust of wind. They shrank from it with frightened whimpers. The setting in each house would have fit perfectly into a post-apocalyptic tale of nuclear holocausts. Shell-shocked expressions gazed into the nothingness. Blankets over faces, silent prayers to the heavens. No curious eyes at the windows, or storm watchers dared to partake. The mere thought of looking out was too much to be borne.”
― Jaime Allison Parker

“It ceased at last, as everything dreadful has to cease, even if it ceases only by death.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“If a memoir needs a reason, mine is simply that wonderful things become even more wonderful for me if I can share them and dreadful things more bearable.”
― Sheila Dhar, "Here's Someone I'd Like You to Meet": Tales of Innocents, Musicians and Bureaucrats

“MacBeth and Me

Down below the twisted step,
The tavern awaits night's Dark guests.
Fires aglow hiss the emb'rous red,
And Hell waits upon her most prized dead.

A charmed man of thirty or so,
Ambition's son who vaults so low.
Tarries he now at table's dread, and drinks
The draught of one Soul condemned.

Lingers he so, o'er beef and wassail,
Choicest portions of desires assailed.
Presses he down lusts murd'rous and hard,
A driving rain of the blackest of hearts.

'Prince of Cumberland,' he had to traverse,
Or fall asunder, star-crossed to his curse.
Sees shadows now and smiles slight at me,
Knows he a kindred, in like debauchery.

Eyes my spirit through cracked mirror.
Banquo saw too and was butchered in Fear.
The Lady also, unsexed, it seemed
(Tended she cravings 'cided that King).

Aye, locked below under tomorrow's step,
He lies awaiting in damned inquest.
Mortals what I am and to what I agree,
Bids me to his table, Macbeth and me.

--Poems on the Run, vol. I”
― Douglas Laurent

“Forever seems dreadful without a love to fill it with.”
― Laura Chouette