Rebellion without truth is like spring in a bleak, arid desert.

The math is dead simple: it seems that the frequency of planets able to support life is roughly one percent. In other words, a billion or more such worlds exist in our galaxy alone. That's a lot of acreage, and it takes industrial-strength credulity to believe it's all bleakly barren.

As a science fiction and fantasy writer, I used to love writing bleak, grimdark futures full of bleak, grimdark people. But I've found that as the world around me darkens, all I really want to do is grasp for more light.

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.

I've always thought that when they say ignorance is bliss, the converse to that is that knowledge is hell. The more you know, the bleaker things can get.

Jesu's walls of distortion are uplifting in comparison to those of its doom-driven contemporaries. The band's 2009 album 'Infinity' has its bleak moments, but that album's single 49-minute song resolves into something inspirational and grandiose by the time it's over.

I try to give people hope. Even though life is bleak, there's hope out there.

To not have any hope is where things start to get really bleak. Things are possible. The impossible can be possible.

Often, small things give me hope when big things feel so oppressively bleak.

We really feel happier when things look bleak. Hope is endurance. Hope is holding on and going on and trusting in the Lord.

The Arctic has huge glaciers, frozen waterfalls and floating ice. This is scenery on which man has left no mark, which has stayed unchanged for centuries, wild, bleak, hauntingly beautiful; it is a part of God's creation we have made no effort to tame.

Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.

I felt cheated by the way grown-ups told me that the future of the world was bleak when I became a teenager in the 1970s. The pollution explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. I genuinely want the next generation, my own kids, to know that actually it's possible that the future might be better than the past.

If we were logical, the future would be bleak, indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work.

Women always try to see the one good part of The Weird Guy because the dating landscape is so bleak. Women will say, 'He's very odd, but he likes to cook. He's creepy, but he makes good pancakes!'

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.

Your attitude is like a box of crayons that color your world. Constantly color your picture gray, and your picture will always be bleak. Try adding some bright colors to the picture by including humor, and your picture begins to lighten up.

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.

"In the bleak midwinter

So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven?

"How strange, Royce thought, that, after emerging victorious from more than a hundred real battles, the greatest moment of triumph he had ever known had come to him on a mock battlefield where he'd stood alone, unhorsed, and defeated. This morning, his life had seemed as bleak as death. Tonight, he held joy in his arms. Someone or something-fate or fortune or Jenny's God-had looked down upon him this morning and seen his anguish. And, for some reason, Jenny had been given back to him.

No. Don't give up hope just yet. It's the last thing to go. When you have lost hope, you have lost everything. And when you think all is lost, when all is dire and bleak, there is always hope.

Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

Hope is not about proving anything. It's about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us.