RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience. It is said to be rich in both obtundite and lethargine, and is brewed in a midnight fog by a fat which of the Dismal Swamp. - Ambrose Bierce
My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers. - Woody Allen
It is dismal coming home, when there is nobody to welcome one! - Ann Radcliffe
All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea. - Nathan Reese Maher
How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape. - Christopher Hitchens
Still, despite all our noise, this universe hinges on a melody, that’s the dismal truth of it. Oh, we can propagandize all we wish, it doesn’t change the fabric of things. This universe was not made for the fallen, only the redeemed. - Geoffrey Wood
Snub end of a dismal year, deep in the dwarf orchard, The sky with its undercoat of blackwash and point stars,I stand in the dark and answer toMy life, this shirt I want to take off,which is on fire . . . - Charles Wright
The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure. - George Bernard Shaw
I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse. - Brendan Behan
No true individual has existed yet, able to live, able to die. Only diseased, tragic, or dismal and ludicrous fools who sometimes hoped to achieve some ideal by fiat, by their great desire for it. But usually by bullying all mankind into believing them. - Saul Bellow, Herzog
Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life. - Henry Van Dyke