Top 120 Dreadful Quotes

I really enjoy the company of my kids… I’m not one of those people who goes ‘Yeah, my kids are my mates’, that’s a dreadful kind of mother, but I’m fortunate that there are times that they do want me around, and I feel lucky that they let me into their world.

The only way to go on holiday is with your expectations at ground level. Convince yourself before you go that the weather’s going to be dreadful and there will be nylon sheets. You’ll then be pleasantly surprised.

I have very little choice. If I don’t write, I feel dreadful. So I write.

People have been able to see that as cheeky and as flirty as I am, I am not the dreadful slapper that the press used to portray me as. But it will probably all turn around and people will hate me again in a couple of years.

I like to be busy. I once shared an agent with the late Sir John Gielgud, who, at 96, was apparently still ringing up, saying, ‘Hello, Gielgud here, any work?’ Good on him. We’ve got to keep working. If we retire, there’ll be nobody to play the old wrinklies, and that would be a dreadful shame.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of things American – but when American people do British stuff, it’s so universally dreadful.

In 1906, just as we were definitely giving up the old shed laboratory where we had been so happy, there came the dreadful catastrophe which took my husband away from me and left me alone to bring up our children and, at the same time, to continue our work of research.

The first couple of pictures I wrote and directed were dreadful, because I was dealing in worlds that were not familiar to me, and writing about fantasy. They were just not anything I was really connected to.

I think we’re doing a dreadful job of educating.

I, Master John Hus, in chains and in prison, now standing on the shore of this present life and expecting on the morrow a dreadful death, which will, I hope, purge away my sins, find no heresy in myself, and accept with all my heart any truth whatsoever that is worthy of belief.

The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP they have run out of better ideas.

I’ve been in so many good movies that I felt like nobody saw; it’s a pretty dreadful feeling.

There will always be that dreadful monster prejudice to do extra battle against because of their color.

I was living in Maryland and my first week was dreadful. My first week I actually got into a fight at school.

The war in Vietnam I thought a dreadful mistake.

I have been an Avengers fan since the middle 1960s. I grew up with them, and I’ve imagined a hundred different versions of an Avengers movie. I think I even have a script I wrote back in eighth grade, ‘Avengers vs. the Mole Man.’ Truly dreadful, but a work of love.

Today’s children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.

Corbyn sounds like a dreadful town, dresses like a catalogue model for the Sue Ryder shop and won’t look significantly different when he’s been dead for a week.

If you get involved with something on stage that makes you feel dreadful, that’s a nightmare because you have to repeat it every night.

The idea of victimage is a dreadful thing, a product of a safe middle-class perspective. What people who are not safe develop is a tragic wisdom, a wisdom that embraces contradiction and seeks a sense of balance rather than going to extremes.

Well, life is dark, isn’t it? Mostly, it’s dreadful. At the same time, death is funny too. I mean, look at the fuss we make of it.

This world of ours… must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Certainly ‘Survivors,’ when we put that series out, the second series dipped below 5 million for one of the episodes – all of a sudden, there’s no recommission, and I think that’s dreadful.

All travellers who had preceded me into the Barren Grounds had relied on the abundant game, and in consequence suffered dreadful hardships; in some cases even starved to death.

Even having to do the amount of press that I have to do is dreadful and gives me so much anxiety. After having done this whole slew of press for ‘Big Love’, now I’ll have anxiety dreams for like a week and a half about all the stupid things I said.

If one of my romantic-comedy colleagues had written and directed ‘Love Actually,’ they would have been torn limb from limb. I thought it was awful, contrived, dreadful. I could see every twist and turn. I thought it was despicable. It was the writing that got me.

The dreadful burden of having nothing to do.

If people take an interest in you and they think there’s half a chance, they might hang on. It’s dreadful.

We started by playing girls who only married at the end of the picture. We didn’t play wives. That came later. But the most dreadful thing was when a star had to play a mother. That was the beginning of her professional end.

After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.

As in any war, there have been dreadful mistakes and civilian casualties. The difference is when Israelis kill innocents they apologize; when Hezbollah kills innocents they celebrate.

Below us the Thames grew lighter, and all around below were the shadows – the dark shadows of buildings and bridges that formed the base of this dreadful masterpiece.

I listened to a clip someone had put up of me singing ‘I Am What I Am’ in the musical ‘La Cage aux Folles.’ I thought I was absolutely dreadful. It’s like when you see photos of yourself at parties – at the time you thought you looked so cool and glamorous but you just look a bit drunk.

If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful.

I was a house dad. Once, my wife was working as a dispatcher at the fire department, and I was staying home and writing while baby-sitting my son, who hardly ever slept. So I wrote in twenty-minute patches. Some of that early stuff is just dreadful. I got a thousand rejects.

Music was such an important part of everyone’s life in the ’60s and ’70s, but everywhere you played, the music was dreadful.

How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there’s no help in the truth.

I started off in this dreadful, vulgar film called ‘The Libertine.’ I was just learning. I needed the money.

Being a single mother in the late 1950s was a very shocking thing – and dreadful thing – for people.

I spent a lot of time in hospitals as a child with these dreadful calliper things, and in push-chairs and God knows what else. I had no interest in sport and no ability at it, and so on. But on the other hand, I had a very powerful imaginative life.

The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters – not to talk in armies and nations and numbers – but to track it home.

No attribute of God is more dreadful to sinners than His holiness.

Revenge is barren of itself: it is the dreadful food it feeds on; its delight is murder, and its end is despair.

I was pretty dreadful on my first night as an announcer as back in those days the scorecards were written in a very strange way so that didn’t help and some of the fighter’s names were unpronounceable.

It is dreadful to see actors reproducing the same image constantly.

Children and teens need to explore the dark side as a healthy part of growing. If a child is protected from everything dreadful, he will have no coping mechanisms in place when finally confronted with disaster.

There’s always a sense of tragedy with icons. It happened to both the Princess of Wales and Diana Dors. A lot of people had grown up with them, and everybody loved them. Then, when they had at last found happiness, they were taken in the most dreadful way.

To most people, jazz-fusion means this dreadful synthetic jazz-rock thing, this jazz-Muzak, which I detest. They also think of jazz as a specific form of music, while to me it’s just the opposite.

I’ve been into lots of auditions, and I’m sure I’ve lost a lot of jobs through that because I’m pretty dreadful at reading.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that ‘nothing succeeds like success.’

I think the notion of retirement is just a dreadful, dreadful idea and I hope I never have to do that.

So many things that happen to you are so dreadful, it’s important to have a sense of humour.

When the Second World War finished, I was 23, and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I’d seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn’t affect me much.

I call on the Western democracies and primarily on the leader of the free world, the United States: Do not repeat the dreadful mistake of 1938, when enlightened European democracies decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia for a convenient temporary solution… Israel will not be Czechoslovakia.

Upon the farm of the uncle with whom I lived, we did know of the mortgage as some dreadful damper on youthful hopes of things that could not be bought. I do have a vivid recollection that the major purpose of a farm was to produce a living right on the spot for the family.

No man who has not tried it can imagine what dreadful hard work it is to listen. Splitting gum logs in the dog days is child’s play to it. I’ve tried both, and give the preference to the gum logs.

When you do what I do, there are a lot of institutions that give you awards. I’ve gotten maybe 20 medals. They’re glorious, and there’s a spirit behind them. But sometimes they give you this dreadful modern glass thing. I wish everyone could afford a loving cup.

The most metal? Some would say Slayer, but I think they’re a dreadful band. Unbelievably boring. Terrible. Apparently it’s not metal to say that, but it’s a personal opinion.

It was dreadful. They tried to put the little redhead in a cage.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

We must have the courage to confront dreadful views even in the people we love the most. But that’s difficult to do when we cast large segments of our fellow citizens into a basket to be condemned and disparaged, judging them even as we ignore that many of their deplorable traits exist in us, too.

I’m an absolutely dreadful hockey player.

My mum was a wonderful mother. She died, aged 80, of Alzheimer’s disease, which was dreadful to watch. I remember she said to me: ‘Believe in yourself because no one else is going to do it for you.’ I’m sure a lot of my success is due to her words of advice.

The Democrats have concocted this whole phony ‘war on women’ narrative simply to mask their dreadful record on the economy and jobs.

‘Penny Dreadful’ is so realistic. The tonality is so earthy and so real that I actually believe it is in the realm of possibility for all these extra species to exist among us.

Historically, Macbeth is one of the greatest kings Scotland ever had. He was on the throne for 19 years, and he simply has this dreadful reputation because Shakespeare manipulated history for the benefit of James I, who was paying him to write the play to blacken Macbeth’s name.

The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

Two birdies and a lot of bogeys doesn’t really help. I say if you’re going to do it, do it properly and be dreadful on all fronts.

I have this dreadful image of me driving down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, with the windows rolled down, and our song comes on… and I’m sitting there listening to it and some guy pulls up next to me and thinks, ‘Hey, it’s that guy from the Goo Goo Dolls… he’s listening to his own music. What a jerk!’

My mother really would make these dreadful concoctions. She really prided herself on something called ‘Everything Stew,’ where she would take everything in the refrigerator, all the leftovers, and put them all together.

It really was hand-to-mouth and you can say, ‘Poor little me, how dreadful, what a deprived childhood’, but I didn’t feel that way at all. It’s all about the attitude at home.

One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm.

I cannot but be grieved to go from my native land, and especially from that part of it for whom and with whom I desired only to live; yet the dreadful apprehensions I have of what is coming upon this land may help to make me submissive to this providence, though more bitter.

I mean to say, this is the book and I really loathe it and I can’t imagine what a nice Jewish boy like me ever, how I ever got into this dreadful trade.

Advice is like castor oil, easy enough to give but dreadful uneasy to take.

I’m creative in my own life. I’m creative when I step out the door. I’m creative when I pick up a glass. Do you know what I mean? I’m one of those dreadful people who probably should have been born at the end of the 19th century and been in cafe society. That would have suited me fine.

I think music on television is just uniformly dreadful. It is mundane, it says nothing.

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.

We’ve taken on health care in a big way in our office, ever since nine years ago when I was paralyzed. I was in eight different hospitals, three different rehab centers, and all the rooms were dreadful. As an architect, designer, and patient, I can do something to help.

Now I’ve been free, I know what a dreadful condition slavery is. I have seen hundreds of escaped slaves, but I never saw one who was willing to go back and be a slave.

There are so few who are men worthy of praise in this dreadful life: Mr. McMahon is one who immediately comes to mind; Billy Shakespeare is another, Bob Barker, god rest his soul – wait, he’s not passed yet has he? Drat, take that one off, I suppose.

I think I can sing, but that does not mean I can actually sing. I fear that I’m like one of those ‘American Idol’ contestants who truly believe they are good and are actually dreadful.

I’d been to South Africa during the Seventies, when it was definitely not kosher to go there. I felt that the best thing to do was to be a missionary and tell people what was going on in their own country because censorship was so dreadful.

The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.

Once you begin being naughty, it is easier to go and on and on, and sooner or later something dreadful happens.

I tend to be a bit of a proselytiser for the importance of royal courts, but all politics – in fact every form of human organisation, and this is something that’s so dreadful for all those brought up in the 60s – naturally reverts to monarchy. Newspapers have editors, companies have chief executives.

It took so long to make it in America. The year I arrived was a bad year for women singers, the record company told me. So I starved. I lived in a hotel so dreadful I can’t even talk about it.

There is the love and marriage and family kind of happiness, which is exceedingly boring to describe but nonetheless is important to have and dreadful not to have.

Old age is a wonderful time of life. At least, that’s what everyone tells you. But let me tell you: it is not true. What’s true is that your hips, knees and ankles gradually give up on you – everything is quite dreadful, really. And it was a terrible thing to have told us because we believed it.

I lift my voice of warning against praising or flattering your ministers. I have seen the evil, the dreadful evil, of praising ministers. Never, never speak a word in the praise of ministers to their faces. Exalt God.

There’s a common misconception about running for office. People think it’s dreadful, morally compromising work. But I’ve found the opposite is true. It made a better person and a better feminist. It forced me to take a hard look at my shortcomings.

I’m the catalyst for the downfall of the Blairites, the Clintonites, the Bushites, and all these dreadful people who work hand in glove with Goldman Sachs and everybody else, have made themselves rich, and ruined our countries. I couldn’t be happier.

Given a little time for the pain to subside, dreadful experiences often can be the basis of funny jokes or stories.

Everything was in stark and dreadful contrast with the trivial crises and counterfeit emotions of Hollywood, and I returned to England deeply moved and emotionally worn out.

I’m a dreadful romantic. No matter what I go through in life, I want to fall in love with a man.

In the World War nothing was more dreadful to witness than a chain of men starting with a battalion commander and ending with an army commander sitting in telephone boxes, improvised or actual, talking, talking, talking, in place of leading, leading, leading.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

On reflection, I think the 1980s were a dreadful, abysmal time.

I knew my knee was getting worse at Villa. The first season was dreadful and we went down. But speak to the Villa fans – take away the last three years – they were saying at the start that I should be playing for England.

It’s a dreadful thing to be strapped for cash when you are elderly. It’s awful when you’re young, too, but you always have hope.

My dad was a terrible father. Dreadful. But he had a very difficult childhood. He was fostered – he never knew who his father was. So he had a very different attitude to family and kids. I don’t have any issues. I’m not suffering some secret angst.

America is a funny place; it’s a land of extremes, I think. There’s fantastic, and there’s gobsmackingly dreadful. In every realm you could imagine, they do extremes very well or badly, depending on how you look at it.

I didn’t get anything published until I was thirty-three, and yet I’d written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful.

I was on holiday recently and I came home to find that one of the papers here had ‘bikini’d’ me on the beach. I was wearing a grossly unflattering costume and they had published photographs of me taken from behind. I looked dreadful. I went into our local newsagent and bought up every copy.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

For everything that you find dreadful, there’s usually something that is rather marvelous as well.

There’s very little about being in a functional-M.R.I. scanner that is natural: you are flat on your back, absolutely still, with your head immobilized by pillows and straps. The scanner makes a dreadful din, which headphones barely muffle.

My mother, in the last years of her life, became very negative, and it’s hard to listen. I remember one day, I said to her, ‘It’s October 1 today,’ and she said, ‘I know, isn’t it dreadful?’ It’s hard to listen when somebody’s that negative.

The American story is a story of great moments and dreadful moments.

The danger of success is that it makes us forget the world’s dreadful injustice.

Every friend to the liberty of his country is bound to reflect, and step forward to prevent the dreadful consequences which shall result from a government of events.

My character and good name are in my own keeping. Life with disgrace is dreadful. A glorious death is to be envied.

All English people have a fascination with Jack the Ripper. I don’t know why, because it’s so dreadful, but such a strange, endearing part of our culture. Morbid fascination sums it up.

Because Bin Laden’s culture doesn’t permit the worship of images, they understand how powerful images are. We wouldn’t have thought of creating a visual bomb. In a way, he’s chopped down two iconic buildings, and used our very truth imagery, to express himself. It’s fascinating… I mean, dreadful.

It was nice doing my own Joy Division book to be able to put forward the fact that Ian was actually quite a nice guy and very hardworking, ambitious and loyal. But the thing was, he was battling such a dreadful illness in an era when they really didn’t know how to treat it.

You know, if you ever listen to your voice on an answering machine everyone thinks we sound dreadful. That’s sort of the way I think when I hear myself speak.

We are a dreadful species indeed, and deserve whatever it is our techno-baubles do to us.

Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so. For, those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow. Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

I used to have quite long hair, and I decided that I wanted to get it cut. I’d never met the person who did it, and she cut it into some kind of dreadful mullet. It looked like a triangle on my head. The other kids were merciless.