To a generation beaten down by skyrocketing unemployment, plunging retirement savings, and mounting home foreclosures, 'Mad Men' offers the schadenfreude-filled message that their predecessors were equally unhappy - and that the bleakness meter in American life has always been set on high.
Adam Cohen
People say 'The Wire's bleak, y'know, but I see it as a love letter to Baltimore, and it's one written in a very strange and complex way.
Aidan Gillen
Life looked bleak when I became chairman of the group at the age of 29. But I survived, as the Lord must have carried me when I needed Him the most.
Ajay Piramal
'Family Life' is a blueprint of my life. It was horrible and physically gruesome in a way the book doesn't attempt to capture. It was emotionally very bleak.
Akhil Sharma
Painters aren't expected to paint bleak pictures, are they?
Alexander McCall Smith
Fiction is able to encompass books that are bleak and which dwell on the manifold and terrible problems of our times. But I don't think that all books need to have that particular focus.
No matter how successful you are, no matter how good you are at what you do, even if a golden path rolls out in front of your feet your whole life, there will come one particularly bleak Tuesday when you glance over at Facebook and notice that Jen From Down The Hall has just won an Oscar.
Alexandra Petri
There are a lot of challenges Ofglen faces as a Handmaid. She has to live her life for the Commander of her home, Glen, and it is really a bleak life. She has no rights, and her main job is to keep him and the rest of the people in his house happy.
Alexis Bledel
From the hour when the Puritan baby opened his eyes in bleak New England, he had a Spartan struggle for life.
Alice Morse Earle
Maybe it's the buildings, maybe it's the weather, but you can see it affects us - that Scottish gallows humour; our tendency towards bleakness, to look at things in a negative way. Those definitely come out in my writing.
Allan Guthrie
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.
Allen Klein
I don't think that there's necessarily a side to drama that has to be completely bleak. You have to have a flicker of humor 'cause everyone has a flicker of humor, something they find funny in life.
Amy Seimetz
I wonder whether my bleak-o-meter is set differently from other people's.
Andrea Arnold
I'm not very popular, because they're bleak and they're mournful and all the rest of it and I get censorious reviews. But I'm only writing fiction. I'm not making munitions, so I think it's acceptable.
Anita Brookner
I think that I'm serious, but I don't think that I'm inordinately bleak.
Ann Beattie
Shetland has always been a place of sanctuary for me. I visited when I dropped out of university, and I just loved it from the minute I got there. It's a bleak but very beautiful place.
Ann Cleeves
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.
Ann Widdecombe
Even though I'm often crazy - and I am, and I know it - still I fight it because I know how sterile, how futile, how bleak... nothing grows from it, and you, meanwhile, only grow into it like a snail.
Anne Sexton
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.
Anthony Fantano
With its breezy guitars and sweet backing vocals, 'Norway' blows away any semblance of Beach House's previously bleak approach to pop.
People who really love you are the ones who stand firm by you when things are bleak.
I just was not going to subject my record to the bleak prospects of a primary election.
Geography was the lesson I always looked forward to most. It was a form of escapism. It could be bleak midwinter outside but inside you're learning about African farming methods or the Great Lakes. No other lesson had that excitement.
I've had enough of the bleak headlines and divisive politics, dark TV dramas and hate-filled social media. I'm embracing a new movement with a slightly ridiculous name and a single mission, to make the world a better place. It's called 'hopepunk'.
I find 'EastEnders' so utterly bleak.
President Obama is one of the great political knife-fighters in modern history. He is a failed president - his economy is bleak, his foreign policy bleaker, his vision for American even bleaker still. But he wins.
I'd had to cope with a lot of death and illness in my family from a young age, and that maybe gave me a bleak outlook on the world.
Joy Division sounded like Manchester: cold, sparse and, at times, bleak.
I've had some terrible jobs, but working in a kitchen at Cracker Barrel is probably the worst I've ever had. I was a grill cook - awful! It wasn't the smell, it was the people. The music, too. We had to be 'country fresh,' so they played this terrible country music eight hours during the shift. It was a bleak existence - a very dark time.
Celebrate your family's bleakest moments and how your relatives overcame them. In doing so, you will encounter darkness, but you'll give your children the confidence that they, too, shall overcome.
I was brought up on Dickens. I remember reading 'Bleak House' but, coming back to it, I didn't remember much about it apart from a few characters.
I am greatly impressed with the BBC's TV adaption of Charles Dickens' 'Bleak House.' The costumes, the sets, the acting and the screenplay are all superb. Every episode is riveting.
I think a lot of bands would just make a dark, bleak album, which is why we wanted to do the opposite. We wanted to let people know that there's hope out there, and that no matter how tough things get, they will always get better. I'm really proud of that.
A while ago, I did a television adaptation of 'Bleak House,' and the character I played, as far as I was concerned, had no redeeming features whatsoever. I wasn't about to try to find any; I didn't need to.
During the late 1940s, Europe was a pretty bleak place.
It's bleak behind the Iron Curtain, although they do have the strongest vodka I've ever had in my life.
Sometimes bleak is good. Sometimes bleak is necessary. Some part of life is always bleak.
I had heard about the nightcrawling world, and I'm very aware that there are tens of millions of young people around the world who are facing bleak employment prospects.
I don't think I can write a book as nihilistic as some of my early ones. They're so bleak. I don't think I would enjoy that as much anymore. You really become fixated on ways out.
I try to give people hope. Even though life is bleak, there's hope out there.
It's a very bleak play, but there is some final sense of redemption. 'Coriolanus' shows mercy, a Christian virtue in an otherwise un-Christian world.
Schools unable to keep their lights on and their doors open for the full working week is just the latest bleak instalment of a long-running show. The age of austerity returns for its ninth miserable year; always in the background, the common denominator in everything from the Brexit vote to knife crime.
No matter how bleak the situation into which we have been thrown by the global economy, it does offer opportunities. Designers need only invent them.
I love bleak things.
Now '90210' is returning with an all-new cast of slightly more plausible teens. I'll be honest: I wish the old cast was back. Ideally, this spin-off would be an Ice Storm-esque exploration of the West Beverly gang's bleak adult lives.
1967 was the bleakest, darkest, most emotional period of my life.
The outlook for the Federal budget is bleak.
The natural world is often bleak, but the language devoted to it is as careful as needlepoint and prophetic as well.
It's possible to watch 'Gone Girl' and feel that you have seen something terribly bleak. But it's also possible to receive it as good news. Any powerful articulation of the need for change is also a testimony to the possibility of change.
The beginnings of a forest is one of the ugliest things on the planet. It's bleak and your neighbours hate you.
