Richard Harris Barham Quotes

A scene of misery and gloomy despair of a community of people who have been plunged abruptly from prosperity to a complete want of the most essential things of life.

Loneliness and hunger were my fortunes of creation.

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

I've been to those places where it's 'poor, pitiful me.'

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

Unending was the stream, unending the misery, unending the sorrow.

All the principal towns are sadly decayed, and instead of finding every mortal employed, you meet with multitudes of poor creatures who are starving in idleness.

From these cities they would go on again, by the roads of vines and olives, through squalid villages, where there was not a hovel without a gap in its filthy walls, not a window with a whole inch of glass or paper; where there seemed to be nothing to support life, nothing to eat, nothing to make, nothing to grow, nothing to hope, nothing to do but die.

Not having a roof over your head at night must be frightening, cold, lonely and depressing. To be seriously ill as well must be beyond upsetting.

At a certain depth of distress, the poor, in their stupor, groan no longer over evil, and are no longer thankful for good.

Aspiring beggary is wretchedness itself.

Three were the fates. Poverty that chains; gray drudgery that grinds the hope away, and gaping ignorance that starves the soul.

... the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.

Want is misery.

Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.

But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it's by way of heartbreak, sometimes it's by way of injustice, sometimes it's by way of fate. There's an infinite number of ways to examine it.

I hate to see anybody sink. I hate to see anybody lose their dream, lose their home, something like that.

If you have ever been in a real tragic or sad situation, the words that come out are hopelessly inadequate and kind of cliched.

Companions, in misery and worse, that is what we all are, and to try to change this substantially avails us nothing.

Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair.

One-third of our people were dangerously ill, getting worse hourly, and we felt sure of meeting the same fate, with death as our only prospect, which in such a country was much worse yet.

We were poor, my mother and I, living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism and bitterness, where storms raged and wolves scratched at the door.

These hands which stretch out, implore, beg, then rise to the head in a gesture of calamity.

Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of the earth is multiform.