"Commonplaceness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... office. This place was his; he had fought for it, worked for it. He had an almost physical sense of unseen hands reaching out to drag him away from it; from David and Lucy, and from Elizabeth. And of himself holding desperately to them all, and to the believed commonplaceness of ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... heavens, and interstellar spaces of the clearest and most flawless ether. The air is like the keen air of the highest glaciers. As we go, the bells keep up a drowsy tinkling at the horse's head. The whole landscape is transfigured—lifted high up out of commonplaceness. The little hills are Monte Rosas and Mont Blancs. Scale is annihilated, and nothing tells but form. There is hardly any colour except the blue of sky and shadow. Everything is traced in vanishing tints, passing ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Shakespeare's credit. He was wise enough to feel that what the crowd wanted, both in matter and in form, was what was needed in the greatest drama. In saying that Shakespeare's mind was commonplace, I meant to tender him the highest praise. In his commonplaceness lies his sanity. He is so greatly usual that he can understand all men and sympathise with them. He is above novelty. His wisdom is greater than the wisdom of the few; he is the heir of all the ages, and draws his wisdom from the general mind of man. And it is largely ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... that "Bitter-Sweet" was not this and that and t'other, but, after all said and done, it would remain an obstinately charming little book. It is not free from faults of taste, nor from a certain commonplaceness of metre; but Mr. Holland always saves himself in some expression so simply poetical, some image so fresh and natural, the harvest of his own heart and eye, that we are ready to forgive him all faults, in our thankfulness at finding the soul of Theocritus transmigrated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... in its heart, it was proud of him. With a half-dozen automobiles, and Christine Howe putting on low neck in the evenings, and now a butler, not to mention Harriet Kennedy's Mimi, it ceased to pride itself on its commonplaceness, ignorant of the fact that in its very lack of ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... on, feverishly, twisting my hands together. "I have given up the fight! I have been beaten—oh, my God—beaten! Think of those raging hours in the woods, those hours of defiance, of glory! I gazed at commonplaceness and dulness—I mocked at it; and now it has conquered me! I am trampled down, beaten! It is all gone out of me!" And then I cried out in despair and terror: "Oh, no, it can't be! ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... it was a city to dwell in and make money in, but hardly a city to live in. The millionaires were building white-marble palaces, taxing the ingenuity and the originality of the native architects, and thus to some extent relieving the general ugliness and drab commonplaceness, while the merchant princes had begun to invade the lower end of the avenue with handsome shops. But in spite of all this, in spite of its pretty girls—and Jefferson insisted that in this one important particular New York had no peer—in spite of ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... that this novel was very popular, and certain causes of its popularity are not difficult to come at. A large measure of the success that Euphues had is due to the commonplaceness of its observations. It abounds in proverbs and copy-book wisdom. In this respect it is as homely as an almanac. John Lyly had a great store of 'miscellany thoughts,' and he cheerfully parted with them. His book succeeded as Tupper's ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... pleasing suggestions, such as seeing faces in the clouds, which vanish almost as soon as they are discerned. Both Imagination and Fancy naturally express themselves, often and effectively, through the use of metaphors, similes, and suggestive condensed language. In painful contrast to them stands commonplaceness, always ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... unfortunate, inability to follow anything but my own genuine opinion prevented me from enjoying it. And I cannot enjoy it now. It is not a commonplace book, nor is anything else of its author's; but the price paid for the absence of commonplaceness is excessive. A person possessing genius, and sure of it, does not tell you that he has been rewriting his book (not for correction of fact, but for improvement of style) for ten years, and that now he doesn't ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... scattered upon this stained and dented table top. He dreamed of joys and luxuries and power which always had been beyond his grasp, and as he dreamed his gaze lifted from the table, as the gaze of a dreamer will, to a far distant goal above the mean horizon of terrestrial commonplaceness. ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... works of her first decade of authorship a few effusions in which Mrs. Haywood has succeeded to a degree in motivating, characterizing, or analyzing the passions of her characters, must be exempted from the general charge of commonplaceness. The first of these is "Idalia: or, the Unfortunate Mistress" (1724), the story of a young Venetian beauty—like Lasselia, her charms can only be imagined not described—whose varied amorous adventures carry her over ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... ago, I called upon Mrs. Wilson after her husband had passed on and left her alone in the charming home. She was in her work-room, if a place so decoratively enchanting can be connected with a subject so stern and prosaic, so crowded with every-day commonplaceness, as work. It was a bower of beauty, with light, graceful furniture, and pots of plants making cheerful greenery at every available spot. Vases of flowers cut from her garden, tended by her own ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... exhilarating quality of nihilism, imbibed, as is said, directly from the author of Zarathustra. Reading a fragment of the documentary statement of Dada-ism, we find that the charm of the idea exists mainly in the fact that they wish all things levelled in the mind of man to the degree of commonplaceness which is typical of and ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley |
