"Banality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... charm—that of quiet seriousness and simplicity. I remember how strange it used to seem to me to hear her discoursing on theatres and the weather to my brother Woloda! I knew that of all things in the world he most despised and shunned banality, and that Varenika herself used to make fun of forced conversations on the weather and similar matters. Why, then, when meeting in society, did they both of them talk such intolerable nothings, and, ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... quadrangles, and puts on the semblance of a male human being as distinguished from an asexual pedagogue. Professor Walter Raleigh is improving. Professor Elton has never fallen to the depths of sterile and pretentious banality which are the natural and customary level of the remaining three.... You think I am letting my pen run away with me? Not at all. That is nothing to what I could say if I tried. Mr. J.W. Mackail might have been one of our major critics, but there again—he, too, prefers the security of a Government ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... settle, and without a word—for words he realised, could do no more than heighten the tragic banality of the situation—he went to the door, ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... the bottom was crumpled into folds which did well enough for little waves breaking on the shore. These waves now began to be agitated, and gradually rose gustily and advanced until they had covered the dead giant. It was a very good effect and avoided the banality of removing the body in sight of the audience; it looked as though the wind had risen and the depths had swallowed him. And this, as I afterwards was told, is what happens to the giant's ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... The banality did not affect Mrs Jones to laughter, as the speaker had a fear it might have done. She seized ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... "Catholicism is naive Christianity; Protestantism is sentimental." The sheer whimsicality of phrase seems to be at times its own excuse for being, as in an explanation of certain elegiac poems as "the sensation of misery in the contemplation of the silliness of the relations of banality to craziness;" but there are many sentences which go deep below the surface—none better remembered, perhaps, than the dictum, "The French Revolution, Fichte's Doctrine of Science, and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister are the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... like to congratulate the authors, Messrs. LECHMERE WORRALL, and HAROLD TERRY, on having given the public what they want, without lapsing into banality. The attraction of the first two Acts was not, perhaps, fully sustained in the third, but they gave us quite a cheerful evening; and at the fall of the curtain the audience was so importunate in their applause that Mr. DENNIS ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... and very centre of the life of our modern Paris. Upon the table there was a like importation of exotic dishes, saffron or anchovy sauces, spices mixed up with Turkish delicacies, chickens with fried almonds, and all this taken together with the banality of the interior, the gilding of the panels, the shrill ringing of the new bells, gave the impression of a table d'hote in some big hotel in Smyrna or Calcutta, or of a luxurious dining-saloon on board a transatlantic liner, the "Pereire" ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... stupidly, standing stock still, conscious of the grasp upon his arm, a curious sense of the importance of this apparently cheap experience surging over him, even while he resented its banality. "This is Broadway. What do you want ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... banality drop. The woman remained pensive for a while, then she shook her head and she—/she/ pronounced the word of excuse, of glorification; more than ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... working class it is always expedient, in the long run, to preserve the essential elements of the democratic order. This is, of course, true as a general rule. But Kautsky has reduced this historical truth to professorial banality. If, in the final analysis, it is to the advantage of the proletariat to introduce its class struggle and even its dictatorship, through the channels of democratic institutions, it does not at all follow that history always ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky |
