"Banal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... independence pleased him. Most women he had known had offered themselves shamelessly; this girl had kept him at a distance. This in itself would be enough to attract most men. The very novelty of it appealed to him. She was exceedingly pretty, too, yet hers was not the banal, conventional beauty of every day, but something fresher, more fascinating, more lovable, an indefinable, elusive charm that kept him guessing, yet always accompanied by a quiet dignity that compelled respect. Instead of flirting ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... for me to take the initiative, and as everything that rose to my lips seemed banal, we stood awkwardly silent till ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... be larger than life. I'm very glad for my own sake that you're to marry Osmond; but I won't pretend I'm glad for yours. You're very brilliant—you know that's the way you're always spoken of; you're an heiress and very good-looking and original, not banal; so it's a good thing to have you in the family. Our family's very good, you know; Osmond will have told you that; and my mother was rather distinguished—she was called the American Corinne. But we're dreadfully ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... bring them in your account, and be paid to the uttermost farthing; but if you would show them 'une galanterie', let your present be of something that is not in your commission, otherwise you will be the 'Commissionaire banal' of all the women of Saxony. 'A propos', Who is your Comtesse de Cosel? Is she daughter, or grand-daughter, of the famous Madame de Cosel, in King Augustus's time? Is she young or ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... at the piano, and without asking his audience to choose, began in a low voice an old, sweet, entirely banal and utterly heartbreaking ballad of Tosti's, with words by ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... provide me with a feast of Midas—all of gold—if necessary, and you shall some day, if you really wish. But to stop over paltry sums of francs, to destroy the thread of our conversation and thoughts—to make it all banal and everyday! That is what I won't have. Dmitry is there for nothing else but to eviter for me these details. It is my holiday, my pleasure-day, my time of joy. I felt young, Paul. You would not make one little shadow for me—would ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... higher than that of the Shepherd's Pipe. The author passes at times abruptly from careful and loving realism to the most stilted conventionality, and from passages of impassioned eloquence to others grotesquely banal. In some of his peculiarities, as in the perpetuai use of elaborate similes and in the indulgence in inflated paraphrases, he anticipates some of the worst faults of style cultivated by writers of the next century. There are ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... and other composers. He insisted on the superiority of Chopin's piano music above all others; nevertheless he devoted more time to Hummel, and I can personally vouch that he adored the slightly banal compositions of the worthy Dussek. It is quite true that he named his little villa on ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... house. Come and look at it." Even to-day and in the centre of London there is still something about a motor—well something.... Everybody who has bought a motor, and everybody who has dreamed of buying a motor, will comprehend me. Useless to feign that a motor is the most banal thing imaginable. It is not. It remains the supreme symbol of swagger. If such is the effect of a motor in these days and in Berkeley Square, what must it have been in that dim past, and in that dim town three hours by the fastest express from Euston? The ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... the ordinary banal hotel salon—is eloquent of the absorbing, far-reaching pursuits and interests amongst which you live. Who could ask a higher privilege than to share your father's work, to be his companion and ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... to her was so obvious that Sam wondered whether this could be the height of innocence or the most banal coquetry. The hostile look in the eyes of the lady proved it could not ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... accurate conception of life. So many things, except in a very nebulous and suggestive way, were sealed books to Aileen—merely faint, distant tinklings. She knew nothing of literature except certain authors who to the truly cultured might seem banal. As for art, it was merely a jingle of names gathered from Cowperwood's private comments. Her one redeeming feature was that she was truly beautiful herself—a radiant, vibrating objet d'art. A man like Rambaud, remote, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... subject to the banal reservation, "weather permitting," and the signal intended to bring Bosambo to his destruction was swallowed up in the bellowings ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... genuine sympathy for earnestness and sincerity, even on the side of truth and righteousness. Nobody else even looked at it. People said to themselves, "This book seems to be a book with a teaching not thoroughly banal, like the novels-with-a-purpose after which we flock; so we'll give it a ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... into my head. Now, please don't say it! It's such a beastly banal joke, don't you know, that one about ideas. Would you mind answering ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... negation of philosophy. Its error consists not in the demand, but in sticking to the demand, which seriously it neither does nor can enforce. It believes it can accomplish this negation by turning its back on philosophy, the while its averted head utters a few irritable and banal phrases over it. Moreover, its horizon is so limited as to exclude philosophy from the realm of German actuality unless it imagines philosophy to be implied in German practice and in the theories subserving it. It urges ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... sitting. When it was all over, and the Vaneckens were eliminated, when, in fact, the Breams had joined the Forsyths at a wedding dinner which the bride's father had given them at Delmonico's and had precipitated themselves into a train for Niagara ("So banal," Mrs. Forsyth said, "but I suppose they had to go somewhere, and we went to Niagara, come to think of it, and it's on their way West"), the bride's mother remained up late talking it all over. She took credit to herself for ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... heaven knows how many other places, and pausing here and there on tiptoe to greet an acquaintance, at the tail of which, carried along by its impetus, was Elinor. She was not looking either well or happy, but she was responding more or less to the impulse of her set, exchanging greetings and banal words with dozens of people, and sometimes turning a wistful and weary gaze towards the pictures on the walls, as if she would gladly escape from the mob of her companions to them, or anywhere. It was no ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... obvious," said Pointed Beard, in a tone that suggested sympathy with Beth for being bored. "I wonder she did not give us 'For manners are not idle,' et cetera, or something equally banal—the kind of thing we are taught ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... merchants' wives are terrified of "brimstone." When people talk to me of what is artistic and inartistic, of what is dramatic and not dramatic, of tendency, realism, and so on, I am bewildered, hesitatingly assent, and answer with banal half-truths not worth a brass farthing. I divide all works into two classes: those I like and those I don't. I have no other criterion, and if you ask me why I like Shakespeare and don't like Zlatovratsky, ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... Tale," he has gradually taken on a hesitating sort of romanticism, and in one of his later books, "Koenigliche Hoheit" (in English, "Royal Highness") he ends upon a note of sentimentalism borrowed from Wagner's "Ring." Fraeulein Viebig has also succumbed to banal and extra-artistic purposes. Her "Die Wacht am Rhein," for all its merits in detail, is, at bottom, no more than an eloquent hymn to patriotism—a theme which almost always baffles novelists. As for Frenssen, he is a parson by trade, and carries ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... And at night something happened that touched me off like an exploded train of gunpowder. Has Tudor told you about it yet? Doubtless he will. I tried to murder him, and succeeded in cracking his eye-glass. Banal, wasn't it? And I have an uneasy feeling that he came out top-dog after all, ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... so enchanted that she was not turning the conversation into banal things, he determined not to say anything which would cause her again to draw down the blind of ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... is on the western side of the harbor between the Petite Corniche and the water. Like all Riviera towns on a main road it has grown rapidly and medieval streets and buildings have almost disappeared, giving way to the banal architecture of the end of the nineteenth century. The garish brick villas of the head of the gulf are excrescences in their lovely garden setting. But after one has reached the eastern side of the harbor and gone through Font Saint Jean, the tramway road, ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... where the single baggage truck stood, loaded with elegant, leather-covered boxes and wicker basket-trunks, marked "E. Mills. S.S. Savoie. Compagnie Generale Transatlantique." Among them, out of place and drab, stood one banal department-store trunk labeled, "Welles. ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... sense he intended, the fur-merchant was entirely delightful—engaging as a child; for, among other marked qualities, he possessed the unerring instinct of the snob which made him select for his friends those whose names or position might glorify his banal insignificance—and his stories were vivid pictorial illustrations of this useful worldly faculty. O'Malley listened with secret delight, keeping a grave face and dropping in occasional innocent questions to heighten the color or increase the output. Others ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... occasional passing contact of her, scarcely veiled from the sense of touch by the thin flame-coloured silk; the perfume she affected; the faint odour of her bright blond hair. In an attempt to break the spell he made some banal remark, but she shook her head impatiently. She danced with her eyes half closed. When the music stopped she drew ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... with such loving care as Pisa. The circuit is complete save where the traveler enters the city; and there, alas, a wide breach has been made by the restless spirit of modernity. But once past the paltry barrier and the banal square, with its inevitable statue of Victor Emanuel, that take the place of the old Porta Romana, one quickly perceives that the city is a walled one. Glimpses of battlements close the vistas of the streets, and green fields peep through the open gates, marking that abrupt transition ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... silence for a space while he revised and restated that encounter. Then he would break out abruptly with some banal phrase. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... Reed Opdyke's chaff, meant in all good nature, had struck home to the very marrow of his self-distrust. He had clambered to a pedestal where he stood and preached banal things which, in reality, he doubted, and smiled at his congregation, and sniffed contentedly at the fumes of incense rising about him, incense of which he was but too well aware. He would have had no idea how to stop it; but, if the truth were told, he had had no ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... fainted from any cause but exhaustion from the general ordeal. She was still weak from the sickness she had been through—too weak to bear the strain of the work she had taken up. Of course, the catastrophe gave the whole surface situation away, and I must say that those rather banal young people behaved very humanely about it. There was nothing but interest of the nicest kind, and, if she is going on with her career, it will be easy enough for her to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... arc lamps gleam through the monotonous downpour. One can only stand and dream ... how charming people are since they are alive ... how charming the rain is and the night.... And how foolish arguments are ... how banal are these cerebral monsters who pose as iconoclasts and devote themselves grandiloquently and inanely to ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... think out things for himself. A pretty compensation! If that's the stuff revolutionists are made of some of us may well go on their knees to them," she continued in a slightly bantering voice, while the banal society smiles hardened on the worldly faces turned towards her with conventional deference. "The poor creature is obviously no longer in a position to take care of himself. Somebody will have to look after him ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... fault," she returned—"that everything, with him, is too deep. He has depths of silence—which he breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark. And when the remark comes it's always something he has seen or felt for himself—never a bit banal THAT would be what one might have feared and what would kill me But never." She smoked again as she thus, with amused complacency, appreciated her acquisition. "And never about you. We keep clear of you. We're wonderful. But I'll tell you what he does do," she continued: ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... would disturb him—no one. Privacy is only possible in a big town. Every detail of life in the Hotel Bungalow was revealed to him in a series of sights, sounds and smells. And should a fellow lunatic arrive, how was he to avoid him? At every meal there would be little exchanges of the banal, after dinner a game of billiards—even possibly, horror of horrors, potential excursions planned with zest and good fellowship. And all the time he would be saying "No," more and more ungraciously, or, worse still—and far more ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... varying colors. The sparkling wit, the swift judgment, the subtle insight, the lightness of touch, the indefinable charm of style—these belong to her temperament and her genius. But the clearness, the justness of expression, the precision, the simplicity that was never banal—such qualities nature does not bestow. One must find their source in careful training, in wise criticism, in ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... To my governor and captain-general, president and auditors of my royal Audiencia of the city of Manila, of the Philipinas Islands. Don Miguel Banal has informed me—in a letter of the fifteenth of July, six hundred and nine—that, at the instance of the natives of the village of Aquiapo, the late archbishop of that city wrote to me that the fathers of the Society ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
... sa baong ualang lamat. (Tag.) Ang sabi sa evangelio ni Cristo ay ganito. Hindi rao sia naparito o nanoag dito sa lupa para sacupin ang mga banal cung ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... Alexandria. A superficial knowledge of the materialistic or rationalistic theories, which were propagated respectively by the Epicurean and Stoic schools, was made the excuse for indifference to the law. Then as now the advanced Jew would mask his self-indulgence under the guise of a banal philosophy, and jeer easily at archaic myths and tribal laws. The dominating motive of Philo's work is to show that the Bible contains for those who will seek it the richest treasures of wisdom, that its ethical teaching is more ideal and yet more real than that which hundreds of sophists ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... guide-book tells you, is noted for its magnificent ruins of Richard Coeur de Lion's Chateau Gaillard, and for the culture of the sugar-beet, and so, often, merely on account of the banal mention of beet-roots, you ignore the attractions of Richard's castle and make the best time you can Parisward by the great Route Nationale on the other side of the Seine. This is wrong, of course, but the mood was on, and the song of speed was ringing in your ears and ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... "bad five minutes," beloved by our naive scribes of the ice-axe, in the perils and death which they court for the sake of adventure and exploration. Sir Martin Conway speaks of the systematic climber as the man for whom climbing takes the place of fishing and shooting. How depressingly banal! Yet Sir Martin Conway has written some of the finest tributes to the glories of the Alps, and has shown himself a master of artistic interpretation of their wealth of beauty. Whymper excels in matter-of-fact history of climbs, yet there is an undercurrent of reverence ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... slammed. They rolled homeward, and Ermentrude suffered from a desperate sense of the unachieved. The princess had been impertinent, the Keroulans rather banal. Mrs. Sheldam watched her charge's face in the intermittent lights ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... the midst of banal flattery of the emperor with astonishing splendour. The poem de qualitate temporis (4) closes with four fine lines with the ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... bowed, without saying anything banal about the absence of trouble. She was demurely conscious beneath his courtesy of the effort he was making to see her handwriting, and she wondered if he thought her refusal rude and a confirmation of his ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... millions, I've decided that this matter of sticking to things wears one out, particularly when the things concerned are men. There's nothing so often overdone and from to-day I swear to be amused. We talked about 'love'—how banal! With how many men have I talked ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... "Banal, hypocritical ass!" Donald soliloquized. "She was the mezzo-soprano soloist in your choir four years, and you haven't tried to help her since she came back to ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... The day after I took over from my predecessor I ventured into the men's recreation room. I was received with silence, frosty and most discouraging. I made a few remarks about the weather. I commented on the stagnant condition of the war at the moment. The things I said were banal and foolish no doubt, yet I meant well and scarcely deserved the reply which came at last. A man who was playing billiards dropped the butt of his cue on the ground with a bang, surveyed me with a hostile stare ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... York branch within two years, having just arrived with her Spring and Summer models, was showing them to an appreciative woman, a patron of many years. It is not an exaggeration to say that in all that procession of costumes for cool days or hot, ball-room, salon, boudoir or lawn, not one was banal, not one false in line or its colour-scheme. Whether the style was Classic Greek, Mediaeval or Empire (these prevail), one felt the result, first of an artist's instinct, then a deep knowledge of the pictorial records of periods in dress, and to crown all, that conviction of the real artist, which ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... is hurt. Amongst the feelings which had waked in her, dim and for the most part hardly understood, two at all events were clear. One a vague longing for something different from the banal path she daily trod, the other a poignant regret that she was as ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... undertaking. But dogmas, in the sense of abstract principles, regarded as immutable, are both superfluous and dangerous. If such dogmas are nothing more than the common denominator of all that has been identified with Judaism in the course of its history, they are sure to be banal and colorless. If they are to be fixed and unalterable, they are bound in time to clash with reason and experience, and to sap the religion of its vitality. Judaism needs principles that can help it to withstand danger, that can ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... mind and making an appointment, at which she turned up cheerful and unconcerned. She went to confession, and would meet me afterwards; and her faith in that, and the difference of our religions (if I had any religion) would make her seem strange and alien to me at times, even banal. At last our meetings became a mere habit of sensuality, with all charm, and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... have been more correct, and nothing more banal, than this part of their conversation. He certainly would call. He would travel down to the idyllic Putney to-morrow. He could not lose such a friend, such a balm, such a soft cushion, such a comprehending intelligence. He would bit by bit become ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... than Westminster, and a most large close about it and offices for the officers thereof, and a fine palace for the bishop." In later times Motley, the historian, thought it "too neat." Henry James calls it "a blonde beauty among churches," and even hints that it is a little banal. Another American critic, Mrs. Van Rensselaer, in a sympathetic study of the cathedral which appeared in "The Century Magazine," says: "If we think it feeble, it will be because we cannot see strength where it has been brought to perfect poise and ease. If our verdict is 'banal,' ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... there had died bravely. Extraordinarily enough, the most criminal had ordinarily met death most bravely. Of course, they had had leisure to prepare themselves, thinking a long time in advance of that supreme moment. But they affronted death, came to it almost negligently, found strength even to say banal or taunting things to those around them. He recalled above all a boy of eighteen years old who had cowardly murdered an old woman and two children in a back-country farm, and had walked to his death without a tremor, talking reassuringly to the priest and the police official, who walked almost ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... the nervous system. Imitators have fallen foul of this easy procedure, and with a laughable naivete imagine that in this way they can easily equal Wagner. And they have succeeded in making this valuable chord absolutely banal. ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... It may seem banal here to recall the truism that first-class art never reproduces its surroundings; but such banality is often justified by our human proneness to shuffle over the fact that many truisms are true. And this ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... that something had to be said, but for the life of him, for the first time in his experience, he couldn't hit upon the thing to say. "Good-afternoon" seemed to him too banal, commonplace; and he could think of nothing else for a moment. However, it ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... beauty, our curious minds, which know so many things and which have been able to compare the works of the most diverse civilizations, are perpetually seeking novelty, eager for rare forms, and inimical to everything banal and to everything that ordinary life brings before our eyes. And in our fin de siecle we have been so much the more prone to subtle pursuits because for some time our French art has seemed to take delight in the forms ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... banal compliments to the noble-women of his garrison and pinches the officers' wives when he finds one in a corner—and they seem to live in corners when His Imperial Highness is around—hence, no ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... part," said Mr. Fett, anointing the gridiron with a pat of ship's butter, "I offer no remark upon it beyond the somewhat banal one by which we have all been anticipated by Hamlet. 'There are more things in ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... ordinary young-men-loafers, and he was admitted as one of the assembly of men who traveled and saw things and wondered about the ways of men. It was good talk he heard; too much of hotels, and too many tight banal little phrases suggesting the solution of all economic complexities by hanging "agitators," but with this, an exciting accumulation of impressions of Vancouver and San Diego, Florida ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... Poetry, like the poor, we have always with us; but the critic is moved to remark, as he casts back in his mind over the last twenty years of amateur publishing activity, that on the whole the tone of amateur poetry is distinctly higher than it used to be. Banal verse we still have in larger amounts than we should; but the amateur journals of a decade or two ago had reams of it. On the other hand, they contained not a few poems with more than a passing spark of the divine fire. The promising fact is that in the poetry of today's journals we get much ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... each ought to be most respected. No one can estimate probably how much of the refinement, of the delicacy of feeling, has been lost to the world by the introduction of the postal-card. Anything written on a postal-card has no personality; it is banal, and has as little power of charming any one who receives it as an advertisement in the newspaper. It is not simply the cheapness of the communication that is vulgar, but the publicity of it. One may have perhaps only ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... with him. Liszt played it off as if he had known it all his life, reading all the orchestra parts. Both these great artists were enchanted with each other, but after a while Liszt became tired of music and asked if we could not have a game of whist. To play a banal game of whist with Liszt seemed a sacrilege, but we played, all the same. I was very distraite, seeing Grieg and his wife (who do not play cards) wandering restlessly around the room, and sometimes I put on an ace when a two would have ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... brief and exceedingly banal interview with Helen, and another with Andrew. And an interval having elapsed, Andrew was observed to approach Helen and ask her for a polka. Helen punctiliously accepted. And he led her out. The outraged gods of social decorum were appeased, ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... something of this feeling. The game was his, but there was no more to be won from her that night. The time had come to descend from the heights to the dull and banal levels. He divined her wish to return to earth, and he had no reason for thwarting it. With a careless laugh he put on speed and rushed her dizzily ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... ideas have brains that function exactly as those of other normal well-ordered citizens. They are not gifted by strange kinks in their brain cells. When the prominent cartoonist is contemplating the banal act of shaving or putting in a new furnace, his thoughts are no more or less exalted or lofty than when creating a cartoon idea intended to sway public opinion. Strange, isn't it, that considering ...
— Pictorial Photography in America 1922 • Pictorial Photographers of America
... Comtes de Foix. Foix' Palais de Justice, built back to back with the rock foundation of the chateau, is itself a singular piece of architecture containing a small collection of local antiquities. This old Maison des Gouverneurs, now the Palais de Justice, is a banal, unlovely thing, regardless ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... a family wishes to have his wife and children brought in contact with the most maudlin and banal phases of life. He defends them from the sensational editor and the unpleasant advertiser. He subscribes to a newspaper which he does not fear to leave about ...
— The Clock that Had no Hands - And Nineteen Other Essays About Advertising • Herbert Kaufman
... majesty—yes, if silver trumpets had announced the advent, instead of a stout, aproned woman, the moment could not have been more majestic in its sadness. I say "sadness," which is the inevitable and sole effect of these eternal and banal questions, "Whence? Whither?" ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... disastrous legislature has excited an universal weariness; the guilt of particular members is now less discussed than the insignificance of the whole assemblage; and the epithets corrupt, worn out, hackneyed, and everlasting, [Tare, use, banal, and eternel.] have almost superseded ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... thus to be banal, it is only to remind you that Collier's theories are today as exploded as the ludicrous deductions of the Spanish school. In the place of their fugitive and warring dreams we have, definitely, ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... melody and witty brevity. How rare it is to find a poet with such metrical skill who is content to handle the minor themes of life in this mood of delicious pleasantry. The only failure in the book is the banal sonnet entitled "On Raiding the Ice Box." This we would be content ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... of remarks suitable to one or both of my old companions, but they all, somehow, seemed banal and excessive as I marshalled them to my lips. A quaint, almost hypnotic quiet rose like the tide around us: all seemed said and agreed to. A tiny fire flickered on the Franklin hearth; the iridescent fan-tailed fish bent ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... what he had expected. There was no empty boast about the speech, as there would have been if Laura Highford had uttered it—she was fond of demonstrating her conquests and power in words. There was only a weariness as of something banal and tiring. He must ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... bowed and he seemed to be speaking to himself. Stanton caught a phrase or two and found it was verse—banal verses, which were there and then fixed in his fly-paper memory. "Tell me, my secret ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... visits to Chantilly and other places, at the massed luxury of the shops; she had wondered, starting with St. Luke's Square as a standard, how they could all thrive. But now in her first real glimpse of the banal and licentious profusion of one among a hundred restaurants, she wondered that the shops were so few. She thought how splendid was all this expensiveness for trade. Indeed, the notions chasing each other within that lovely and foolish head ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... Plates were printed after the first page of Postscript, at the mid-sentence point "they preferred imitations of sentimental, / banal, story-telling ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... She blinked her eyes open and moved one hand at her side, and then she came fully awake. "Well," she said. "And a bright hello to you, Sleuth. If it's not being too banal, where ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... to make martyrdom less inevitable in the end, for the man who has a thought, a discovery, an idea, to tell us. Such men are rare, and their thought, when they produce it, is sure to be unpalatable. For, if it were otherwise, it would be thought of our own type—familiar, banal, commonplace, unoriginal. It would encounter no resistance, as it thrilled on its way through our brain, from established errors. What the genius and the prophet are there for is just that—to make us listen to unwelcome ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... shrewd conjecture and let the opportunity to say something banal go by without a word. Perhaps it was a test, after all. He merely replied that she was paying him a greater ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... lights, in the middle of this theater of people, facing the bland, almost banal, stare of that monocle, it looked exceedingly probable that, after all, in spite of her dreaming, this was what life would prove to be. But she hated the thought, as she hated that Kerr should be the one to show it to her; as she would ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... hurled at her in a glance all the love I must forego; she stood there with than banal smile of hers, the detestable chill smile of a marble statue, with none of the warmth in it that it seemed to express. Can you form any idea, my friend, of the pain that overcame me on the way home through rain and snow, across a league of icy-sheeted quays, without a hope left? Oh, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... peculiar to the morrow of a fete. The furniture, stripped of its coverings, offered the faded tint of old maids at their rising. With heavy head, he sat at his desk and looked at the piled-up documents with a vague expression. Always the eternal pile of despatches, optimistic reports, and banal summaries of the daily press. Nothing new, nothing interesting, all was going well. This ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... thrown back, with that banal expression on his face of a dog pretending not to understand. The histrionic excellence of the performance was not lost on Tommy, who laughed ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... call attention to some reason for severity or mercy. But on the one hand if this is important it will already have been touched in the adduction of evidence, and on the other hand such points are generally banal and indifferent to the real issue in the case. If this be not so it would only indicate that either we need a larger number of judges, or even when there are many judges that one thing or ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... the most diverting instances of Mr. Benson's trick-playing style. He didn't mean that; he only said it. Much, if not most, of "The Thread of of Gold" is merely absurd. Some of it is pretentious, some of it inept. All of it is utterly banal. All of it has the astounding calm assurance of mediocrity. It is a solemn thought that tens of thousands of well-dressed mortals alive and idle to-day consider themselves to have been uplifted by the perusal of this work. It is also a solemn ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... minds keep regular office hours. Their habits of thought are all ready-made, proper, sober, befitting the Average Man. They worship dogma. The Bromide conforms to everything sanctioned by the majority, and may be depended upon to be trite, banal and arbitrary. ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... banal gratitude till they were out of earshot, when Lawrence drew a deep breath as if to throw off some physical oppression. Under the weathered archway, down the flagged steps and over the lawn. . . . How still it was, and ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... It was a banal statement, and Theydon knew it, but he blurted out the first crazy words that would serve to cloak the monstrous thought which leaped into his brain. And a picture danced before his mind's eye, a picture, not of the fair and gracious ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... Marian Fancourt's, it denoted the happy human being; but also it represented to Paul Overt that the author of "Shadowmere" had now definitely ceased to count—ceased to count as a writer. As he smiled a welcome across the place he was almost banal, was almost smug. Paul fancied that for a moment he hesitated to make a movement, as if for all the world he had his bad conscience; then they had already met in the middle of the room and had shaken ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... though proud of her handiwork, proclaimed him as such, —while he, quite unconscious of the effect he produced, wondered why this bevy of human beings, most of whom were more or less distinguished in the world of art and literature, had so little to say for themselves. Their conversation was BANAL,—tame,— ordinary; they might have been well-behaved, elegantly dressed peasants for aught they said of wise, cheerful, or witty. The weather,—the parks,—the theatres,—the newest actress, and the newest remedies ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... tired out suddenly. Her head drooped; from the windows of a building with terraces and balconies came the banal sound of hotel music; before the low mean portals of the Casino two red posters blazed under the electric lamps, with a cheap provincial effect.—and the emptiness of the quays, the desert aspect of the streets, had an air of ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... the same measure that his health was undermined, his artistry grew keener, becoming fastidious, exquisite, precious, delicate, irritable toward the banal, and most sensitive in matters of tact and taste. When he first came forward, there was much noise of approval and joy among those concerned, for what he had produced was a thing full of valuable ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... the etiquette, the books of that age always seem to the young to be the last word of all that is awkward and "bad form," although in two or three generations these very modes regain a certain quaint charm. And for the moment poor Anthony represents to the emancipated youth of our time all that was "banal" and prosy some thirty years ago. The taste of our youth sets hard for a new heaven, or at least a new earth, and if not that, it may be a new hell. Novels or poems without conundrums, without psychologic problems, with no sexual theorems to solve, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... seen from the outside. Nothing particular may be transpiring within the walls, or tragedies, crimes, hideous suffering may be enclosed. The conclusion is obvious to banality—but as suggestive as banal—so suggestive in fact that the hyper-sensitive and too imaginative had better, for their own comfort's sake, leave the matter alone. In most cases the existing conditions would not be altered even if one knocked at the door and insisted on entering with drawn sword in the form of attendant ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... banal remark, but Adelle recognized it for a compliment and smiled prettily. She said nothing. Silence was still the principal method ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... know!" said Miriam Rooth. "You've not said a word to me. I don't mind your not having praised me; that would be too banal. But if I'm bad—and I know I'm dreadful—I wish you'd ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... words, and by a marked miracle of the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, that he persevered till death in the Catholic faith, and in submission to the Church. Another named Bonneville, or Banal, who is also stated to have been an heresiarch, who had been thirty years buried in the darkness of errors, was converted in a similar manner at Rimini by the sermons of St. Anthony, and had a ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... Linder—she thinks he is a dear, only she daren't tell Mother and Father so, or they would be startled. And then there is Mr. C. Chaplin—always there is Mr. C. Chaplin. Personally, I loathe the cinematograph. It is, I think, the most tedious, the most banal form of entertainment that was ever flung at a foolish public. The Punch and Judy show is sweetness and light by comparison. It is the mechanical nature of the affair that so depresses me. It may be clever; I have no doubt it is. But I would rather see the worst music-hall show that was ever put ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... fine were the air and scenery—but it remained unvisited, and thus the two were thrown together. One scorching noon they met; he invited her to a stroll on the cliff-road. She took his arm, and (looking back upon it now) remembers that as she took it she smiled "sillily," and made some banal speech about the blazing, brazen sea below. For she felt that he had guessed her secret, timid hope. . . . Now, recalling the episode (it is he who has given the signal for such reminiscence), she asks him what effect his ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... commonplace and conventional matter, lumbered with the recognized, inevitable and sacrosanct forms of composition. This was particularly the case in Sweden, where the influence of Ibsen now proved more violent and catastrophic than anywhere else. Ibsen destroyed the attraction of the old banal poetry; his spirit breathed upon it in fire, and in all its faded elegance it ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... Hugo, a gift for imposing upon himself with the charlatanry of pseudo-ideas; to observe, to analyse, to evoke with his imagination was not enough; he also would be among the philosophers—and Balzac's philosophy is often pretentious and vulgar, it is often banal. Outside the general scheme of the human comedy lie his unsuccessful attempts for the theatre, and the Contes Drolatiques, in which the pseudo-antique Rabelaisian manner and the affluent power do not entirely atone for the anachronism of ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Standish read the banal message on the soiled card, then restored cash and postal to their respective pockets. After which he stood frowning down in puzzled ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... say or do that was not banal in the eyes of men who had been through such experiences? Only listen and look on with the awe of one who feels that he is in the presence of immortal heroism. And an hour's motor ride away were troops in the glow ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... deeply in your debt,' he said; 'it would be banal to thank you for your divine music, yet permit me to say that I would willingly keep you for ever as my creditor, if you would but promise to make my debt the greater by singing to ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... Banal enough! Banal as truth! But I'm not thinking of his banners. I'm thinking of his pinched white youth And ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... perfectly natural and explicable, has all the air of a miracle. My contention is that the full use of those seven-and-a-half hours will quicken the whole life of the week, add zest to it, and increase the interest which you feel in even the most banal occupations. You practise physical exercises for a mere ten minutes morning and evening, and yet you are not astonished when your physical health and strength are beneficially affected every hour of the day, ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... order to be perfect, and that the doctrine of perfection reached by suffering was a barbarous cruelty, held in horror under the beautiful sky of Italy. When the conversation languished, he prudently sought again at the piano the phrases of the graceful and banal Sicilian air, fearing to slip into an air of Trovatore, which was written in the ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... walk," he said. He did not mean it like that, or as a compliment to her. When it was said he thought it sounded banal, and ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... nothing to tell herself that Mrs. Pantin was her best friend, and that what she was asking was merely a matter of business—the sort of thing that Mr. Pantin was doing every day. Her heart beat ridiculously and she was rather shocked to hear herself laughing shrilly at Mr. Pantin's banal inquiry as to whether she had not "nearly blown off." He added ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... could recommend you a better book to begin upon than the Poems and Ballads. Don't you see the moral of those four lines I've just quoted to you? Why should we wish to change from anything so free and delightful and poetical as lovers into anything so fettered, and commonplace, and prosaic, and BANAL, as wives and husbands? Why should we wish to give up the fanciful paradise of fluttering hope and expectation for the dreary reality of housekeeping and cold mutton on Mondays? Why should we not be satisfied with the real pleasure of the passing moment, without ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... listened to the feeble rattling of the palpable in such pieces as "Man and Superman" and "You Never Can Tell." It was precisely the manner of an old maid devouring "What Every Girl of Forty-Five Should Know" behind the door. As for Chesterton, his banal arguments in favour of alcohol shocked the country so greatly that his previous high services to religious superstition were forgotten, and today he is seldom mentioned by ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... his chapters in "Hunting the Grizzly" and ask yourself wherein its animation and attraction lie, you will find that it is because every sentence and every line report things seen. He does not, like the Realist, try to get a specious lifelikeness by heaping up banal and commonplace facts; he selects. His imagination reminds one of the traveling spark which used to run along the great chandelier in the theatre, and light each jet, so that its passage seemed a flight from point to point of brilliance. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... on opposite sides of the table, and had nothing to say to each other. After each banal observation he made came a heart-rending pause; she let a subject drop as soon as it was broached. It was over two months now since Maurice had seen her, and he was startled by the change that had taken ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... large exposition - one of these banal world fairs which I had often railed at. But now with my thousand-fold heightened sensibility of joy and beauty, I saw it all as a distinct dawning and precursor ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... of a Spanish dancer. Worth told me that he had put his whole mind upon it; it did not feel much heavier for that: a banal yellow satin skirt, with black lace over it, the traditional red rose in my hair, red boots and a bolero embroidered in steel beads, and small steel balls dangling all over me. Some com-pliments were paid ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... description of himself, and a description of Lottie, sort of authentic passports to be used in the conscious world. These authentic passports, self-describing: nose short, mouth normal, etc.; he had insisted that they should do all the duty of the man himself. This ready-made and very banal idea of himself as a really quite nice individual: eyes blue, nose short, mouth normal, chin normal; this he had insisted was really himself. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... with barren words? I leave you to say what that is. We have a certain gentle disrespect among us for the doctor who is described as, oh! so sympathetic,—the man who goes about his work with a pocket-full of banal phrases calculated to soothe and comfort the cravings of the wretched. The sick and feeble take gladly these imitation crumbs cast from the full table of the strong. But sometimes people of firm character revolt at such petty and economical charity. I heard a vigorous old Quaker lady say once, after ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... ever made such a banal remark to a French vaudevilliste, whose clothes, jewels, and automobile represented an income as incompatible with fixed salaries as with war time, I cannot imagine. Automatic Americanism, ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... is not a repulsive skeleton, but rather a majestic form, full of grandiose mystery. Andreyev, on the other hand, but rarely breaks the bounds which unite him to reality. His heroes are living people, who act, and whose banal life ends with a banal death. This realism and this passionate love of truth make the strength and the beauty ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... had gleaned the first-fruits of Honor's sacrifice, for he had been less taciturn, and had even responded to his wife's efforts to engage him in ordinary conversation. Instead of sitting in silence throughout the meal, or exchanging banal remarks about the food or the weather, they had discussed the war and all that India was going to do to prove her loyalty to the Crown. He had spoken of the advance in science and surgery, bound to result from the lessons of the war; ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... Dignity doesn't trouble you any! My word! I'm often ashamed for you. You love everybody. You take all sorts of rebuffs without even raising your back. You're as pleasant and as banal as ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... of you, Angleford. If I were asked to spot a happy man, I should pitch upon you. I congratulate you upon your engagement. She's one of the prettiest and most charming girls I've ever met. That sounds rather banal, but I mean it. I hope you'll let us see a great deal of her, for Mary"—Mary was the duchess—"has, I can see, taken a great fancy to her. And I'm very glad to hear that you intend to make this your ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... find there, p. 5, a passage which I reproduce here on account of its agreement with my position. I must state at the outset that according to Furtmueller, psychoanalysis is peculiarly qualified to arouse suspicion against the banal conscience, which leads self-examination into the realm of the conscious only, with neglect of the unconscious impulses, which are quite as important for the performance of actions. The passage of interest ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... When she comes to the solution of the right triangle, the baseball diamond does not come to her mind. She has the boy learn a rule and try to apply it instead of having him find the distance from first base to third in a direct line. In her thinking such a proceeding would be banal because it would violate the sanctity of the book. She must adhere to the book though the heavens fall, ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... I have said, was an indication that it might be termed extremely clever or extremely stupid. It was not a poem, as has been held by some critics, that was a piece of intellectual vanity. Browning was far too great a man to stoop down to such mere banal conceit. The poem was a very different thing. It was a creature created by the obscurity of Browning's mind, which, as Chesterton thinks, was the natural reaction for a genius, born in a villa street in ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... of Rosina in Rossini's Il Barbiere has long been a favourite peg with prime donne on which to hang interpolated ornaments for the display of their vocal agility. Some of these are not always in good taste, being trivial or banal in character, thus concealing the natural charm of the original melody under a species of Henri Herz variations. Others, however, such as those used by the Patti and the Sembrich, for instance, are of great originality ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... in the Atre Perilleus,[7] and of Gawain and Hector in the Lancelot of the final cyclic prose version, are of the most banal description; the theme, originally vivid and picturesque, has become watered down into a meaningless adventure of the ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... Turkish carpet of banal reds, blues, and greens, it had to be concealed under rugs of black fur which, luckily, the hotel possessed in plenty. It was all very mysterious and exciting, and Annesley could imagine the effective ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... to give the extremely banal remark about dining and drinking tea at Rosings to Elizabeth instead of to Maria. The third edition, followed by all the others, ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... se trouva seul dans cette chambre froide, devant ce lit d'auberge inconnu et banal, loin de ceux qu'il aimait, son c[oe]ur clata, et ce grand philosophe pleura comme un enfant. La vie l'pouvantait prsent; il se sentait faible et dsarm devant elle, et il pleurait, il pleurait.... Tout coup, au milieu de ses larmes, l'image ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... banal waltz again, till the lad caught the tune. He hit it amazingly well, and his ear was unusually true. The dark one had been in Canada and was hungry for American rag-time. "'The Good Old Summer Time'—you know that? 'Harrigan'—you know that?" he said in English. The ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... culture and refinement. But a subtle spirit of irony pervaded it all. She would never have answered his printed inquiry had she not laughed over it. For, pinned to the top of the letter was the clipping, the stupid, banal clipping—"Will the lady who sang from Madame Angot communicate with gentleman who leaned out of the window? J.H. Burgomaster Club." There was neither a formal beginning nor a formal ending; only four crisp ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... It sounded banal, even ridiculous, but I hardly knew what to say. I was startled. The tolling of the bell, too, ...
— The Spinster - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... burlesque of no special distinction, and he projected for the Atlantic a scheme of "blindfold novelettes," a series of stories to be written by well-known authors and others, each to be constructed on the same plot. One can easily imagine Clemens's enthusiasm over a banal project like that; his impulses were always rainbow-hued, whether valuable or not; but it is curious that Howells should welcome and even encourage an enterprise so far removed from all the traditions of art. It fell to pieces, at last, of inherent misconstruction. The title was ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... free and independent—each could and did act according to his or her whim, and none could say them nay. Such freedom seemed unreal. They were children playing at life, and playing dangerously. Hundreds of times, in conversation with her coevals, she had cheerfully protested against the banal complaint that the world had changed of late years. But now she felt grievously that the world was different—that it had indeed deteriorated since her young days. She was fatigued by the modes of thought of these youngsters, as a nurse or mother is fatigued by too long a spell ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... her. Reason made a valiant but hopeless effort to assert itself. Was I sure that I wanted her—for life? No use! I wanted her now, no matter what price that future might demand. An awkward silence fell between us—awkward to me, at least—and I, her guide and mentor, became banal, apologetic, confused. I made some idiotic remark about being together in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Peter went home. Lord Evelyn shook hands with Peter rather affectionately, and said, "Come and see me again soon, dear boy. Lunch with me at Florian's to-morrow—you and your wealthy friend. Busy sight-seeing, are you? How banal of you. Morning in the Duomo, afternoon on the Lido, and the Accademia to fill the spare hours; I know the dear old round. Never could be worried with it myself; too much else to do. But one manages to enjoy life even without it, so don't overwork. ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... Marguerite. And what had he lost? What was there in her? She was not brilliant; she had no position; she had neither learning nor wit. He could remember nothing remarkable that they had ever said to each other. Indeed, their conversations had generally been rather banal. But he could remember how they had felt, how he had felt, in their hours together.... The sensation communicated to him by her hand when he had drawn off her glove in the tremendous silence of the hansom! Marvellous, exquisite, magical sensation that no words of his ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... had been set down. And partly the humour, like the delicate reserve of her manner, was a mask or a shelter. "I have taught myself," she writes to me from India, "to be commonplace and like everybody else superficially. Every one thinks I am so nice and cheerful, so 'brave,' all the banal things that are so comfortable to be. My mother knows me only as 'such a tranquil child, but so strong-willed.' A tranquil child!" And she writes again, with deeper significance: "I too have learnt the subtle philosophy of living from moment to moment. Yes, it is a subtle philosophy, ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... religious faithfulness surround the blind Pontiff. Before him all fall on their faces. Khans and Hutuktus approach him on their knees. Everything about him is dark, full of Oriental antiquity. The drunken blind man, listening to the banal arias of the gramophone or shaking his servants with an electric current from his dynamo, the ferocious old fellow poisoning his political enemies, the Lama keeping his people in darkness and deceiving them with his prophecies and fortune telling,—he ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... affairs that I am now dealing, not with heroic enterprises, ambitions, martyrdoms. Take the day, the ordinary day in the ordinary house or office. Though it comes seven times a week, and is the most banal thing imaginable, it is quite worth attention. How does the machine get through it? Ah! the best that can be said of the machine is that it does get through it, somehow. The friction, though seldom such as to bring matters to a standstill, is frequent—the sort of friction that, when it occurs in ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... they were served nutritious meals on bare boards, in china half an inch thick. Autumn, New York's most beautiful season, was in the air with its heart-lightening tang; energy seemed to flow into them as they breathed. They took long walks in the afternoons to the Park, which Stefan voted hopelessly banal; to the Metropolitan Museum, where they paid homage to the Sorollas and the Rodins; to the Battery, the docks, and the whole downtown district. This they found oppressive at first, till they saw it after dark from a ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... enough will be of as high a quality as anything that the average commercial photographer can produce, and, better yet, it will not have any flat and stale commercial flavor about it. Nothing is more static and banal than the composition that the ordinary professional will produce if you fail to prevent him from having his own way. Ten to one, all the lower half of the picture will be empty foreground, and not a living creature will appear in the entire ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... that sort of business, and there was no question about it that Hardy was enjoying himself hugely. He was leaning upon the table, a coffee-cup between his relaxed brown hands, listening with an eagerness highly complimentary to the banal remarks we had to make upon the subject. "This is talk!" he ejaculated once with ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... surprise. Where he had expected to find an overblown, coarse woman with the strident voice of the music hall and its banal vulgarities, he had seen a girl, young, spontaneous, full of a sparkling charm. He had heard enough singing to know that her voice, fresh and untrained, had promise, and that the spirited dash of her performance indicated no common gifts. Under any circumstances she would have interested him; ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... break it did not seem so bad as he had anticipated. At first things went on smoothly enough. The campaign had not opened, and he was free to exercise his talents outside the political field. He drew cartoons dealing with banal subjects, touching with the gentle satire of his humorous pencil foibles which all the world agreed about, and let vital questions alone. And he and Edith enjoyed themselves: indulged oftener in ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... that," he told her. "You are so truthful yourself," he went on boldly, "that I shall run the risk of saying the most banal thing in the world, just because it happens to be the truth. I have felt for you since our first meeting what I have felt for no ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ma vie a tes huees, Je ne danserai pas sur ton treteau banal Avec tes histrions et ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... others. I find whole passages in my works wrongly quoted, and it is only in my appendix, which is absolutely lucid, that an exception is made. The misquotation is frequently due to carelessness, the pen of such people has been used to write down such trivial and banal phrases that it goes on writing them out of force of habit. Sometimes the misquotation is due to impertinence on the part of some one who wants to improve upon my work; but a bad motive only too often prompts the misquotation—it ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... The banal compliment pleased Mrs. Murray, and she began to talk of trivial matters in her usual trivial strain. Sydney scarcely listened: for once he was disconcerted, and angry with himself. He knew that he would have talked in a very different strain if he had imagined for one moment ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... know how much, nor how deeply distressing this whole affair has been to me." He managed to put an affecting pathos into words sufficiently banal, for he was an excellent actor. "I find that I am all sentiment. Under the shell of the hard-headed business man beats the heart of a school-boy. The memory of the hours we have spent together, the places we have seen, the joys and discouragements ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... yeggs too—it seemed only square—but the judge was out of town, and the marshal was afraid his Honor might cite him for contempt if he brought his prisoners to my party. These things probably seem to you most banal, but take it all round I do manage to keep amused. Of course, now and then I pay more for my fun than it's worth. Last summer I mixed in with some moonshiners in Tennessee. Moonshining is almost a lost art, and I wanted the ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... character. It has become slightly banal from frequent repetition, likewise the C sharp minor study in opus 25. But of its beauty, balance and exceeding chastity there can be no doubt. The architecture is at ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... snatches of song which for the past half-hour had proceeded from that part of the house, became more subdued and more rare. One by one the friends of the artists were leaving the theatre, after having paid the usual banal compliments to those whom they favoured, or presented the accustomed offering of flowers to the ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... still remained mysteriously at liberty in spite of the constant search for him. He seemed to have disappeared as completely as though he had passed out of the world and merged his identity into a chiselled name and a banal ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees |
