"Banality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thought. Instead, the words that came seemed to him somehow banal and commonplace. "I love you. I want to be with you all the time. When we are together things grow strange and desirable." Amorous mediocrities! So he edited them into a further banality and thus concealed his inability to give lofty utterance to his emotions by amusing himself with deliberately cheapened insincerities. "Saving my linguistic face," he thought suddenly, and ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... tired of doing much the same thing every day. My friends pursued their course with uneventfulness; they had no longer any surprises for me, and when I met them I knew pretty well what they would say; even their love-affairs had a tedious banality. We were like tram-cars running on their lines from terminus to terminus, and it was possible to calculate within small limits the number of passengers they would carry. Life was ordered too pleasantly. I was seized with panic. I gave ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... the banality of the judicial decisions in the matter of what is called beautiful. We come to learn their even greater uselessness in the matter of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... deteriorated and Trelawny's judgment grew more acute. Her corners grew more brutally protuberant beneath the tissue of glamour cast over them by a name. To her also Trelawny's purse was open; but long before the quarrel over "Queen Mab" his generous spirit had begun to groan under her prim banality, and to express itself in ungenerous backbitings. His final estimate he imparted to Claire when he was seventy-eight years old, and it remains for those who dislike ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... and cynically to the surface: Imita bene! The stuff is a good match enough! What more do you want? To produce plausible imitations, to save appearances, to amuse the mind with tricks, was the last resort of Catholicism in its warfare against rationalism. And such is the banality of human nature as a whole, that the Jesuits, those monopolists of Brummagem manufactures, achieved eminent success. Their hideous churches, daubed with plaster painted to resemble costly marbles, encrusted with stucco polished to deceive the eye, loaded with gewgaws and tinsel and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... coarsening of the craftsmanship, the spiritual bankruptcy, of the later Strauss, the grotesque pedantry of Reger, the intellectualism with which the art of Schoenberg has always been tainted, and by which it has been corrupted of late, the banality of Mahler, dovetail suspiciously. And yet, it is probable that the cause lies otherwhere, and that the conjunction of these four men is accidental. There have been, after all, few environments really friendly to the artist; most of the masters ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... part of Isolde was originally intended for Mdlle. Tietjens. He even adopted Italian mannerisms, operatic turns, trills, suspensions, cadences, and bravura tricks. We may follow how these Italicisms appearing in all their banality in his earlier works become more and more expressive ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... with no decent private accommodation for this kind of thing. The protagonist of Carnival was lodged in a perfectly good Venetian palace, where there was every convenience for having the matter out with his wife and her lover. For the rest the plot was commonplace to the verge of banality. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... the Bastions a very convenient place, since the girl did not think it prudent as yet to introduce that young man to her mother. It was here, then, I thought, looking round at that plot of ground of deplorable banality, that their acquaintance will begin and go on in the exchange of generous indignations and of extreme sentiments, too poignant, perhaps, for a non-Russian mind to conceive. I saw these two, escaped out of four score of millions of human beings ground between the ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... the orgy of banality, Frederick moved off to be alone with his thoughts. The deck, which in the middle of the day had been dripping with water, was now quite dry. He walked to the stern and looked out over the broad, foaming wake. He heaved a deep breath of joy at the thought that he was ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... her alone with her daughter, continuing by the lamplight their knitting for the poor, he had great difficulty in preventing himself from saying sneering things about the Marquis, and from revealing to Annette his real banality, veiled by a mask of ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant |
