"Banal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 and flattened ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... that she 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 find engagements ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... banal message on the soiled card, then restored cash and postal to their respective pockets. After which he stood frowning down in puzzled conjecture on ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... sa canan nang dios ama macagagaua sa lahat. Ang ycapito sumangpalataia ang a tin panginoon Jesuchristo saca parito hohocom sa nabubuhai at sa nangamatai na tauo. Ang ba nal na tauo gagantihin niya nag caloualhatian nang langit, ang nacasonor silla nang caniyang otos. Ang di banal pacasasamin sa infierno ang di silla sumonor nang otos ...
— Doctrina Christiana • Anonymous
... plus grandes, deviennent niaiseries tot ou tard. Votre ignorance de ma langue m'epargne cette heure fatale. Pour vous, mon livre sera toujours une belle et noble chose. Il ne peut jamais devenir pour vous banal comme une epouse. II sera pour vous une vierge, mieux qu'une vierge, il sera pour vous une demi-vierge. Chaque fois que vous l'ouvrirez, vous penserez a des annees ecoulees, au jardin ou les rossignols chantent, ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... rather 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 rag-time of "Harrigan" ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... stopped before them, and were eying equally the artist, his work, and his companion with somewhat insolent curiosity. Helen felt herself stiffening; her companion drew himself up with soldierly rigidity. For a moment it seemed as if, under that banal influence, they would part with ceremonious continental politeness, but suddenly their hands met in a national handshake, and with a ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... 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
... the other," she announced. I think she expected him to say "Impossible," but, whatever he was, he was never banal. ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the books, magazines, flowers, and candy, with which Banneker had sought to fortify her against the tedium of the trip. As the time for departure drew near, they fell into and effortfully maintained that meaningless, banal, and jerky talk which is the inevitable concomitant of long partings between people who, really caring for each other, can find nothing but commonplaces wherewith to ease their stress of mind. Miss Van Arsdale's common sense came ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... terrified, as 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, I don't venture to answer. Perhaps in time and as I grow wiser ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... 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 ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... his chest; her smooth arm against his shoulder; the 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 a ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... dear, all this isn't news to me. Surely you, who've gipsied with me, aren't going to be so obvious, so banal, as to blame me because you've cared ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... 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 withered up ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... If you read one of 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 ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... have thought of; or they may 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
... is 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
... 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. It ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... professional guidance. At an early stage in his growth he discovered and fed full upon Shakespeare. As a university student he also fell in love with the homely lore of German folk-poetry. In 1794 he came back to Berlin, and turned to rather banal hack-writing for the publisher Nicolai, chief of all exponents of rationalism. Significant was his early rehabilitation of popular folk-tales and chapbooks, as in The Wonderful Love-Story of Beautiful ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 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 Garden ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... by Oncken are the Bosnian crisis, the Morocco question, and the Austro-Serbian quarrel which led to the present war. It seems banal to have to point out that Bosnia was unlawfully annexed by Germany's vassal—Austria; that Germany, herself, brought Europe to the verge of war by sending the Panther to Agadir; and that the final catastrophic Machtprobe was likewise provoked ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... any possibility of inquiry for some time to come." He paused, and behind her, Diana heard him strike another match. The banal little incident nearly snapped her nerves that were stretched to breaking-point. She put her hands to her head to try and stop the throbbing ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... 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 ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... fear of being identified. When a man did open his mouth it was only to commit some banal idiocy, for which, during office hours, he would have been haled to the nearest insane asylum and labeled incurable. Added to this was a heat matching Sahara's and the oppressive odor of ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... 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 ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... 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
... 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, and the reputations of Mrs. Prockter and her parties ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... shared 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 ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... from 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 amanuensis?"—She paused, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... they don't 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
... concluded to be inevitable, whether it led to separation or legalization of their hitherto banal condition, followed quickly upon the appearance of Mr. O'Brien. On the day Mr. O'Brien called he had gone on a journey to Hegewisch, a small manufacturing town in Wisconsin, where he had been invited to witness the trial of a new motor intended to operate elevators—with a view ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... 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 ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... redeeming point in it, except that some ingenuity is shown in bringing about the denouement by a rupture between the villain-hero and the villainess-heroine, M. le Vicomte de Valmont and Mme. la Marquise de Merteuil. Even this, though fairly craftsmanlike in treatment, is banal enough in idea—that idea being merely that jealousy, in both sexes, survives love, shame, and everything else, even community in scoundrelism—in other words, that the green-eyed monster (like "Vernon" and unlike "Ver") ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... 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, with no unique idiosyncrasies ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... 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 ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... part, of the first "book" is—interesting! It is mere verse. As verse, even, it is often so involved, so musicless occasionally, so banal now and again, so inartistic in colour as well as in form, that one would, having apprehended its explanatory interest, pass on without regret, were it not for the noble close—the passionate, out-welling lines to "the truest poet I have ever ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... if we consider the Croats only in respect to their language, as it prevails among them at the present time. Here they do not appear as a distinct race; but still are divided into two portions. One, in Military Croatia, comprising the military districts of Carlstadt and Varasdin, and also the Banal Border, speak the Dalmatian-Servian dialect with very trifling variations; the other, in Provincial Croatia, i.e. the provincial counties of Agram, Kreutz, and Varasdin, approach nearer to the Slovenzi or Vindes, whose language will be the subject of our next section.[31] ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... 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 ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... 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 me ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... flew for restoratives; bathed her brow with a dampened handkerchief; held strong salts to her nostrils, and murmured words of foolish, banal consolation, whilst Rotherby, in a half-dreaming condition, stunned by the suddenness of the blow, stood beside her, mechanically lending his ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... head 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 soul," ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... 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 woman ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... stilted, banal little phrase had fallen awkwardly from Magda's lips, and Quarrington had ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... galanterie', 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 ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... lost 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 could render! ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... celestial figures, with the exception of the original Lucifer, are as banal as those of the old miracle plays; and his Adam and Eve are dull, wooden figures that serve merely to voice the poet's theology or ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... 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 for indigestion,—these sort of subjects were ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... or if he may escort her to a place of amusement. There are instances in romantic stories and in real life where a man and a maid have met without the help of a third party and have entered upon a charming friendship. They are rare, rarer in fact than in fiction. It is banal to say that a girl can usually tell. But she can, and if she has any doubt (and this is true of all her relations with men) she should have no doubt. She should stop where ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... 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 compliment than ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... finishing of it. The last touches, which are intended to draw the picture together, take off from its freshness. To appear before the public one must cut out all those happy accidents which are the joy of the artist. I compare these murderous retouchings to those banal flourishes with which all airs of music end, and to those insignificant spaces which the musician is forced to put between the interesting parts of his work in order to lead on from one motive to another or to give them their ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... appeared in the doorway for a second before he saw my father and was struck with fear, and how like yours it was—but more like John Prather's. And the high-sounding preachments about the poverty that might go with fine gowns became real to me. They were not banal at all. They were simple truth, free of rhetoric and pretence. I knew that my cry of 'It's not in the blood' was as true in me as any impulse of yours ever could ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... 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
... phrase as being not inapplicable to the atmosphere of MacDowell's writing. He has few reservations, and he shows small liking for recondite effects of harmonic colour, for the wavering melodic line—which is far from implying that he is ever merely obvious or banal: that he never is. His clarity, his directness, find issue in an order of expression at once lucid and distinguished, at once spontaneous and expressive. It is difficult to recall, in any example of his maturer work, a single passage that is not touched with a measure of beauty ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... 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 of Jesus, under pretense that the metropolitan dean of Manila ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
... reading room, resembles some dingy settlement boys club. A desk and high stool are in one corner. A table with papers, stacks of pamphlets, chairs about it, is at center. The whole is decidedly cheap, banal, commonplace and unmysterious as a room could well be. The secretary is perched on the stool making entries in a large ledger. An eye shade casts his face into shadows. Eight or ten men, longshoremen, iron workers, ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... 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 ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... large dwellings, a fine church bearing all the insignia of nobility, a spacious farmyard in which there is a barn, a stable, a sheep-pen, a dovecote, and other buildings, all of which are within the area of the said fort; next to which stands a banal mill, a fine brewery of masonry, together with a large retinue of servants, horses, and equipages, the cost of which buildings amount to sixty thousand livres; so much so that this seigneury is one of the most valuable in the whole country.' The population of Longueuil, in the census ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... belonged to him by the title of those dangers he had been through. What had Florimond done to establish his claim to her? He had remained absent during long years, a-warring in a foreign land. With how many banal loves might not the fellow in that time have strewn his soldier's path! Garnache knew well how close does Cupid stalk in the wake of Mars, knew well the way of these gay soldiers and the ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... 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, ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... 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 hypocritical ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... 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
... town of Villefranche 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 ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... had made the 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 things they loved; went more frequently to the theater; appeared ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... 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
... After the usual banal phrases my husband inquired if Martin was staying in the house, and then asked if he would ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... of plans are 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
... "Verdi's bric-a-brac is very banal. Perhaps you prefer Strauss. His dissonances are ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... 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 ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... 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 ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... 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 ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... 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 Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... Corinne Madame de Stael had, in the fullest sense of a banal phrase, "seen a great of the world." She had lost the illusions which the Duessa Revolution usually spreads among clever but not wise persons at her first appearance, and had not left her bones, as too many[12] ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... The novel, mediocre, banal, merely sensational, and worthless for any purpose of intellectual stimulus or elevation of the ideal, is thus encouraged in this age as it never was before. The making of novels has become a process of manufacture. Usually, after the fashion of the silk-weavers of Lyons, ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 a ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... comprehension of the feelings of a dozen young women who appeared to spend their whole existence in statuesque poses and plaintive but nonsensical lyricism. It failed, honestly; and even when the action descended from song to banal dialogue, it was not reassured. 'Silly' was the unspoken epithet on a hundred tongues, despite the delicate persuasion of the music, the virginal charm of the maidens, and the illuminated richness of costumes and scene. The audience understood as little of the operatic ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... works. He reveled in portraying men of learning and/or high stature as well as peasants, believing that portraits of the latter could be as instructive as those of the former. His marriage to his wife Agnes was childless and banal, apparently because Drer was too preoccupied with intellectual matters to be much interested ...
— Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - [This is our volunteer's translation of the title] • Albrecht Durer
... crossed his mind at the moment, she had, by the time the last bars of the minuet had been played, succeeded in completely dispelling it; he never realised in what a fever of excitement she was, what effort it cost her to keep up a constant ripple of BANAL conversation. ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... 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 ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... in the mouths of beginners, possess an unfailing charm for women, and are insipid only when read coldly; for a young man's tone, glance and attitude give a surpassing eloquence to the banal phrases. Mme. de Nucingen thought that Rastignac was adorable. Then, woman-like, being at a loss how to reply to the student's outspoken admiration, ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ferry boat, ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... a certain want of correspondence between the melodious language and any clearly apprehended mental picture. We might find the vigour too often lapsing into sheer bad taste, or the simplicity taking the fatal step into simpledom, as when Tennyson ends the story of Enoch Arden with the banal remark that ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... more wholesome. But it was no good. I was seeing red all the time. 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
... 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
... uttered with a tragic emphasis which left him speechless. He could think of nothing to say that was not banal or superficial, and he realised that here were deep waters! He glanced once or twice at her face, which had grown suddenly dark and brooding; then, with a little motion of her hands, she seemed to push ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... Accustomed to dictate extempore speeches on any subject whatever to his shorthand pupils, he was quite at his ease, quite master of his faculties, and self-satisfaction seemed to stand out on his brow like genial sweat while the banal phrases poured glibly from the cavern behind his jagged teeth; and each phrase was a perfect model of provincial journalese. George Cannon had to sit and listen,—to approve, or at ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... comparison after I had left him for the night. It moved me strangely. I read the letter he had lent me the letter of Cecilia, who found the Berkshire moors so banal. Yes, she promised to prove a very undesirable help-meet on the veld, so far as I could judge. I thought over things generally that night, and I made up my mind to make a Quixotic offer in the morning. I would offer to ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... beautiful dark hair, the mere sight of which at one time stirred me to passion, had from sitting so long with her head bent c ome loose from the comb and was untidy, but, to my eyes, that only made it look more rich and luxuriant. All this, though is banal to the point of vulgarity. Before me stood an ordinary woman, perhaps neither beautiful nor elegant, but this was my wife with whom I had once lived, and with whom I should have been living to this day if it had not been for her ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... 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
... as yet he had said nothing to comfort her, or himself; and because every word that came bubbling to the surface appeared banal and inadequate, he continued silent, gazing at her and marveling at ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... 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 especial ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... conscious of a touch of impatience.... The manner was superb, tranquil and stately as a river; but the matter a trifle banal. Here was this old reprobation of Freemasonry, ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... man of few words, and those not the most polite in tone, for when the General began with a banal remark about the weather, M. ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... resigned myself to the fact that there was no one on Earth I would care to marry. I always had these teen-age dreams of a hero from space who would carry me off, and I guess I slipped you into the pattern without realizing it. I'm old enough now to face the fact that I like my work more than a banal marriage, and I'll probably end up a frigid and virtuous old maid, with more degrees and titles ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... 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 ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... 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 imagination must be forced ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... always are disappointing when they're hunted down. The ones that roar are quite insufferable, and the ones that don't are just banal." ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... saw and—he had read Jean d'Agreve!—they got to that at the end of the first half-hour, and then she froze up a little; some instinct told her it was dangerous ground, so she spoke suddenly of the weather, in a banal voice. ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... by foliage from Lake Constance, her husband slowly drowsed toward dissolution. She herself ripened in the sharp air of the capital and grew almost into another woman in this banal, disillusioned world, sober ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... art for life. As a portraitist, Titian's is the only name to be coupled with that of Velasquez. He neither flattered his sitters, as did Van Dyck, nor mocked them like Goya. And consider the mediocrities, the dull, ugly, royal persons he was forced to paint! He has wrung the neck of banal eloquence, and his prose, sober, rich, noble, sonorous, rhythmic, is to my taste preferable to the exalted, versatile volubility and lofty poetic tumblings in the azure of any school of painting. His palette is ever cool and fastidiously restricted. It has been said that he lacks ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... I 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 |
