"Banality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... generations and worn smooth by use. The lyrical phrase, when the first two or three words of it have been pronounced, finishes itself. From Carew's "Ask me no more," with its long train of imitations, to the latest banality of the music-halls, the songs that catch the ear catch it by the same device. The lyric, that is to say, is almost always dependent for its music on easy idiomatic turns of speech. The surprising word occurs rarely; with all the greater effect inasmuch as it is embedded in phrases ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... standing stock still, conscious of the grasp upon his arm, a curious sense of the importance of this apparently cheap experience surging over him, even while he resented its banality. "This is Broadway. What do you want ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... were romances in French, Italian, German, English, and American, new books, old books, all repeating the same stencils of passion in different colors. She could have spat at them and their silly ardors over the same old banality: I love him; he loves me—beatitude! I ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... 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 ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... banality drop. The woman remained pensive for a while, then she shook her head and she—/she/ pronounced the word of excuse, of glorification; more than ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... bilocation of Diana by the assistance of a simple magical process, when to his most certain knowledge she was hundreds of leagues away; but the recitations of Doctor Bataille have reduced bilocation to a banality, and a mere ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... OLD MORALITY, Back from your rest to loud banality. After St. Stephen's shindy, Devon No doubt appeared a very heaven: But cream's as much like water chalky As Torquay ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... Paris! Still, Professor Saintsbury does occasionally stray out of the university quadrangles, and puts on the semblance of a male human being as distinguished from an asexual pedagogue. Professor Walter Raleigh is improving. Professor Elton has never fallen to the depths of sterile and pretentious banality which are the natural and customary level of the remaining three.... You think I am letting my pen run away with me? Not at all. That is nothing to what I could say if I tried. Mr. J.W. Mackail might have been one of our major critics, but there again—he, too, prefers ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... growing stale in London. I was 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 up ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... you are finding me grouchy and that you are going to answer me: "What difference does all that make?" But everything makes a difference, and we are dying of humbug, of ignorance, of self-confidence, of scorn of grandeur, of love of banality, and ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... with a rope or a horse, young Mr. Fairbanks fills in his spare time writing scenarios. As everyone knows, the motion-picture drama has been a tawdry thing for the most part—either a rehash of old stage plays, novels, and short stories, or else mediocre "originalities" that epitomized banality. Young Mr. Fairbanks dissented from the established custom from the ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... read he commented. "These men who are writing like this are doing for this country what the Lake Poets did for England. They are making true literature for the nation, and saving it from banality. They are going to live. They will be classed some day with Wordsworth and all the rest of the best. Hear this from James Russell Lowell. It's about a violin, and is called 'In the Twilight.' It's worthy of Shelley." ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... 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 what is ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... acknowledge was his point of view—and this he was wise enough not to press at dinner tables and in drawing-rooms—that religion should have the penetrability of ether; that it should be the absorbent of life. He did not have to commit the banality of reminding them of this conviction of his at their own tables; he had sufficient humour and penetration to credit them with knowing it. Nay, he went farther in his unsuspected analysis, and perceived that these beliefs made one of his chief attractions for them. It was pleasant ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... talked music, of course—the commonplaces of it—such as any well-bred, smart, educated woman of the world knows how to talk nowadays, with perhaps just one good, big, absurd mistake thrown in,—thus, by the grace of humor keeping banality from becoming absolutely fatal. Madame Romedek was rather amusing. She tried to be the lady—which, as she doesn't know how, and only succeeds in being impossibly stupid, must have bored the men on ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... reaction was neither fear nor sorrow—only this deep delight in being with her that colored the banality of his words and made the mawkish seem sad and the posturing seem wise. He would come ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... been any renewal of pressure, and there are moments when the difference between proposing oneself and surrendering as a prize to one of several eagerly competing hostesses seems too crushing to be contemplated. My own people were at Aix for my father's gout; to join them was a pis aller whose banality was repellent. Besides, they would be leaving soon for our home in Yorkshire, and I was not a prophet in my own country. In short, I was ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... 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 ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... I'm sure. There must be lots," agreed Stanor, with a sincerity which condoned the banality of the speech. "About your good nature for one thing, I should say, and your generosity in forgiving a blundering man, and your jolly disposition which makes you smile when another girl would have been wild. I can understand all those and a lot more, but, just as a matter ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... be a banality to speak about the gratitude of the Belgian people toward America. Every one knows from the beginning of the war that when the Belgians were faced with starvation, it was the American Commission for Relief which saved the situation, forming all ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... the Charleston Transfer Company—a conveyance which, one judges, may be coeval with the city's oldest mansions. Little as we wished to leave Charleston we did not wish to defer our departure through any such banality as the unnecessary missing of a train. Therefore as we waited for the bus, on the night of leaving, and as train time drew nearer and nearer, with no sign of the lumbering old vehicle, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... proposait de faire beaucoup rire les spectateurs, mais il voulait aussi qu'ils se corrigeassent en riant." All this is disappointing. We should have expected Gallic esprit to rise superior to such banality. ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... suffered, blackened by time and neglect; and he asked himself whose work it might be that it should move him so intensely. On the adjoining wall a picture of a Madonna, a bad copy of an eighteenth-century painting, irritated him by the banality of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola |
