Banality Quotes - Page 2

• When you're creating you have to descend to depths. You've just got to go there - to the boredom, the banality, the loneliness and all that. Those moments of really feeling in the flow are fleeting.

  Errollyn Wallen

  Loneliness, Creating, Boredom

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• Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.

  Perry Anderson

  Simple, Ideas, Quality

  Perry Anderson (2005). “Spectrum”, p.76, Verso

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• What concerns me most is the horrible degradation our notions of truth, civility, and decency have undergone. Also the way that language has been malformed - we have been overcome with banality and the cynical misuse of language. When a candidate runs a campaign on a series of dog-whistles to bigots, then turns around and talks about "healing the wounds of division," that is right out of Orwell.

  George Saunders

  Running, Dog, Healing

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.

  Russell Jacoby

  Past, Thinking, Space

  "Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing". Book by Russell Jacoby, 1975.

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• Fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world.

  Diana Vreeland

  Fashion, World, Release

  Diana Vreeland (1985). “D.V.”, Vintage

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• My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life.

  Max Beckmann

  Art, Average, Fairy Tale

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• It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish.

  James Joyce

  Men, Long, Care

  James Joyce (1963). “Stephen Hero”, p.54, New Directions Publishing

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• A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices.

  Alasdair Gray

  Numbers, Immature, Ordinary

  "Unlikely Stories, Mostly". Book by Alasdair Gray, 1983.

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• American bankers believe in the personal touch; the teller conveys a sense that he happens to be there accidentally and he is overjoyed at the lucky chance of the encounter.

  Graham Greene

  Believe, Bankers, Encounters

  Graham Greene (1970). “The Collected Edition: Our man in Havana”

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• I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me.

  Chris Marker

  World, Interest, Stills

  "Fictional character: Narrator". "Sans Soleil", www.imdb.com. 1983.

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• It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror.

  Jean Lorrain

  Blood, Ice, Everyday

  Jean Lorrain (2002). “Nightmares of an Ether-drinker”

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• The only master that exists, the only one that's true and believable is your own conscience. To find it you have to stand in silence-alone and in silence-you have to stand on the naked earth, naked yourself and with nothing around you, as if you were already dead. You don't hear anything at first; the only thing you feel is terror, but then you begin to hear a voice, away in the background, far off; it's a calm voice, and maybe its banality gets on your nerves to begin with.

  Susanna Tamaro

  Voice, Silence, Naked

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• Billy was fascinated by the television. At its most basic level, it occupied his time and shut out the demons of isolation. This was another irony because, for so long, he had shunned the tube for a similar purpose-to prevent it from bombarding his brain with demons of banality. However, each time he turned the machine on, he began to discover a world of assorted delights, as well as gain insight into the insidious manner in which this medium was shaping the mass psyche. If nothing else, he learned there was nothing innocuous about it.

  Jim Carroll

  Long, Brain, Purpose

  Jim Carroll (2010). “The Petting Zoo: A Novel”, p.176, Penguin

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• It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Class, Bourgeoisie, Chromosomes

  Jean Baudrillard (1989). “America”, p.87, Verso

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• The truth is so simple that it is regarded as a pretentious banality.

  Dag Hammarskjold

  Simple, Truth Is, Pretentious

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• That's what I love about music...all these banalities suddenly turn into these beautiful, effervescent pearls.

  Mark Ruffalo

  Beautiful, Pearls, Turns

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• On the subway today, a man came up to me to start a conversation. He made small talk, a lonely man talking about the weather and other things. I tried to be pleasant and accommodating, but my head began to hurt from his banality. I almost didn't notice it had happened, but I suddenly threw up all over him. He was not pleased, and I couldn't stop laughing.

  John Doe

  Lonely, Hurt, Men

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• At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life.

  Milan Kundera

  Morning, Moving, Adventure

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• The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.

  Teju Cole

  Evil, World, Enthusiasm

  Teju Cole (2016). “Known and Strange Things”, p.240, Faber & Faber

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• But some natives--most natives in the world--cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go--so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they enjoy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Reality, Envy, Boredom

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• Banality is sometimes striking.

  Marguerite Duras

  Sometimes

  Marguerite Duras (2015). “Hiroshima Mon Amour”, p.93, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Hume develops his arguments by a series of models. He doesn't call them models in the pretentious way in which we envelope, very often, pure banalities in this jargon

  Lionel Robbins, Baron Robbins

  Jargon, Envelopes, Way

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• Life happened. In all its banality, brutality, cruelty, unfairness. But also in its beauty, pleasures and delights. Life happened.

  Thrity Umrigar

  Brutality, Delight, Life Happens

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• When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés moves us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion. . . . Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.

  Umberto Eco

  Laughter, Pain, Moving

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• Whatever power there is in the urban pictures is bound to the closeness with which they skirt banality. For a shot to be good — suggestive of more than just
  what it is — it has to come perilously near being bad, just a view of stuff.

  Robert Adams

  Views, Stuff, Skirts

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