Dull Quotes - Page 11

• You travel with a whetstone on your arm? (Kiara) You don’t ever want to kill someone with a dull knife. It takes too long to sever their arteries, or puncture organs, and it makes it even messier than normal. (Nykyrian)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Knives, Long, Want

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2009). “Born Of Night: Number 1 in series”, p.93, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel; But do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade.

  William Shakespeare

  Friendship, Real Friends, Adoption

  'Hamlet' (1601) act 1, sc. 3, l. 58

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

  Lionel Shriver

  Age, Stories, Wells

  Lionel Shriver (2011). “We Need to Talk about Kevin”, p.17, Counterpoint Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• She handed him a glass of water and two Aleve gelcaps. “They’re anti-inflammatories. They will dull the pain a little bit and keep down swelling and redness. Swallow the pills, don’t chew.” “Well, I thought I’d stick them into my nose and impersonate a walrus, but if you insist, I’ll swallow them.

  Ilona Andrews

  Pain, Glasses, Two

  5 Copy quote

• Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Inspirational, Life, Creative

  H. P. Lovecraft (2013). “The Classic Horror Stories”, p.414, OUP Oxford

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence.

  Samuel Beckett

  Lightning, Guarantees, Compromise

  4 Copy quote

• Does not man lack the force at the very point where he needs it most? And when he soars upward in joy, or sinks down in suffering, is not checked in both, is he not returned again to the dull, cold sphere of awareness, just when he was longing to lose himself in the fullness of the infinite.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Men, Joy, Suffering

  Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1990). “Sammlung”, Burns & Oates

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

  Albert Einstein

  Personality, Creative, Political

  Albert Einstein (2011). “The World As I See It”, p.15, Open Road Media

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.

  Edith Wharton

  Ignorance, Hypocrisy, Together

  Edith Wharton (2010). “The Age of Innocence”, p.36, Bibliolis Books

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Spiritual, Sadness, Sick

  104 Copy quote

• She had gradually changed her name. "Jane" was too dull. Last year, she'd added a "y", becoming Jayne, which had more personality.

  Caroline B. Cooney

  Years, Names, Personality

  Caroline B. Cooney (2009). “The Face on the Milk Carton”, p.2, Laurel Leaf

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I certainly must,' said she. 'This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of everything's being dull and insipid about the house! I must be in love; I should be the oddest creature in the world if I were not.

  Jane Austen

  House, Stupidity, Feelings

  Jane Austen (2014). “Emma”, p.188, Lulu.com

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Look at Charlie Brown's face. Would you please hold still a minute Charlie Brown? I want Linus to study your face. Now this is what you call a failure face, Linus. Notice how it has failure written all over it. Study it carefully Linus. You rarely see such a good example. Notice the deep lines, the dull vacant look in the eyes. Yes, I would say this is one of the finest examples of a failure face that your liable to see for a long while.

  Charles M. Schulz

  Eye, Long, Lines

  4 Copy quote

• I think she is going to find you too old... Yes that was it, the moment she said it I knew it was true, and the revelation caused me no surprise, it was like the echo of a dull, not unexpected shock. The age difference was the last taboo, the final limit, all the stronger for the fact that it remained the last and had replaced all the others. In the modern world you could be a swinger, bi, trans, zoo into S&M, but it was forbidden to be old.

  Michel Houellebecq

  Zoos, Thinking, Echoes

  Michel Houellebecq (2006). “The Possibility of an Island”, p.148, Vintage

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• He’s gone, Harry told himself. He’s gone. He had to keep thinking it as he washed and dressed, as though repetition would dull the shock of it. He’s gone and he’s not coming back. And that was the simple truth of it, Harry knew, because their protective enchantments meant that it would be impossible, once they vacated this spot, for Ron to find them again.

  J. K. Rowling

  Simple, Thinking, Enchantment

  4 Copy quote

• Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them.

  Nancy Mitford

  Cake, Sometimes, Life Is

  Nancy Mitford (2010). “The Pursuit of Love”, p.182, Vintage

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• You don't scare me, Cadence Jones. I've lived with crazy, I've ridden with crazy, I've vacationed with crazy, I've visited crazy in various hospitals, I've sat in on therapy sessions with crazy. Frankly, I think women who don't have major emotional disorders are really very dull.

  MaryJanice Davidson

  Crazy, Emotional, Thinking

  MaryJanice Davidson (2010). “Me, Myself and Why?”, p.125, St. Martin's Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull; if you talk, you are thought impertinent and arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to be, whether your vanity or your prudence predominates.

  William Hazlitt

  Vanity, Arrogant, Cases

  William Hazlitt (1837). “Characteristics: in the manner of Rochefoucault's Maxims [by W. Hazlitt].”, p.135

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use…time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space — for wilderness and public space — must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Fighting, Space, Imagination

  9 Copy quote

• I suppose I'll be remembered as dull. Timid. No one ever knew me. People came. They went. I was kind, I think. Not sympathetic, but considerate of others. I always gave up my place in line. I loaned out pencils and paper, or let people take them from me. I never reported a sexual assault.

  Julie Anne Peters

  Thinking, People, Paper

  4 Copy quote

• It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made he (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one...that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

  Mark Twain

  Sports, Dog, Pain

  58 Copy quote

• They say the cure is about happiness, but I understand now that it isn't, and it never was. It's about fear: fear of pain, fear of hurt, fear, fear, fear - a blind animal existence, bumping between walls, shuffling between ever-narrowing hallways, terrified and dull and stupid.

  Lauren Oliver

  Hurt, Wall, Pain

  4 Copy quote

• It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Suicide, Distance, Eye

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1999). “The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader”, p.5, University of Virginia Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Tuesday night I reorganized my record collection. I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it.

  Nick Hornby

  Nice, Stress, Night

  Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.65, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Your thoughts are too dull to entertain.

  William Peter Blatty

  William Peter Blatty (2010). “The Exorcist”, p.257, Random House

  4 Copy quote

  Show source