Grotesque Quotes - Page 7

• Since art is dead in the actual life of civilized nations, it has been relegated to these grotesque morgues, museums.

  Walter Gropius

  Art, Museums, Civilized Nations

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• Photography today appears to be in a state of flight... The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.

  Dorothea Lange

  Photography, Sunday, Today

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• The common belief that... the actual relations between religion and science over the last few centuries have been marked by deep and enduring hostility... is not only historically inaccurate, but actually a caricature so grotesque that what needs to be explained is how it could possibly have achieved any degree of respectability.

  Colin Archibald Russell

  Atheism, Degrees, Needs

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• There is the life of the plankton in almost endless variety; there are the many kinds of fish, both surface and bottom living; there are the hosts of different invertebrate creatures on the sea-floor; and there are those almost grotesque forms of pelagic life in the oceans depths. Then there are the squids and cuttlefish, and the porpoises, dolphins and great whales.

  Alister Hardy

  Ocean, Whales, Sea

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• It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few of them for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate, and the contrast between the popular estimate of my powers and achievements and the reality is simply grotesque.

  Albert Einstein

  Character, Fate, Science

  Albert Einstein (2011). “The World As I See It”, p.35, Open Road Media

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• I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know, that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?

  Ernest Becker

  Encouragement, Pain, Inspirational Life

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• All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.

  Tom Stoppard

  Eye, Nudge, Existentialism

  'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead' (1967) act 1

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• The more outré and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it deserves to be examined.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Hounds, Incidents, Deserve

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2014). “Sherlock Holmes Complete Collection With illustrated Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - 4 Novels, 56 Short Stories and 120+ illustrations”, p.874, Ageless Reads

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• It seems to me that if one had kept silence up to now regarding religion, people would still be submerged in the most grotesque and dangerous superstition ... regarding government, we would still be groaning under the bonds of feudal government ... regarding morals, we would still be having to learn what is virtue and what is vice. To forbid all these discussions, the only ones worthy of occupying a good mind, is to perpetuate the reign of ignorance and barbarism.

  Denis Diderot

  Ignorance, Government, People

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• Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine.

  C. S. Lewis

  Moving, Sunshine, Looks

  C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.46, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul

  Kate Chopin

  Dream, Reality, Soul

  Kate Chopin (1899). “The Awakening”, p.81

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• The more grotesque your boss's pay and the less he has do to earn it, the bigger the motivation for you to work with the aim of being promoted to what he has.

  Tim Harford

  Motivation, Boss, Pay

  Tim Harford (2010). “The Logic Of Life: Uncovering the New Economics of Everything”, p.133, Hachette UK

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• My tough and grotesque images were thrown on the roads and were stepped on by my critics, and I was talked about with scorn. I felt regret that readers only seemed to like something they were accustomed to.

  Kim Hyesoon

  Regret, Tough, Critics

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship. The body that was broken into pieces is a sick body. I put the disease of this world and my sick body together.

  Kim Hyesoon

  Sick, Broken, Together

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think that, honestly, people's censorship issues are personal but I disagree with most of those personal choices that I see others make. You know, I watch television and there's a grotesque amount of violence on almost every show that you would watch that comes on past 8:00 pm. And I think my dirty brand of humor is far less destructive to a child's mentality.

  Seth Rogen

  Children, Dirty, Thinking

  "Seth Rogen's B.O.B. Returns in Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space". Interview with B. Alan Orange, movieweb.com. October 26, 2009.

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• The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity.

  Martin Gardner

  Book, Heart, Turtles

  "The Annotated Alice". Book by Martin Gardner (Introduction), 1960.

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• I've been through the whole western world, and it seems to me that there's more retail floor space devoted to the sale of books than food! There's more retail floor space devoted to the sale of books than there's been in the entire history of humanity! It's grotesque!

  William Gibson

  Book, Space, Humanity

  Source: craphound.com

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• The one thing I'm quite critical of Hillary Clinton for, and it obviously hurt her, is that at some level, the Clintons had to know that she was going to run for president. Why did they feel it necessary to make tens of millions of dollars with speaking engagements? They must have known that it would look grotesque. The word for it is "buckraking." It's beyond me. I don't understand it.

  David Remnick

  Running, Hurt, President

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• The intellectual ... may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. Although there have been zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the essence.

  Richard Hofstadter

  Essence, Ideas, Intellectual

  Richard Hofstadter (2012). “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life”, p.29, Vintage

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• What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.

  Zadie Smith

  Sublime, Balance, Half

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I think that poets can say, "What we want is for everybody on earth to wake up free from fear and with access to medicine and clean water and education." But I don't think poets have any special insight on how to get there. And the 20th century is a pretty good record of that because so many of the great poets were Stalinists: Vallejo, Neruda, Eluard, Aragon, etc. They wrote their odes to Lenin and Stalin. They glorified some of the most violent and grotesque dictatorships of the 20th century. And a lot of the ones who were not Stalinists were fascists or fascist sympathizers.

  Robert Hass

  Thinking, Medicine, Water

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it.

  Mark Twain

  Believe, Average, Incredibles

  Mark Twain (2013). “Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2: The Complete and Authoritative Edition”, p.136, Univ of California Press

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• The humor of jazz is rich and many-sided. Some of it is obvious enough to make a dog laugh. Some is subtle, wry-mouthed, or back-handed. It is by turns bitter, agonized, and grotesque. Even in the hands of white composers it involuntarily reflects the half-forgotten suffering of the negro. Jazz has both white and black elements, and each in some respects has influenced the other. It's recent phase seems to throw the light of the white race's sophistication upon the anguish of the black.

  Bix Beiderbecke

  Dog, Light, Race

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• Therefore, a grotesque account of a period some thousands of years ago is taken seriously though it be built by piling special assumptions on special assumptions, ad hoc hypothesis [invented for a purpose] on ad hoc hypothesis, and tearing apart the fabric of science whenever it appears convenient. The result is a fantasia which is neither history nor science.

  James Bryant Conant

  Taken, Years, Special

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• I'm a cartoonist, it's what I am at heart, so cartoons take reality and deform it and make it grotesque, you make it funny, but you alter it. If it works, it's based on reality. That's what I try to do.

  Terry Gilliam

  Heart, Reality, Cartoon

  Source: collider.com

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