Quaint Quotes - Page 2

• To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.

  Tennessee Williams

  School, Eye, Class

  Tennessee Williams (1945). “The Glass Menagerie”, p.5, New Directions Publishing

  53 Copy quote

  Show source

• As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars.

  James Gleick

  Book, Gun, Technology

  4 Copy quote

• In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography, man compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Dark, Men, Space

  9 Copy quote

• Princeton is a wonderful little spot. A quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts.

  Albert Einstein

  Education, Village, Littles

  Albert Einstein (2017). “Einstein on Peace”, p.357, Pickle Partners Publishing

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Gandhi has sound economic and cultural reasons for encouraging the revival of cottage industries, but he does not counsel a fanatical repudiation of all modern progress. Machinery, trains, automobiles, the telegraph have played important parts in his own colossal life! Fifty years of public service, in prison and out, wrestling daily with practical details and harsh realities in the political world, have only increased his balance, open-mindedness, sanity, and humorous appreciation of the quaint human spectacle.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Appreciation, Humorous, Wrestling

  "Autobiography of a Yogi". Book by Autobiography of a Yogi, Ch. 44 - With Mahatma Gandhi At Wardha, 1946.

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• Holland seems like a quaint toy.

  Marian Hooper Adams

  Europe, Toys, Holland

  6 Copy quote

• Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny their children protection so that they could safeguard their own self- image. Or maybe we'll just seem like a bunch of lunatics.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Self, Parent

  4 Copy quote

• The amount of quaint, authentic, rustic charm varies inversely with the pounds per square inch of water pressure in the shower.

  Frank Mankiewicz

  Squares, Water, Pounds

  4 Copy quote

• Baltimore is one of the most beautiful towns, really. And trust me, I don't say that about every place. There is just something so quaint, old and beautiful about this place.

  Polly Bergen

  Beautiful, Baltimore, Towns

  "'Night Music''s Polly Bergen is Back in Baltimore". Interview with James Howard, www.broadwayworld.com. March 27, 2008.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Many Americans think of the rest of the world as a kind of Disneyland, a showplace for quaint fauna, flora and artifacts. They dress for travel in cheap, comfortable, childish clothes, as if they were going to the zoo and would not be seen by anyone except the animals.

  Alison Lurie

  Travel, Zoos, Animal

  9 Copy quote

• Lie bills and calculations much perplexed, With steam-boats, frigates, and machinery quaint Traced over them in blue and yellow paint.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Lying, Blue, Yellow

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). “The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.665, Modern Library

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• All effort at originality must end either in the quaint or the monstrous. For no man knows himself as an original; he can only believe it on the report of others.

  Washington Allston

  Believe, Men, Effort

  Washington Allston, Richard Henry Dana (1850). “Lectures on Art, and Poems”, p.174, Scholarly Pub Office Univ of

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The days when the words Hollywood actor framed Ronald Reagan like bunny fingers as an ID tag and an implied insult seem far-off and quaint: nearly everybody in politics - candidate, consultant, pundit, and Tea Party crowd extra alike - is an actor now, a shameless ham in a hoked-up reality series that never stops.

  James Wolcott

  Party, Reality, Tea

  4 Copy quote

• Quaint, outlandish heathen gods
  Black men fashion out of rods

  Countee Cullen

  Fashion, Men, Black

  Countee Cullen (2013). “Countee Cullen: Collected Poems: (American Poets Project #32)”, p.65, Library of America

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Since I first went to India twenty some years ago, there's been a palpable change. There's now pizza everywhere, meat is much more popular than it's ever been. Vegetarianism is "that quaint thing our parents did."

  Neal Barnard

  Vegetarianism, Years, Parent

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

  Don DeLillo

  Religious, Book, Writing

  4 Copy quote

• But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found, Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long preserv'd virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust. The grave's a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace.

  Andrew Marvell

  Song, Lying, Thinking

  "To His Coy Mistress" l. 31 (1681)

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ever since roughly 1890, when snot poets first decided that rhyme was confining and unnecessary, every idiot with a pen fancied hisself a poet. The mere act of rhyming was suddenly regarded as a quaint, mannered, and uncool atavism, consigning doggerelists like me to the trash bin of literary history.

  Gene Weingarten

  Rhyming, Firsts, Idiot

  Source: live.washingtonpost.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poverty is considered quaint in the rural areas because it comes thatched.

  John Gummer

  Rural Areas, Poverty, Areas

  4 Copy quote

• In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, painted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.

  Terence McKenna

  Democratic Ideals, People, Might

  4 Copy quote

• And angling too, that solitary vice, What Izaak Walton sings or says: The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb, in his gullet Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it.

  Lord Byron

  Should Have, Fishing, Vices

  Lord Byron (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Lord Byron (Illustrated)”, p.2252, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Old timidity has disappeared, and is replaced by silent, quaint fun, with which his face twinkles all over, as he listens.

  Thomas Hughes

  Fun, Faces, Silent

  Thomas Hughes (2011). “Tom Brown's School Days”, p.311, The Floating Press

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• My parents are really conservative. My dad is Muslim, and my mom is the most conservative woman you've ever met. They're very aristocratic in the most quaint suburban way.

  SZA

  Mom, Dad, Parent

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  36 Copy quote

  Show source

• If Jeff Mogil and Ron Melzack are right about genetics and pain, fifty years from now, generic Tylenol tablets will seem as quaint to us as a bottle of sarsaparilla tonic. Instead, we'll take our genotype ID bracely to the local genopharmacologist to order some bespoke pharmaceuticals. Or we may rise at four A.M. to meditate on the part of our nature that is painful and feel better for it. Along with social insurance, we'll carry geno-cards that list our predispositions: photosensitivity, osteoporosis, and poor response to codeine.

  Marni Jackson

  Pain, Feel Better, Order

  16 Copy quote

• It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Visionaries, Arms

  "The Victorian Age in Literature". Book by G. K. Chesterton, Ch I: The Victorian Compromise and Its Enemies, p. 8, 1913.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source