"Banality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... over he came back, a trifle flushed, and I felicitated him; my remark (which I forget) being no doubt 'just the sort of banality, you know, one does come out with'—as maybe that the British Navy kept its old knack of cutting out. But he looked at me almost in tears and blurted, 'It isn't her beauty, sir. You saw? ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... all the popular impulses; they laugh when the multitude laughs and weep when it weeps; and they have the gift—which is really rare not common—of calling the multitude's attention to their books in which is displayed, as in a consoling mirror, the sweet, rosy, empty features of banality. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... he had to make an effort to take his eyes from it, and in a sort unknown to him in summer he perceived the offence of the hotel itself amid the pure and lonely beauty of the winter landscape. It was a note of intolerable banality, of philistine pretence and vulgar convention, such as Whitwell's low, unpainted cottage at the foot of the hill did not give, nor the little red school-house, on the other hand, showing through the naked trees. There should have been really no human ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... was a theatre in Bursley," she remarked idly, driven into a banality by the press of ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... averting her glance. "Then—" There the devil ended the sentence and she withdrew her hand and felt the relief of one escaping suffocation, to find that he had realized that anything further during that interview would be banality ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... thought. Instead, the words that came seemed to him somehow banal and commonplace. "I love you. I want to be with you all the time. When we are together things grow strange and desirable." Amorous mediocrities! So he edited them into a further banality and thus concealed his inability to give lofty utterance to his emotions by amusing himself with deliberately cheapened insincerities. "Saving my linguistic face," he thought suddenly, ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... Duke George, took his dunce-son's education in hand; but this gentleman was peculiar in his notions of the training of young minds. French and German he deemed unnecessary trivialities, and the Christian religion a banality. Instead of these prosaic lessons the boy was instructed in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian tongues, and, in lieu of the Bible, the Koran was placed ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... romance! His true 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 |
