As Dull As Quotes

#1. No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased.

T. E. Hulme

#2. I love to be envied, and would not marry a wife that I alone could love; loving alone is as dull as eating alone.

William Wycherley

#3. The auction houses seemed not as dull as their financial counterparts on Wall Street, where parents of daughters imagined glass celings and bottom patting.

Steve Martin

#4. There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.

Ben Hecht

#5. He thought it better to start the day by acknowledging that it was going to be just as dull as the days preceding it. That way, you wouldn't be disappointed. Abdul

Katherine Boo

#6. It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

Henry David Thoreau

#7. As dull as moon face, never seem to change.

Toba Beta

#8. The yellow commuter train ran through canal-crossed fields as dull as graph paper. Always one saw evidence of the tiny brick houses that the incontinent municipalities, Voorschoten and Leidschendam and Rijswijk and Zoetermeer, pooped over the rural spaces surrounding The Hague.

Joseph O'Neill

#9. Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.

Italo Calvino

#10. Reality really isn't as dull as it's cracked up to be.

Estelle

#11. At an early age, you started hearing it: It's a virtue to be "well-rounded." ... They might as well have said : Become as dull as you possibly can be.

Donald O. Clifton

#12. As dull as Nate Gray is," Will said, "his head is not actually filled with gears, Henry. He's a human.

Cassandra Clare

#13. I loved fairy tales as a kid. I've always been drawn to fantasy. They're always exciting. There's never a dull moment. I just love the embellishments and the magical stuff. It's such fun to work with and to re-imagine your own way.

Gail Carson Levine

#14. If you went through life refusing all the bait dangled in front of you, that would be no life at all. No changes would be made and you would have nothing to fight against. Life would be dull as ditchwater.

Alan Sillitoe

#15. Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?

Sylvia Plath

#16. This is what I have.
The dull hangover of waiting,
the blush of my heart on the damp grass,
the flower-faced moon.
A gull broods on the shore
where a moment ago there were two.
Softly my right hand fondles my left hand
as though it were you.

Mary Oliver

#17. As a writer, you're making a pact with the reader; you're saying, 'Look, I know and you know that if this book was really a murder investigation, it would be a thousand pages long and would be very dull, and you would be very unhappy with the ending.'

Mark Billingham

#18. Courtship is to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.
(quoted in Life After Life)

William Congreve

#19. I use dull colors in my drawings because I started out using a root beer base because it seemed like an interesting idea and when it turned out that it worked quite well as an ink I started using other colors that would compliment it.

Marcel Dzama

#20. And yet she was content to pair off with this dull young adventurer in the tarnished lace! It was, he supposed, the sort of thing to be expected of a sex that all philosophy had taught him to regard as the maddest part of a mad species.

Rafael Sabatini

#21. Sky glowing dull pink. Simmer dim, as the Shetlanders called

Ian Rankin

#22. Can it be, I wondered, that life without her is so dull as this?

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

#23. As high over the mountains the eagle spreads its wings, may your perspective be larger than the view from the foothills. When the way is flat and dull in times of gray endurance, may your imagination continue to evoke horizons.

John O'Donohue

#24. Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.

W. Somerset Maugham

#25. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

#26. A lot of people view science as dull or boring, and I think the stance we take, using humour, not taking ourselves too seriously ... I think people enjoy that. I think it's quite refreshing.

Elise Andrew

#27. I picture heaven as a vast library, with unlimited volumes to read. And paintings and statues to examine galore. I picture it as a great doorway to learning ... rather than one great dull answer to all our questions

Anne Rice

#28. Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony.

Jonathan Raban

#29. The leaf was darkish, and had prickles on it, But in another country, as he said, Bore a bright golden flow'r, but not in this soil; Unknown, and like esteem'd, and the dull swain Treads on it daily with his clouted shoon.

John Milton

#30. He seems to have become a part of my life and I'm disappointed if I don't see him. If I get to the end of the day without seeing someone who reminds me of him, I feel as if a dull shadow has fallen over me.

Dorothy Koomson

#31. Topographically the country is magnificent - and terrifying. Why terrifying? Because nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak.

Henry Miller

#32. And as we swam, or played, or talked, a feeling would come. It was almost like fear, in the way it filled me, rising in my chest. It was almost like tears, in how swiftly it came. But it was neither of those, buoyant where they were heavy, bright where they were dull.

Madeline Miller

#33. I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm sorry for everything. For the past and the future.' An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could almost have written a poem.

Matt Haig

#34. Laughter is wholesome. God is not so dull as some people make out. Did not He make the kitten to chase its tail.

Heinrich Heine

#35. I have three phobias which, could I mute them,would make my life as slick as a sonnet,but dull as ditch water:I hate to go to bed,I hate to get up and I hate to be alone ...

Tallulah Bankhead

#36. In Nina Kimbereley's garden the scabiosa flowers were dark as garnet brooches; the nicotiana a veil of tossing crimson stars. Nothing was usual, or a dull color. All was exceptional, designed to be exceptional since it had been planned as the background for a beauty by the beauty.

Elizabeth Enright

#37. He is a dull observer whose experience has not taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#38. The media, far from being a conspiracy to dull the political sense of the people, could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference.

David Riesman

#39. Mediocrity triumphs because it presents itself as democratic and because it is dull, and so for many does not seem worth struggling against.

Anthony Daniels

#40. There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need never be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings.

D.E. Stevenson

#41. dependable as only incredibly dull things can be,

Michael R. Fletcher

#42. Had he known his death was imminent, he might have gone somewhere else. Instead, he did what we all do. He went about his dull routine as if all the days in the world were still to come.

Mitch Albom

#43. There's nothing in this world can make me joy: Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man; And bitter shame hath spoil'd the sweet world's taste That it yields nought but shame and bitterness.

William Shakespeare

#44. At the North Carolina border, the dull landscape ended abruptly, as if by decree. Suddenly the countryside rose and fell in majestic undulations, full of creeping thickets of laurel, rhododendron and palmetto.

Bill Bryson

#45. Admit it, you want to be fucked and it's not Emen, that dull fuck, you want to feel saddled fast and riding hard between your legs. It's me. My bruises on your skin, my bite marks for you to wear as if it were the finest jewelry.

Penny Alley

#46. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

Frederick Douglass

#47. Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after long time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#48. Sister Simplicitie!
Sing, sing a song to me,
Sing me to sleep!
Some legend low and long,
Slow as the summer song
Of the dull Deep.

Sydney Thompson Dobell

#49. I relived those memories repeatedly until I could breathe in his presence all around. The thought that I had lost him forever was a constant dull pain. May be poets had it right. Love was pain in disguise. I revered it, as there was pleasure in that pain.

Preethi Venugopala

#50. I found the project to be a bit quiet (that is, dull), which may have led to the manuscript's current confabulation - a pseudo autobiography in which the speaker portrays herself as a fifteen-year-old girl/cheetah amalgam.

Julie Schumacher

#51. The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

Wilkie Collins

#52. But jest apart
what virtue canst thou trace
In that broad trim that hides thy sober face?
Does that long-skirted drab, that over-nice
And formal clothing, prove a scorn of vice?
Then for thine accent
what in sound can be
So void of grace as dull monotony?

George Crabbe

#53. If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

Emil Cioran

#54. This unreal feeling was heightened when, after half an hour, she reached another High Street, more or less the same as the one she had left behind. That was all London was beyond its center, an agglomeration of dull little towns. She made a resolution never to live in any of them.

Ian McEwan

#55. A library should fill our leisure with adventure. It is a refuge from the commonplace and the dull, a sanctuary where all the trials, the tribulations, and the boredoms of the outer world are forbidden and where such an evil thing as a tax-collector may be forgotten and, peradventure, forgiven.

E. Norman Torry

#56. Dull people don't write interesting books. But they sure as hell can write them thick and fast.

Abram Gitspof

#57. You have to be careful so you don't make your character dull and predictable. Sometimes you have to bend the script a little ... The bad guys are mostly the same on the paper ... A bad guy wouldn't think of himself as bad.

Michael Wincott

#58. In the dull, persistent beat of her heart, she hears the rhythm of hope. It is faint and thin as a thread, but it is there.

Libbie Hawker

#59. So at twelve, I discovered that alcohol could dull pain and saw it as a friend. It was only in later years I realized that a friendship with a bottle can overnight turn into a relationship with the enemy.

Toni Maguire

#60. And when I am forgotten, as I shall be, And asleep in dull cold marble, where no mention Of me must be heard of, say, I taught thee.

William Shakespeare

#61. Gathered around me were the weak instead of the strong, the ugly instead of the beautiful, the losers instead of the winners. It looked like it was my destiny to travel in their company through life. That didn't bother me so much as the fact that I seemed irresistible to these dull idiot fellows.

Charles Bukowski

#62. There's no such thing as a life that is not normal, or, there's no such thing as a life that is not abnormal. We all have amazing lives; we all have very dull lives.

Anne Enright

#63. People's lives in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable - deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.

Alice Monro

#64. You shouldn't be embarrassed by the things you do because that's who you are. Your quirks are what separate you from all of the dull, regular and boring people who all look and act the same as everyone else.

Benjamin Jones

#65. That's the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real.

Salman Rushdie

#66. The entire landscape was illuminated and transformed by these unique pyrotechnics of labour atoning for its grime, and dull, weird sounds, as of the breathings and sighings of gigantic nocturnal creatures, filled the enchanted air.

Arnold Bennett

#67. (Baseball's a dull game, really; that's the reason that it is so good. We do not love the game so much as we love the sprawl and drowse and shirt-sleeved apathy of it.)

Thomas Wolfe

#68. An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could have almost written a poem.

Matt Haig

#69. Nature, as it grows again toward earth, is fashioned for the journey, dull and heavy.

William Shakespeare

#70. The sun had burned through and the day had gone from dull to dazzling, yet in the west blask-satin thunderheads continued to stack up. It was as if night has burst a blood-vessel in the sky over there.

Stephen King

#71. First things that a hurting person needs to do is break the habit of using other people as a narcotic to numb the dull aching of an inner void.

T.D. Jakes

#72. Her gut ached, as if love was being dug out of her with a dull knife.

Janet Fitch

#73. And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.

Joseph Conrad

#74. [I]t's guilty of the very thing that makes kids hate history as a subject when it's taught badly: The Da Vinci Code makes the past feel like a dull, grainy, faraway thing, instead of something vibrant and alive.

Stephanie Zacharek

#75. I feel like everything you learn as an actor growing up is wrong. You're supposed to hit your mark, find your light and know your lines. Those are all things that just make things wooden, dull and boring.

Joaquin Phoenix

#76. Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape," Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, "on the bare chance that he might ultimately do her the honor of boring her for life?

Edith Wharton

#77. The secret is to become someone else, something else. All sex grows dull. You renew it by reinventing yourself, and as a new character, you have new urges. I adore being a rabbit.

Chloe Thurlow

#78. However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or
complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't
this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will
never even be offered life in the first place?

Richard Dawkins

#79. My own life would make a pretty dull story, I think, and I envy him as I drive to work on a cold Minnesota morning across the Mississippi River with its coal barges still struggling upstream like so many of us nowadays.

Garrison Keillor

#80. How charming is divine Philosophy!
Not harsh, and crabbed as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute,
And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets,
Where no crude surfet raigns.

John Milton

#81. Really to succeed, we must give; of our souls to the soulless, of our love to the lonely, of our intelligence to the dull. Business is quite as much a process of giving as it is of getting.

Alice Foote MacDougall

#82. A slippery fish, flashing scales in the water and a noble fighter on the line, but dull as lead at the bottom of the boat.

Michael David Lukas

#83. Reptiles and amphibians are sometimes thought of as primitive, dull and dimwitted. In fact, of course, they can be lethally fast, spectacularly beautiful, surprisingly affectionate and very sophisticated.

David Attenborough

#84. There are people who buy pictures because they were difficult to do, and are done. Such pictures are often only a record of pain and dull perseverance. Great works of art should look as though they were made in joy. Real joy is a tremendous activity, dull drudgery is nothing to it.

Robert Henri

#85. As Thomas Hobbes said, If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.

Mortimer J. Adler

#86. Literature, I have always thought, is in most places and companies a singularly dull and uninteresting thing to talk about, but one may, as a rule, hate literary conversation, and yet at the right moment, with all its powers of feeling, the mind in silence may feel what it owes to literature.

William Hurrell Mallock

#87. Teddy Roosevelt "had relished "every hour" of every day as president. Indeed, (he was) fearing the "dull thud" he would experience upon returning to private life.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#88. Past and future to him were the realities; the present dull, meaningless, only significant if, as now, going back along the sands, he could say to himself: 'Later on, I shall remember.

Elizabeth Taylor

#89. My days could be described as an ever changing palette of blues, greens, browns, and golds. Mostly because of surfing and garden-gazing. On tour, the colors are desaturated by florescent lights and dull grey carpets.

Jason Mraz

#90. My dreams were dull as my everyday life.

Sarah Dessen

#91. Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding-places in a voluminous writer.

Joseph Addison

#92. The idea of Utopia is mischievous as well as unrealistic. And dull, to boot. Man is born pushing and shoving as the sparks fly upward.

David Lilienthal

#93. If there wasn't anything to find out, it would be dull. Even trying to find out and not finding out is just as interesting as trying to find out and finding out; and I don't know but more so.

Mark Twain

#94. It is rather astonishing how little practical value scientific knowledge has for ordinary men, how dull and commonplace such of it as has value is, and how its value seems almost to vary inversely to its reputed utility.

G.H. Hardy

#95. I can't remember a time when I didn't love fashion. As a child, I was always particular about what I'd wear. I remember feeling most aggrieved that I had to put on a dull uniform to go to boarding school.

Trinny Woodall

#96. A library is such a potent symbol of a town's values: each one closed down might as well be six thousand stickers plastered over every available surface, reading WE CHOSE TO BECOME MORE STUPID AND DULL.

Caitlin Moran

#97. There's no such thing as a good death ... It's just a dull, stupid thing we all have to do eventually. To ask meaning of it is to ask meaning of a shadow.

Robert Jackson Bennett

#98. Here, precisely here, man imitates God: God granted Himself the work of creation, as the highest delight, and He demands that man, too, be a creator of prosperity and the harmonious course of things. And this they call dull!

Nikolai Gogol

#99. Financial regulation is the next item on the political horizon, and it doesn't have to be the deathly dull wonk-battle that it sounds like. In fact, if the Democrats do their job, it can just as easily become a platform for addressing the greatest issues of them all.

Thomas Frank

#100. The world was fucked up. It was hard to say how exactly, but we could feel it. There was injustice, lots of it, we saw it as a dull shape coming into focus.

Michelle Tea