Quotes About Banal

#1. I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.

George Saunders

#2. Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.

Jean Baudrillard

#3. It's precisely the sense that we're different that makes us so banal.

Daniel Kehlmann

#4. It could be a meeting on the street, or a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, then suddenly there is a flash of recognition and the embers of kinship glow. There is an awakening between you, a sense of ancient knowing.

John O'Donohue

#5. I'm a right pain in the hole for my agent. I won't take certain parts if I think they're offensive or banal. For instance, I won't do a film if I think it's full of violence for violence's sake, or a television drama if I don't think it's intelligent writing.

Anne-Marie Duff

#6. Everything is banal in experience, fleeting in duration, sordid in content; in all respects the same today as generations now dead and buried have found it to be.

Marcus Aurelius

#7. It's one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It's another to have it captured in writing.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#8. The real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road - and the road has a trick of being the most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright - and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.

James Baldwin

#9. Welcome to JG Ballard's future, fast becoming a consensus of its own, wherein the future is intrinsically banal. It is, essentially, the sensible position to take right now.

Warren Ellis

#10. To some, the '50s were a decade marked by the banal, the predictable.

Annette Funicello

#11. The existential hero strives for authenticity even when it is costly, lives meaningfully in the midst of a banal, absurd world, and confronts rather than rejecting reality regardless of the personal cost.

Jason Dias

#12. Marco Polo has been kind of buried under this cloud of rather banal historical dust, when the true story is so much more exciting.

John Fusco

#13. There's something tragic in the fate of almost every person
it's just that the tragic is often concealed from a person by the banal surface of life ... A woman will complain of indigestion and not even know that what she means is that her whole life has been shattered.

Ivan Turgenev

#14. No, that can't be so.' 'Believe me, it is. All kinds of things you told them like sunsets are good and killing small birds is bad.' 'Oh please, may I have said something less banal. Please!

Maeve Binchy

#15. I think we endure the banal as a way of skirting around the bane.

David Levithan

#16. She had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.

Vladimir Nabokov

#17. The process of a date, I think, is terrible. Horrible. Because everything is banal and predicted.

Miuccia Prada

#18. I believe that photography loves banal objects, and I love the life of objects.

Josef Sudek

#19. I've encountered my fair share of war reenactors over the years, but I've never seen a reenactment of this banal predicament: a tired woman in a dark house answering a child who is supposed to be asleep that she has no idea when Daddy's coming home.

Sarah Vowell

#20. Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.

Edward Abbey

#21. This monotonous world around
Seems boring, colorless, and dull.
I just existed till I found
You in my life which was banal.

Tatyana K. Varenko

#22. The great work of art is the complete banality, and the fault with most banalities is that they are not banal enough. Banality here is not infinite in its depth and consequence, but rests on a foundation of spirituality and aesthetics.

Asger Jorn

#23. In a face, look for the main light and the main shadow; the rest will come naturally - it's often not important. And then you must cultivate your memory, because Nature will only provide you with references. Nature is like a warden in a lunatic asylum. It stops you from becoming banal.

Edouard Manet

#24. As a child, the person I admired most in the world was Lana Turner! She seemed the epitome of glamour, and her glitzy surroundings so enviable, the opposite of my mother's extremely banal taste.

Lee Radziwill

#25. The thing about filming is that it can be the most banal experience because it's slow and there's a lot of waiting around.

Tom Burke

#26. He has depths of silence - which he breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark. And when the remark comes it's always something he has seen or felt for himself - never a bit banal. That would be what one might have feared and what would kill me. But never. She

Henry James

#27. You seem to find everything banal." "it's a new word whose correct use i have only lately learnt,' said josephine with dignity. 'i find it applies to nearly everything.

Evelyn Waugh

#28. Future became Present, Present became Past. A truth so banal, so obvious and accepted that he had somehow managed to ignore it before.

Iain Banks

#29. It was the most banal idea about a war, Michael knew, that if of fatality, but it was impossible not to think of it, impossible not to think of the casual threads of accident on which we survive to face the next if that comes tomorrow.

Irwin Shaw

#30. The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed.

Frank Herbert

#31. We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.

Werner Herzog

#32. One of the many sad ironies of African-American life is that every banal dysfunctional social gathering is called a "function.

Paul Beatty

#33. Of a terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices archive the most disproportionate result.

Philip Roth

#34. What happened was simple, even banal: I became naked, died, lost parts of my flesh and most of my ego along with a few illusions such as a belief in the uniqueness of my personal scrap of consciousness and the cosmic importance therof, and went on from there.

MacDonald Harris

#35. What happens to us either happens to everyone or only to us: in the first instance it's banal; in the second it's incomprehensible.

Fernando Pessoa

#36. Photography is the easiest thing in the world if one is willing to accept pictures that are flaccid, limp, bland, banal, indiscriminately informative, and pointless. But if one insists in a photograph that is both complex and vigorous it is almost impossible

John Szarkowski

#37. Living through art is a better way to live - not necessarily making art, but being surrounded by art. I think it's just as banal as trying to show my version of the beauty in the world. It's about beauty at the end of the day.

Ragnar Kjartansson

#38. A lot of things trigger my inspiration. It can be the most banal things.

Manolo Blahnik

#39. In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

Mary McCarthy

#40. It isn't an easy job to paint oneself - at any rate if it is to be different from a photograph. And you see - this, in my opinion, is the advantage that impressionism possesses over all the other things; it is not banal, and one seeks after a deeper resemblance than the photograph.

Vincent Van Gogh

#41. Photography is a holding together of opposites: Light and dark, beautiful and ugly, sublime and banal, concious and unconcious. I am still struck by the power of photography to strip away the bark of the mind and reveal the visceral workings underneath.

Jack Welpott

#42. In Japan, I took part in a tea ceremony. You go into a small room, tea is served, and that's it really, except that everything is done with so much ritual and ceremony that a banal daily event is transformed into a moment of communion with the universe.

Okakura Kakuzo

#43. The diary was evidence; it was - it might be - corroboration. It might disrupt the banal reiterations of memory. It might jump-start something - though I had no idea what.

Julian Barnes

#44. L'Oreal's slogan 'because you're worth it' has come to epitomise banal narcissism of early 21st century capitalism; easy indulgence and effortless self-love all available at a flick of the credit card.

Geoff Mulgan

#45. It can stand in the way of narration in cases where we want the protagonist to actually go through some kind of catharsis while our own (non-fictional) experiences and stories lead to something banal or completely uninteresting.

Sasa Stanisic

#46. Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.

Raoul Vaneigem

#47. Apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence.

Anthony Giddens

#48. If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day.

Alexander Payne

#49. Such forced compromises with the spirit of the times, though quite banal, are actually inevitable unless we are ready to ask everyone who doesn't like our century to join in a general strike.

Milan Kundera

#50. His point, of course, is that it is easy to make any banal situation seem extraordinary if you treat it as fateful. So

Bill Bryson

#51. It's nice that I can go down the road of obsessing over this smiley-face bullshit so maybe I can get free from it and think about something else-it's so banal and yet so crazy!

Nate Lowman

#52. Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

Alfred Hitchcock

#53. Like so many of his successors in the language-crank world today, though, (Jonathan) Swift not only loathes (the) banal and common change (language); he ascribes it to moral failing.

Robert Lane Greene

#54. The worst curse to befall anyone is stagnation, a banal existence, the quiet desperation that comes out of a need for conformity.

Deepak Chopra

#55. What really is wild about rock 'n' roll? Nothing. It's so banal and so part of corporate culture. It threatens to lose all its life.

Ezra Furman

#56. How drugs patchworked simple, banal thoughts into phrases that seemed filled with importance. My glitchy adolescent brain was desperate for causalities, for conspiracies that drenched every word, every gesture, with meaning. I wanted Russell to be a genius.

Emma Cline

#57. To belong to something - that's banal. Creed, ideal, wife or profession: nothing but prison cells and shackles.

Pessoa, Fernando

#58. It isn't that I don't tackle issues; it's just that they're secondary to giving somebody an escape route from the banal routine of everyday life.

Geraldine McCaughrean

#59. Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.

Sol LeWitt

#60. It is perfectly banal to establish a city in the middle of nature but it is perfectly extraordinary to establish nature in the middle of a city! Ordinary nations do the first, extraordinary nations do the second!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#61. In a world growing increasingly banal and familiar, what seems enigmatic instantly draws attention. Never make it too clear what you are doing or about to do. Do not show all your cards. An air of mystery heightens your presence; it also creates anticipation - everyone

Robert Greene

#62. In an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self.

Milton Glaser

#63. The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity'
of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.

Roland Barthes

#64. As anthropomorphic and surreal people have said my early writing was, to me it was really stock and almost banal in the sense that it was just description, the poetry of comparing: "Your feet are like A, and your eyes like B."

Devendra Banhart

#65. Today Eratosthenes' method [of calculating the circumference of the earth] seems almost banal ... yet it is inaccessible to prescientific civilizations, and in all of Antiquity not a single Latin author succeeded in stating it coherently.

Lucio Russo

#66. The internet does not adhere to the inherent, necessary asymmetry of high-versus-low-art categorizations that we use in the cultural sector: in a banal sense, all photographs on the Web are orphans ready to be claimed.

Charlotte Cotton

#67. The more they measure, the more they realize how much the Greeks departed from regular and banal lines in order to produce their effect.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

#68. Creating conflicts and killing each other to be in accord with our only Creator should be the definition of insanity.

By promoting divisions and hostility among men, all monotheisms have proven that they are nothing but banal manners of clan formation.

Haroutioun Bochnakian

#69. To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.

Jane Jacobs

#70. All lives are extraordinary. All lives are simultaneously banal and obvious.

Douglas Kennedy

#71. I've been writing a lot about my encounter with love. Which is the white stag as far as songwriting is concerned because love songs are so banal, and my experience with love is anything but that.

J. Tillman

#72. I am gagged and imprisoned. I can't even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream.

Salman Rushdie

#73. I did not then know that the world is often plainer than people imagine and that the truth, no matter how banal, is always alive and glowing.

Jean-Christophe Grange

#74. Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

Guy Debord

#75. Existence is in a way so banal, you may as well try and make a kind of grandeur of it

Francis Bacon

#76. All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.

Walter Benjamin

#77. The deviant that does not observe the trivial uses of the language is a poet, a deviant who violates the banal customs of society is a criminal.

William C. Brown

#78. The Collector [John Fowles book] does such a good job of capturing the mindset of a capturer, and also that's become a banal trope of every second crime novel: the weirdo, fetishistic watcher/stalker/kidnapper/kidnapper of women or children.

Emma Donoghue

#79. I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life.

Anne Michaels

#80. I think of myself as a very ordinary person. I like writing about the juxtaposition between people: the beauty of them at times and then the banal, everyday context in which we find ourselves.

Rachel Joyce

#81. Sometimes it seems as if writing a group of songs is like getting groceries, or doing the laundry - banal things I do more or less on a day-to-day basis. We deal with the issues involved in our mundane activities as they come up,

David Byrne

#82. She had no time for anything humdrum, banal, or mundane - to the extent that the task of cleaning her desk at every night had to be done with a bottle of Perrier water and Chanel No. 5.

Anna Wintour

#83. The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.

John Updike

#84. People worry about Twitter. Twitter is banal. It's 140-character messages. By definition, you can hardly say anything profound. On the other hand, we communicate. And, sometimes, we communicate about things that are important.

James Gleick

#85. Music is as integral to me as my own DNA. My life has become a continual soundtrack, with music underscoring the most powerful and even the most banal moments of my life.

Danielle De Niese

#86. A novel which I called Pornografia. At that time it wasn't such a bad title, today, in view of the excess of pornography, it sounds banal, and in a few languages it was changed to Seduction.

Witold Gombrowicz

#87. If we have been given the vocation and grace to die with Christ then the everyday and banal occurrence which we call human death has been elevated to a place among God's mysteries.

Karl Rahner

#88. People wrestle sometimes making movies, and I think that conflict is a very essential thing. I think a lot of very happy productions have produced a lot of very banal movies.

Edward Norton

#89. If you lie to your husband - even about something so banal as how much you drink - each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it's deflected away.

Mary Karr

#90. No matter how predictable, banal and listless the rest of my life might be, you can guarantee that there'll always be something interesting going on with my skin.

David Nicholls

#91. Dawn was written well before 9/11. People speak a lot today about the banality of evil, but not all evil is banal. Some of it is carefully structured and well-thought-out. That's where the real danger lies.

Alan Dean Foster

#92. There is nothing so banal in the world,' said Ada 'than pitching stones at a hawfinch.

Vladimir Nabokov

#93. There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry - architecture being the least banal derivative of the latter.

Edith Wharton

#94. You can control and censor a child's reading, but you can't control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that to adults seems banal or ridiculous or outmoded will alter itself and evolve inside the darkness of a child's heart.

Hilary Mantel

#95. Readers are made by readers - it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.

Aidan Chambers

#96. There's almost a fear that if you understood too deeply the way you arrived at choices, you could become self-conscious. In any case, many ideas which are full of personal meaning seem rather banal when you put words to them.

Peter Weir

#97. How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

Joyce Carol Oates

#98. Mahmoud Darwish wrote that "extreme clarity is a mystery." That sounds right to me. I don't want anyone hunting for anything ancillary to the true mystery. If that means risking being thought of as glib or dull or banal or stupid or whatever, I guess that will just have to be the way it is.

Matthew Zapruder

#99. Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept ... The plastic asshole of the world.

William Faulkner

#100. What draws me to theater and religion are these rituals made to make you feel emotion. It's so banal in an interesting way. In visual art it's about making you feel emotional, but it's more subtle.

Ragnar Kjartansson