Top 100 Quotes About Grotesque
#1. Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.
Flannery O'Connor
#2. You know so much about people from the second they open their mouths. Right away you might know that you might want to keep them out. That's part of the horror of speaking, of writing. There is nowhere to hide. When you try to hide, the spectacle can grow grotesque.
Maggie Nelson
#3. I envy people who can just look at a sunset. I wonder how you can shoot it. There is nothing more grotesque to me than a vacation.
Dustin Hoffman
#4. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
Oscar Wilde
#5. You see we adults have learned how to disguise our terrible characters but a child ... well, it's like a grotesque drawing of us. They should be neither seen nor heard. And no one must make another one.
Gore Vidal
#6. What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth. It has to be truthful and honest, even if it is ugly and grotesque.
Corin Nemec
#7. Bodies lay everywhere, in grotesque attitudes of violent death, but manifesting the miracle of life in a snore, a mutter, the flight of a bubble from the lips.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#8. Taxes are like abortion, and not just because both are grotesque procedures supported by Democrats. You're for them or against them. Taxes go up or down; government raises taxes or lowers them. But Democrats will not let the words 'abortion' or 'tax hikes' pass their lips.
Ann Coulter
#9. Asylums are nothing more than gardens of human cabbages, of miserable, grotesque, repugnant human beings watered with the fertilizer of injections.
Antonio Lobo Antunes
#10. As it is, the grotesque distortions of the global market mean that for every dollar the West dispatches to Africa in the form of aid, two dollars are clawed back through subsidies and tariff barriers: a monumental rip-off by the rich as they instruct the poor to accept 'free' trade or else.
Jonathan Dimbleby
#11. Some came to help satisfy the various lusts of what Mark Twain called "a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society! Men - only swarming hosts of stalwart men - nothing juvenile, nothing feminine visible anywhere.
Tom Cole
#12. Really, is there a ruder thing to do than put someone down based on what she reads? It's a classist, obnoxious, and utterly grotesque use of energy.
Sarah Wendell
#13. The implication strongly is that Osama bin Laden is a Hitler, even though he has no state power at all. It's just grotesque if you seriously think about it.
Tariq Ali
#14. The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque.
Ron Wyden
#15. You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It's just grotesque.
Gore Vidal
#16. Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness
that is, the improbable
with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.
Emile M. Cioran
#17. At six
I lived in a graveyard full of dolls,
avoiding myself,
my body, the suspect
in its grotesque house.
Anne Sexton
#18. My reflection followed me mercilessly in mirrors, car doors, shop windows. I lived in a world of circus mirrors, the grotesque distortion of my body looking back at me everywhere.
Bethany Pierce
#19. I'm not sure I agree with the thesis, because I think that even though something grotesque or gross has been part of film since way back, what we accept or what we can get away with on the screen is broader now.
Ivan Reitman
#20. It's a sad and grotesque thing that you and your friends have become so accustomed to lies that the truth has to be prefaced because it's inherently surprising, a startling departure from the lies that comprise your lives.
Caroline Kepnes
#21. There is indeed no such thing in life as absolute darkness; one's eyes revolt and hasten to fill the vacuum by floating in sparks, dream patterns, figures whimsical and figures grotesque, shifting and clad in complementary colors, to appease the indignant cups and rods of the retina.
Gelett Burgess
#22. Christian theology: nothing so grotesque could possibly be true.
Edward Abbey
#23. There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,
when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.
Kate Chopin
#24. I believed, with morbid sincerity, that if I could make him my friend, we would together, in some small but consequential way, defy the wicked logic of hate and war, that we, together, would stand as a rebuke to the grotesque idea that our problem was without a solution.
Jeffrey Goldberg
#25. Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.
Walt Whitman
#26. If American opinion has been uninformed, misinformed and prejudiced, the missionaries are largely to blame. Interpreting history in terms of the advance of Christianity, they have given an inadequate, distorted, and occasionally a grotesque picture of Moslems and Islam.
Noam Chomsky
#27. I remember having to take detours around the Hollywood sign to avoid having to see this grotesque poster of myself on Sunset Boulevard.
Rachel Ward
#28. He was grotesque, really. But joy radiated from his homespuns when you walked beside him. It welled out; it enveloped you.
Ford Madox Ford
#29. humans were grotesque a lot of the time, but-just once in a while-there was
something about them that was marvelous, too" ("Lost Voices" by Sarah
Porter,109)
Sarah Porter
#30. The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it histruth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced a falsehood.
Sherwood Anderson
#31. !The true magick of art is the discovery of the sublime within the mundane, the beautiful within the grotesque, the light within the darkness and all those reversed.!
Andy Paciorek
#32. If he were cast in my Zombie version of Vampire Diaries, he so would have been Stefan, the very brother I wanted to watch die of something grotesque and gruesome. Team Daemon every single day.
Rachel Higginson
#33. The huge veins on his neck throb with the exertion and rush of it all and his whole body flexes and pumps like one enormous, grotesque organ.
Mark Simpson
#34. As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.
Victor Hugo
#35. It's obvious nonsense, but it makes nice people feel good about themselves to do their bit for the planet. It's vanity of a grotesque kind to believe that mankind, and our 'carbon footprint', has more impact on the future of Earth than Nature, which bends our planet to its will, as it sees fit.
Charles Saatchi
#36. I think the grotesque can inspire intimacy (it draws us in) as well as awe, like the cabinets of curiosities.
Anna Journey
#37. That these man-like creatures were in truth only bestial monsters, mere grotesque travesties of men, filled me with a vague uncertainty of their possibilities which was far worse than any definite fear.
H.G.Wells
#38. Perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.
Salman Rushdie
#39. I am an anomaly in the system, living proof of how grotesque it is, and every day I mock it gently, deep within my impenetrable self.
Muriel Barbery
#40. Surviving isn't just about cutting out your heart and burning every feeling into ash. Sometimes it means taking what ever is thrown at you, beautiful or grotesque, poisonous or blissful, and carving out your life with the pieces you're given.
Roshani Chokshi
#41. One who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul
Kate Chopin
#42. The eternal, not the modern, is what I love: the modern will be antiquated and grotesque in ten years, when the fashion passes. - MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
Clive James
#43. 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
#44. Is it not grotesque when the representatives of an antiquated myth-sorcery, who believes in trinity, angels, devils, hell, virgin-birth, bodily Ascension, making of water into wine, wine to blood, - when they want to impress us with their "science"?
Karlheinz Deschner
#45. I distrust every idea that doesn't seem obsolete and grotesque to my contemporaries.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#46. All wars are grotesque blasphemies against God's greatest gift: Life. Until
Rita Mae Brown
#47. He had an air of magnificent melancholy sophistication, as if his proper place were elsewhere, somewhere infinitely more compelling even than Brakebills, and he'd been confined to his present setting by a grotesque divine oversight, which he tolerated with as much good humor as could be expected.
Lev Grossman
#48. I think one of the few faults in Dickens is that mostly his lead characters are blanks - who is David Copperfield, who is Oliver Twist? And yet he takes such joy in populating the rest of his novels with these fantastic, grotesque people like Pecksmith and so on.
Mark Gatiss
#49. but the very content that comes from finding yourself is overshadowed by the knowledge that by doing so you are admitting you are not only a grotesque, but a special kind of grotesque.
Sylvia Plath
#50. All the birds had flown away, save only the great, grotesque penguins.
H.P. Lovecraft
#51. He was seeing the final contradiction, the grotesque absurdity at the end of the irrationalists' game
Ayn Rand
#52. 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
#53. The true grotesque being the expression of the repose or play of a serious mind, there is a false grotesque opposed to it, which is the result of the full exertion of a frivolous one.
John Ruskin
#54. It's a shameful moment for U.S. media when it insists on being subservient to the grotesque propaganda agencies of a violent, aggressive state.
Noam Chomsky
#55. Since art is dead in the actual life of civilized nations, it has been relegated to these grotesque morgues, museums.
Walter Gropius
#56. 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
#57. I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have been trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot accomplish it. I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it. It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible.
Mark Twain
#58. Miles couldn't help admiring women for their ability to dismiss the evidence of their senses. If that's what explained it. If it wasn't simply that from time to time they were unaccountably drawn to the grotesque.
Richard Russo
#59. Fate's got a fucking sick sense of humor. Fate is a shape-shifter. It's the kindest and most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than a person deserves, and then it shrinks and curls and forms into something grotesque. You think its one thing, but then its another.
Deb Caletti
#60. Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
H.L. Mencken
#62. I'm interested in the crevices, and the grotesque, and the unsavory. That started out when I was young. I've never quite been able to shake that.
Carrie Brownstein
#63. The random talk of people who have no chance of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself into the moment for ever.
Virginia Woolf
#64. Including four mice posed with tiny china cups, seated around a miniature table. A Mad Hatter's grotesque tea party.
Tess Gerritsen
#65. There is such a quiet desperation and chronic sense of dullness to Helena, Montana, which makes it the most socially grotesque and culturally bitter of any of the capital cities.
Brian D'Ambrosio
#66. I was grotesque to the theatrical pitch, a stage miser, but I was certainly not a physical impossibility
H.G.Wells
#67. Life is but a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.
Mark Twain
#68. He found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#69. Above him loomed a grotesque fat man [ ... ] His bedrobe was large enough to serve as a tourney pavilion, but its loosely knotted belt had come undone, exposing a huge white belly and a pair of heavy breasts that sagged like sacks of suet covered with coarse yellow hair.
George R R Martin
#70. The Loser proceeds to narrate the same story he tells in virtually every one of his plays and novels: a story of frustrated ambition and (incestuous) love, suicide, and the generally grotesque absurdity of existence. But
Thomas Bernhard
#71. I am sent too many mainstream scripts in which the older woman is really quite grotesque. Sometimes you read a script and you feel quite sick that they have to caricature older women in such a negative way.
Sigourney Weaver
#72. The grotesque in my poems is the motion I use to put myself and the grotesque world together. So the miserable images I use in my poems are the same as the letters I send into the miserable world.
Kim Hyesoon
#73. For me the grotesque is necessary to understand beauty,
David Altmejd
#74. Psychological horror I've always appreciated, like 'Rosemary's Baby.' The slasher movies and the grotesque movies are the ones that I've really been off for a while.
John Carroll Lynch
#75. I think there's an instinct to make grotesque horror films that are purely carnal, like the 'Saw' movies.
Amber Heard
#76. Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s), I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts.
Camille Paglia
#77. Freudism and all it has tainted with its grotesque implications and methods, appear to me to be one of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others. I reject it utterly, along with a few other medieval items still adored by the ignorant, the conventional, or the very sick.
Vladimir Nabokov
#78. Well, even if the boy lives, he'll be a cripple, grotesque. Give me a good, clean death any day.' ... 'Speaking for the grotesques, I'll have to disagree. Death is so final. Whereas life, ah life is so full of possibilities.
George R R Martin
#79. O sleep! ridiculous mystery which makes faces appear so grotesque, you are the revealer of human ugliness. You uncover all shortcomings, all deformities and all defects. You turn every face touched by you into a caricature.
Guy De Maupassant
#80. Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute.
David Sedaris
#81. 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
#82. It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny. It is a blow to your parents, at whom you are pissed.
Marya Hornbacher
#83. For me, the single word "God" suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque.
Andre Breton
#85. I never wanted to do something grotesque. I never wanted to shock. I wanted my audience to be happy, to be kind.
Eva Zeisel
#86. Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.
U.G. Krishnamurti
#87. Jesus took away all of our ugliness. Unlike a typical bride, we are all shabby, grotesque, and woefully unprepared moments before we walk down the aisle. But our Groom beautifies us when we look to Him in faith, and in that instant we become His cherished bride.
Francis Chan
#88. There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it.
Mark Twain
#89. Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.
Sylvia Plath
#90. I have a great need to learn what the norm is by dealing with what is not the norm ... with the grotesque and the fantastic.
Alfred Brendel
#91. While there are so many beautiful Baroque churches and it's a beautiful artistic tradition, it almost gets hideous and grotesque if you push it further. You can take something beautiful and overdo it.
Win Butler
#92. A man without passion would be like a body without a soul. Or even more
grotesque, like a soul without a body.
Edward Abbey
#93. I like characters with character, not just pretty faces. Anyway, I think people can be both grotesque and beautiful at the same time. Look at Mick Jagger in the seventies. Look at Angelina Jolie.
Ted Naifeh
#94. I have been attacked by crows and men with grotesque faces; I have been set on fire by the boy who almost threw me off a ledge; I have almost drowned - twice - and this> is what I can't cope with? This is the fear I have no solutions for - a boy I like, who wants to ... have sex with me?
Veronica Roth
#95. She seemed to have waited so long to hear those words that for a moment the earth stood still, and the moon, the trees, the grotesque shadows across the heath, became in that instant transfixed in her memory. How shall I bear this exquisite happiness? It is too much: it will destroy me.
Vera Brittain
#96. There is something I have learned since being paralyzed, and that is that in the absence of sensory information, the imagination always tends to the grotesque.
Patrick McGrath
#97. I have butchered many men. All are innocent and equaled when they are on the table. All are exquisite and grotesque. -Dr. Spencer Black
E.B. Hudspeth
#98. The queer and strange, the unrestrained, the grotesque is not only interesting: it is valuable. It is not always necessary to purge it out altogether in order to attain to the Sublime.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#99. Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.
E. M. Forster
#100. Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung.
Christopher Hitchens
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