Tawdry Quotes

#1. We constantly pass up the rich and beautiful and ennobling experiences and seek out the tawdry, the cheap, and the degrading. These are the works of the devil, and they flourish on every side!

Billy Graham

#2. The last thing my mother said to me was, 'SuSu, your life is a celebration of everything that is cheap and tawdry.' I've always liked that, and I've always tried to live up to it.

Susan Tyrrell

#3. Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.

Edmund Leach

#4. If you focus on the humanity of your stories, your characters, then the horror will be stronger, scarier. Without the humanity, the horror becomes nothing more than a tawdry parlor trick. All flash and no magic, and worst of all, no heart.

Don Roff

#5. The greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.

Josef Pieper

#6. I'm not a villain, I've never hurt anyone. I'm just a tawdry character who explodes now and again.

Oliver Reed

#7. ARRIVAL And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom - feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind ... !

William Carlos Williams

#8. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity.

Lionel Shriver

#9. Truth looks tawdry when she is overdressed.

Rabindranath Tagore

#10. These were the facts. Facts were important. They separated fiction from reality, the tawdry world of Mike Longshott from the concrete spaces of Joe's world.

Lavie Tidhar

#11. Good only for destruction - has destroyed all that was valuable in the monarchy - is destroying France with daemonic energy - this tawdry, theatrical empire - a deeply vulgar man - nothing French about him - insane ambition - the whole world one squalid tyranny. His infamous treatment of the Pope!

Patrick O'Brian

#12. The making of a picture ought surely to be a rather fascinating adventure. It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion.

Raymond Chandler

#13. I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet's world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy.

Dan Simmons

#14. All things are a-flowing,' sage Heraclitus says, but a tawdry cheapness shall outlast all days.

Ezra Pound

#15. I saw a lot of lousy movies and watched a ton of crappy television and read a bunch of utterly forgettable books and comics and listened to hours of junk music as a kid. And I'm still drawing profitably in my own art on some of the tawdry treasure I stored up in those years.

Michael Chabon

#16. 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

#17. How could I describe our relationship even to myself without either disparaging it or insulting it with the tawdry decoration of sentimentality?

Olaf Stapledon

#18. It seemed so tawdry what he had offered her - mere money - compared with what she offered him. He offered her an extraneous thing with which he could part without a pang, while she offered him herself, along with disgrace and shame, and sin, and all her hopes of heaven.

Jack London

#19. Do I like tawdry, sleazy stories? Yeah, I do.

Errol Morris

#20. What strange times we live in, when good must disguise itself in the tawdry rags of evil!

Amin Maalouf

#21. Dreams are tawdry when compared with the leading of God, and not worthy of the aura of wonder we usually surround them with. God only doeth wonders. He does nothing else. His hand can work nothing less.

Jim Elliot

#22. Luxuries and indulgences were distractions from true greatness, tawdry and ephemeral baubles that dissipated energy that could be directed toward more meaningful and durable accomplishments in the world around him.

Ramez Naam

#23. Historic Amsterdam, that old part you first see when you turn up at Centraal Station, may have its monuments, but it's also the most tawdry and overcrowded part of the city.

David Hewson

#24. It's certainly easy to mock some things ... Oddly enough though I've never found it easy to mock anything of value. Only things that are tawdry and fatuous - perhaps it's just me.

Stephen Fry

#25. I probably owe my political dismay to New Labour, but also my growing sense that the satirical shape of human affairs is international and historical, not glued to the tawdry ambitions of a team of politicians who represent nothing but themselves.

Andrew O'Hagan

#26. The fake seen tawdry.

Toba Beta

#27. And if you'd swap your metalife for a bone clock's snatched, wasted, tawdry handful of decades!

David Mitchell

#28. A huge advertisement in the unmistakably bright red tones of Vodacom, the global mobile phone giant, looked on this tawdry scene. It read to me like a distilled message about the only values that remained in this country, whose leaders were once committed Marxists: money and power.

Howard W. French

#29. A tawdry, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular. What we once regarded as a *kind* of sexual expression we now regard *as* sexuality.

Ariel Levy

#30. Some might call it a tawdry romance, or mommy porn. Samantha, however, found romances very educational. For example, she knew exactly what to do if facing an angry Saxon - swoon in his arms. See? Useful stuff.

Eve Langlais

#31. The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.

Arthur C. Clarke

#32. My history teacher could make us feel like he was imparting rare gossip to us when he was talking about Maria Theresa and the Habsburgs. I just loved that sense of - the Western canon is here, and it's gossipy and tawdry, and everyone is sort of goofy.

Mallory Ortberg

#33. Within us is something of divinity. One who has this knowledge and permits it to influence his life will not stoop to do a mean or cheap or tawdry thing.

Gordon B. Hinckley

#34. Living is not this tawdry, mediocre, disciplined thing which we call our existence. Living is something entirely different; it is abundantly rich, timelessly changing, and as long as we don't understand that eternal movement, our lives are bound to have very little meaning.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#35. Damn it, I'm angry now. I do believe life is loss, I do, but my suffering-to-words-ratio was out of control: lying around composing nothing but these - righteous arias, month after month, these tawdry special pleas.

Gwendoline Riley

#36. The artistic taste of the Catholic priests is appalling and I am most anxious to have a Catholic church in which everything is genuine and good, and not tawdry and ostentatious.

Giles Gilbert Scott

#37. On such a night,' I thought, 'were ill and good,
Bright and unlovely; precious, tawdry,
All mingled into one
And pressed against my heart.

Irene Hunt