Banality Quotes
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Banality is like boredom: bored people are boring people, people who think that things are banal are themselves banal. Interesting people can find something interesting in all things.
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People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.
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Cannot Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' be subject to transposition: the evil of banality?
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Perhaps Lila was right: my book—even though it was having so much success—really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn’t been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.
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It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possess neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth and can be radical.
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I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me.
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Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.
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In woman sex corrects banality, in men it aggravates it.
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Once you start rewriting, you're not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it.
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There is no blue without yellow and without orange, and if you put in blue, then you must put in yellow, and orange too, mustn't you? Oh well, you will tell me that what I write to you are only banalities.
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The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
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English tradition debars from dinner-table conversation almost all topics that might interest the conversers and insists upon strict adherence to banalities.
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Even when there are banalities, they're usually kind of benign banalities.
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Language is in decline. Not only has eloquence departed but simple, direct speech as well, though pomposity and banality have not.
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The most conspicuous thing about suffering is, as W.H. Auden once observed, its banality. The day is green, the sun is shinging, someone is eating, or opening a window, the torturer's horse is scatching its innocent behind on a tree, and in a mere second someone we love is dead.
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When you're creating you have to descend to depths. You've just got to go there - to the boredom, the banality, the loneliness and all that. Those moments of really feeling in the flow are fleeting.
