"Banal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glittering white gave an air of almost ostentatious prosperity to the place. There was even an attempt at gayety in the ornamentation, yet there appeared to be nothing attractive to tourists, save the Foreign Legion, which gave mystery and romance to all that would otherwise have been banal. Noise was everywhere, loud, shrill, insistent; rumbling, shrieking, rattling, roaring. Huge wagons, loaded with purple-stained cases of Algerian wine, bumping over the stones; strings of bells ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... these pointed to a woman of culture and refinement. But a subtle spirit of irony pervaded it all. She would never have answered his printed inquiry had she not laughed over it. For, pinned to the top of the letter was the clipping, the stupid, banal clipping—"Will the lady who sang from Madame Angot communicate with gentleman who leaned out of the window? J.H. Burgomaster Club." There was neither a formal beginning nor a formal ending; only four crisp lines. But these implied ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... my complexion, another on the choice of colours in my dress, a third, with a sly smile, on the conquests I had made at Aph-Lin's entertainment. But I knew already that all such language was what the French call 'banal,' and did but express in the female mouth, below earth, that sort of desire to pass for amiable with the opposite sex which, above earth, arbitrary custom and hereditary transmission demonstrate by ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... his sins one after another. The man's charity had grown with the extent of his misdoings; nothing had astonished this confessor. And yet, what could be the motive of a mover in the intrigues of kings? Lucien at first was fain to be content with the banal answer—the Spanish are a generous race. The Spaniard is generous! even so the Italian is jealous and a poisoner, the Frenchman fickle, the German frank, the Jew ignoble, and the Englishman noble. Reverse these verdicts and you shall arrive within a reasonable distance of the truth! The Jews have ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... case, the district attorney, and the United States marshal. I wanted to ask the yeggs too—it seemed only square—but the judge was out of town, and the marshal was afraid his Honor might cite him for contempt if he brought his prisoners to my party. These things probably seem to you most banal, but take it all round I do manage to keep amused. Of course, now and then I pay more for my fun than it's worth. Last summer I mixed in with some moonshiners in Tennessee. Moonshining is almost a lost ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... shocked at the impression, blaming herself. Surely Saidee did not know her yet, that was all; or the surprise was too great. She wished she had sent word by the negress. Though that would have seemed banal, it would have been better than to see the blank look on Saidee's face, a look which froze her into a marble statue. But it was too late now. The only thing left was to make the best of ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... preachment must at least be a novelty. Travel books imparting no patriotic lesson may well be left to authors and readers of older and self-sufficient nations. A work appealing on common lines to a New World audience would be worse than banal, and a conscientious American writer is compelled to describe not alone what he saw, but in clarion notes tell of some things he failed of seeing for our country, emerging but now from the formative period, ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... The banal compliment pleased Mrs. Murray, and she began to talk of trivial matters in her usual trivial strain. Sydney scarcely listened: for once he was disconcerted, and angry with himself. He knew that he would have talked in a very different strain if he had imagined for one moment that ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... And what had he lost? What was there in her? She was not brilliant; she had no position; she had neither learning nor wit. He could remember nothing remarkable that they had ever said to each other. Indeed, their conversations had generally been rather banal. But he could remember how they had felt, how he had felt, in their hours together.... The sensation communicated to him by her hand when he had drawn off her glove in the tremendous silence of the hansom! Marvellous, ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... gazed at her. He hardly breathed, lest some banal word should frighten this wonderful ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... the greater part, of the first "book" is—interesting! It is mere verse. As verse, even, it is often so involved, so musicless occasionally, so banal now and again, so inartistic in colour as well as in form, that one would, having apprehended its explanatory interest, pass on without regret, were it not for the noble close—the passionate, out-welling lines to "the truest poet I have ever known," the ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... door, or if one pressed one's face against the window pane at the right moment. On the very rare occasions when the Lady appeared on the threshold of the day-nursery, Robin stood and stared with immense startled eyes and answered in a whisper the banal little questions put ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... will stop any possibility of inquiry for some time to come." He paused, and behind her, Diana heard him strike another match. The banal little incident nearly snapped her nerves that were stretched to breaking-point. She put her hands to her head to try and stop ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... life, reading all the orchestra parts. Both these great artists were enchanted with each other, but after a while Liszt became tired of music and asked if we could not have a game of whist. To play a banal game of whist with Liszt seemed a sacrilege, but we played, all the same. I was very distraite, seeing Grieg and his wife (who do not play cards) wandering restlessly around the room, and sometimes I put on an ace when a two would have done ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... scribes of the ice-axe, in the perils and death which they court for the sake of adventure and exploration. Sir Martin Conway speaks of the systematic climber as the man for whom climbing takes the place of fishing and shooting. How depressingly banal! Yet Sir Martin Conway has written some of the finest tributes to the glories of the Alps, and has shown himself a master of artistic interpretation of their wealth of beauty. Whymper excels in matter-of-fact history of climbs, yet there is an undercurrent of reverence for the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... sympathy which has taken possession of them capable of surviving an interview with the person who gave it birth. Yet, in spite of this fine casuistry, I simply must confess to you—no, no, nothing. Guess if you can, and forgive me for this banal letter. Or rather, read between the lines, and perhaps you will find there a little bit of my heart and a great deal of what I ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... petit Chose se trouva seul dans cette chambre froide, devant ce lit d'auberge inconnu et banal, loin de ceux qu'il aimait, son c[oe]ur clata, et ce grand philosophe pleura comme un enfant. La vie l'pouvantait prsent; il se sentait faible et dsarm devant elle, et il pleurait, il pleurait.... Tout coup, au milieu de ses larmes, l'image des siens passa devant ses yeux; il vit la ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... Palais de Justice, built back to back with the rock foundation of the chateau, is itself a singular piece of architecture containing a small collection of local antiquities. This old Maison des Gouverneurs, now the Palais de Justice, is a banal, unlovely thing, regardless ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... keep regular office hours. Their habits of thought are all ready-made, proper, sober, befitting the Average Man. They worship dogma. The Bromide conforms to everything sanctioned by the majority, and may be depended upon to be trite, banal and arbitrary. ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... bulkier things, such as wax, silk, meat, etc., they had steelyards, which they called sinantan, which was equivalent to ten cates, of twenty onzas [i.e., ounce] apiece. The half of that they called banal, which was five cates; and the half of the cate they called soco. Consequently, these old weights having been adjusted to the Spanish weights by the regulations of the year 1727, one cale is equivalent to one libra, six onzas; ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... keeping my friends utterly in the dark concerning her presence in the abandoned east wing; and of what we were pleased to allude to as "separate maintenance," employing a phrase that might have been considered distasteful and even banal ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... "social" hours of non-interest, non-satisfaction, how long, how unbearably long, they can seem! Lois' face twitched, as well as her fingers; she did not realize, as women often do not, that to Justin this conversation, banal and irrelevant to any action of his present life or his present anxiety, was like coming up from under-depths to breathe at ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... at the Scoglio di Frisio would have been banal in comparison with this glorious progress through the night in the teeth of opposing elements. She envied Gaspare, who was outside with the sailors, and whose form she could dimly see, a blur against ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... word of all that is awkward and "bad form," although in two or three generations these very modes regain a certain quaint charm. And for the moment poor Anthony represents to the emancipated youth of our time all that was "banal" and prosy some thirty years ago. The taste of our youth sets hard for a new heaven, or at least a new earth, and if not that, it may be a new hell. Novels or poems without conundrums, without psychologic ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... he had revealed a good deal of himself. The prelude in Soho had no doubt prepared the way for such talk by carrying them to Naples on wings of music. They would not have talked just like that after a banal dinner at Claridge's or the Carlton. Craven had shown the enthusiasm that was in him for the sun, the sea, life let loose from convention, nature and beautiful things. The Foreign Office young man—quiet, reserved, and rather ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... a family wishes to have his wife and children brought in contact with the most maudlin and banal phases of life. He defends them from the sensational editor and the unpleasant advertiser. He subscribes to a newspaper which he does not fear to ...
— The Clock that Had no Hands - And Nineteen Other Essays About Advertising • Herbert Kaufman
... she said, laying her hand on his arm; "I am tired, and the conversation of one's ball-room partners is very banal. Monsieur Gervase would like me to dance all night, I imagine; but I am too lazy. I leave such energy to Lady Fulkeward and to all the English misses and ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... Strauss, and other composers. He insisted on the superiority of Chopin's piano music above all others; nevertheless he devoted more time to Hummel, and I can personally vouch that he adored the slightly banal compositions of the worthy Dussek. It is quite true that he named his little villa on the Wissahickon Creek ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... restoratives; bathed her brow with a dampened handkerchief; held strong salts to her nostrils, and murmured words of foolish, banal consolation, whilst Rotherby, in a half-dreaming condition, stunned by the suddenness of the blow, stood beside her, mechanically lending his assistance ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... of Velasquez. He neither flattered his sitters, as did Van Dyck, nor mocked them like Goya. And consider the mediocrities, the dull, ugly, royal persons he was forced to paint! He has wrung the neck of banal eloquence, and his prose, sober, rich, noble, sonorous, rhythmic, is to my taste preferable to the exalted, versatile volubility and lofty poetic tumblings in the azure of any school of painting. His palette is ever ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... side-tracks, towards where the single baggage truck stood, loaded with elegant, leather-covered boxes and wicker basket-trunks, marked "E. Mills. S.S. Savoie. Compagnie Generale Transatlantique." Among them, out of place and drab, stood one banal department-store trunk labeled, "Welles. 320 ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... that something had to be said, but for the life of him, for the first time in his experience, he couldn't hit upon the thing to say. "Good-afternoon" seemed to him too banal, commonplace; and he could think of nothing else for a moment. However, it ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... Peter went home. Lord Evelyn shook hands with Peter rather affectionately, and said, "Come and see me again soon, dear boy. Lunch with me at Florian's to-morrow—you and your wealthy friend. Busy sight-seeing, are you? How banal of you. Morning in the Duomo, afternoon on the Lido, and the Accademia to fill the spare hours; I know the dear old round. Never could be worried with it myself; too much else to do. But one manages to enjoy life even without it, so don't overwork. And come and see ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... erect, very straight of eyebrow, keen of glance, precise of speech. His extraordinary black eyes peered out from beneath his level brows in a disquietingly observant manner. One felt immediately that one's hands and feet were peculiarly large and awkward, or one's last remark hopelessly banal, or one's birthplace in some cheap and innominate region outside of Manhattan. So long as Miss Wardrop remained under forty, Mr. Lispenard had held aloof. Perhaps he feared that by calling on a maiden lady under forty he might arouse hopes which, however chaste, could ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... The arc lamps gleam through the monotonous downpour. One can only stand and dream ... how charming people are since they are alive ... how charming the rain is and the night.... And how foolish arguments are ... how banal are these cerebral monsters who pose as iconoclasts and devote themselves grandiloquently and inanely to disturbing the ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... which the bench might not have thought of; or they may call attention to some reason for severity or mercy. But on the one hand if this is important it will already have been touched in the adduction of evidence, and on the other hand such points are generally banal and indifferent to the real issue in the case. If this be not so it would only indicate that either we need a larger number of judges, or even when there are many judges that one thing ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... years, having just arrived with her Spring and Summer models, was showing them to an appreciative woman, a patron of many years. It is not an exaggeration to say that in all that procession of costumes for cool days or hot, ball-room, salon, boudoir or lawn, not one was banal, not one false in line or its colour-scheme. Whether the style was Classic Greek, Mediaeval or Empire (these prevail), one felt the result, first of an artist's instinct, then a deep knowledge of the pictorial records of periods in dress, and ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... number of remarks suitable to one or both of my old companions, but they all, somehow, seemed banal and excessive as I marshalled them to my lips. A quaint, almost hypnotic quiet rose like the tide around us: all seemed said and agreed to. A tiny fire flickered on the Franklin hearth; the iridescent fan-tailed fish bent and flattened and glided in the translucent globe; ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... judgment, the subtle insight, the lightness of touch, the indefinable charm of style—these belong to her temperament and her genius. But the clearness, the justness of expression, the precision, the simplicity that was never banal—such qualities nature does not bestow. One must find their source in careful training, in wise criticism, in early familiarity ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... they don't know!" said Miriam Rooth. "You've not said a word to me. I don't mind your not having praised me; that would be too banal. But if I'm bad—and I know I'm dreadful—I wish you'd ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... there. He was divine last night. All felt that he was divine. He spoke to everyone with an admirable modesty, gaily, his eyes laughing. Several women kissed him, including Morenita. Not that I minded. In the theatre the code is different, coarser, more banal. He alone raised this crowd above its usual level and gave ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... original sin, and that sort of business, and there was no question about it that Hardy was enjoying himself hugely. He was leaning upon the table, a coffee-cup between his relaxed brown hands, listening with an eagerness highly complimentary to the banal remarks we had to make upon the subject. "This is talk!" he ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... things that can themselves be written and talked about, there are current many cliches—stock and banal sayings that express, or have at some time expressed, a certain amount of truth. The most familiar of these for a good many years past has been that the penny post has killed it. Whether revival of the twopenny has caused it to exhibit any kind of corresponding resurrectionary symptoms ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... banal message on the soiled card, then restored cash and postal to their respective pockets. After which he stood frowning down in puzzled ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... one who is hurt. Amongst the feelings which had waked in her, dim and for the most part hardly understood, two at all events were clear. One a vague longing for something different from the banal path she daily trod, the other a poignant regret that she was ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... exposition - one of these banal world fairs which I had often railed at. But now with my thousand-fold heightened sensibility of joy and beauty, I saw it all as a distinct dawning and precursor of untold ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... commissions, whether from men or women, 'point de galanterie', bring them in your account, and be paid to the uttermost farthing; but if you would show them 'une galanterie', let your present be of something that is not in your commission, otherwise you will be the 'Commissionaire banal' of all the women of Saxony. 'A propos', Who is your Comtesse de Cosel? Is she daughter, or grand-daughter, of the famous Madame de Cosel, in King Augustus's time? Is she young ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... slowly, as if tired out suddenly. Her head drooped; from the windows of a building with terraces and balconies came the banal sound of hotel music; before the low mean portals of the Casino two red posters blazed under the electric lamps, with a cheap provincial effect.—and the emptiness of the quays, the desert aspect of ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... chaff, meant in all good nature, had struck home to the very marrow of his self-distrust. He had clambered to a pedestal where he stood and preached banal things which, in reality, he doubted, and smiled at his congregation, and sniffed contentedly at the fumes of incense rising about him, incense of which he was but too well aware. He would have had no idea how to stop it; but, if the truth were told, he had had ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... handsomer than Westminster, and a most large close about it and offices for the officers thereof, and a fine palace for the bishop." In later times Motley, the historian, thought it "too neat." Henry James calls it "a blonde beauty among churches," and even hints that it is a little banal. Another American critic, Mrs. Van Rensselaer, in a sympathetic study of the cathedral which appeared in "The Century Magazine," says: "If we think it feeble, it will be because we cannot see strength where it has been brought to perfect poise and ease. If our verdict ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... of this feeling. The game was his, but there was no more to be won from her that night. The time had come to descend from the heights to the dull and banal levels. He divined her wish to return to earth, and he had no reason for thwarting it. With a careless laugh he put on speed and rushed her ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... higher than that of the Shepherd's Pipe. The author passes at times abruptly from careful and loving realism to the most stilted conventionality, and from passages of impassioned eloquence to others grotesquely banal. In some of his peculiarities, as in the perpetuai use of elaborate similes and in the indulgence in inflated paraphrases, he anticipates some of the worst faults of style cultivated by writers of the next century. There are portions of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... ever since the mail-boat had cast off from the quay. Robin had made some banal attempt at conversation, urging (but without much sincerity) that, after her experiences of the day, the girl should go to her cabin and rest. But Mary Trevert had merely shaken her head impatiently, ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... touches, which are intended to draw the picture together, take off from its freshness. To appear before the public one must cut out all those happy accidents which are the joy of the artist. I compare these murderous retouchings to those banal flourishes with which all airs of music end, and to those insignificant spaces which the musician is forced to put between the interesting parts of his work in order to lead on from one motive to another or to ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... one time stirred me to passion, had from sitting so long with her head bent c ome loose from the comb and was untidy, but, to my eyes, that only made it look more rich and luxuriant. All this, though is banal to the point of vulgarity. Before me stood an ordinary woman, perhaps neither beautiful nor elegant, but this was my wife with whom I had once lived, and with whom I should have been living to this day if it had not been for her unfortunate character; she was the one human ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... proclaimed him as such, —while he, quite unconscious of the effect he produced, wondered why this bevy of human beings, most of whom were more or less distinguished in the world of art and literature, had so little to say for themselves. Their conversation was BANAL,—tame,— ordinary; they might have been well-behaved, elegantly dressed peasants for aught they said of wise, cheerful, or witty. The weather,—the parks,—the theatres,—the newest actress, and the newest remedies for indigestion,—these sort of subjects were bandied about from one to the other ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... is frankly banal; but it is so perpetually ignored in our political prosing that it must be made plain. A little boy in a little house, son of a little tradesman, is taught to eat his breakfast, to take his medicine, to love his country, to say his prayers, and to wear his Sunday clothes. ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... religious faithfulness surround the blind Pontiff. Before him all fall on their faces. Khans and Hutuktus approach him on their knees. Everything about him is dark, full of Oriental antiquity. The drunken blind man, listening to the banal arias of the gramophone or shaking his servants with an electric current from his dynamo, the ferocious old fellow poisoning his political enemies, the Lama keeping his people in darkness and deceiving them with his prophecies and fortune telling,—he is, ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... with banal gratitude till they were out of earshot, when Lawrence drew a deep breath as if to throw off some physical oppression. Under the weathered archway, down the flagged steps and over the lawn. . . . How still ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... It was a banal remark, but Adelle recognized it for a compliment and smiled prettily. She said nothing. Silence was still the principal method ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... "The Old Wives' Tale," he has gradually taken on a hesitating sort of romanticism, and in one of his later books, "Koenigliche Hoheit" (in English, "Royal Highness") he ends upon a note of sentimentalism borrowed from Wagner's "Ring." Fraeulein Viebig has also succumbed to banal and extra-artistic purposes. Her "Die Wacht am Rhein," for all its merits in detail, is, at bottom, no more than an eloquent hymn to patriotism—a theme which almost always baffles novelists. As for Frenssen, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... time to think out things for himself. A pretty compensation! If that's the stuff revolutionists are made of some of us may well go on their knees to them," she continued in a slightly bantering voice, while the banal society smiles hardened on the worldly faces turned towards her with conventional deference. "The poor creature is obviously no longer in a position to take care of himself. Somebody will have to look after him ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... enchanted that she was not turning the conversation into banal things, he determined not to say anything which would cause her again to draw down ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... envious of you, Angleford. If I were asked to spot a happy man, I should pitch upon you. I congratulate you upon your engagement. She's one of the prettiest and most charming girls I've ever met. That sounds rather banal, but I mean it. I hope you'll let us see a great deal of her, for Mary"—Mary was the duchess—"has, I can see, taken a great fancy to her. And I'm very glad to hear that you intend to make this your home; ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... magazines, flowers, and candy, with which Banneker had sought to fortify her against the tedium of the trip. As the time for departure drew near, they fell into and effortfully maintained that meaningless, banal, and jerky talk which is the inevitable concomitant of long partings between people who, really caring for each other, can find nothing but commonplaces wherewith to ease their stress of mind. Miss Van Arsdale's common sense ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... These banal words suddenly roused Gomov's indignation. They seemed to him degrading and impure. What barbarous customs ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... paused for an instant, while the six, now formed into a semicircle, hummed together softly a suggestion of distant nightingales. Not an imitation—that would be too banal—but a suggestion. In point of fact I thought I detected the air of "The Little ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 8, 1914 • Various
... from any cause but exhaustion from the general ordeal. She was still weak from the sickness she had been through—too weak to bear the strain of the work she had taken up. Of course, the catastrophe gave the whole surface situation away, and I must say that those rather banal young people behaved very humanely about it. There was nothing but interest of the nicest kind, and, if she is going on with her career, it will be easy enough for her to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... nutritious meals on bare boards, in china half an inch thick. Autumn, New York's most beautiful season, was in the air with its heart-lightening tang; energy seemed to flow into them as they breathed. They took long walks in the afternoons to the Park, which Stefan voted hopelessly banal; to the Metropolitan Museum, where they paid homage to the Sorollas and the Rodins; to the Battery, the docks, and the whole downtown district. This they found oppressive at first, till they saw it after dark from a ferry boat, when Stefan became fired by the towerlike skyscrapers sketched ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... conscious of a touch of impatience.... The manner was superb, tranquil and stately as a river; but the matter a trifle banal. Here was this old reprobation of ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... faded tint of old maids at their rising. With heavy head, he sat at his desk and looked at the piled-up documents with a vague expression. Always the eternal pile of despatches, optimistic reports, and banal summaries of the daily press. Nothing new, nothing interesting, all was going well. This tired world ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... millions, I've decided that this matter of sticking to things wears one out, particularly when the things concerned are men. There's nothing so often overdone and from to-day I swear to be amused. We talked about 'love'—how banal! With how many men have I talked ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... advertisements. There was nothing that could even be twisted into a message of hidden meaning to the initiated. Las Nuevas was what it called itself: The News. It was exactly as innocuous as he had believed it to be. Its editorial page, even, was absolutely banal in its servility to the city, ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... were remote not so much from a serious as from an accurate conception of life. So many things, except in a very nebulous and suggestive way, were sealed books to Aileen—merely faint, distant tinklings. She knew nothing of literature except certain authors who to the truly cultured might seem banal. As for art, it was merely a jingle of names gathered from Cowperwood's private comments. Her one redeeming feature was that she was truly beautiful herself—a radiant, vibrating objet d'art. A man like Rambaud, remote, conservative, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... against his chest; her smooth arm against his shoulder; the occasional passing contact of her, scarcely veiled from the sense of touch by the thin flame-coloured silk; the perfume she affected; the faint odour of her bright blond hair. In an attempt to break the spell he made some banal remark, but she shook her head impatiently. She danced with her eyes half closed. When the music stopped she drew a deep ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... that his health was undermined, his artistry grew keener, becoming fastidious, exquisite, precious, delicate, irritable toward the banal, and most sensitive in matters of tact and taste. When he first came forward, there was much noise of approval and joy among those concerned, for what he had produced was a thing full of valuable work, of humor, and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Paris, between visits to Chantilly and other places, at the massed luxury of the shops; she had wondered, starting with St. Luke's Square as a standard, how they could all thrive. But now in her first real glimpse of the banal and licentious profusion of one among a hundred restaurants, she wondered that the shops were so few. She thought how splendid was all this expensiveness for trade. Indeed, the notions chasing each other within that lovely and foolish ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... our flightiness, because the majority of us are unable and unaccustomed to think or to look deeply into life's phenomena, nowhere else do people so often say: "How banal!" nowhere else do people regard so superficially, and often contemptuously other people's merits or serious questions. On the other hand nowhere else does the authority of a name weigh so heavily as with us Russians, who have been abased ...
— Note-Book of Anton Chekhov • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
... had, in common with Victor Hugo, a gift for imposing upon himself with the charlatanry of pseudo-ideas; to observe, to analyse, to evoke with his imagination was not enough; he also would be among the philosophers—and Balzac's philosophy is often pretentious and vulgar, it is often banal. Outside the general scheme of the human comedy lie his unsuccessful attempts for the theatre, and the Contes Drolatiques, in which the pseudo-antique Rabelaisian manner and the affluent power do not entirely atone for the anachronism of a grossness more natural in the sixteenth ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... nothing to tell herself that Mrs. Pantin was her best friend, and that what she was asking was merely a matter of business—the sort of thing that Mr. Pantin was doing every day. Her heart beat ridiculously and she was rather shocked to hear herself laughing shrilly at Mr. Pantin's banal inquiry as to whether she had not "nearly blown off." He ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... Banal as truth! But I'm not thinking of his banners. I'm thinking of his pinched white youth And your disgusting "new ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... response may be made to that banal objection that socialism will suppress all liberty—that objection repeated to satiety by all those who more or less consciously conceal, under the colors of political liberalism, ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... Mr. Fett, anointing the gridiron with a pat of ship's butter, "I offer no remark upon it beyond the somewhat banal one by which we have all been anticipated by Hamlet. 'There are more things in heaven and ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... compliment, not in a banal way, and then mentioned that at half-past seven he was dining ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... life. I'm very glad for my own sake that you're to marry Osmond; but I won't pretend I'm glad for yours. You're very brilliant—you know that's the way you're always spoken of; you're an heiress and very good-looking and original, not banal; so it's a good thing to have you in the family. Our family's very good, you know; Osmond will have told you that; and my mother was rather distinguished—she was called the American Corinne. But we're dreadfully fallen, I think, and ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... or pistol. If you read one of his chapters in "Hunting the Grizzly" and ask yourself wherein its animation and attraction lie, you will find that it is because every sentence and every line report things seen. He does not, like the Realist, try to get a specious lifelikeness by heaping up banal and commonplace facts; he selects. His imagination reminds one of the traveling spark which used to run along the great chandelier in the theatre, and light each jet, so that its passage seemed a flight from point ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... foliage from Lake Constance, her husband slowly drowsed toward dissolution. She herself ripened in the sharp air of the capital and grew almost into another woman in this banal, disillusioned world, sober even in ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... swaddling-clothes. He puts his trust in the marriage contract he has in his pocket. Trouble is past and gone. One can now give oneself and let oneself go as if one were at home. That isn't the sense of a child! It's banal! He has no education; he sees nothing; he sees neither me nor himself; he is blind, ...
— Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit) - A Tragedy in Four Acts • Frank Wedekind
... go on in silence for a space while he revised and restated that encounter. Then he would break out abruptly with some banal phrase. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... Linder—she thinks he is a dear, only she daren't tell Mother and Father so, or they would be startled. And then there is Mr. C. Chaplin—always there is Mr. C. Chaplin. Personally, I loathe the cinematograph. It is, I think, the most tedious, the most banal form of entertainment that was ever flung at a foolish public. The Punch and Judy show is sweetness and light by comparison. It is the mechanical nature of the affair that so depresses me. It may be ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... Well, it was banal enough, heaven knows—how else could it have been popular? Lincoln was not a musician, so far as I know, but he knew that one can't fool all the people all the time! And the good Tosti, however light he may ring nowadays, had one little bit of information not always at the disposal ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... doctrine of perfection reached by suffering was a barbarous cruelty, held in horror under the beautiful sky of Italy. When the conversation languished, he prudently sought again at the piano the phrases of the graceful and banal Sicilian air, fearing to slip into an air of Trovatore, which was written in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the power of the preaching it has inspired. The periods of greatest preaching have always been the periods of freest access to the Bible. No one can overlook the immense power of the sermons of history. There have been poor, inept, banal expositors, doubtless; but even they turned men's minds to the Bible. Reading the Bible makes men thinkers, and so makes preachers inevitably. Witness the Scotch. James was raised in Scotland and believed in the power of preaching. At one time ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... Sometimes his verse is banal—as in the advice To a Working Man. But oftener his imagination plays on familiar scenes in town and country with a lambent flame, illuminating and glorifying common objects. He has the heart of the child, and tries to see life ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... reached the summit, and stood a moment gazing at the prospect outspread. A sunset in a novel has become too banal for repetition; it seems, indeed, almost the last word in literary mediocrity; and yet at the evening hour in Rhodesia, in September, when the rains are nearly due, and great masses of cloud begin to gather on the horizon, there is again and again a pageant of wonder and colouring ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... always had these teen-age dreams of a hero from space who would carry me off, and I guess I slipped you into the pattern without realizing it. I'm old enough now to face the fact that I like my work more than a banal marriage, and I'll probably end up a frigid and virtuous old maid, with more degrees and titles than you have ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... his house consistently,—to try to spread the good word that period furnishing does not necessitate great wealth, and that it is as easy and far more interesting to furnish a house after good models, as to have it banal and commonplace. ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... one of the Prime Ministers of the Entente, the War was the decisive struggle between the forces of autocracy and liberty, between the dark powers of evil and violence and the radiant powers of good and right. To-day all this causes nothing but a smile. Such things are just speechifying, and banal at that. Perhaps they were a necessity of War-time which might well be made use of; when you are fighting for your very life you use every means you have; when you are in imminent danger you do not choose your weapons, you use everything to hand. All the War propaganda against ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... delicacies of consideration for the privacy of each ought to be most respected. No one can estimate probably how much of the refinement, of the delicacy of feeling, has been lost to the world by the introduction of the postal-card. Anything written on a postal-card has no personality; it is banal, and has as little power of charming any one who receives it as an advertisement in the newspaper. It is not simply the cheapness of the communication that is vulgar, but the publicity of it. One may have perhaps only a cent's worth of affection to send, but it seems worth ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... panginoon Jesuchristo saca parito hohocom sa nabubuhai at sa nangamatai na tauo. Ang ba nal na tauo gagantihin niya nag caloualhatian nang langit, ang nacasonor silla nang caniyang otos. Ang di banal pacasasamin sa infierno ang di silla sumonor ...
— Doctrina Christiana • Anonymous |
