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More "Banal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of a 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 ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... was once asked where he got his ideas. In reply he asked "what ideas?" Men of ideas have brains that function exactly as those of other normal well-ordered citizens. They are not gifted by strange kinks in their brain cells. When the prominent cartoonist is contemplating the banal act of shaving or putting in a new furnace, his thoughts are no more or less exalted or lofty than when creating a cartoon idea intended to sway public opinion. Strange, isn't it, that considering the thousands of earnest thinking diligent-working young students, that ...
— Pictorial Photography in America 1922 • Pictorial Photographers of America
... 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 ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 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 from a ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... a man of few words, and those not the most polite in tone, for when the General began with a banal remark about the weather, M. Baume ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... Villefranche is on the western side of the harbor between the Petite Corniche and the water. Like all Riviera towns on a main road it has grown rapidly and medieval streets and buildings have almost disappeared, giving way to the banal architecture of the end of the nineteenth century. The garish brick villas of the head of the gulf are excrescences in their lovely garden setting. But after one has reached the eastern side of the harbor and gone through ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... entertaining him is simply the ghost of some ancient idea that his school-master forced into him in 1887, or the mouldering corpse of a doctrine that was made official in his country during the late war, or a sort of fermentation-product, to mix the figure, of a banal heresy launched upon him recently by his wife. This is the penalty that the man of intellectual curiosity and vanity pays for his violation of the divine edict that what has been revealed from Sinai ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... all do to make martyrdom less inevitable in the end, for the man who has a thought, a discovery, an idea, to tell us. Such men are rare, and their thought, when they produce it, is sure to be unpalatable. For, if it were otherwise, it would be thought of our own type—familiar, banal, commonplace, unoriginal. It would encounter no resistance, as it thrilled on its way through our brain, from established errors. What the genius and the prophet are there for is just that—to make us listen to unwelcome truths, to compel us to hear, ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... which lie under these singular uplifts above the great alluvial plain. As of right, here grow mansion homes, and here is lived life as nearly feudal and as wholly dignified and cultured as any in any land. Ignorant of the banal word "aristocracy," here, uncounting wealth, unsearching of self and uncritical of others, simple and fine, folk live as the best ambition of America might make one long to live, so far above the vulgar northern scramble for money and display as might make angels weep ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... of that part of my life in which I did not know that woman. These are like the last hours of a previous existence. It isn't my fault that they are associated with nothing better at the decisive moment than the banal splendours of a gilded cafe and the bedlamite yells of ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... not what he had expected. There was no empty boast about the speech, as there would have been if Laura Highford had uttered it—she was fond of demonstrating her conquests and power in words. There was only a weariness as of something banal and tiring. He must ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... 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, constructive, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... 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 ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... Standish read the 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
... 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, ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... needs; of ways and means for 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 under ordinary conditions. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... the sense he intended, the fur-merchant was entirely delightful—engaging as a child; for, among other marked qualities, he possessed the unerring instinct of the snob which made him select for his friends those whose names or position might glorify his banal insignificance—and his stories were vivid pictorial illustrations of this useful worldly faculty. O'Malley listened with secret delight, keeping a grave face and dropping in occasional innocent questions to heighten the color or increase the output. Others in ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... governor and captain-general, president and auditors of my royal Audiencia of the city of Manila, of the Philipinas Islands. Don Miguel Banal has informed me—in a letter of the fifteenth of July, six hundred and nine—that, at the instance of the natives of the village of Aquiapo, the late archbishop of that city wrote to me that the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
... the hydrant water run: He fancies lonely, banal, bald-headed mountains, affected by the daily caress of the tropical sun, weeping tears the length of brooks down their faces and flanks. She lets the hydrant water run: He hearkens Father Sebastian cooking ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... swift 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
... the moment, she had, by the time the last bars of the minuet had been played, succeeded in completely dispelling it; he never realised in what a fever of excitement she was, what effort it cost her to keep up a constant ripple of BANAL conversation. ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... but afterward I tried to talk to them a little. They all stood in a group at one end of the room, flanked by an interpreter—the three principal chiefs well in front. I don't know what the interpreter said to them from me, probably embellished my very banal remarks with flowers of rhetoric, but they were very smiling, opening wide their black mouths and made me very low bows—evidently appreciated my intention and effort ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... of any reality that they dare not think a 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 ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... door slammed. They rolled homeward, and Ermentrude suffered from a desperate sense of the unachieved. The princess had been impertinent, the Keroulans rather banal. Mrs. Sheldam watched her charge's face in the intermittent lights of the ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... pleased him. Most women he had known had offered themselves shamelessly; this girl had kept him at a distance. This in itself would be enough to attract most men. The very novelty of it appealed to him. She was exceedingly pretty, too, yet hers was not the banal, conventional beauty of every day, but something fresher, more fascinating, more lovable, an indefinable, elusive charm that kept him guessing, yet always accompanied by a quiet dignity that compelled respect. ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... has 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 ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... I am terrified, as merchants' wives are terrified of "brimstone." When people talk to me of what is artistic and inartistic, of what is dramatic and not dramatic, of tendency, realism, and so on, I am bewildered, hesitatingly assent, and answer with banal half-truths not worth a brass farthing. I divide all works into two classes: those I like and those I don't. I have no other criterion, and if you ask me why I like Shakespeare and don't like Zlatovratsky, I don't venture to answer. Perhaps in time and as I grow wiser I may work ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... 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 Maple Avenue. ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... —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 ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... 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 ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... 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, he is a parson by trade, and carries over into the novel ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... of the gallant days of the Comtes de Foix. Foix' 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 of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... the general level of Britannia's Pastorals is distinctly 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 ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... was that of a Spanish dancer. Worth told me that he had put his whole mind upon it; it did not feel much heavier for that: a banal yellow satin skirt, with black lace over it, the traditional red rose in my hair, red boots and a bolero embroidered in steel beads, and small steel balls dangling all over me. Some com-pliments were paid to me, but unfortunately ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... suggest trap doors, or secret panels or anything so banal," he said, "nor mysterious springs in the wall which, ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... 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 to point of brilliance. Wherever he focuses his ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... paid the appropriate compliment, not in a banal way, and then mentioned that at half-past seven he was dining ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... 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 or another may ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... was ready to receive the idea. There was the same optimistic temper among the comfortable classes in both countries. Shaftesbury, the Deist, had struck this note at the beginning of the century by his sanguine theory, which was expressed in Pope's banal phrase: "Whatever is, is right," and was worked into a system by Hutcheson. This optimism penetrated into orthodox circles. Progress, far from appearing as a rival of Providence, was discussed in the interests of Christianity by the Scotch theologian, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... this young man and himself the banal relations of two persons accustomed to frequent the same house, whom no tie unites, who seem ever separated by a certain antipathy of nature, of manner of life. What explanation could there be called for between them? He followed him ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... banal," said the unreal editor, resisting an impulse to do the Easy Chair some sort of violence. At the same time he made his reflection that if preachers were criticised in that way to their faces there would shortly be very few saints left in the pulpit. He gave himself ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... two were thrown together. One scorching noon they met; he invited her to a stroll on the cliff-road. She took his arm, and (looking back upon it now) remembers that as she took it she smiled "sillily," and made some banal speech about the blazing, brazen sea below. For she felt that he had guessed her secret, timid hope. . . . Now, recalling the episode (it is he who has given the signal for such reminiscence), she asks him what effect his divination of her trembling ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... the Turkish carpet of banal reds, blues, and greens, it had to be concealed under rugs of black fur which, luckily, the hotel possessed in plenty. It was all very mysterious and exciting, and Annesley could imagine the effective ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... a houri, an ideal toy or the remains of an ideal toy; I had not expected any kind of obvious brilliancy, nor a subtle charm that would haunt my memory for evermore. On the other hand, I had not expected the banal, the perfectly commonplace. And I think that Miss Annie Brett was the most banal person that it has pleased Fate to send into my life. I knew that instantly. She was a condemnation of Simon Fuge. SHE, one of the 'wonderful ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... dear, all this isn't news to me. Surely you, who've gipsied with me, aren't going to be so obvious, so banal, as to blame me because you've cared for ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... care as Pisa. The circuit is complete save where the traveler enters the city; and there, alas, a wide breach has been made by the restless spirit of modernity. But once past the paltry barrier and the banal square, with its inevitable statue of Victor Emanuel, that take the place of the old Porta Romana, one quickly perceives that the city is a walled one. Glimpses of battlements close the vistas of the streets, and green fields peep through the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... made the break it did not seem so bad as he had anticipated. At first things went on smoothly enough. The campaign had not opened, and he was free to exercise his talents outside the political field. He drew cartoons dealing with banal subjects, touching with the gentle satire of his humorous pencil foibles which all the world agreed about, and let vital questions alone. And he and Edith enjoyed themselves: indulged oftener in things they loved; went more frequently to the theater; appeared at recitals; ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... be said. The banal wishes for happiness would not rise to his lips. He looked at her intently for a moment, saw her eyes again drop, and walked away. He was suddenly tired and wanted to go home and rest. The reaction of his nervous and physical strain ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... prostration. So she thought of it. She forced the note, no doubt. Afterward she was unpleasantly conscious of that. But at any rate the talk flowed. There was some give and take. The joints of their intercourse did not creak as if despairingly appealing to be oiled. Of course it was very banal to talk about Italy. But, still, these moments must come sometimes to all those who go much into the world. And what is Italy, beautiful, siren-like Italy, for if not to be talked about? Charmian said ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... will be of as high a quality as anything that the average commercial photographer can produce, and, better yet, it will not have any flat and stale commercial flavor about it. Nothing is more static and banal than the composition that the ordinary professional will produce if you fail to prevent him from having his own way. Ten to one, all the lower half of the picture will be empty foreground, and not a living creature will appear in the entire ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... 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
... ornaments, which will justly be accounted barbarisms until formally adopted and naturalised. Such are the "peoples" of Kossuth and the useful "lengthy," an American revival of a good old English term. Nor will my modern versionist relegate to a foot-note, as is the malpractice of his banal brotherhood the interesting and often startling phases of his foreign author's phraseology and dull the text with its commonplace English equivalent—thus doing the clean reverse of what he should do. It is needless to quote instances concerning this phase of "Bathos:" they abound ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... with him. Liszt played it off as if he had known it all his 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 ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... Lester had concluded to be inevitable, whether it led to separation or legalization of their hitherto banal condition, followed quickly upon the appearance of Mr. O'Brien. On the day Mr. O'Brien called he had gone on a journey to Hegewisch, a small manufacturing town in Wisconsin, where he had been invited to witness the trial of a new motor ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... 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 ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... Croats only in respect to their language, as it prevails among them at the present time. Here they do not appear as a distinct race; but still are divided into two portions. One, in Military Croatia, comprising the military districts of Carlstadt and Varasdin, and also the Banal Border, speak the Dalmatian-Servian dialect with very trifling variations; the other, in Provincial Croatia, i.e. the provincial counties of Agram, Kreutz, and Varasdin, approach nearer to the Slovenzi or Vindes, whose language will ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... Dignity doesn't trouble you any! My word! I'm often ashamed for you. You love everybody. You take all sorts of rebuffs without even raising your back. You're as pleasant and as banal ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... but the critic is moved to remark, as he casts back in his mind over the last twenty years of amateur publishing activity, that on the whole the tone of amateur poetry is distinctly higher than it used to be. Banal verse we still have in larger amounts than we should; but the amateur journals of a decade or two ago had reams of it. On the other hand, they contained not a few poems with more than a passing spark of the divine fire. The promising fact is that in the poetry of today's journals we get ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... mountains which appears to travellers now and then, bringing them good luck. Of course some people would say it was just an ordinary, cafe-au-lait-coloured deer, with the sun shining on it to make it look white; because there are still deer in the mountains: but you and Monty wouldn't be so banal! ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... of the kind that runs for a year and costs the price of two books for a good seat. Its humor is either good horseplay or vulgar farce, and its literary quality nil. Its music is better, less banal than the words, and, sometimes, almost excellent. But its setting, the costumes, the scenic effects, the stage painting, and, most of all, the color schemes are always artistic and sometimes exquisite. They intrigue ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... for me to take the initiative, and as everything that rose to my lips seemed banal, we stood awkwardly silent till he was ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... stayed. Yes, friendship stayed—in spite of all. Her conduct had made him blush for her, had covered him with shame, but she was a woman, and therefore weak—he had come to that now. She was on a lower plateau of honour, and therefore she must be—not forgiven—that was too banal; but she must be accepted as she was. And, after all, there could be no more deception; for opportunity and occasion no longer existed. He would go and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... at the piano, and without asking his audience to choose, began in a low voice an old, sweet, entirely banal and utterly heartbreaking ballad of Tosti's, ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... there with head bowed and he seemed to be speaking to himself. Stanton caught a phrase or two and found it was verse—banal verses, which were there and then fixed in his fly-paper memory. "Tell me, my ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... doorway for a second before he saw my father and was struck with fear, and how like yours it was—but more like John Prather's. And the high-sounding preachments about the poverty that might go with fine gowns became real to me. They were not banal at all. They were simple truth, free of rhetoric and pretence. I knew that my cry of 'It's not in the blood' was as true in me as any impulse of yours ever could ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... of anger. She detested him now. This failing to keep their rendezvous seemed to her an insult, and she tried to rake up other reasons to separate herself from him. He was incapable of heroism, weak, banal, more spiritless than a ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... morrow of a fete. The furniture, stripped of its coverings, offered the 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 ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... 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 ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... death itself is not a repulsive skeleton, but rather a majestic form, full of grandiose mystery. Andreyev, on the other hand, but rarely breaks the bounds which unite him to reality. His heroes are living people, who act, and whose banal life ends with a banal death. This realism and this passionate love of truth make the strength and the beauty ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... the Atre Perilleus,[7] and of Gawain and Hector in the Lancelot of the final cyclic prose version, are of the most banal description; the theme, originally vivid and picturesque, has become watered down into a meaningless adventure of the most ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... 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 talk to me ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Banal enough! Banal as truth! But I'm not thinking of his banners. I'm thinking of his pinched white youth And your ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... was mine," he said in his most banal tones, "the surprise, alas, was all for you—and all ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... "disappeared on the eve of her marriage to elope with some poet or painter, and set society by the ears. Thoroughly modern and banal!" ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... bearing and serene face as she moved about her stateroom setting in order the books, 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 came to ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... only fault," she returned—"that everything, with him, is too deep. 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 smoked again as she thus, with amused complacency, appreciated her acquisition. "And never about you. We keep clear of you. We're wonderful. But I'll tell you what he does do," she ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... unfailing resource to worried sub-editors. When seasons are slack and silly, the humblest member of the staff has but to turn out a column on this subject, and whether it be a serious dissertation on 'The Perfections of Polygamy' or a banal discussion on 'Should husbands have tea at home?' it will inevitably achieve the desired result, and fill the spare columns of the papers with letters for weeks to come. People are always interested in matrimony, ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... 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 ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... 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
... shared something 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 dizzily ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... persons, but a book of journeyings loaded with gentle 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, and destined to permanently lead the universe ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... blinked her eyes open and moved one hand at her side, and then she came fully awake. "Well," she said. "And a bright hello to you, Sleuth. If it's not being too banal, ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... or if he may escort her to a place of amusement. There are instances in romantic stories and in real life where a man and a maid have met without the help of a third party and have entered upon a charming friendship. They are rare, rarer in fact than in fiction. It is banal to say that a girl can usually tell. But she can, and if she has any doubt (and this is true of all her relations with men) she should have no doubt. She should ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... conventionality proved perfectly competent to avenge herself!" she exclaimed. "The animal Destournelle took the average, the banal view, as might have been anticipated. He had the insane presumption to suppose it was himself, not his art, in which I was interested. I explained his error, and departed. I recovered my equanimity. That took time. I felt soiled, degraded. And then to-day I meet him again, unashamed, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... her. Reason made a valiant but hopeless effort to assert itself. Was I sure that I wanted her—for life? No use! I wanted her now, no matter what price that future might demand. An awkward silence fell between us—awkward to me, at least—and I, her guide and mentor, became banal, apologetic, confused. I made some idiotic remark about being together ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... pinned up a nice description of himself, and a description of Lottie, sort of authentic passports to be used in the conscious world. These authentic passports, self-describing: nose short, mouth normal, etc.; he had insisted that they should do all the duty of the man himself. This ready-made and very banal idea of himself as a really quite nice individual: eyes blue, nose short, mouth normal, chin normal; this he had insisted was really himself. It was his ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... interior of the room, which is general assembly room, office, and reading room, resembles some dingy settlement boys club. A desk and high stool are in one corner. A table with papers, stacks of pamphlets, chairs about it, is at center. The whole is decidedly cheap, banal, commonplace and unmysterious as a room could well be. The secretary is perched on the stool making entries in a large ledger. An eye shade casts his face into shadows. Eight or ten men, longshoremen, iron workers, and the like, are grouped about the table. Two are playing checkers. ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... ever made such a banal remark to a French vaudevilliste, whose clothes, jewels, and automobile represented an income as incompatible with fixed salaries as with war time, I cannot imagine. Automatic Americanism, ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... to boast of not understanding,' which, as I have said, was an indication that it might be termed extremely clever or extremely stupid. It was not a poem, as has been held by some critics, that was a piece of intellectual vanity. Browning was far too great a man to stoop down to such mere banal conceit. The poem was a very different thing. It was a creature created by the obscurity of Browning's mind, which, as Chesterton thinks, was the natural reaction for a genius, born in a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... been more and more interested as he told of 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 ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... windows, doors, steps which lead up to the threshold, are what are to be seen from the outside. Nothing particular may be transpiring within the walls, or tragedies, crimes, hideous suffering may be enclosed. The conclusion is obvious to banality—but as suggestive as banal—so suggestive in fact that the hyper-sensitive and too imaginative had better, for their own comfort's sake, leave the matter alone. In most cases the existing conditions would not be altered even if one knocked at the door and insisted on entering ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Crevecoeur is one of our reasons for praising his spontaneity and vigour. He did not import nightingales into his America, as some of the poets did. He blazed away, rather, toward our present day appreciation of surrounding nature—which was not banal then. Crevecoeur's honest and unconventionalised love of his rural environment is great enough to bridge the difference between the eighteenth and the twentieth century. It is as easy for us to pass a happy evening with him as it was for Thomas Campbell, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... a dozen young women who appeared to spend their whole existence in statuesque poses and plaintive but nonsensical lyricism. It failed, honestly; and even when the action descended from song to banal dialogue, it was not reassured. 'Silly' was the unspoken epithet on a hundred tongues, despite the delicate persuasion of the music, the virginal charm of the maidens, and the illuminated richness of costumes and scene. The audience understood as little of the operatic ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... Fitzgerald's fine phrase as being not inapplicable to the atmosphere of MacDowell's writing. He has few reservations, and he shows small liking for recondite effects of harmonic colour, for the wavering melodic line—which is far from implying that he is ever merely obvious or banal: that he never is. His clarity, his directness, find issue in an order of expression at once lucid and distinguished, at once spontaneous and expressive. It is difficult to recall, in any example of his maturer work, a single passage that is not touched with a measure of beauty ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... And the woman talked to him, asked him how many cattle had come over that morning, whether they were yet unloaded, when they would be finally landed and led to the slaughter pens a little way inland. It was all so gross, so banal, yet it was all there was of incident in the day, and most clays were still more barren, with not even these paltry events to discuss. And he felt that he was sinking to the level of these people, he ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... might be interpreted as Margaret's true feelings as she answered Mrs. Mervill's question and succeeded in making some banal remarks about the view and the magnificence of the hotel. When she had said all that politeness demanded of her, she turned ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... 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 ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... sank, as, without reply, she submitted to the banal boredom of this blustering dame's society gabble. Mrs. Gannette hooked her arm into the girl's and led her to a divan. "It's a great affair, isn't it?" she panted, settling her round, unshapely form out over the seat. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... dictate extempore speeches on any subject whatever to his shorthand pupils, he was quite at his ease, quite master of his faculties, and self-satisfaction seemed to stand out on his brow like genial sweat while the banal phrases poured glibly from the cavern behind his jagged teeth; and each phrase was a perfect model of provincial journalese. George Cannon had to sit and listen,—to approve, or at worst to ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... 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, exquisite, magical sensation ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... she had gleaned the first-fruits of Honor's sacrifice, for he had been less taciturn, and had even responded to his wife's efforts to engage him in ordinary conversation. Instead of sitting in silence throughout the meal, or exchanging banal remarks about the food or the weather, they had discussed the war and all that India was going to do to prove her loyalty to the Crown. He had spoken of the advance in science and surgery, bound to result from the lessons of the war; and had told her of his wishes and intentions ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... 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 nang ...
— Doctrina Christiana • Anonymous
... 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 blind ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... naturally for fear of being identified. When a man did open his mouth it was only to commit some banal idiocy, for which, during office hours, he would have been haled to the nearest insane asylum and labeled incurable. Added to this was a heat matching Sahara's and the oppressive ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... harsh judgments of Tchaikovsky, Richard 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 ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... table where her husband sat reading she leant her chin in her hands and thought of the peasants, of suffering, of her own beauty, of the inevitable compromise, and of how she would write it down. Nor did Evan Williams say anything brutal, banal, or foolish when he shut his book and put it away to make room for the plates of soup which were now being placed before them. Only his drooping bloodhound eyes and his heavy sallow cheeks expressed his melancholy tolerance, his ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... mysterious about it," he said. "I get up at half past three every morning. I am at that desk most of the day; I go to bed at nine o'clock. If I had to write a banal note, it might take time, but there are certain ideas which I have worked with all my life. I worked a good many years without expressing them; they are all in my head, and when I want them I've only got to take them out. I am ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... from the ordinary banal hotel salon—is eloquent of the absorbing, far-reaching pursuits and interests amongst which you live. Who could ask a higher privilege than to share your father's work, to be his companion and amanuensis?"—She paused, as emphasising the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... in your debt,' he said; 'it would be banal to thank you for your divine music, yet permit me to say that I would willingly keep you for ever as my creditor, if you would but promise to make my debt the greater by singing to ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... possible in a big town. Every detail of life in the Hotel Bungalow was revealed to him in a series of sights, sounds and smells. And should a fellow lunatic arrive, how was he to avoid him? At every meal there would be little exchanges of the banal, after dinner a game of billiards—even possibly, horror of horrors, potential excursions planned with zest and good fellowship. And all the time he would be saying "No," more and more ungraciously, or, worse still—and ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... au fond d'un theatre banal Qu'enflammait l'orchestre sonore Une fee allumer dans un ciel ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... another, Miss Adair's place was on the opposite side of the table, and two removes from Ford's. Time and again the young engineer tried to side-track business in the interests of something a little less banal to the two women; but the president was implacable and refused to be pulled out of the narrow rut of details; was still running monotonously and raspingly in it when Kenneth glanced at his watch and suggested that the time for action ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... had stood 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 ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... 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 clever; I have no doubt it ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... been taken out of herself and to be regarding the scene from outside, regarding it coolly and critically; and it was plain to her that Ginger, in this upheaval of all things, was bearing himself perfectly. He had attempted no banal words of sympathy. He had said nothing and he was not looking at her. And Sally felt that sympathy just now would be torture, and that she could not have borne to be ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... outwardly, was, as to its interior, a characteristic maze in the Scottish baronial style of architecture beloved by mid-Victorian philanthropists. How the evicted orphans will like to return to those stone-flagged passages and large airy dormitories, after having experienced the comforts of the banal but snug suburban villas in which they are at present located, I know not. There is a certain dignity about the Scottish baronial pile, I admit. The silhouette of its grey stone facade, rising above delightful lawns, makes a good impression—from a distance. Postcard views of it ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... known completion. In the space it had occupied in his mind another one abruptly sprouted. The first subject after all was banal. A better one ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... fragment of the eternal and indestructible energy, which exists from everlasting to everlasting, deliberately expending its activity on the choice of a necktie! Why a necktie? Then one goes downstairs and exchanges banal phrases with other immortals. And one can't start breakfast immediately, because some ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... speaking to her was so obvious that Sam wondered whether this could be the height of innocence or the most banal coquetry. The hostile look in the eyes of the lady proved it could not ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... heresiarch, was so convinced by the power of his words, and by a marked miracle of the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, that he persevered till death in the Catholic faith, and in submission to the Church. Another named Bonneville, or Banal, who is also stated to have been an heresiarch, who had been thirty years buried in the darkness of errors, was converted in a similar manner at Rimini by the sermons of St. Anthony, and had ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... to understand exactly what she wanted to talk about; he saw all the things she saw and—he had read Jean d'Agreve!—they got to that at the end of the first half-hour, and then she froze up a little; some instinct told her it was dangerous ground, so she spoke suddenly of the weather, in a banal voice. ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... the controversy amicably to tatters in complete absorption. He had not joined in the argument. As always Gillian was too shy to address him of her own accord, but she was acutely conscious of his nearness. She deprecated her own attitude, yet silence was better than the banal platitudes which were all she had to offer. Her range was so restricted, his—who had travelled the world over—must be so great. With the exception of one subject her knowledge was negligible. But he too was an artist—hopeless to attempt that topic, she concluded with ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... advancement of civilization, is the faculty of penetrating national and racial disguises, and going directly to the heart of the human problem. Mark Twain possessed this faculty in supreme degree. As a literary critic he was banal and futile; but as a social and racial critic he was remarkable and profound. His essay 'Concerning the Jews' is a masterpiece of impartial interpretation; his comprehension of French and German racial traits, as revealed in his works, is keen and pervasively pertinent; and his magnificent analysis ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... and exceedingly banal interview with Helen, and another with Andrew. And an interval having elapsed, Andrew was observed to approach Helen and ask her for a polka. Helen punctiliously accepted. And he led her out. The outraged gods of social decorum were appeased, and the reputations ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... Bible at Alexandria. A superficial knowledge of the materialistic or rationalistic theories, which were propagated respectively by the Epicurean and Stoic schools, was made the excuse for indifference to the law. Then as now the advanced Jew would mask his self-indulgence under the guise of a banal philosophy, and jeer easily at archaic myths and tribal laws. The dominating motive of Philo's work is to show that the Bible contains for those who will seek it the richest treasures of wisdom, that its ethical teaching is more ideal and yet more real than ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... suddenly appeared insufferably dull, empty; the thought of monotonous, identical days spun thinly out, the nine hundred dollars extended to its greatest length, in that banal setting, suddenly grew unbearable.... There was ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and demoniacal brooding, madness and cruelty are here more sheerly powerfully expressed than in the earlier score; the scene of recognition between brother and sister is more large and touching than anything in "Salome"; Elektra's paean and dance, for all its closeness to a banal cantilena, its tempo di valse so characteristic of the later Strauss, is perhaps more grandiosely and balefully triumphant than the dancer's scene with the head. Nevertheless, the work is by no means realized. It is formally impure, a ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... novelists who use it so freely), when one fair Gy complimented me on the freshness of 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 mouth of ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Opdyke's 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 ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... 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.... ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... It was a banal statement, and Theydon knew it, but he blurted out the first crazy words that would serve to cloak the monstrous thought which leaped into his brain. And a picture danced before his mind's eye, a picture, not of the fair and gracious woman who had been done to death, but of a sweet-voiced girl ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... 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, ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... taste the delicious savor of the lovely gilded marbles, golden as honey. The antiques of the Vatican were frankly repulsive to him. He was disgusted by their stupid faces, their effeminate or massive proportions, their banal, rounded modeling, all the Gitons and gladiators. Hardly more than a few portrait-statues found favor in his sight, and the originals had absolutely no interest for him. He was no more kindly towards the pale, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... kin and kind is made pleasanter by our daily platitudes. Who is more tedious than the man incessantly struggling to avoid the banal? Nature rules that such a one will produce nothing better than epigram and paradox, saying old, old things in a new way, or merely shifting object for subject—and his wife's face, when he shines for a circle, is worth a glance. With ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... printed after the first page of Postscript, at the mid-sentence point "they preferred imitations of sentimental, / banal, ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... 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 ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... odd days that they had spent in 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 head were a ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... contempt. The long duration of this disastrous legislature has excited an universal weariness; the guilt of particular members is now less discussed than the insignificance of the whole assemblage; and the epithets corrupt, worn out, hackneyed, and everlasting, [Tare, use, banal, and eternel.] have almost superseded those of rogues ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... in a low, monotonous voice, staring haggardly at the fire, while I knelt by her side. I murmured some banal apologia, miserably aware that one set of words is as futile as another when one ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... third-form schoolgirl would have done better. There were even one or two mistakes in spelling, the grammar was slipshod, the different utterances what few schoolgirls would have attempted to make: so banal, so threadbare, so used-up were they. Where was that terse and vigorous style? Where were those epigrammatic utterances? Where was the pure Saxon which had delighted his scholarly mind in the stories ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... Turkish carpet of banal reds, blues, and greens, it had to be concealed under rugs of black fur which, luckily, the hotel possessed in plenty. It was all very mysterious and exciting, and Annesley could imagine the effective background these contrivances ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... learned from one critic that his technique was magnificent, his picture a masterpiece of psychology and of portraiture, and that if he kept on he'd soon be one of the Immortals. He learned from another that while he undoubtedly had technique, his posing was commonplace, his subject banal, his imagination hopelessly bourgeois; that he was a painter of the ugly and the ordinary, without inspiration or imagination; that the one pretty and delicate note in the whole canvas was the butterfly in the lower left-hand corner, and that that was obviously reminiscent ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... brought with him. Liszt played it off as if he had known it all his 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 ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... Schroeder who, they inform me, has 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 ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... "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, he is a parson by trade, and carries over into the novel ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... had expected. There was no empty boast about the speech, as there would have been if Laura Highford had uttered it—she was fond of demonstrating her conquests and power in words. There was only a weariness as of something banal and tiring. He ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... paper, the modest size, all 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. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... all this isn't news to me. Surely you, who've gipsied with me, aren't going to be so obvious, so banal, as to blame me because you've cared for ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... proved perfectly competent to avenge herself!" she exclaimed. "The animal Destournelle took the average, the banal view, as might have been anticipated. He had the insane presumption to suppose it was himself, not his art, in which I was interested. I explained his error, and departed. I recovered my equanimity. That took time. I felt soiled, degraded. And then to-day I meet him again, unashamed, actually claiming ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... langit nalolocloc sa canan nang dios ama macagagaua sa lahat. Ang ycapito sumangpalataia ang a tin 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 nang ...
— Doctrina Christiana • Anonymous
... dwellings, a fine church bearing all the insignia of nobility, a spacious farmyard in which there is a barn, a stable, a sheep-pen, a dovecote, and other buildings, all of which are within the area of the said fort; next to which stands a banal mill, a fine brewery of masonry, together with a large retinue of servants, horses, and equipages, the cost of which buildings amount to sixty thousand livres; so much so that this seigneury is one of the most valuable ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... the Croats only in respect to their language, as it prevails among them at the present time. Here they do not appear as a distinct race; but still are divided into two portions. One, in Military Croatia, comprising the military districts of Carlstadt and Varasdin, and also the Banal Border, speak the Dalmatian-Servian dialect with very trifling variations; the other, in Provincial Croatia, i.e. the provincial counties of Agram, Kreutz, and Varasdin, approach nearer to the Slovenzi or Vindes, whose language will ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... It sounded banal, even ridiculous, but I hardly knew what to say. I was startled. The tolling of the bell, too, was getting on ...
— The Spinster - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... she announced. I think she expected him to say "Impossible," but, whatever he was, he was never banal. ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... demand, but in sticking to the demand, which seriously it neither does nor can enforce. It believes it can accomplish this negation by turning its back on philosophy, the while its averted head utters a few irritable and banal phrases over it. Moreover, its horizon is so limited as to exclude philosophy from the realm of German actuality unless it imagines philosophy to be implied in German practice and in the theories subserving it. It urges the necessity for linking up with vital forces, but forgets that the real ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... know how much, nor how deeply distressing this whole affair has been to me." He managed to put an affecting pathos into words sufficiently banal, for he was an excellent actor. "I find that I am all sentiment. Under the shell of the hard-headed business man beats the heart of a school-boy. The memory of the hours we have spent together, the places we have seen, the ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... with the Marchesino 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 the blackness. She longed to ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... 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 clever; I have no doubt it is. But I would rather ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... explicable, has all the air of a miracle. My contention is that the full use of those seven-and-a-half hours will quicken the whole life of the week, add zest to it, and increase the interest which you feel in even the most banal occupations. You practise physical exercises for a mere ten minutes morning and evening, and yet you are not astonished when your physical health and strength are beneficially affected every hour of the day, and ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... and thus the two were thrown together. One scorching noon they met; he invited her to a stroll on the cliff-road. She took his arm, and (looking back upon it now) remembers that as she took it she smiled "sillily," and made some banal speech about the blazing, brazen sea below. For she felt that he had guessed her secret, timid hope. . . . Now, recalling the episode (it is he who has given the signal for such reminiscence), she asks him what effect his ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... preserved their medieval walls with such loving care as Pisa. The circuit is complete save where the traveler enters the city; and there, alas, a wide breach has been made by the restless spirit of modernity. But once past the paltry barrier and the banal square, with its inevitable statue of Victor Emanuel, that take the place of the old Porta Romana, one quickly perceives that the city is a walled one. Glimpses of battlements close the vistas of the streets, and green fields peep through the open ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... when they're hunted down. The ones that roar are quite insufferable, and the ones that don't are just banal." ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... rather banal waltz again, till the lad caught the tune. He hit it amazingly well, and his ear was unusually true. The dark one had been in Canada and was hungry for American rag-time. "'The Good Old Summer Time'—you know that? 'Harrigan'—you know that?" he said in English. The ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... been more correct, and nothing more banal, than this part of their conversation. He certainly would call. He would travel down to the idyllic Putney to-morrow. He could not lose such a friend, such a balm, such a soft cushion, such a comprehending intelligence. ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... hidden by 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 ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... plans are subject to the banal reservation, "weather permitting," and the signal intended to bring Bosambo to his destruction was swallowed up in the bellowings ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... Paul gazed at her. He hardly breathed, lest some banal word should frighten this ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... thrown back, with that banal expression on his face of a dog pretending not to understand. The histrionic excellence of the performance was not lost on Tommy, who ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... under these singular uplifts above the great alluvial plain. As of right, here grow mansion homes, and here is lived life as nearly feudal and as wholly dignified and cultured as any in any land. Ignorant of the banal word "aristocracy," here, uncounting wealth, unsearching of self and uncritical of others, simple and fine, folk live as the best ambition of America might make one long to live, so far above the vulgar northern scramble ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... "I muttered some banal words of comfort, and continued to tie him up—though God knows it was a pretty hopeless task. I hadn't even any morphia I could give him to make ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... 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 ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... independence pleased him. Most women he had known had offered themselves shamelessly; this girl had kept him at a distance. This in itself would be enough to attract most men. The very novelty of it appealed to him. She was exceedingly pretty, too, yet hers was not the banal, conventional beauty of every day, but something fresher, more fascinating, more lovable, an indefinable, elusive charm that kept him guessing, yet always accompanied by a quiet dignity that compelled respect. Instead of flirting with him or giving ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... Richard 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 ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... he told her. "You are so truthful yourself," he went on boldly, "that I shall run the risk of saying the most banal thing in the world, just because it happens to be the truth. I have felt for you since our first meeting what I have felt for no ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... grasped something. She would write it down. And moving to the table where her husband sat reading she leant her chin in her hands and thought of the peasants, of suffering, of her own beauty, of the inevitable compromise, and of how she would write it down. Nor did Evan Williams say anything brutal, banal, or foolish when he shut his book and put it away to make room for the plates of soup which were now being placed before them. Only his drooping bloodhound eyes and his heavy sallow cheeks expressed his melancholy tolerance, his conviction that though forced to live with circumspection and deliberation ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... 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 much more ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... enjoying my walk," he said. He did not mean it like that, or as a compliment to her. When it was said he thought it sounded banal, and was sorry. "What ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... and 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, however, ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... Comtes de Foix. Foix' 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 of its ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... 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 wound round the great horns of horses' collars ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... 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
... little boy away. They walked down the cinder-covered 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 Maple Avenue. ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... itself is not a repulsive skeleton, but rather a majestic form, full of grandiose mystery. Andreyev, on the other hand, but rarely breaks the bounds which unite him to reality. His heroes are living people, who act, and whose banal life ends with a banal death. This realism and this passionate love of truth make the strength and the beauty ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... After the usual banal phrases my husband inquired if Martin was staying in the house, and then asked if he would dine with us ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... loud laughter and occasional snatches of song which for the past half-hour had proceeded from that part of the house, became more subdued and more rare. One by one the friends of the artists were leaving the theatre, after having paid the usual banal compliments to those whom they favoured, or presented the accustomed offering of flowers to the brightest star ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... is reflected in a thousand varying colors. The sparkling wit, the swift 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
... 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 the streets, had an air of hypocritical ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... brief and exceedingly banal interview with Helen, and another with Andrew. And an interval having elapsed, Andrew was observed to approach Helen and ask her for a polka. Helen punctiliously accepted. And he led her out. The outraged ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... lets the hydrant water run: He fancies lonely, banal, bald-headed mountains, affected by the daily caress of the tropical sun, weeping tears the length of brooks down their faces and flanks. She lets the hydrant water run: He hearkens Father Sebastian cooking and spreading homely themes over an inept-looking clavier confounding the wits of his ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... Fancourt's, it denoted the happy human being; but also it represented to Paul Overt that the author of "Shadowmere" had now definitely ceased to count—ceased to count as a writer. As he smiled a welcome across the place he was almost banal, was almost smug. Paul fancied that for a moment he hesitated to make a movement, as if for all the world he had his bad conscience; then they had already met in the middle of the room and had shaken hands—expressively, cordially on St. George's ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... more at the piano, and without asking his audience to choose, began in a low voice an old, sweet, entirely banal and utterly heartbreaking ballad of Tosti's, with words ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Gawain in the Atre Perilleus,[7] and of Gawain and Hector in the Lancelot of the final cyclic prose version, are of the most banal description; the theme, originally vivid and picturesque, has become watered down into a meaningless adventure of the ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... 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 ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... the poor, we have always with us; but the critic is moved to remark, as he casts back in his mind over the last twenty years of amateur publishing activity, that on the whole the tone of amateur poetry is distinctly higher than it used to be. Banal verse we still have in larger amounts than we should; but the amateur journals of a decade or two ago had reams of it. On the other hand, they contained not a few poems with more than a passing spark of the divine fire. The promising fact is that in the poetry of today's journals we ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... of the most diverting instances of Mr. Benson's trick-playing style. He didn't mean that; he only said it. Much, if not most, of "The Thread of of Gold" is merely absurd. Some of it is pretentious, some of it inept. All of it is utterly banal. All of it has the astounding calm assurance of mediocrity. It is a solemn thought that tens of thousands of well-dressed mortals alive and idle to-day consider themselves to have been uplifted by the perusal of this work. It is also a solemn thought that God in His infinite mercy and wisdom ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... conversation. He spoke reasonably of psychoanalysis, Long Island polo, and the Ming platter he had found in Vancouver. She promised to meet him in Deauville, the coming summer, "though," she sighed, "it's becoming too dreadfully banal; nothing but Americans and ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... a low, monotonous voice, staring haggardly at the fire, while I knelt by her side. I murmured some banal apologia, miserably aware that one set of words is as futile as another when one has ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Extraordinarily enough, the most criminal had ordinarily met death most bravely. Of course, they had had leisure to prepare themselves, thinking a long time in advance of that supreme moment. But they affronted death, came to it almost negligently, found strength even to say banal or taunting things to those around them. He recalled above all a boy of eighteen years old who had cowardly murdered an old woman and two children in a back-country farm, and had walked to his death without a tremor, talking ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... could say them nay. Such freedom seemed unreal. They were children playing at life, and playing dangerously. Hundreds of times, in conversation with her coevals, she had cheerfully protested against the banal complaint that the world had changed of late years. But now she felt grievously that the world was different—that it had indeed deteriorated since her young days. She was fatigued by the modes of thought of these youngsters, as a nurse or mother is fatigued by too long a spell ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... town of Villefranche is on the western side of the harbor between the Petite Corniche and the water. Like all Riviera towns on a main road it has grown rapidly and medieval streets and buildings have almost disappeared, giving way to the banal architecture of the end of the nineteenth century. The garish brick villas of the head of the gulf are excrescences in their lovely garden setting. But after one has reached the eastern side of the harbor and gone through Font Saint Jean, the tramway road, with ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... 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
... has a genuine sympathy for earnestness and sincerity, even on the side of truth and righteousness. Nobody else even looked at it. People said to themselves, "This book seems to be a book with a teaching not thoroughly banal, like the novels-with-a-purpose after which we flock; so we'll give it ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... 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 ...
— Note-Book of Anton Chekhov • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
... feminism, and many other movements and propagandas, each of which in its turn induced ecstatic visions of a new heaven and a new earth. The same individuals have grown lyrical in praise of every bizarre and eccentric art fad. In the banal and grotesque travesties of art produced by cubists, futurists, et al., they saw transcendent genius. They are forever seeking new ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of Rosina in Rossini's Il Barbiere has long been a favourite peg with prime donne on which to hang interpolated ornaments for the display of their vocal agility. Some of these are not always in good taste, being trivial or banal in character, thus concealing the natural charm of the original melody under a species of Henri Herz variations. Others, however, such as those used by the Patti and the Sembrich, for instance, are of great ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... 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
... more to be said. The banal wishes for happiness would not rise to his lips. He looked at her intently for a moment, saw her eyes again drop, and walked away. He was suddenly tired and wanted to go home and rest. The reaction of his nervous and physical strain ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... you justly when it seems aware Of some not all banal compunction, And of your memory in its despair Reproaching you, "Ah, ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... any great undertaking. But dogmas, in the sense of abstract principles, regarded as immutable, are both superfluous and dangerous. If such dogmas are nothing more than the common denominator of all that has been identified with Judaism in the course of its history, they are sure to be banal and colorless. If they are to be fixed and unalterable, they are bound in time to clash with reason and experience, and to sap the religion of its vitality. Judaism needs principles that can help it to withstand danger, that can give it a lease upon life. This is the criterion ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... came another needed conception: that intellectual arrogance is the true modern devil; that the ancient devil, desire of flesh, is obvious, banal, and commonplace, compared to this.... He dared to bring his realizations to a woman, and found that she had a crown for each and every one. And he learned to talk to her about things vital to men and women, and found that this was the strangest, grandest and most ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... hanging to a line, equalled the diameter of a small boy's hat; and when the 'knight' succeeded in bearing it off upon his pole, he rode up to be decorated by the hands of a very charming person with a ribbon-baudriere of Bath dimensions and rainbow colours. Prizes were banal as medals after a modern war, and perhaps for the same purpose—to prevent unchristian envy, hatred, and malice. Almost any trooper in an Anglo-Indian cavalry regiment would have done better; but then he would have couched ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... and unconcerned. She went to confession, and would meet me afterwards; and her faith in that, and the difference of our religions (if I had any religion) would make her seem strange and alien to me at times, even banal. At last our meetings became a mere habit of sensuality, with all charm, and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... was an indication that it might be termed extremely clever or extremely stupid. It was not a poem, as has been held by some critics, that was a piece of intellectual vanity. Browning was far too great a man to stoop down to such mere banal conceit. The poem was a very different thing. It was a creature created by the obscurity of Browning's mind, which, as Chesterton thinks, was the natural reaction for a genius, born in a villa street in ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... 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
... of beauty, our curious minds, which know so many things and which have been able to compare the works of the most diverse civilizations, are perpetually seeking novelty, eager for rare forms, and inimical to everything banal and to everything that ordinary life brings before our eyes. And in our fin de siecle we have been so much the more prone to subtle pursuits because for some time our French art has seemed to take delight in the forms of ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... sting out of his impudent insinuations, for he regretted having made a premature move with his trump card, Carovius smiled in a scurrilous fashion, ducked his head, coward that he was, and riveted his greedy, banal eyes ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... the break it did not seem so bad as he had anticipated. At first things went on smoothly enough. The campaign had not opened, and he was free to exercise his talents outside the political field. He drew cartoons dealing with banal subjects, touching with the gentle satire of his humorous pencil foibles which all the world agreed about, and let vital questions alone. And he and Edith enjoyed themselves: indulged oftener in things they loved; went more frequently to the theater; appeared at recitals; ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... as she moved about her stateroom setting in order the books, 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 ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... 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 ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... his life was poisoned. Even his dreams were not free, but, as usual, this restraint made them only the stronger. When nothing hampers action, the soul has fewer reasons for action, and the closer the walls of Jean-Christophe's prison of care and banal tasks were drawn about him, the more his heart in its revolt felt its independence. In a life without obstacles he would doubtless have abandoned himself to chance and to the voluptuous sauntering of adolescence. As he could be free only for ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... 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 to point ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... was unpleasantly conscious of that. But at any rate the talk flowed. There was some give and take. The joints of their intercourse did not creak as if despairingly appealing to be oiled. Of course it was very banal to talk about Italy. But, still, these moments must come sometimes to all those who go much into the world. And what is Italy, beautiful, siren-like Italy, for if not to be talked about? Charmian said that to herself ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... commonplace and conventional matter, lumbered with the recognized, inevitable and sacrosanct forms of composition. This was particularly the case in Sweden, where the influence of Ibsen now proved more violent and catastrophic than anywhere else. Ibsen destroyed the attraction of the old banal poetry; his spirit breathed upon it in fire, and in all its faded elegance ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... materialistic or rationalistic theories, which were propagated respectively by the Epicurean and Stoic schools, was made the excuse for indifference to the law. Then as now the advanced Jew would mask his self-indulgence under the guise of a banal philosophy, and jeer easily at archaic myths and tribal laws. The dominating motive of Philo's work is to show that the Bible contains for those who will seek it the richest treasures of wisdom, that its ethical teaching is more ideal and yet more real than that ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... tells you, is noted for its magnificent ruins of Richard Coeur de Lion's Chateau Gaillard, and for the culture of the sugar-beet, and so, often, merely on account of the banal mention of beet-roots, you ignore the attractions of Richard's castle and make the best time you can Parisward by the great Route Nationale on the other side of the Seine. This is wrong, of course, but the mood was on, ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... may have crossed his mind at the moment, she had, by the time the last bars of the minuet had been played, succeeded in completely dispelling it; he never realised in what a fever of excitement she was, what effort it cost her to keep up a constant ripple of BANAL conversation. ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... fault," she returned—"that everything, with him, is too deep. 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 smoked again as she thus, with amused complacency, appreciated her acquisition. "And never about you. We keep clear of you. We're wonderful. But I'll tell you what he does do," she continued: "he ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... with common daily affairs that I am now dealing, not with heroic enterprises, ambitions, martyrdoms. Take the day, the ordinary day in the ordinary house or office. Though it comes seven times a week, and is the most banal thing imaginable, it is quite worth attention. How does the machine get through it? Ah! the best that can be said of the machine is that it does get through it, somehow. The friction, though seldom such as to bring matters to a standstill, is frequent—the sort of friction that, when ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... luxury; ugliness and demoniacal brooding, madness and cruelty are here more sheerly powerfully expressed than in the earlier score; the scene of recognition between brother and sister is more large and touching than anything in "Salome"; Elektra's paean and dance, for all its closeness to a banal cantilena, its tempo di valse so characteristic of the later Strauss, is perhaps more grandiosely and balefully triumphant than the dancer's scene with the head. Nevertheless, the work is by no means realized. It is formally ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... ventured into the men's recreation room. I was received with silence, frosty and most discouraging. I made a few remarks about the weather. I commented on the stagnant condition of the war at the moment. The things I said were banal and foolish no doubt, yet I meant well and scarcely deserved the reply which came at last. A man who was playing billiards dropped the butt of his cue on the ground with a bang, surveyed me with a hostile stare ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... face turning red and hot. Almost before he knew what he was saying his tongue began to wag, and he heard himself saying, in a stiff, stilted voice, "It was very nice in the Park this afternoon!..." Oh, banal fool, he thought, she will despise you now, as if you were a great, ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... without saying anything banal about the absence of trouble. She was demurely conscious beneath his courtesy of the effort he was making to see her handwriting, and she wondered if he thought her refusal rude and a confirmation of his suspicion, or ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... were printed after the first page of Postscript, at the mid-sentence point "they preferred imitations of sentimental, / banal, ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... be interpreted as Margaret's true feelings as she answered Mrs. Mervill's question and succeeded in making some banal remarks about the view and the magnificence of the hotel. When she had said all that politeness demanded of her, she turned ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... 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 beautiful ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... which lead up to the threshold, are what are to be seen from the outside. Nothing particular may be transpiring within the walls, or tragedies, crimes, hideous suffering may be enclosed. The conclusion is obvious to banality—but as suggestive as banal—so suggestive in fact that the hyper-sensitive and too imaginative had better, for their own comfort's sake, leave the matter alone. In most cases the existing conditions would not be altered even if one knocked at the door and insisted on ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 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 ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... himself greater liberties. Compare lines 2-6 with the original and with Lembcke. In every case the Danish version is more faithful than the Norwegian. And more mellifluous. Why Lassen should choose such clumsy and banal lines as: ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... were not near me at dinner, but afterward I tried to talk to them a little. They all stood in a group at one end of the room, flanked by an interpreter—the three principal chiefs well in front. I don't know what the interpreter said to them from me, probably embellished my very banal remarks with flowers of rhetoric, but they were very smiling, opening wide their black mouths and made me very low bows—evidently appreciated my intention and effort ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... companion shared something 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 dizzily ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... behaving extremely well. She seemed to have been taken out of herself and to be regarding the scene from outside, regarding it coolly and critically; and it was plain to her that Ginger, in this upheaval of all things, was bearing himself perfectly. He had attempted no banal words of sympathy. He had said nothing and he was not looking at her. And Sally felt that sympathy just now would be torture, and that she could not have ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... done, they sat on opposite sides of the table, and had nothing to say to each other. After each banal observation he made came a heart-rending pause; she let a subject drop as soon as it was broached. It was over two months now since Maurice had seen her, and he was startled by the change that had taken place in her. Her face seemed to have grown longer; and there were hollows in the fine oval ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... 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 added in ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... 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 ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... perceive what it was. He gloried in his performance. Accustomed to dictate extempore speeches on any subject whatever to his shorthand pupils, he was quite at his ease, quite master of his faculties, and self-satisfaction seemed to stand out on his brow like genial sweat while the banal phrases poured glibly from the cavern behind his jagged teeth; and each phrase was a perfect model of provincial journalese. George Cannon had to sit and listen,—to approve, or at ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... grown upon it. Beautiful, yes. Sometime he would tell her. Pour it out in words. There was a paradox about the situation. He was obviously somewhat bored. Yet to leave her, to put an end to their strolling through the strange moments, would hurt. Had he ever lived before? Banal question. "No, I've never lived before. Living is somewhat of ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... genres are heeded with a severity such as has been practised before only in antiquity or perhaps by the French. Poets like Detlev von Liliencron, who formerly had appeared as advocates of poetical frivolity, now chafed over banal aids for rhyming, as once Alfred de Musset had done. Friedrich Spielhagen, the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and Jacob Wassermann are seen to busy themselves with the technical questions pertaining to the prose-epic, no longer in a merely ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... talked to him, asked him how many cattle had come over that morning, whether they were yet unloaded, when they would be finally landed and led to the slaughter pens a little way inland. It was all so gross, so banal, yet it was all there was of incident in the day, and most clays were still more barren, with not even these paltry events to discuss. And he felt that he was sinking to the level of these people, he who had dreamed of high romance, of the mystery of the Far Eastern Tropics! ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... stilted, banal little phrase had fallen awkwardly from Magda's lips, and Quarrington had ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... 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 ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... melody and witty brevity. How rare it is to find a poet with such metrical skill who is content to handle the minor themes of life in this mood of delicious pleasantry. The only failure in the book is the banal sonnet entitled "On Raiding the Ice Box." This we would be content ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... 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 ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... conscience and cowardice and 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 ejaculated once with ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
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