Banality Quotes

“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror.”
― Jean Lorrain

“Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.”
― Perry Anderson, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas

“Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don’t let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, “honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.” Good to remember…”
― Elif Shafak

“Perhaps Lila was right: my book—even though it was having so much success—really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn’t been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.”
― Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence

“Most people seem to turn off at some point in their lives. Maybe it's thirty or forty. For most people it's lots younger. They stop there. Stop growing or changing or learning or something. From that point on they're dead.”
― Katherine Dunn, Truck

“At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the big one. That was presented to me by the Reich Youth Leader himself, Baldur von Schirach. Let me show you my scrapbook.”
― William Styron, Sophie’s Choice

“What is awful is at once appealing and repulsive, it fascinates and generates disgust, and those who succumb to the awful can only escape it at the price of ennui, of boredom.”
― Hubertus Kohle, Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst

“The worst people are still people; their humanity is impossible to disregard, but it does not absolve them. If anything, it makes their choices more abhorrent, surrounded, as they are, by the banality of a life indistinguishable from other lives.”
― Talia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

“The end of this history saw the banality of art merge with the banality of the real world - Duchamp's act, with its automatic transference of the object, being the inaugural (and ironic) gesture in this process. The transference of all reality into aesthetics, which has become one of the dimensions of generalized exchange...
All this under the banner of a simultaneous liberation of art and the real world.
This 'liberation' has in fact consisted in indexing the two to each other - a chiasmus lethal to both.
The transference of art, become a useless function, into a reality that is now integral, since it has absorbed everything that denied, exceeded or transfigured it. The impossible exchange of this Integral Reality for anything else whatever. Given this, it can only exchange itself for itself or, in other words, repeat itself ad infinitum.
What could miraculously reassure us today about the essence of art? Art is quite simply what is at issue in the world of art, in that desperately self-obsessed artistic community. The 'creative' act doubles up on itself and is now nothing more than a sign of its own operation - the painter's true subject is no longer what he paints but the very fact that he paints. He paints the fact that he paints. At least in that way the idea of art remains intact.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“The question is banal but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“You may have seen, you must have seen, some of those awful text books written not by educators but by educationalists—by people who talk about books instead of talking within books. You may have been told by them that the chief aim of a great writer, and indeed the main clue to his greatness, is "simplicity." Traitors, not teachers. In reading exam papers written by misled students, of both sexes, about this or that author, I have often come across such phrases—probably recollections from more tenderyears of schooling—as "his style is simple" or "his style is clear and simple" or "his style is beautiful and simple" or "his style is quite beautiful and simple." But remember that "simplicity" is buncombe. No major writer is simple. The Saturday Evening Post is simple. Journalese is simple. Upton Lewis is simple. Mom is simple. Digests are simple. Damnation is simple. But Tolstoys and Melvilles are not simple.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature

“He was looking for the Knight of Faith, the real prodigy. That real prodigy, having set its relations with the infinite, was entirely at home in the finite. Able to carry the jewel of faith, making the motions of the infinite, and as a result needing nothing but the finite and the usual. Whereas others sought the extraordinary in the world. Or wished to be what was gaped at.”
― Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet

“This was everything that I wanted to be done with, the relaxed banality of life without goals.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Some people can't see their piteous personalities. They can't fathom the of their own selves!

They remain prisoners in their own cages of archaic thoughts. Fettered to a parochial mentality, they fail to become visionaries! Enslaved to their innate desire for pettiness, they remain small minded and little hearted!

Alas, wearing a well-tailored tailored suit or a trendy blazer does not take away their lack of sophistication. Unknowingly they make a caricature of themselves!

Thus, they remain epitomes of platitude and banality; their thoughts reek of oafishness, fatuousness, and avariciousness!

In the process, they fail to inspire the world, and let down people around them.”
― Avijeet Das

“The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the material world, could exert the same strange attraction and pose the same insoluble questions as were reserved in the past for a few rare aristocratic forms known as works of art.
That is where true democracy lay: not in the accession of everyone to aesthetic enjoyment, but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which every object would, without distinction, have its fifteen minutes of fame (particularly objects without distinction). All objects are equivalent, everything is a work of genius. With, as a corollary, the transformation of art and of the work itself into an object, without illusion or transcendence, a purely conceptual acting-out, generative of deconstructed objects which deconstruct us in their turn.
No longer any face, any gaze, any human countenance or body in all this - organs without bodies, flows, molecules, the fractal. The relation to the 'artwork' is of the order of contamination, of contagion: you hook up to it, absorb or immerse yourself in it, exactly as in flows and networks. Metonymic sequence, chain reaction.
No longer any real object in all this: in the ready-made it is no longer the object that's there, but the idea of the object, and we no longer find pleasure here in art, but in the idea of art. We are wholly in ideology.
And, ultimately, the twofold curse of modem and contemporary art is summed up in the 'ready-made': the curse of an immersion in the real and banality, and that of a conceptual absorption in the idea of art.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“an unbearably tense and disorienting paradox that underscores everyday life in a working-class environment—on the one hand it’s an abrasive and in-your-face world, yet, at the same time, much of it seems extrinsic and is perpetually uninvolving. One is relentlessly overwhelmed and understimulated all at the same time.”
― Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19

“Only those thoughts which go to extremes can face up to the all-powerful powerlessness of certain agreement.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

“In fact, I hated Loomis—let me count the ways. His imprecision and laziness maddened my compulsive instincts—his patchiness, the way even his speech was riddled with drop-outs and glitches like a worn cassette, the way his leaden senses refused the world, his attention like a pinball rolling past unlit blinkers and frozen flippers into the hole again and again: game over . He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict.”
― Jonathan Lethem

“His imprecision and laziness maddened my compulsive instincts—his patchiness, the way even his speech was riddled with drop-outs and glitches like a worn cassette, the way his leaden senses refused the world”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

“It almost seems like a boy that was once captivated by scientific wonders, then became a scientist and discovered the sheer banality of it all.”
― Kinoko Nasu, 空の境界 中

“Insisting that architecture maintain such a profound lack of character without even the hint of any feeling is not a lack of position or an accidental design flaw but rather a commitment to a once progressive but now painfully outmoded position struggling to maintain its faded hegemony. What was once radical abstraction in pursuit of universality and utopia is today just banal accommodation in pursuit of free corporate expansion.”
― Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture

“The internet is passive - it only reacts to our desires, our questions, our clicks. But the internet is not only a mirror but also a camera that produces an image of our desiring self. And the content of the accounts does mostly refer to the ordinary, everyday life, which as such is totally uninteresting.”
― Boris Groys, Philosophy of Care

“We tend to underestimate the power of banality.”
― Ursule Molinaro, The Autobiography of Cassandra, Princess & Prophetess of Troy

“Entering the workforce was like one last long night with nothing after it but the terrifying certainty of death.”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck

“A woman, Erika S., who lived at Melk in Austria near the site of one of the subcamps of Mauthhausen, gives a frank account of the way she dealt with this physical proximity. She did sometimes see things, unavoidably. She tells of having felt pity in particular for the plight of one Jew she observed, though a pity, it has to be said, that was mixed with something darker, namely amusement at the incongruous gait---'like a circus horse'---forced upon this man by the pain in his bare feet and the whipping of the guards. Her general attitude, however, Erika S. characterizes as follows: 'I am happy when I hear nothing and see nothing of it. As far as I am concerned, they aren't interned. That's it. Over. It does not interest me at all”
― Norman Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust

“I'm certain that the Cesare Borgia who existed was banal and stupid. He must have been, because to exist is always stupid and banal.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“In "A Stolen Life," Dugard’s ability to think through questions of suffering, love, hope, and justice is indistinguishable from that of people her age who have lived "normally,” immersed in the world of blockbuster films, disposable fashion, popular music, easy virtue, virtue signaling, screen addiction, trendy political causes, and banal propaganda. The further I got into "A Stolen Life," the more I realized Dugard sounded just like the young women (and men) whose work I read in college writing workshops. My conclusion is both horrifying and offensive: for all the good our freedom is doing us we might as well have been locked up in a dungeon with demoniacs. The effects of living freely in the Modern world are not easily distinguishable from the effects of living in captivity with a psychopath.”
― Joshua Gibbs

“Мода просто забула про минуле і, здається, вже втратила віру в майбутнє. Залишилося лише одне — вічне теперішнє. Такий ефект став можливим завдяки зникненню будь-яких бар’єрів на шляху інформації: відтепер мода приречена нескінченно повертатися до короткого списку тривіальних і заяложених рішень, які щоразу з пристрастю подаються як щось абсолютно нове й досі небачене.”
― Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle