Banality Quotes
Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will not be because you admire them.
Roger Ebert
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.
Ursula K. Le Guin
My whole life, I have sought comfort in individualism. I escaped the banality of my background with the flamboyance of my haircut, the low expectations of my class with the grandiosity of my parlance, and the fear of being ordinary by becoming a professional weirdo. In a way, my success in show business represents little more than the harvesting of my psychosis. I made my idiosyncrasies and flaws beneficial by exaggerating them.
Russell Brand
Sometimes my sister and I dream of having a run-of-the-mill father. He would make coffee and toss salads. He would not prefer his work to us, and he would tell us instead: "How pretty you look, my dear, tell me what you did today." He would speak to us with words of affectionate banality.
André Weil
The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.
In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.
Milan Kundera
The only master that exists, the only one that's true and believable is your own conscience. To find it you have to stand in silence-alone and in silence-you have to stand on the naked earth, naked yourself and with nothing around you, as if you were already dead. You don't hear anything at first; the only thing you feel is terror, but then you begin to hear a voice, away in the background, far off; it's a calm voice, and maybe its banality gets on your nerves to begin with.
Susanna Tamaro