#banal

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

#creativity #art

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

#banality #death #despair #dread #ennui

It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror. ↗

— Jean Lorrain

#horror #life #reality #terror #ugly

Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not. ↗

— Raoul Vaneigem

#banal #been #essentially #everything #few

There's almost a fear that if you understood too deeply the way you arrived at choices, you could become self-conscious. In any case, many ideas which are full of personal meaning seem rather banal when you put words to them. ↗

— Peter Weir

#any #arrived #banal #become #case

Dawn was written well before 9/11. People speak a lot today about the banality of evil, but not all evil is banal. Some of it is carefully structured and well-thought-out. That's where the real danger lies. ↗

— Alan Dean Foster

#banal #banality #before #carefully #danger

To some, the '50s were a decade marked by the banal, the predictable. ↗

— Annette Funicello

#decade #marked #predictable #some #were

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it. ↗

— Christopher Lasch

#banality #endless #erected #order #overcome

In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality. ↗

— Mary McCarthy

#democratic #enjoy #equality #facts #how

My life is short. I can't listen to banality. ↗

— V. S. Naipaul

#i #life #life is short #listen #my life