"Banal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
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... 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 ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
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... 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
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... of 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 ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
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... 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 ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
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... mother-tongue with novel and alien ornaments which shall justly be accounted barbarisms until formally naturalized and adopted. Nor will any modern versionist relegate to a foot-note, as is the malpractice of his banal brotherhood, the striking and often startling phases of the foreign author's phraseology and dull the text with well-worn and commonplace English equivalents, thus doing the clean reverse of what he should do. It was this beau ideal of a translator's success which ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
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... 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 ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
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... 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 laughed ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
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... Murray's does not appeal to me; the pseudo-Grecian temple in the corner, with water cascading down its steps, the make-believe clouds which float across the ceiling, the tables of glass lighted from beneath—all this, ordinarily, seems trivial and banal; but occasionally, in an esoteric mood, I like Murray's, and can even find something picturesque and romantic in bright gowns, and gleaming shoulders, and handsome faces seen amid these bizarre surroundings. And then, of course, ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
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... 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 ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
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... 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 ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
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... 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, ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
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... longue which was at hand. 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 who had dreamed of high romance, of the mystery of the Far Eastern Tropics! And ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
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... Plates were printed after the first page of Postscript, at the mid-sentence point "they preferred imitations of sentimental, / banal, story-telling oil paintings".] ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
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... him and we entered again the East Room, where Mr. Tyler still prolonged the official greeting of the curious, the obsequious, or the banal persons who passed. Mr. Calhoun stood apart for a time, watching the progress of this purely American function. It was some time ere the groups thinned. This latter fact usually would have ended the reception, since it is ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
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... 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
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... made a good host, passing quickly but quietly from one group to another. His blight blue eves were cold and tired-looking as ever, and took no part in the rather banal smile which played over his lips, as if the accustomed expression of indifference could never be obliterated. The indolent lines about his mouth were not those of temperament, because if he spoke to a Finance Minister or other ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
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... 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 me, are ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
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... shocked at the impression, blaming herself. Surely Saidee did not know her yet, that was all; or the surprise was too great. She wished she had sent word by the negress. Though that would have seemed banal, it would have been better than to see the blank look on Saidee's face, a look which froze her into a marble statue. But it was too late now. The only thing left was to make the ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
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... Reed 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 no idea how to stop it; but, if the truth were told, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
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... 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 Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
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... grandes, deviennent niaiseries tot ou tard. Votre ignorance de ma langue m'epargne cette heure fatale. Pour vous, mon livre sera toujours une belle et noble chose. Il ne peut jamais devenir pour vous banal comme une epouse. II sera pour vous une vierge, mieux qu'une vierge, il sera pour vous une demi-vierge. Chaque fois que vous l'ouvrirez, vous penserez a des annees ecoulees, au jardin ou les rossignols ...
— The Lake • George Moore
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... the banal message on the soiled card, then restored cash and postal to their respective pockets. After which he stood frowning down in puzzled conjecture on ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
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... deeply 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 ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
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... 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 ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
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... of strength recounted by Oncken are the Bosnian crisis, the Morocco question, and the Austro-Serbian quarrel which led to the present war. It seems banal to have to point out that Bosnia was unlawfully annexed by Germany's vassal—Austria; that Germany, herself, brought Europe to the verge of war by sending the Panther to Agadir; and that the final catastrophic Machtprobe was likewise ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
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... 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 far ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
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... 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
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... 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 ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
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... When it was all over, and the Vaneckens were eliminated, when, in fact, the Breams had joined the Forsyths at a wedding dinner which the bride's father had given them at Delmonico's and had precipitated themselves into a train for Niagara ("So banal," Mrs. Forsyth said, "but I suppose they had to go somewhere, and we went to Niagara, come to think of it, and it's on their way West"), the bride's mother remained up late talking it all over. She took credit to herself for the whole affair, and ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
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... 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 ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
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... 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 ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
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... 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 shall suffice for him, and for his resistance to the natural process ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
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... 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 ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
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... in silence for a space while he revised and restated that encounter. Then he would break out abruptly with some banal phrase. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
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... 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 that to herself afterward, and was amazed at her own vulgarity ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
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... "Miss Lady!" and presently sprang after, to return a moment later with the two ere they had left the hall. Whereupon followed all manner of helpless, hopeless, banal and inadequate commonplaces, out of which Eddring blankly remembered only that the visit of Miss Lady to the city was to terminate that evening, at the departure of the down train. And so, after all, little remained for him but a present parting, though all his ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
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... has taken possession of them capable of surviving an interview with the person who gave it birth. Yet, in spite of this fine casuistry, I simply must confess to you—no, no, nothing. Guess if you can, and forgive me for this banal letter. Or rather, read between the lines, and perhaps you will find there a little bit of my heart and a great deal of ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
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... 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
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... Arnold Bennett of "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, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
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... comparison after I had left him for the night. It moved me strangely. I read the letter he had lent me the letter of Cecilia, who found the Berkshire moors so banal. Yes, she promised to prove a very undesirable help-meet on the veld, so far as I could judge. I thought over things generally that night, and I made up my mind to make a Quixotic offer in the morning. I would offer to take on Leonard's work. Let ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
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... ordinary young-men-loafers, and he was admitted as one of the assembly of men who traveled and saw things and wondered about the ways of men. It was good talk he heard; too much of hotels, and too many tight banal little phrases suggesting the solution of all economic complexities by hanging "agitators," but with this, an exciting accumulation of impressions of Vancouver and San ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
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... 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
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... 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 circle responded ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
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... gone in a fit 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
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... 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. "Dear me! I did intend to come ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
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... stopped before them, and were eying equally the artist, his work, and his companion with somewhat insolent curiosity. Helen felt herself stiffening; her companion drew himself up with soldierly rigidity. For a moment it seemed as if, under that banal influence, they would part with ceremonious continental politeness, but suddenly their hands met in a national handshake, and with a ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
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... 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 stop where ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
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... Yet behind the shoddy tinsel of Doyers and Pell Streets, as behind Alice's looking-glass, there is another Chinatown—a strange, inhuman, Oriental world, not necessarily of trapdoors and stifled screams, but one moved by influences undreamed of in our banal philosophies. Hearken then to the story of the avenging ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
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... interest and memory—and pretty well nothing else. This—you see—is the last evening 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
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... same measure that his health was undermined, his artistry grew keener, becoming fastidious, exquisite, precious, delicate, irritable toward the banal, and most sensitive in matters of tact and taste. When he first came forward, there was much noise of approval and joy among those concerned, for what he had produced was a thing full of valuable work, of humor, and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
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... 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
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... 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
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... the finishing of it. The last touches, which are intended to draw the picture together, take off from its freshness. To appear before the public one must cut out all those happy accidents which are the joy of the artist. I compare these murderous retouchings to those banal flourishes with which all airs of music end, and to those insignificant spaces which the musician is forced to put between the interesting parts of his work in order to lead on from one motive to another or to give them their ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
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... 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 ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
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... seat, 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 Freemasonry, ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
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... and that the 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
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... narratives of the infancy is less apparent in the Third Gospel than in the First, because the stories are much better constructed as legend, and do not resemble a midrash upon Messianic prophecies. "Le merveilleux en est moins banal et moins enfantin. II parait cependant impossible de leur reconnaitre une plus grande ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
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... be going." The stilted, banal little phrase had fallen awkwardly from Magda's lips, and ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
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... attractive—almost bewildering. She was going to expostulate: "Surely you don't imagine that," when something which she read in his face, in his intelligent hands, and in his general manner made her feel that the words would sound banal. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
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... experience in language of haunting 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 ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
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... upon great pauses of emotional dreaming, and if by chance we passed a girl in a governess cart, or some farmer's daughter walking to the station, we became alertly silent or obstreperously indifferent to her. For might she not be just that one exception to the banal decency, the sickly pointless conventionality, the sham modesty of the times ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
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... 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 ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
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... 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
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... 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 gods and burying ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
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... delicacies of consideration for the privacy of each ought to be most respected. No one can estimate probably how much of the refinement, of the delicacy of feeling, has been lost to the world by the introduction of the postal-card. Anything written on a postal-card has no personality; it is banal, and has as little power of charming any one who receives it as an advertisement in the newspaper. It is not simply the cheapness of the communication that is vulgar, but the publicity of it. One may have perhaps only a cent's worth of affection to send, but it seems worth much more ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
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... 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. ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
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... 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 ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
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... 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, ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
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... 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
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... from encouraging. The day after I took over from my predecessor I 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 ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
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... of five days he still remained mysteriously at liberty in spite of the constant search for him. He seemed to have disappeared as completely as though he had passed out of the world and merged his identity into a chiselled name and a banal aspiration on ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
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... 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 ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
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... 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 otos ...
— Doctrina Christiana • Anonymous
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... of a family wishes to have his wife and children brought in contact with the most maudlin and banal phases of life. He defends them from the sensational editor and the unpleasant advertiser. He subscribes to a newspaper which he does not fear to ...
— The Clock that Had no Hands - And Nineteen Other Essays About Advertising • Herbert Kaufman
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... hurled at her in a glance all the love I must forego; she stood there with than banal smile of hers, the detestable chill smile of a marble statue, with none of the warmth in it that it seemed to express. Can you form any idea, my friend, of the pain that overcame me on the way home through rain and snow, across a league of icy-sheeted ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
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... villa, 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
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... "The Canvasser's Story," a burlesque of no special distinction, and he projected for the Atlantic a scheme of "blindfold novelettes," a series of stories to be written by well-known authors and others, each to be constructed on the same plot. One can easily imagine Clemens's enthusiasm over a banal project like that; his impulses were always rainbow-hued, whether valuable or not; but it is curious that Howells should welcome and even encourage an enterprise so far removed from all the traditions of art. It fell to pieces, at last, of inherent ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
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... 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 ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
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... 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 of ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
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... 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 ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
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... never finds with anyone in Abyssinia is that refined and pure sentiment which gives so much charm to love in Europe. Here the heart is seldom touched; tender words are often spoken, but they are banal and rarely sincere; never do these people experience those extraordinary emotions of which the very remembrance agitates us a long time, those celestial feelings which convert an atheist into a believer. In this country love ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
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... se trouva seul dans cette chambre froide, devant ce lit d'auberge inconnu et banal, loin de ceux qu'il aimait, son c[oe]ur clata, et ce grand philosophe pleura comme un enfant. La vie l'pouvantait prsent; il se sentait faible et dsarm devant elle, et il pleurait, il pleurait.... Tout coup, au milieu de ses larmes, l'image des siens passa devant ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
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... of the debonair Max Linder—she thinks he is a dear, only she daren't tell Mother and Father so, or they would be startled. And then there is Mr. C. Chaplin—always there is Mr. C. Chaplin. Personally, I loathe the cinematograph. It is, I think, the most tedious, the most banal form of entertainment that was ever flung at a foolish public. The Punch and Judy show is sweetness and light by comparison. It is the mechanical nature of the affair that so depresses me. It may be clever; I have no doubt it is. But I would rather see the worst music-hall show that was ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
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... 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 fathers of the Society of Jesus, under pretense that ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
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... seeing 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, ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
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... 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 ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
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... 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 ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
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... 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 ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
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... ladies of whom I am particularly thinking. They would consider me a dunce were they to suspect me of any such commonplace intent. No! I am not going to call them "eighty years young," or employ any of those banal euphemisms with which would-be "tactful" but really club-footed sentimentalists insult the intelligence of the so-called "old." Of course, I know that they are both eighty or thereabouts, and they know very well that I know. We make no secret of it. Why should we? Actually ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
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... esteem 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, ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
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... consistently,—to try to spread the good word that period furnishing does not necessitate great wealth, and that it is as easy and far more interesting to furnish a house after good models, as to have it banal ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
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... 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. ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
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... 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 ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
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... exhaustion from the general ordeal. She was still weak from the sickness she had been through—too weak to bear the strain of the work she had taken up. Of course, the catastrophe gave the whole surface situation away, and I must say that those rather banal young people behaved very humanely about it. There was nothing but interest of the nicest kind, and, if she is going on with her career, it will be easy enough for her to find engagements ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
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... 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 ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
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... 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 originality and ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
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... Frothingham, showed faces like the pools in which pebbles might be dropped, making no ripples—one must suppose that there are such pools, since there are certainly such faces. St. George saw how it was. Here, spoken casually by the prince, just as the Banal would speak of the visible and invisible worlds, here was the Sesame of understanding toward which the centuries had striven, the secret of the link between two worlds; and here, of all mankind, were only they two to hear—they ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
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... Corinne Madame de Stael had, in the fullest sense of a banal phrase, "seen a great of the world." She had lost the illusions which the Duessa Revolution usually spreads among clever but not wise persons at her first appearance, and had not left her bones, as too many[12] such persons ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
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... name to be coupled with that of Velasquez. He neither flattered his sitters, as did Van Dyck, nor mocked them like Goya. And consider the mediocrities, the dull, ugly, royal persons he was forced to paint! He has wrung the neck of banal eloquence, and his prose, sober, rich, noble, sonorous, rhythmic, is to my taste preferable to the exalted, versatile volubility and lofty poetic tumblings in the azure of any school of painting. His palette is ever cool and fastidiously restricted. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
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... 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
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... refinement. But a subtle spirit of irony pervaded it all. She would never have answered his printed inquiry had she not laughed over it. For, pinned to the top of the letter was the clipping, the stupid, banal clipping—"Will the lady who sang from Madame Angot communicate with gentleman who leaned out of the window? J.H. Burgomaster Club." There was neither a formal beginning nor a formal ending; only four crisp lines. But these implied one thing, ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
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... have thought of; or they may call attention to some reason for severity or mercy. But on the one hand if this is important it will already have been touched in the adduction of evidence, and on the other hand such points are generally banal and indifferent to the real issue in the case. If this be not so it would only indicate that either we need a larger number of judges, or even when there are many judges that one thing ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
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... said Pointed Beard, in a tone that suggested sympathy with Beth for being bored. "I wonder she did not give us 'For manners are not idle,' et cetera, or something equally banal—the kind of thing we ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
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... and future 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
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... from men or women, 'point de galanterie', bring them in your account, and be paid to the uttermost farthing; but if you would show them 'une galanterie', let your present be of something that is not in your commission, otherwise you will be the 'Commissionaire banal' of all the women of Saxony. 'A propos', Who is your Comtesse de Cosel? Is she daughter, or grand-daughter, of the famous Madame de Cosel, in King Augustus's time? Is she young or ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
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... 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 ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
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... 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. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
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... "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
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