Boredom Quotes - Page 24

• But some natives--most natives in the world--cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go--so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they enjoy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Reality, Envy, Tourists

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• They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Omnipotence, Succeed, Experiments

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• For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect – not just the fantastic degradation, not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice. So all right. We’re back where we started. To you, nothing – from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason, other than that I value it so much.

  Martin Amis

  Thinking, Should Have, Degradation

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• Of course, it is boring to read about boring thing, but it is better to read something that makes you yawn with boredom than something that will make you weep uncontrollably, pound your fists against the floor, and leave tearstains all over your pillowcase, sheets, and boomerang collection.

  Daniel Handler

  Fists, Pounds, Boring

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• Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate--for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.

  Albert Camus

  Book, Reality, Cities

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Fall”, p.50, Vintage

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• Only the dead are truly smart, truly cool. Nothing touches them. While I live, however, I side with bumbling suffering crooked life, with anger rather than boredom, with sweet lust, hunger & carelessness...against the icy avant-guard & its fashionable premonitions of the sepulcher.

  Hakim Bey

  Sweet, Smart, Lust

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• One wonders what would happen in a society in which there were no rules to break. Doubtless everyone would quickly die of boredom.

  Susan Howatch

  Wonder, Break, Happens

  FaceBook post by Susan Howatch from Dec 23, 2014

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• Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?

  Gustave Flaubert

  Goal, Principal, Bored

  Gustave Flaubert, Francis Steegmuller (1980). “The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857”, p.113, Harvard University Press

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• Nothing is so stifling as symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, the quintessence of mourning. Despair yawns. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering - a hell of boredom.

  Victor Hugo

  Wisdom, Blessing, Mourning

  Victor Hugo, Charles Edwin Wilbour (1987). “Les misérables”, Dutton Adult

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• The books in Mo and Meggie's house were stacked under tables, on chairs, in the corners of the rooms. There where books in the kitchen and books in the lavatory. Books on the TV set and in the closet, small piles of books, tall piles of books, books thick and thin, books old and new. They welcomed Meggie down to breakfast with invitingly opened pages; they kept boredom at bay when the weather was bad. And sometimes you fall over them.

  Cornelia Funke

  Book, Fall, Weather

  Cornelia Funke (2011). “Inkheart”, p.9, Scholastic Inc.

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• Sometimes, though, I feel that pushing books is a whole lot like pushing medicine. Think of books as pills. I have pills that cure ignorance and pills that cure boredom. I have pills to elevate moods and pills to open people's eyes to the awful truth: uppers and downers as they were. I sell pills to help people find themselves and pills to help them lose themselves when they require escape from the pressures and anxieties of life in a complex society.

  Tom Robbins

  Book, Ignorance, Eye

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”, p.86, Bantam

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• Really, these wizards! You'd think no one had ever had a cold before! Well, what is it?" she asked, hobbling through the bedroom door onto the filthy carpet. "I'm dying of boredom," Howl said pathetically. "Or maybe just dying.

  Diana Wynne Jones

  Thinking, Doors, Dying

  Diana Wynne Jones (2002). “Wizard's Castle”

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• Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

  Saul Bellow

  Real, Social, Tedium

  Saul Bellow (2008). “Humboldt's Gift”, Penguin Classics

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• Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.

  Robertson Davies

  Evil, Stupidity, Three

  Robertson Davies (1976). “World of wonders”, Penguin Books, 1977

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• This was solidarity. The debutante having her toenails pedicured - the housewife buying carrots from a pushcart - the bookkeeper who had wanted to be a pianist, but has the excuse of a sister to support - the businessman who hated his business - the worker who hated his work - the intellectual who hated everybody - all were united as brothers in the luxury of common anger that cured boredom and took them out of themselves, and they knew well enough what a blessing it was to be taken out of themselves.

  Ayn Rand

  Brother, Taken, Blessing

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• The world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Disrespect, World, Holy Places

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (2015). “The Divine Milieu”, p.62, Lulu Press, Inc

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• And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on.

  Douglas Adams

  Successful, Dull, Faults

  Douglas Adams (2009). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”, p.76, Pan Macmillan

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• The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.

  Michel Houellebecq

  Want, Absence, Alas

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• According to Gur's theory of boredom, everything that happens in the world today is because of boredom: love, war, inventions, fake fireplaces - ninety-five percent of all that is pure boredom.

  Etgar Keret

  War, Fake, World

  Etgar Keret (2006). “The Nimrod Flipout: Stories”, p.55, Macmillan

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• Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Pleasure, Situation, Turns

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• I fear the boredom that comes with not learning and not taking chances.

  Robert Fulghum

  Blessing, Take A Chance, Chance

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• Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Weed, Stress, Marijuana

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• Love can never really be a great base for marriage because love is fun and play. If you marry someone for love you will be frustrated, because soon the fun is gone, the newness is gone, and boredom sets in. Marriage is for deep friendship, deep intimacy. Love is implied in it, but it is not alone. So marriage is spiritual. It is spiritual. There are many things which you can never develop alone. Even your own growth needs someone to respond, someone so intimate that you can open yourself totally to him or her.

  Rajneesh

  Marriage, Spiritual, Fun

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• Hell is more like boredom, or not having enough to do, and too much time to contemplate one's deficiencies.

  Dorothy Gilman

  Too Much, Hell, Enough

  Dorothy Gilman (2000). “Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled”, p.60, Ballantine Books

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• Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Dream, People, Stupidity

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