Grotesque Quotes - Page 4

• There is indeed no such thing in life as absolute darkness; one's eyes revolt and hasten to fill the vacuum by floating in sparks, dream patterns, figures whimsical and figures grotesque, shifting and clad in complementary colors, to appease the indignant cups and rods of the retina.

  Gelett Burgess

  Dream, Eye, Color

  Gelett Burgess (1916). “The Romance of the Commonplace”

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• I never wanted to do something grotesque. I never wanted to shock. I wanted my audience to be happy, to be kind.

  Eva Zeisel

  Be Kind, Shock, Wanted

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• My idea of a perfect surrealist painting is one in which every detail is perfectly realistic, yet filled with a surrealistic, dreamlike mood. And the viewer himself can't understand why that mood exists, because there are no dripping watches or grotesque shapes as reference points. That is what I'm after: that mood which is apart from everyday life, the type of mood that one experiences at very special moments.

  Ian Hornak

  Ideas, Perfect, Everyday

  The 57th Street Review, January 1976.

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• We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Strength, Nature, Character

  "Frederick the Great". Book by Thomas Babington Macaulay Baron Macaulay, p. 90, 1842.

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• The cause of the attack was not American foreign policy but an amoral disregard for human life.It is grotesque to suggest that a four-year-old girl, making her first and only flight in an aeroplane, should somehow bear responsibility for the actions of a government for whom she was never allowed the chance to grow up and vote either for or against.

  Menzies Campbell

  Girl, Growing Up, Responsibility

  "Key quotes from the Commons debate" by Matthew Tempest, www.theguardian.com. October 4, 2001.

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• I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers- historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state- all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Dark, Years

  Chris Hedges (2014). “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, p.3, PublicAffairs

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• Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.

  E. M. Forster

  Romance, Pairs, Unexpected

  E. M. Forster (2013). “Delphi Collected Works of E. M. Forster (Illustrated)”, p.30, Delphi Classics

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• Religion is a belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die. It therefore has no reality check. And it is therefore uniquely armored against criticism, questioning, and self-correction. It is uniquely armored against anything that might stop it from spinning into extreme absurdity, extreme denial of reality… and extreme, grotesque immorality.

  Greta Christina

  Reality, Voice, Self

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• Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless...antique shops, clothes, hi-fi, etc. Don't say, don't write 'etc'. Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. You still haven't looked at anything, you've merely picked out what you've long ago picked out.

  Georges Perec

  Stupid, Writing, Long Ago

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• Those who live in the country get idiotic in time, without noticing it, for a while they think it's original and good for their health, but life in the country is not original at all, for anyone who wasn't born in and for the country it shows a lack of taste and is only harmful to their health. The people who go walking in the country walk right into their own funeral in the country and at the very least they lead a grotesque existence which leads them first into idiocy, then into an absurd death.

  Thomas Bernhard

  Country, Thinking, People

  Thomas Bernhard (2010). “The Loser: A Novel”, p.28, Vintage

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• Many of the younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions, but don't believe that I ever existed as a person. They think I'm a nonperson, just a name that signifies a tangled web of pipes or wires or strings that suggest machinery. My name to them is like a spiral staircase, veal cutlets, barber's itch — terms that give you an immediate picture of what they mean.

  Rube Goldberg

  Believe, Mean, Thinking

  "Rube Goldberg: Inventions!".

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• The aggressive and quite illogical idea of a single religion for all mankind, a religion universal by the very force of its narrowness, one set of dogmas, one cult, one system of ceremonies, one ecclesiastical ordinance, one array of prohibitions and injunctions which all minds must accept on peril of persecution by men and spiritual rejection or eternal punishment by God, that grotesque creation of human unreason which has been the parent of so much intolerance, cruelty and obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism, has never been able to take firm hold of the Indian mentality.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Spiritual, Men, Ideas

  "A Defense of Indian Culture". Essay by Sri Aurobindo, as quoted in Sisirkumar Mitra "The Vision of India", 1947.

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• Size without shape is grotesque.

  Vince Gironda

  Shapes, Size

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• The concept of free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms.

  Ayn Rand

  Government, Law, Competition

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.100, Penguin

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• I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Life, Southern, Doubt

  Flannery O'Connor (1965). “Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories”, p.23, Macmillan

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• My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life.

  Max Beckmann

  Art, Average, Fairy Tale

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• Ambition is to be the fastest runner on this planet, to be the first on the South Pole, which is a grotesque perversion of ambition. It's an ego trip, and I'm not on an ego trip. I don't have ambitions - I have a vision.

  Werner Herzog

  Ambition, Ego, Vision

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• The first rule of life is to reveal nothing, to be exceptionally cautious in what you say, in whatever company you may find yourself. If you have a secret, you have only to whisper it to your dearest friend with the strictest injunction that it will go no further, and within half a day the story is all over town, and when you do make what would seem to be a perfectly sensible remark, you will find it reported in the most grotesque form, thus incurring no end of criticism to rebound upon you.

  Elizabeth Aston

  Secret, Finding Yourself, Criticism

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• The laws of Nature take precedence of all human laws. The purpose of all human laws is one - to defeat the laws of Nature. This is the case among all the nations, both civilized and savage. It is a grotesquerie, but when the human race is not grotesque it is because it is asleep and losing its opportunity.

  Mark Twain

  Opportunity, Race, Law

  Mark Twain (2013). “Autobiography of Mark Twain”, p.127, Univ of California Press

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• An unchurched christian is a grotesque anomaly. The New Testament knows nothing of such a person. For the church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought. It is not an accident of history. On the contrary, the church is God's new community.

  John Stott

  Christian, Lying, Community

  John Stott (2012). “The Living Church”, p.15, SPCK

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• Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s), I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, School, Practice

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• Considering the popularity of soaps with the African-American audience, it's grotesque that the entertainment industry, for all its vaunted liberalism, is lagging so far behind social changes in the United States. And why has there never been an all-black daytime network soap? It would probably blow the white soaps off the map.

  Camille Paglia

  Blow, White, African American

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• I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.

  Flannery O'Connor

  People, Dumb, Needs

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• There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,--when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.

  Kate Chopin

  Depression, Sorry, Struggle

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• Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Fashion, Two, Mind

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