Grotesque Quotes - Page 5

To stroll is a science, it is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.... To stroll is to enjoy, it is to assume a mind-set, it is to admire the sublime pictures of unhappiness, of love, of joy, of graceful or grotesque portraits; it is to plunge one's vision to the depths of a thousand existences: young, it is to desire everything; old, it is to live the life of the young, to marry their passions.

Honore de Balzac

Live Life, Passion, Eye

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The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life.

Aldous Huxley

Book, Artist, People

Aldous Huxley (1954). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Point counter point”

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In the current setting the situation of the poor is neglected despite the grotesque wealth of the capitalist elites, and the dangers to the well-being of humanity associated with climate change are ignored despite a strong scientific consensus warning of the adverse, and possibly irreversible, consequences of further delays in reducing the level of greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon.

Richard A. Falk

Strong, Humanity, Delay

Source: www.counterpunch.org

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I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have been trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot accomplish it. I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it. It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible.

Mark Twain

Thinking, Trying, Sentimental

Mark Twain, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays”, p.4172, GENERAL PRESS

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At six
I lived in a graveyard full of dolls,
avoiding myself,
my body, the suspect
in its grotesque house.

Anne Sexton

House, Childhood, Dolls

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To me, the grotesque is like a sonic manifestation of reality. I don't know how you could look out onto our world and see only beauty. And I like beautiful things. I like the aesthetically harmonious. But I am much more attracted to something that is off-kilter. It is a truer reflection of not only nature, but the human spirit - the state of the world. I just think everything feels a little off.

Carrie Brownstein

Beautiful, Reflection, Reality

"Carrie Brownstein Discusses Her Memoir". Interview with Jenn Pelly, pitchfork.com. October 27, 2015.

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In order to win over Paris and appear, in the eyes of all Europe, an absolute innovator, the most advanced of all, I urge you to get to work with all your heart, resolute on being bolder, crazier, more advanced, surprising, eccentric, incomprehensible, and grotesque than anybody else in music. I urge you to be a madman.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Heart, Eye, Winning

"Modernism: An Anthology". Book by Lawrence Rainey, p. 2, 2005.

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Asylums are nothing more than gardens of human cabbages, of miserable, grotesque, repugnant human beings watered with the fertilizer of injections.

Antonio Lobo Antunes

Garden, Asylums, Cabbage

"Knowledge of Hell (2008)". Book by Antonio Lobo Antunes, 2008.

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Our tolerance of the intolerable found a low threshold as early as the late 1950s with the grotesque excesses of McCarthyism, which destroyed so many honest lives, and then with the insane nuclear arms race and confrontations.

Pankaj Mishra

Race, Tolerance, Insane

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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[Vathek] has, in parts, been called, but to some judgments, never is, dull: it is certainly in parts, grotesque, extravagant and even nasty. But Beckford could plead sufficient "local colour" for it, and a contrast, again almost Shakespearean, between the flickering farce atrocities of the beginning and the sombre magnificence of the end. Beckford's claims, in fact, rest on the half-score or even half-dozen pages towards the end: but these pages are hard to parallel in the later literature of prose fiction.

William Thomas Beckford

Fiction, Half, Literature

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Despite his reputation as one of America's foremost "serious" filmmakers, Oliver Stone's name under the "director" caption does not guarantee a good movie. I learned that lesson while enduring the seemingly-endless tedium of The Doors, and was reminded of it during some of the long, drawn-out portions of JFK. However, nothing that Stone has directed or misdirected prepared me for the grotesque mess that is Natural Born Killers.

James Berardinelli

Doors, Names, America

"Natural Born Killers". Movie Review, 1994.

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After a moment of shrinking back, we domesticate the grotesque.

Mason Cooley

Shrinking, Moments

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The men who are messing up their lives, their families, and their world in their quest to feel man enough are not exercising truemasculinity, but a grotesque exaggeration of what they think a man is. When we see men overdoing their masculinity, we can assume that they haven't been raised by men, that they have taken cultural stereotypes literally, and that they are scared they aren't being manly enough.

Frank Pittman

Taken, Exercise, Men

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The grotesque prudishness and archness with which garlic is treated in [England] has led to the superstition that rubbing the bowl with it before putting the salad in gives sufficient flavor. It rather depends whether you are going to eat the bowl or the salad.

Elizabeth David

Giving, Cooking, Flavor

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But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained, as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is [to be] avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination's freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination.

Immanuel Kant

Art, Divorce, Garden

"Critique of Judgment".

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The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and panic.

H. G. Wells

Running, Men, Paper

H. G. Wells, Warwick Goble (2015). “The War of the Worlds”, p.94, Courier Dover Publications

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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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Children being children, however, the grotesque Hopping Pot had taken hold of their imaginations. The solution was to jettison the pro-Muggle moral but keep the warty cauldron, so by the middle of the sixteenth century a different version of the tale was in wide circulation among wizarding families. In the revised story, the Hopping Pot protects an innocent wizard from his torch-bearing, pitchfork-toting neighbours by chasing them away from the wizard's cottage, catching them and swallowing them whole.

J. K. Rowling

Children, Taken, Imagination

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Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

Marisha Pessl

Sweet, Epic, Greek

Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.84, Penguin

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Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.

Oscar Wilde

Men, Clothes, House

Oscar Wilde “The Importance of Being Earnest”, BoD - Books on Demand

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perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

Salman Rushdie

Wish, Conformity, Individualism

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...I am an anomaly in the system, living proof of how grotesque it is, and every day I mock it gently, deep within my impenetrable self.

Muriel Barbery

Self, Anomalies, Proof

"The Elegance of the Hedgehog". Book by Muriel Barbery, September 2, 2013.

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he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Rose, Great Gatsby American Dream, Sunlight

F. Scott Fitzgerald (2013). “The Great Gatsby”, p.117, Oldcastle Books

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