Grotesque Quotes - Page 5

• 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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• 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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• ...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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• The vampire’s true appearance was grotesque--but it wasn’t as bad as some of the things I had seen in my day. Some demons were a lot worse, and some of the Elder Things could rip your mind apart just by letting you look at them

  Jim Butcher

  Rip, Mind, Vampire

  Jim Butcher (2000). “Storm Front: Book one of The Dresden Files”, p.108, Penguin Group

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• Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.

  Sylvia Plath

  Laughing, Waiting, Sides

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.16, Anchor

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• Harvey wasn't interested in the clothes, it was the masks that mesmerized him. They were like snowflakes: no two alike. Some were made of wood and of plastic; some of straw and cloth and papier-mâché. Some were as bright as parrots, others as pale as parchment. Some were so grotesque he was certain they'd been carved by crazy people; others so perfect they looked like the death masks of angels. There were masks of clowns and foxes, masks like skulls decorated with real teeth, and one with carved flames instead of hair.

  Clive Barker

  Crazy, Real, Angel

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• Fate is a shape-shifter. It is the kindest and most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than a person deserves, and then it shrinks and curls and forms into something grotesque. You think something is one thing, but then it´s another.

  Deb Caletti

  Fate, Thinking, Curls

  Deb Caletti (2012). “Stay”, p.48, Simon and Schuster

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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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• 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 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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• 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 history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice--although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Witty, Style, Execution

  Edgar Allan Poe (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Illustrated)”, p.3363, Delphi Classics

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• ... the random talk of people who have no chance of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself into the moment for ever.

  Virginia Woolf

  Beautiful, Light, People

  Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.27, Oxford University Press

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

  Mason Cooley

  Shrinking, Moments

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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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• I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Real, Loneliness, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “Walden; Or, Life in the Woods”, p.89, Courier Corporation

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• Young people are more hopeful at a certain age than adults, but I suspect that's glandular. As for children, I keep as far from them as possible. I don't like the sight of them. The scale is all wrongs. The heads tend to be too big for the bodies, and the hands and feet are a disaster. They keep falling into things. The nakedness of their bad character! We adults have learned how to disguise our terrible character, but children, well, they are like grotesque drawings of us. They should be neither seen nor heard, and no one must make another one.

  Gore Vidal

  Children, Fall, Drinking

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• I don't believe men want women to have grotesque plastic surgery or be undernourished and bony. All the plastic surgery in the world can't stop you getting older.

  Michelle Pfeiffer

  Believe, Men, Getting Older

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• The night
  Makes everything grotesque. Is it because
  Night is the nature of man's interior world?

  Wallace Stevens

  Night, Men, World

  Wallace Stevens, Jos e Rodr iguez Feo, Beverly Coyle, Alan Filreis (1986). “Secretaries of the Moon: The Letters of Wallace Stevens & José Rodríguez Feo”, p.14, Durham [N.C.] : Duke University Press

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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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• [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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