Dullness Quotes (page 17)
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I read it [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all? it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.
Jane Austen
The Divine was beyond description, beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. To say that the Divine was Creation divided by Destruction was as close as one could come to definition. But the puny of soul, the dull of wit, weren't content with that. They wanted to hang a face on the Divine. They went so far as to attribute petty human emotions (anger, jealousy, etc) to it, not stopping to realize that if God were a being, even a supreme being, our prayers would have bored him to death long ago.
Tom Robbins
I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it. I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.
Jack Kerouac
The master was an old Turtle--we used to call him Tortoise--'
Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn't one?' Alice asked.
We called him Tortoise because he taught us,' said the Mock Turtle angrily; 'really you are very dull!'
You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question,' added the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked at poor Alice, who felt ready to sink into the earth.
Lewis Carroll
GOING TO WALDENIt isn't very far as highways lie. I might be back by nightfall, having seen. The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water. Friends argue that I might be wiser for it. They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper: How dull we grow from hurrying here and there! Many have gone, and think me half a fool. To miss a day away in the cool country. Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish, Going to Walden is not so easy a thing. As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult....
Mary Oliver
There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows--in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain--in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine--it is then that despair threatens; it is then that...
George Eliot
Ah! The world is a new and a wide one to you, But the world to your sweetheart is shut, For a change never comes to the lonely Bush girl From the stockyard, the bush, and the hut; And the only relief from the dullness she feels Is when ridges grow softened and dim, And away in the dusk to the sliprails she steals To dream of past meetings with him.
Henry Lawson
I really do believe that there are those who would like and trust me better if they saw me weeping into a whisky, making a fool of myself, getting aggressive, maudlin and drunkenly out of control. I have never found those states in others anything other than tiring, awkward, embarrassing and fantastically dull, but I am quite sure that people would cherish a view of me in that condition at least once in a while.
Stephen Fry