Don't Be Dull Quotes & Sayings

I should like to save the Shire, if I could - though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don't feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again. — J.R.R. Tolkien

And morally, maybe, if there's such a thing as moral exhaustion. There is such a thing, he decides. You start by being idealistic, morally strong if you will, but then the rock of your moral strength is eroded, bit by bit, until you're, well, exhausted, and you do things that you never thought you would. Or you do things that you always feared you would. Or something like that. You'd think that there would be a breaking point - a decisive moment - but there is no single moment or event that you can put your finger on. No, it's not that dramatic - it's the dull, monotonous process of erosion. Maybe — Don Winslow

But heaven won't be like church - all the time," said Anne. "I hope it ain't," said Davy emphatically. "If it is I don't want to go. Church is awful dull. Anyway, I don't mean to go for ever so long. I mean to live to be a hundred years old, like Mr. Thomas Blewett of White Sands. He says he's lived so long 'cause he always smoked tobacco and it killed all the germs. Can I smoke tobacco pretty soon, Anne?" "No, Davy, I hope you'll never use tobacco," said Anne absently. "What'll you feel like if the germs kill me then?" demanded Davy. — L.M. Montgomery

Be anything you want to be, but don't be dull. — Frank Robinson

Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. — George Orwell

As a real person, he wouldn't last a minute, would he? But drama is about imperfection. And we've moved away from the aspirational hero. We got tired of it, it was dull. If I was House's friend, I would hate it. How he so resolutely refuses to be happy or take the kind-hearted road. But we don't always like morally good people, do we? — Hugh Laurie

I think that's the biggest favor you can grant anyone, don't you? Permission to be dull. I know Henry will sometimes say something so utterly uninteresting that I could faint. And that's when you know you're in love; the tedium isn't unbearable, it's lovely. — Lionel Shriver

It's superb to be out in the early, early morning before the sun comes up. There's this sense of being super-alive. You're in on a secret that all the dull, sleeping people don't know about. Unlike them, you're alert and aware of existing right here in this precise moment between what happened and what's going to happen. — Tim Tharp

Be pompous, obese, and eat cactus
Be dull and boring and omnipresent
Criticize things you don't know about
Be oblong and have your knees removed — Steve Martin

[Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves. — Fran Lebowitz

Don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it. — Charles Bukowski

Peter - do please be happy. I mean, you've always been the comfortable sort of person that nothing could touch. Don't alter, will you?" That was the second time Wimsey had been asked not to alter himself; the first time, the request had exalted him; this time, it terrified him. As the taxi lurched along the rainy Embankment, he felt for the first time the dull and angry helplessness which is the first warning stroke of the triumph of mutability. Like the poisoned Athulf in the Fool's Tragedy, he could have cried, "Oh, I am changing, changing, fearfully changing." Whether his present enterprise failed or succeeded, things would never be the same again. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Starting in 1792 with George Washington, there were financial crises every ten to fifteen years. Panics, bank runs, credit freezes, crashes, depressions. People lost their farms, families were wiped out. This went on for more than a hundred years, until the Great Depression, when Oklahoma turned to dust. "We can do better than this." Americans said. "We don't need to go back to the boom-and-bust cycle." The Great Depression produced three regulations:
The FDIC-your bank deposits were safe.
Glass-Steagall-banks couldn't go crazy with your money.
The SEC-stock markets would be tightly controlled.
For fifty years, these rules kept America from having another financial crisis. Not one panic or meltdown or freeze. They gave Americans security and prosperity. Banking was dull. The country produced the greatest middle class the world had ever seen. — Elizabeth Warren

The old master oil paintings were usually done in transparent oil colors on top of a black-and-white underpainting, which was often painted in egg temperas. My version of this technique was to start with a watercolor underpainting, which is fast drying like tempera, but I have an easier time controlling it. Then I seal the underpainting with a coat of clear, matte acrylic medium. That keeps the oil paints, which come next, from soaking into the paper, where they would turn dull and flat. Instead, thin layers of transparent oil paint can be smoothed into glowing colors and bold, glossy surfaces, with a depth and space that I don't think can be gotten any other way. It isn't easy to do, but when it works, the results can still surprise me. — Paul O. Zelinsky

The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it. — Helen Dunmore

Mahmoud Darwish wrote that "extreme clarity is a mystery." That sounds right to me. I don't want anyone hunting for anything ancillary to the true mystery. If that means risking being thought of as glib or dull or banal or stupid or whatever, I guess that will just have to be the way it is. — Matthew Zapruder

The gods have a great sense of humor, don't they? If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. The dull and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice their central nervous systems like an onion, romantic dreamers will end up in the rope yard. — Tom Robbins

You have to be careful so you don't make your character dull and predictable. Sometimes you have to bend the script a little ... The bad guys are mostly the same on the paper ... A bad guy wouldn't think of himself as bad. — Michael Wincott

Now I will be anything else you please, except dull. You may say I have been dull already? As I am an honest woman, I don't agree with you. There are some people who bring dull minds to their reading - and them blame the writer for it. I say no more. — Wilkie Collins

Be courteous, kind, and forgiving. Be gentle and peaceful each day. Be warm and human and grateful, And have a good thing to say. Be thoughtful and trustful and childlike, Be witty and happy and wise. Be honest and love all your neighbors, Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant. Be pompous, obese, and eat cactus. Be dull and boring and omnipresent. Criticize things you don't know about. Be oblong and have your knees removed. Be sure to stop at stop signs, And drive fifty-five miles an hour. Pick up hitchhikers foaming at the mouth, And when you get home get a master's degree in geology. Be tasteless, rude, and offensive. Live in a swamp and be three-dimensional. Put a live chicken in your underwear. Go into a closet and suck eggs. — Steve Martin

Oh, Frances, for somebody so clever you can be awfully dull sometimes. Don't you know the sort of mistake I mean? I was going to have a — Sarah Waters

I just want to know...if I am special,' finished September, halfway between a whisper and a squeak. 'In stories, when someone appears in a poof of green clouds and asks a girl to go away on an adventure, it's because she's special, because she's smart and strong and can solve riddles and fight with swords and give really good speeches, and . . . I don't know that I'm any of those things. I don't even know that I'm as ill-tempered as all that. I'm not dull or anything, I know about geography and chess, and I can fix the boiler when my mother has to work. But what I mean to say is: Maybe you meant to go to another girl's house and let her ride on the Leopard. Maybe you didn't mean to choose me at all, because I'm not like storybook girls. I'm short and my father ran away with the army and I wouldn't even be able to keep a dog from eating a bird. — Catherynne M Valente

As We Are So Wonderfully Done with Each Other"

As we are so wonderfully done with each other
We can walk into our separate sleep
On floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood lies

O my lady, my fairest dear, my sweetest, loveliest one
Your lips have splashed my dull house with the speech of flowers
My hands are hallowed where they touched over your
soft curving.

It is good to be weary from that brilliant work
It is being God to feel your breathing under me

A waterglass on the bureau fills with morning . . .
Don't let anyone in to wake us. — Kenneth Patchen

I convince myself that I am having fun playing big lawyer in the big city-working all hours, surrounded by a ringing phone and day-old pizza crust. That I am reveling in this life of a caricature. But that would be a lie, because the truth is that I don't really feel much of anything at all. Just a dull ache around my edges. — Julie Buxbaum

Wild Horses

Childhood living is easy to do
The things you wanted I bought them for you
Graceless lady you know who I am
You know I can't let you slide through my hands

Wild horses couldn't drag me away
Wild, wild horses couldn't drag me away

I watched you suffer a dull aching pain
Now you've decided to show me the same
No sweeping exit or offstage lines
Could make me feel bitter or treat you unkind
Wild horses couldn't drag me away
Wild, wild horses couldn't drag me away
I know I've dreamed you a sin and a lie
I have my freedom but I don't have much time
Faith has been broken tears must be cried
Let's do some living after we die

Wild horses couldn't drag me away
Wild, wild horses we'll ride them some day
Wild horses couldn't drag me away
Wild, wild horses we'll ride them some day — The Rolling Stones

These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong
too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil. The fool is too much of a fool or the devil too much of a devil
I don't know which. Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place
and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won't pretend to say. But most of us are neither one or the other. — Joseph Conrad

NO ONE GETS OUT OF CHILDHOOD ALIVE. It's not the first time I've said that. But among the few worthy bon mots I've gotten off in sixty-seven years, that and possibly one other may be the only considerations eligible for carving on my tombstone. (The other one is the one entrepreneurs have misappropriated to emboss on buttons and bumper stickers: The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
(I don't so much mind that they pirated it, but what does honk me off is that they never get it right. They render it dull and imbecile by phrasing it thus: "The two most common things in the universe are ... "
(Not things, you insensate gobbets of ambulatory giraffe dung, elements! Elements is funny, things is imprecise and semi-guttural. Things! Geezus, when will the goyim learn they don't know how to tell a joke. — Harlan Ellison

Here I was with Barrons dead. Again.
I knew he wasn't really dead, or at least he wouldn't be for long, but my grief was too fresh and my emotions too complicated.
"How long until he - " I broke off, horrified to hear the catch of a sob in my voice.
"Why do you give a fuck?"
"I don't, I mean, I just - shit!" I turned and beat at the wall with my fists. I didn't care that my parents could hear the dull thud or that the wall shuddered beneath my blows. I didn't care what Lor thought of me. I hated Barrons being dead. Hated it. Beyond reason. Beyond my understanding.
I punched until Lor caught my bloody fists and pulled me away.
"How long?" I demanded. "I want to know! Answer me or else!"
He grinned faintly. "What, you gonna feed me bloody runes?"
I scowled. "Do you guys tell each other everything?"
"Not everything. Pri-ya sounded pretty fucking fascinating to me. Never did get all the details. — Karen Marie Moning

One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That's what you wanted to write about, about what you didn't know. So. What mysterious time and place don't we know?
[Remember This: Write What You Don't Know (New York Times Book Review, December 31, 1989)] — Ken Kesey

What is it like ... what is it like to be dead?' Evan looked at him with his dull, unblinking blue eyes, ' I don't know, what is it like ... to be alive? — Daniel Waters

Why? But I want to know just why it's impossible for an American to be gracefully idle" - his words gathered conviction - "it astonishes me. It - it - I don't understand why people think that every young man ought to go down-town and work ten hours a day for the best twenty years of his life at dull, unimaginative work, certainly not altruistic work. — F Scott Fitzgerald

It's sad if people think that's (homemaking) a dull existance, [but] you can't just buy an apartment and furnish it and walk away. It's the flowers you choose, the music you play, the smile you have waiting. I want it to be gay and cheerful, a haven in this troubled world. I don't want my husband and children to come home and find a rattled woman. Our era is already rattled enough, isn't it? — Audrey Hepburn

If there wasn't anything to find out, it would be dull. Even trying to find out and not finding out is just as interesting as trying to find out and finding out; and I don't know but more so. — Mark Twain

But this is one of the things that makes rap at its best so human. It doesn't force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or a sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas. Having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is the most common thing in the world. The real bullshit is when you act like you don't have contradictions inside you, that you're so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places. — Jay-Z

People tend to be exquisitely precise when describing pain. We don't just say it hurts, we say it throbs or aches; it's a burning, wrenching, gnawing sensation; it's sharp or dull; it chafes; it stings. But where pain specifies, joy generalizes. It was great! we say. Terrific! Beautiful! Fantastic! — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

People who sleep only two or three hours in the twenty-four are always geniuses. The ones you hear about, anyway. Never mind if the ones you don't hear about are dolts. Insomnia is genius. It must be. Think of all the work you could do the thoughts you could think, the books you could read, the love you could make, while the dull clods lie snoring. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I don't want to go back," Beatrix moaned. "It's so dreadfully dull, and I don't like all that rich food, and I've been sitting beside the vicar who only wants to talk about his own religious writings. It's so redundant to quote oneself, don't you think?"
"It does bear a certain odor of immodesty," Amelia agreed with a grin, smoothing her sister's dark hair. "Poor Bea. You don't have to go back, if you don't wish it. I'm sure one of the servants can recommend a nice place for you to wait until supper is done. The library, perhaps."
"Oh, thank you." Beatrix heaved a sigh of relief. "But who will create another distraction if Leo starts being disagreeable again?"
"I will," Cam assured her gravely. "I can be shocking at a moment's notice."
"I'm not surprised," Amelia said. "In fact, I'm fairly certain you would enjoy it. — Lisa Kleypas

As for those who think they don't like to read, well, I know they're making a mistake, just as all of us do when we try to judge ourselves. Now is the time to give reading a chance, for if you don't get the habit when you're young you may never get it. And if you don't get it, you may grow up to be just as dull as most adults are. — Clifton Fadiman

It follows that a tender heart that reaches for love and understanding is often the easiest to break. Hearts that are open and trusting are usually the ones that are wounded the most. This world is filed with men and woman who have rejected the love offered to them from a heart that is gentle and tender. Those strong, hard-shelled hearts that trust no one, hearts that give so little, hearts that demand love be constantly proved, hearts that are always calculating hearts that are always manipulating and self-serving, hearts that are afraid to risk are the ones that seldom get broken. They don't get wounded, because there is nothing to wound. They are too proud and self-centered to allow anyone else to make them suffer in any way. They go about breaking other hearts and trampling on the fragile souls who touch their lives, simply because they are so thick and dull at heart themselves, and they think everyone should be just as they are. — David Wilkerson

It does not bother me that some say I'm dull and boring because the people that do know me will tell you a different story. It is very difficult to be open with people you don't know. There is nothing I can do about the fact that the real me does not get across and it is probably difficult to know the real me. — Alan Shearer

Wait, so you do love me?" I asked, hope welling in my heart.
She growled and pounded her fist into a locker, leaving a fist-shaped dent. "Stop it, Justin. Stop it!"
I grabbed her shoulders. "Look at me and tell me you don't love me," I said. "Do it and I'll never bother you again."
"I don't love you," she mumbled.
"Look at me when you say it!"
She turned to me, her eyes hard but dull and faded. "I don't love you."
I let her go. My heart turned to lead, the heavy lump sagging in my chest. "Well, if there are agents out there looking to kill me, I guess it would be a mercy."
I turned to leave. Her hand gripped my shoulder.
"Please listen to me, Justin."
I pushed her hand away but didn't turn to face her. I couldn't let her see the tears welling in my eyes. "Why? What does it matter?"
"It just does. I - I don't want to see you hurt."
I took a deep shuddering breath. "You're not doing a very good job of it." I walked away and left her standing there. — John Corwin

Educational bureaucracies dull a child's questing sensitivity. The young must be dampened down. Never let them know how good they can be. That brings change. Spend lots of committee time talking about how to deal with exceptional students. Don't spend any time dealing with how the conventional teacher feels threatened by emerging talents and squelches them because of a deep-seated desire to feel superior and safe in a safe environment. — Frank Herbert

Remember, the conversation between you and your horse must never be dull or inert. It should be, "Ask, receive, give. Ask, receive, give." Ask with your body and legs; receive through your body into your hands; give primarily with the hands, but also with your body and legs, so that you can ask all over again, receive again, and give again. The give is your thanks. If you don't give, you must ask harder the next time, and even harder after that, until you end up with a dead or resistant horse. I have heard Major Hans Wikne, coach of the Swedish dressage team and head of the Swedish National School for Instructors, say so many times, "For everything you ask from your horse, your must give back a little more. The give is more important than the take." Riding is much more than a push-me-pull-you between leg and hand. — Sally Swift

Your mistake is this, and it is a very common mistake. This young bounder has a life of his own. What right have you to conclude it is an unsuccessful life, or, as you call it, 'grey'?"
"Because - "
"One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests - wife, children, snug little home. That's where we practical fellows" he smiled - "are more tolerant than you intellectuals. We live and let live, and assume that things are jogging on fairly well elsewhere, and that the ordinary plain man may be trusted to look after his own affairs. I quite grant - I look at the faces of the clerks in my own office, and observe them to be dull, but I don't know what's going on beneath. — E. M. Forster

Very few people are aware of the fact that in the beginning the proud and glorious phrase "dirty old man" was actually meant as derision.
The very phrase, originated as it was by young men, is a standing testimonial to the ignorance of the same young men. Sex is dirty - if you do it right. Young men don't know how to do it right, so they stay clean. Some old men never learn how and they stay clean, too.
But unless you have the ambition to retreat into dull hopelessness, don't you do it. Don't be bashful with ladies while young and retreat altogether as you grow older. Grow bolder with the years: advance, advance.
Be a dirty old man and be proud of it. — Isaac Asimov

I watch people who are not driven by creativity any more, and I think how dull it must be to produce the same kind of thing. If you don't feel you're reaching something new, then don't do it. — George Michael

Crowds have one expression, cruel and fixed. You let yourself be trapped by a look. You let yourself be carried off and shut away in a place of silence. There your eyes may be ripped out, your tongue cut off, and your fingers hammered until the little bones splinter. The walls are splashed with thick clots of blood. Words are the worst kind of dog, they drag us along despite ourselves to somewhere we didn't want to go, they obsess us, they don't let us have a moment's rest, a moment's rest.

But before that? Before that is another place altogether. Memory blanks things out methodically. It has several floors, sealed off from one another and there is no passage joining them. One of them is hell. When you fall in, at the very instant you lose your footing, you forget everything, even what light is like. But once you are back in the world you retain only a faint memory of being shut up. It resonates like the dull echo of pain. — Marie Desplechin

You love Robert, not me. You don't love Lord Stuffy, so I tried to be like Robert."
The sweet idiot! She felt like weeping again. She began to protest, but he cut her off.
"I don't drink and I don't gamble and I don't have a mistress. I'm dull. You told me so, the first time we met. So I tried to change." He frowned. "Not the mistress. I'll never do that."
"Good," she whispered.
"I'm trying to be like Robert, but I'm no good at it. I drank wine. And brandy, lots of it. I didn't like it and it made me sick. I played hazard and I lost." He looked momentarily cheerful and her heart sank. "But I didn't like that either. If I was a real man like Mr. Fox, or Robert, I'd have lost thousands."
The sadder he looked, the more her heart ached, a happy ache.
"I failed you, Caro. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I'll always be Lord Stuffy," he said, and closed his tortured, bloodshot eyes. — Miranda Neville

Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.
We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we're lying.
If we say No, we don't see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.
So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness. — Rumi

Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "Woo the muse of the odd." You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don't hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. To hell with them. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Don't become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. — Bruce Sterling