Dull Conversation Quotes & Sayings

This was what real grief felt like - she had never truly felt it before. All the times she had been sad, all the times she had wept in her life, all the glooms and melancholies were merely moods, mere passing whims. Grief was a different thing altogether. — Dan Chaon

Want to play hangman? asks Theophile, and I ache to tell him that I have enough on my plate playing quadriplegic. But my communication system disqualifies repartee: the keenest rapier grows dull and falls flat when it takes several minutes to thrust it home. By the time you strike, even you no longer understand what had seemed so witty before you started to dictate it, letter by letter. So the rule is to avoid impulsive sallies. It deprives conversation of its sparkle, all those gems you bat back and forth like a ball-and I count this forced lack of humor one of the great drawbacks of my condition. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favorite authors and see if that isn't precisely one of the things that engages you, often at first without your noticing it. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull or obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful. This is how philosophy evolved in the symposium, before philosophy was written down. And poetry began with the voice as its only player and the ear as its only recorder. — Christopher Hitchens

There is something funny about the human condition, and civilized intelligence makes fun of its own ideas. — Saul Bellow

I am a dull fellow ... my person reeks, my conversation consists of insipid platitudes. — Jack Vance

Five minutes before Julian arrived, they might be slouched in the living room
curtains drawn, dinner simmering on chafing dishes in the kitchen, everyone tugging at collars and dull-eyed with fatigue
but the instant the doorbell rang their spines would straighten, conversation would snap to life, the very wrinkles would fall from their clothes. — Donna Tartt

Only an atmosphere of quiet hard work and dull, serious conversation were appropriate to him. — Anthony Powell

People's wardrobes in history are something that society and culture imposed. But sexuality is not about the way you dress. — Riccardo Tisci

(Note curtailment. Not conclusion.) 7. Dementing boredom. (I found small children brutally dull. I did, even at the outset, admit this to myself.) 8. Worthless social life. (I had never had a decent conversation with a friend's five-year-old in the room.) 9. Social demotion. (I was a respected entrepreneur. Once I had a toddler in tow, every man I knew - every woman, too, which is depressing - would — Lionel Shriver

I am a book-collector, a proud avocationist in what Eric Quayle (wrongly) asserts to be the "least vicious" of hobbies (we are quite savage). We collectors are puzzled and often piqued unpleasantly by the common, absurd notion whereby we are only a pack of myopic, semi-crazed old pedants fretting over a book's colophon, dull dogs full of humorless zeal and no conversation, who suck our fingers free of pounce. — Paul Theroux

Look carefully around you and recognize
the luminosity of souls.
Sit beside those who draw you to that. — Rumi

Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right. — Ann Patchett

Do you suppose it's so much easier to make conversation with someone you already know well than with someone you don't know at all primarily because of all the previously exchanged information and shared experiences between two people who know each other well, or because maybe it's only with people we already know well and know know us well that we don't go through the awkward mental process of subjecting everything we think of saying or bringing up as a topic of light conversation to a self-conscious critical analysis and evaluation that manages to make anything we think of proposing to say the other person seem dull or stupid or banal or on the other hand maybe overly intimate or tension-producing? — David Foster Wallace

The only people who are worth knowing are either saints, scoundrels or madmen; at least their conversation is always interesting. Sensible people are dull by definition, because they are always harping on to the same boring tune about everyday life. They form part of the crowd, the more intelligent part perhaps, but the crowd for all that, and I'm sick of them. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Never invite to dinner: those who won't decide until the last minute; those who come more than half an hour late; those who want to bring along two or three friends; drunks; monologists; those who stay until three o'clock in the morning; those who think that conversation means having an argument; those who take a high moral tone; those who are stupid, ugly, or dull. Enforcement of these rules will enable one to eat alone every night in comfort. — Mason Cooley

It is, I think, a good deal owing to the preponderance of the commercial element in Society that conversation has sunk to its present dull level of conventional chatter. — Dorothy Nevill

A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull and obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful. — Christopher Hitchens

Mind, Sancho, I do not say that a proverb aptly brought in is objectionable; but to pile up and string together proverbs at random makes conversation dull and vulgar. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Certain dressmakers desire to pass for an artist. I have one ambition: that is to have good taste. — Jean Patou

I am careful with the arguas (tomato caterpillars). Be careful with your mothers' hearts too, por favor.
THE PINATA-MAKER'S DAUGHTER — Eileen Granfors

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

Literature, I have always thought, is in most places and companies a singularly dull and uninteresting thing to talk about, but one may, as a rule, hate literary conversation, and yet at the right moment, with all its powers of feeling, the mind in silence may feel what it owes to literature. — William Hurrell Mallock

Most reputations are not ruined but forgotten. — Mason Cooley

I have listened to much dull and heavy conversation in America, but rarely to any that I could strictly call silly (if I except the every where privileged class of very young ladies). — Frances Trollope

Beauty, business, blogs, & bullshit...never a dull conversation with your friends you have tons in common with. — April Mae Monterrosa