Gaudy Me Quotes & Sayings

I felt rotten. Dead butterfly floating on the surface of the pool. Audible machine hum. Drowned crickets and beetles swirling in the plastic filter baskets. Above, the setting sun flared gaudy and inhuman, blood-red shelves of cloud that suggested end-times footage of catastrophe and ruin: detonations on Pacific atolls, wildlife running before sheets of flame. — Donna Tartt

There was the gaudy patch of sunflowers beside the west gate of the palace of the Prince of Ombria, that did nothing all day long but turn their golden-haired, thousand-eyed faces to follow the sun. — Patricia A. McKillip

The last copy of the Chicago Daily News I picked up had three crime stories on its front page. But by comparison to the gaudy days, this is small-time stuff. Chicago is as full of crooks as a saw with teeth, but the era when they ruled the city is gone forever. — John Gunther

She'd stumbled into Norman Bates' attic. There in the bathroom was a gaudy heart shaped pink bathtub, and standing proudly next to it was a bear. Holding a clean white towel draped over his arm like a waiter. — Erin McCarthy

One of the first evidences of a real lady, is that she should be modest. By modesty we mean that she shall not say, do, nor wear anything that would cause her to appear gaudy, ill-bred, or unchaste. There should be nothing about her to attract unfavorable attention, nothing in her dress or manner that would give a man an excuse for vulgar comment. When we dress contrary to the rule of modesty we give excuse for unwholesome thoughts in the mind of those who look upon us, and every girl who oversteps these bounds makes herself liable to misunderstanding and insult, though she may be innocent of any such intention. — Margaret Hale

Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories — H.L. Mencken

There is only one kind of wisdom that has any social value, and that is the knowledge of one's own limitations. — Dorothy L. Sayers

You're looking, sir, at a very dull survivor of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it's hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider. — William Faulkner

Can I have the heart to fluster the flustered Thipps further - that's very difficult to say quickly - by appearing in a top-hat and frock-coat? I think not. Ten to one he will overlook my trousers and mistake me for the undertaker. A grey suit, I fancy, neat but not gaudy, with a hat to tone, suits my other self better. Exit the amateur of first editions; new motive introduced by solo bassoon; enter Sherlock Holmes, disguised as a walking gentleman. — Dorothy L. Sayers

What do you want me to do, Peter?"
"Chuck the ball back to me if it runs out of the circle. Not obviously. Just exercise your devastating talent for keeping to the point and speaking the truth."
"That sounds easy."
"It is
for you. That's what I love you for."
Gaudy Night — Dorothy L. Sayers

I faced the gaudy sunflower on her canvas bag
it looked hand-painted and at last my eyes fell into hers. I said, 'Thanks for the card.' Her smile put the sunflower to shame. She walked off. — Jerry Spinelli

You know you can get gaudy with something, and they didn't do that. To me, I think it's very tasteful, well done, with the silver and gold and the engraving. I think it's very tasteful. — Earl Scruggs

Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary. — Erik Naggum

I've been watching 'Pawn Stars' every week for the last year. I like learning about the history behind the items that people bring into the pawnshop. I actually pawned a ring once that a woman sent to me while I was on 'Jerry Springer.' It was really gaudy. — Steve Wilkos

Like many visitors, they had been unnerved by the inimitable creepiness of the Holy Sepulchre, a grimly gaudy, theopathical Turkish bathhouse where their childhood saints glared like demented spooks from every moldering wall. — Robert Stone

A lot of people have said I'd have probably done better in my career if I hadn't looked so cheap and gaudy. But I dress to be comfortable for me, and you shouldn't be blamed because you want to look pretty. — Dolly Parton

He should hate those nails. He normally considered that sort of thing tacky or gaudy, but damn if that look didn't work on her. And because it worked on her - it was really working on him. — Shelly Laurenston

We pass a church with a massive blue neon cross, and I am spiritually lifted by feelings of great religiosity. No, I'm not, for crying out loud. Don't be ridiculous. But what I do love about this road is how the gaudy becomes grand, how tastelessness is a way of everyday life. You have to admire how these people shamelessly try to get your attention as you drive by, whether they're trying to feed you a hamburger or a savior. (p.37) — Michael Zadoorian

Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell
No God, no demon of severe response
Deigns to reply from heaven or from hell
Then to my human heart I turn at once:
Heart, thou and I are here, sad and alone,
Say, why did I laugh? O mortal pain!
O darkness! darkness! Forever must I moan
To question heaven and hell and heart in vain?
Why did I laugh? I know this being's lease
My fancy to it's utmost blisses spreads
Yet would I on this very midnight cease
And all the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds
Verse, fame and beauty are intense indeed
But death intenser, death is life's high meed. — John Keats

It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies. — Robert Silverberg

The planet, saved for another day, stokes up
its slow-burning gases and toxic dust, gold rift and scarlet
gash that take our breath away; a world at its interminable
show of holy dying. And we go with it, the old
gatherer and hunter. To its gaudy-day, though the contribution
is small, adding our handsel of warm clay. — David Malouf

We Jews, thank God, have nothing to do with the East ... The Islamic soul must be broomed out of Eretz-Yisrael ... [Muslims are] yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags. — Ze'ev Jabotinsky

And when I looked up and saw you as you were, in no gaudy robes and bearing no solemn goblet - suddenly I had hope.'
'I did not see you looking,' said Mirasol.
'I did no want you to see,' said the Master.'And I looked away quickly, because I knew the hope was false. I knew - I think I knew - that it was not really about hope, it was about looking at you. And so I looked at Horuld, and at his sword, and reminded myself that they were about to kill me. — Robin McKinley

Bees sip honey from flowers and hum their thanks when they leave. The gaudy butterfly is sure that the flowers owe thanks to him. — Rabindranath Tagore

Behold the Drojim Palace," King Urgit said extravagantly to Sadi, "the hereditary home of the House of Urga."
"A most unusual structure, You Majesty," Sadi murmured.
"That's a diplomatic way to put it." Urgit looked critically at his palace. "It's gaudy, ugly, and in terribly bad taste. It does, however, suit my personality almost perfectly. — David Eddings

Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold; But friendship is the rose, with sweets in every fold. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Oh yes," said Randolph stretching his legs , lighting a mentholated cigarette, "do not take it seriously, what you see here: it's only a joke played on myself by myself ... it amuses and horrifies ... a rather gaudy grave, you might say. There is no daytime in this room, or night, the seasons are changeless here, and the years, and when I die, if indeed I haven't already, then let me be dead drunk and curled, as in my mother's womb, in the warm blood of darkness. Wouldn't that be an ironic finale for one who, deep in his goddamned soul, sought sweetly the clean-limbed life? bread and water, a simple roof to share with some beloved, nothing more. — Truman Capote

A good editor is like tinsel to a Christmas Tree ... they add the perfect amount of sparkle without being gaudy. — Bobbi Romans

Some will be always strong, and some will be always weak; and though, if there is no God, no divine and fatherly source of order, there will be, trust me, no aristocracies, there will still be tyrannies. There will still be rich and poor; and that will then mean happy and miserable; and the poor will be--as I sometimes think they are already--but a mass of groaning machinery, without even the semblance of rationality; and the rich, with only the semblance of it, but a set of gaudy, dancing marionettes, which is the machinery's one work to keep in motion. — William Hurrell Mallock

Architecture is, to a certain extent, a sensual gratification. It addresses itself to the eye, and affords the best scope for the parade of barbaric pomp and splendour. It is the form in which the revenues of a semi-civilized people are most likely to be lavished. The most gaudy and ostentatious specimens of it, and sometimes the most stupendous, have been reared by such hands. It is one of the first steps in the great march of civilization. — William H. Prescott

At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, when all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again. — Italo Calvino

While I knew him, he made me see--Poe did; made me understand that, unlike a bodily organ, the soul desires, even wills, its own continuance.It can be said to be the seat of will and desire and, even in its necrotic state, the root of evil. ... A Sunday school lesson or one of Cotton Mather's gaudy rants that helped to kindle the Salem bonfires is nearer to the truth of it than a fable by Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville. Evil's a malignancy beyond the skill and scalpel of {doctors} to heal or extirpate. — Norman Lock

The world of "magick" is, nine times out of ten, a world where people can hide their deep-set insecurity and personal damage behind illusion, constructed identities and claims to privileged knowledge, power or spiritual status. A gaudy carnival magic show, conducted with props that have long since begun to disintegrate with age, that seems to function only to distract people from the real magic that is occurring all around them, in every facet of their lives, every day of their lives. While the rituals and magical techniques of the Temple seem overly simplistic in comparison with the loftier Qabalahs, tables of correspondences and secret formulae of "high" magick, they have one thing which high magick quite often forgets: a concrete function. — Jason Louv

The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day Is crept into the bosom of the sea. — William Shakespeare

I really knew nothing about the dancing habits of the Scottish. But I wanted to help. "I could teach them Indian folk dances," I offered, scrounging my mind for school dances in gaudy garments.
"Well, I'm not sure that they would be complex enough for competitions," she said. Pursing her lips, she blushed a dark, deep red. I knew I had said something wrong, but it took me a few days to understand the reason for Miss Manson's disapproval and discomfort. She blushed a beetroot red because I had unwittingly questioned the core belief of the school: British was Better. — Nayana Currimbhoy

I only ever play Vegas one night at a time. It's a hideous, gaudy place; it may not be the end of the world per se, but you can certainly see it from there. — Robin Williams

In striving for the best, in losing onself in others, one is lifted above the common material furniture of life, above the gaudy trappings and encumbering paraphenalia ... into the realm of peace which passeth understanding. — Olympia Brown

The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours, and hair bobbed in strange new ways ... — F Scott Fitzgerald

Gratitude and treachery are merely the two extremities of the same procession. You have seen all of it that is worth staying for when the band and the gaudy officials have gone by. — Mark Twain

The stars burned with a lidless fixity and they drew nearer in the night until toward dawn he was stumbling among the whinstones of the uttermost ridge to heaven, a barren range of rock so enfolded in that gaudy house that stars lay awash at his feet and migratory spalls of burning matter crossed constantly about him on their chartless reckonings. — Cormac McCarthy

I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. — Italo Calvino

Baseball outfits went through their gaudy period during the disco '70's, when the White Sox looked like softball players and the Athletics looked like 'Saturday Night Fever' personified. — George Vecsey

I told him I was sick unto death of miniwomen, miniclothes, miniloves, minideaths and my own damned minilife. I wanted empty cays, gaudy reefs, hot sun, swift fish, and maybe some talk when it was time for talking. — John D. McDonald

For the Bible, despite all its contradictions and absurdities, its barbarisms and obscenities, remains grand and gaudy stuff, and so it deserves careful study and enlightened exposition. It is not only lovely in phrase; it is also rich in ideas, many of them far from foolish. One somehow gathers the notion that it was written from end to end by honest men - inspired, perhaps, but nevertheless honest. When they had anything to say they said it plainly, whether it was counsel that enemies be slain or counsel that enemies be kissed. They knew how to tell a story, and how to sing a song, and how to swathe a dubious argument in specious and disarming words. — H.L. Mencken

A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cotton-fields. This, then, is the Cotton Kingdom
the shadow of a marvelous dream. — W.E.B. Du Bois

The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts
not to give it joy, but to give it a grand and somewhat gaudy sense of virtue. The essay is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of the age. The novel, properly conceived, is a means of uplifting the spirit; its aim is to inspire, not merely to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man. — H.L. Mencken

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell. The — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

She could have made a much better thing of that, if she had not been afraid of giving herself away. What hampered her was this sense of being in the middle of things, too close to things, pressed upon and bullied by reality. If she could succeed in standing aside from herself she would achieve self-confidence and a better control. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Harrogate saw them going along Blount Avenue Sunday morning. They wore outfits all cut from the same bolt of cloth and in the church pew standing six across they looked like a strip of gaudy wallpaper cut into those linked dolls madfolk pass their time in fashioning. — Cormac McCarthy

It was a small tortoise with Julia's initials set in diamonds in the living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on the polished boards, now striding across the card-table, now lumbering over a rug, now withdrawn at a touch, now stretching its neck and swaying its withered, antediluvian head, became a memorable part of the evening, one of those needlehooks of experience which catch the attention when larger matters are at stake. — Evelyn Waugh

Sergeant Bellow marched us to the quartermaster's. It was there we were stripped of all vestiges of personality. It is the quartermasters who make soldiers, sailors and marines. In their presence, one strips down. With each divestment, a trait is lost; the discard of a garment marks the quiet death of an idiosyncrasy. I take off my socks; gone is a propensity for stripes, or clocks, or checks, or even solids; ended is a tendency to combine purple socks with brown tie. My socks henceforth will be tan. They will neither be soiled, nor rolled, nor gaudy, nor restrained, nor holey. They will be tan. The only other thing they may be is clean. — Robert Leckie

Strike deep, divide us from cheap-got doubt,
Leap, leap between us and the easy out;
Teach us to seize, to use, to sleep well, to let go;
Let our loves, freed in us, gaudy and graceful, grow. — Marie Ponsot

Come,
Let's have one other gaudy night. Call to me
All my sad captains. Fill our bowls once more.
Let's mock the midnight bell. — William Shakespeare

Extremist material of any kind always looks gaudy and cheap, like a bad pizza menu. Not because they can't afford decent computers - these days you can knock up a professional CD cover on a pay-as-you-go mobile - but because anyone who's good at graphic design is likely to be a thoughtful, inquisitive sort by nature. And thoughtful, inquisitive sorts tend to think fascism is a bit shit, to be honest. If the BNP really were the greatest British party, they'd have the greatest British designer working for them - Jonathan Ive, perhaps, the man who designed the iPod. But they don't. They've got someone who tries to stab your eyes out with primary colours.
— Charlie Brooker