My Dullness Quotes & Sayings

We were not for underestimating magic - a life-conductor like the sap between the tree-stem and the bark. We know that it keeps dullness out of religion and poetry. It is probable that without it we might die. — Freya Stark

For there was a conspiracy of dullness in the world, a universal plan to shut out the resurgences of spirit which might interfere with clockwork. Better to keep your elevation unseen until it is higher than strangers' hands can reach to pull you down to their level. — Tennessee Williams

All around, everywhere you look, is dullness and uncertainty. Even something born of beauty soon leads to boredom and banality, commonplace, the human ritual, the tedious rhythm of life. — Andrzej Sapkowski

Before, they had laughed at me, despising me for my ignorance and dullness; now, they hated me for my knowledge and understanding. Why? What in God's name did they want of me? — Daniel Keyes

You talk of beauty, love, laughter and life like a precious memory. As if the sunshine of love and laughter shall never flow into your life again. You make it sound like your present and future shall promise you nothing but safety and comfort in a sort of dead, dull way. What killed the spirit of madness, the spark of adventure and the sense of delicious fun ? Your aliveness ? Is this what it is to get old ? — Srividya Srinivasan

Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living. — Truman Capote

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating. — Harold Rosenberg

It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome. — Joseph Conrad

Like threads of old spider webs, still sticky and hovering, the past waits for us to submit, or depart. When I least expect it, a memory comes skittering out of the dark, spinning and netting the air, ready to snap me up and ensnare me in old and complex puzzles. Just a glimpse of a worn-out patchwork quilt and the old question comes thudding out of the night again like a great moth. Why did my mother not return? After all these years, I find myself wondering, but with the dullness of expecting no response. — Joy Kogawa

How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet. — Virginia Woolf

I like to prowl ordinary places.
I feel sorry for us all or glad for us
all
caught alive together
and awkward in that way.
there's nothing better than the joke
of us
the seriousness of us
the dullness of us — Charles Bukowski

Sedentary people are apt to have sluggish minds. A sluggish mind is apt to be reflected in flabbiness of body and in a dullness of expression that invites no interest and gets none. — Rose Kennedy

Gregor grinned. "Congratulations to you, too, Miles. Your father before you needed a whole army to do it, but you've changed Barrayaran history just with a dinner invitation." Miles shrugged helplessly. God, is everybody going to blame me for this? And for everything that follows? "Let's try to avoid making history on this one, eh? I think we should push for unalleviated domestic dullness." "With all my heart," Gregor agreed. With a cheery salute, he cut the com. Miles laid his head down on the table, and moaned. "It's not my fault!" "Yes, it is," said Ivan. "It was all your idea. I was there when you came up with it." "No, it wasn't. It was yours. You're the one who dragooned me into attending the damned state dinner in the first place." "I only invited you. You invited Galeni. And anyway, my mother dragooned me." "Oh. So it's all her fault. Good. I can live with that." Ivan — Lois McMaster Bujold

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness. — George Eliot

This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy. — Henry A. Wallace

Security and safety were the reward of dullness. — Hanif Kureishi

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design. — Richard Powers

Her dullness made her own punishment. — Daphne Du Maurier

I suppose it is the way with all men and women who reach middle age without the clear perception that life never can be thoroughly joyous: under the vague dullness of the grey hours, dissatisfaction seeks a definite object, and finds it in the privation of an untried good. Dissatisfaction — George Eliot

It was like being a prisoner on death row who survives month after month and becomes accustomed to the life, while he registers with an objective eye the horror of the new arrivals: registers it with the same numbness tha he brings to the murders and deaths themselves. All survivor literature talks about this numbness, in which life's functions are reduced to minimum, behavior becomes completely selfish and indifferent to others, and gassing and burning are everyday occurences. In the rare accounts by perpetrators , too, the gas chambers and ovens become ordinary scenary, the perpetrators reduced to their few functions and exhibiting a mental paralysis and indifference, a dullness that makes them seem drugged or drunk. — Bernhard Schlink

But a certain dullness of mind seems an almost necessary qualification, if not for every public man, at least for every one seriously engaged in making money. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I guess I'm hoping the weapons will make me feel better, grant me some kind of fucking control, especially if I sense the dullness inside me get too heavy and thick, warning me that something is again approaching, creeping slowly towards my room, no figment of my imagination either but as tangible as you and I, never ceasing to scratch, waiting, perhaps for a word or an order or some other kind of sign to at last initiate this violent and by now inevitable confrontation - always as full of wrath as I am full of fear. — Mark Z. Danielewski

Wicked ecclesiastics who show the worst example to the people," and, above all, nobles who empty the purses of the poor by their extravagance, and disdain them for "lowness of blod or foulenesse of body," for deformed shape of body or limb, for dullness of wit and uncunning of craft, and deign not to speak to them, and who are themselves stuffed with pride - of ancestry, fortune, gentility, possessions, power, comeliness, strength, children, treasure - "prowde in lokynge, prowde in spekyng, ... prowde in goinge, standynge and sytting." All would be drawn by fiends to Hell on the Day of Judgment. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free. — Willa Cather

[I]t is really the ponderous books which I envy. How easy merely to put down everything you think or imagine. No holding back, no telling oneself that this does not belong, or that. No hewing to the line. No cutting. No fear of letting the interest die. No wastebasket. How wonderful. And how dull! — Mary Roberts Rinehart

Dullness is the enemy. — Philip Johnson

The devil's name is dullness. — Robert E.Lee

I'm not sure that I shall. I'm trying to develop my own large capacity for dullness and contentment. I've failed at every positive thing I've tried. I'd better 'settle down,' as they call it, and be satisfied to be - nothing. — Sinclair Lewis

In time I came to realise my playmates were chosen for their dullness, their lack of guile or cunning. Friends with sharper minds would have sharpened my own thoughts, made me consider that this pleasant life of luxury and plenty was in reality nothing more than an ornate cage, and I a slave within it. — Anthony Ryan

Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse. — Howard Zinn

Excess is part of my nature. Dullness is a disease. I really need danger and excitement. I'm never scared of putting myself out on a limb. — Freddie Mercury

I need to somehow peel away the dullness and heighten my sensitivity and alertness. I need to start sucking the juice out of every single moment of the most precious gift ever to be had, "my life!" — Bryan Kest

Let my lips avoid vain repetition as I lift my voice in praise, O Lord. Distract me from my distractions, awaken me from the dullness of mind, and transform habit and routine into vibrant times of worship. — Jack W. Hayford

The cool wind blew in my face and all at once I felt as if I had shed dullness from myself. Before me lay a long gray line with a black mark down the center. The birds were singing. It was spring. — Burl Ives

The things that we preceive as beautiful may be different, but the actual characteristics we ascribe to beautiful objects are similar. Think about it. When something strikes us as beautiful, it displays more presence and sharpness of shape and vividness of color, doesn't it? It stands out. It shines. It seems almost iridescent compared to the dullness of other objects less attractive. — James Redfield

Paradoxical thinking requires that we embrace a view of the world in which opposites are joined, so that we can see the world clearly and see it whole ... The result is a world more complex and confusing than the one made simple by either-or thought - but that simplicity is merely the dullness of death. When we think together we reclaim the life force in the world, in our students, in ourselves. — Parker J. Palmer

Fashions smile has given wit to dullness and grace to deformity, and has brought everything into vogue, by turns, but virtue. — Charles Caleb Colton

To the other. It is the realism needed to manage the inevitable. A model of living that has broadly worked well in the West is spreading, adapting to local conditions as it goes. We should all look forward to the time when Chinese and Indian teenagers write sulky songs about the appalling dullness of suburbia. — Anonymous

Mystery is the wine of this universe. It makes us dizzy and makes us feel happy! Man needs enigma so that he can get rid of the dullness of the reality! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion. — Joseph Conrad

The only thing about 3-D is the dullness of the image. — Peter Jackson

What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves. — Christian Wiman

The dullness of certain people is sometimes a sufficient security against the attack of an artful man. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The camel carries on his dreary circular task with his usual slow and pompous step and head poised superciliously, as if it were a ritual affair above the comprehension of the vulgar; and no doubt he comforts himself for the dullness of life by a sense of virtue, like many other formalists beside him. — Freya Stark

The half-brained creature to whom books are other than living things may see with the eyes of a bat and draw with the fingers of a mole his dullard's distinction between books and life: those who live the fuller life of a higher animal than he know that books are to poets as much part of that life as pictures are to painters or as music is to musicians, dead matter though they may be to the spiritually still-born children of dirt and dullness who find it possible and natural to live while dead in heart and brain. — Algernon Charles Swinburne

He remembers the philosophers dead with detail, and how they honed their trade into the grave for the sake of their livelihoods. Incapable of audacity, they pleasured themselves with a maze constructed of nothing but dead-ends. They were so petrified they might happen upon the truth, might come to know something for certain, that they deployed some of their best minds to obliterate it, scattering its shards into infinity. But they were only trying to keep the dream alive, after all, fighting to keep the questions outnumbering the answers, picking away at the odd dropped stitch in an otherwise ever-tightening blanket of sacrosanct precision. They fought hard, if unwittingly, against the encroaching dullness of complete knowledge, but ultimately paid the price of becoming as dull as their enemy - at least the chemical truths of literature sometimes bothered to wear a suit and tie. — Gary J. Shipley

The first bowl sleekly moistened throat and lips, The second banished all my loneliness The third expelled the dullness from my mind, Sharpening inspiration gained from all the books I've read. The fourth brought forth light perspiration, Dispersing a lifetimes troubles through my pores. The fifth bowl cleansed every atom of my being. The sixth has made me kin to the Immortals. This seventh ... I can take no more. — Lu Tong

He firmly believed that everything he did was right, that he ought on all occasions to have his own way - and like the sting of a wasp or serpent his hatred rushed out armed and poisonous against anything like opposition. He was proud of his hatred as of everything else. Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world? As — William Makepeace Thackeray

Jeremy Taylor, Charles I's personal chaplain, wrote a tract, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living, in 1650 that illustrates that not much has changed in over 360 years. He characterised drunkenness by: Apish gestures. Much talking. Immoderate laughing. Dullness of sense. Scurrility, that is wanton jeering or abusive language. A useless understanding. Stupid sleep. Epilepsies, or — Simon Wills

He knows I have a soft spot for RLS and not just because he was sick or because we have the same initials but because there's something impossibly romantic about him and because before he started writing Treasure Island he first drew a map of an unknown island and because he believed in invisible places and was one of the last writers to know what the word adventure means. I could give you a hundred reasons why RLS is The Man. Look in his The Art of Writing (Book 683, Chatto & Windus, London) where he says that no living people have had the influence on him as strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. Or when he says his greatest friend is D'Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (Book 5, Regent Classics, London). RLS said: 'When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge, I take them like opium.' And when you read Treasure Island you feel you are casting off. That's the thing. You are casting off and leaving behind the ordinary dullness of the world. — Niall Williams

When the boy asked him if this knowledge were a special knowledge only to the blind the blind man said that it was not. He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had no time to sharpen them. — Cormac McCarthy

There is a special blessing in old clothes, and that aside from their comfort, for which especially they are to be cherished. They confer a kind of anonymity on one who wears them gladly; all their bright places rubbed to a uniform dullness, they achieve an appearance so nearly nondescript that only a close scrutiny could learn that ever they held shape at all. — Maude Meagher

It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness, of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment ... the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world. — Sinclair Lewis

Dullness it is that perverts and corrups the spirit but it is always possible to look past the dullness, and see the bright, shining heart of things — Jude Morgan

It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves. — Martin Gardner

As in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first brought to light. — Herman Melville