Rococo Quotes & Sayings

In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble. — Alan Perlis

We live in an era of mind-blowing scientific discovery, virtually none of which ever makes the front page, even as every trivial twist and turn in the rococo political drama has a secure place as the lead story. — Timothy Noah

What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out, this is the wrong question to ask. Chemistry was not an "alternative" to alchemy; it was a wholesale exchange of ignorance at its most rococo for genuine knowledge. We will find that, as with alchemy, to speak of "alternatives" to religious faith is to miss the point. — Sam Harris

There is no more wild, free, vigorous growth of the forest, but everything is in pots or rows like a rococo garden ... The pupil is in the age of spontaneous variation which at no period of life is so great. He does not want a standardized, overpeptonized mental diet. It palls on his appetite. — G. Stanley Hall

He simply painted the portrait of some aristocratic Mesalina, and was tactful enough to let Cupid hold the mirror in which she tests her majestic allure with cold satisfaction. He looks as though his task were becoming burdensome enough. The picture is painted flattery. Later an 'expert' in the Rococo period baptized the lady with the name of Venus. The furs of the despot in which Titian's fair model wrapped herself, probably more for fear of a cold than out of modesty, have become a symbol of the tyranny and cruelty that constitute woman's essence and her beauty. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

You see, for me [art]'s not one of life's ornaments, rococo relaxation to be greeted affably after a day of hard work; I'm inverted on this : for me it's my very breath, the one thing necessary, and all else is excretion and a latrine. — Arno Hintjens

The room was rococo. I had a strong sense of gilt. — Eric Idle

Oooh!" Bill squealed. "Very rococo."
"So, I'm really doing this? I'm just going to go down there and pretend
" (Luce)
"No pretending." Bill shook his head. "Own it. Own that cleavage, girl, you know you want to. — Lauren Kate

His bedroom was the gilded, diamond-studded, pearl-encrusted rococo lair of a god-king. — Lev Grossman

When I looked up 'rococo' in the dictionary a while back it was defined as 'an ornamental style emphasizing the florid and the gorgeous, but lacking substance', and I couldn't help but laugh. It was so perfect. How could anything beautiful have 'substance' anyway? Pure beauty is always without meaning or morality. — Osamu Dazai

If I'm researching something strange and rococo, I'll go to the London Library or the British Library and look it up in books. — Ben Schott

You make sexiness strong by balancing it out: something familiar with something unfamiliar, something masculine with something feminine, something streamlined with something rococo. It's a Yin and Yang. Women are made of layers, your mood shifts, no one is neither one extreme nor the other. — Michael Kors

Crossed the room to where a selection of implements was arranged on a table top. These could have been mistaken for the trade tools of a cook, physician, or torturer, save for the fact that the surface on which they rested was a slab of polished pink marble, topping a white and gilt dressing table-cum-sculpture, done up in the new, hyper-Baroque style named Rococo. It was adorned, for example, with several cherubs, bows drawn, eyes asquint, as they drew beads on unseen targets, butt cheeks polished to a luster with jeweler's rouge. It had, in other words, all the earmarks of a gift that had been sent to the princess by someone with a lot of money who did not know her very well. — Neal Stephenson

Sylvia's inherent appreciation for beauty as both artist and consumer is evident in her journals and letters ... ... .she wrote beautifully about clothes. She wrote about them with irony and wit mixed in with all the rococo prettiness. — Elizabeth Winder

Is that Rococo, Pascal?" Chrissie said as she stood by the missus's desk, peering into the nests of pigeonholes and cubbies. "Oh, don't touch there or you'll be shot," Pascal said, because it was where the missus kept her souvenirs, love letters from men before him, locks of hair, dried shamrock, and the words of songs that she rehearsed for her parties. Her family was musical, — Edna O'Brien

I like Modernism. I grew up around these sort of eclectic, heavily carved, baroque, rococo, highly ornamented styles that were in my life from the time that I was a child until now in my business life. So I like clean, straight, minimalist lines. — Paul Brown

The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century - or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Motzart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet. — Laini Taylor

In the West, we look at art through life. Well, that's one way of living. In the Orient they look at life through art. They even drink their tea without sugar, for the same reason that they don't like a lot of frilly decorations on a painting. I can't stand butter on my bread for the same reason. I'm allergic to goo and rococo. — Paul Rand

I spend a lot of time looking at rococo books. And almanacs used to be huge sellers - they were pretty much part of the fabric of life. I thought, this is bizarre, I'd love to buy a book like this, and there isn't one. So I thought, all right then, this could be fun. I'll write an almanac. — Ben Schott

Orthodoxy builds a rococo logical palace on loose empirical sand. — Richard R. Nelson

Kitsch is the contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque. — Frank Wedekind