Stilted Quotes & Sayings

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard. — Charles Bukowski

We have taken beauty and exchanged it for stilted voices. — Mark Bailey

...he softly touched his lips to hers. Sweetly. Innocently.

"Ronin," she drew in a short, stilted breath. The ache in her body was reaching a tortuous level.

"I know. I'm sorry." Ronin studied her closely before he softly said, "Had to. — Sibylla Matilde

A Dumont actor was considered to be too stilted - the way we Dumont actors used to speak. — Leon Askin

In the years that I could not see him, I came to know my father through the medium of photography. My perceptions of him were forged on black-and-white squares that stole an instant out of history and immortalized it between the pages of a family album. When I summoned up the image of the man, it came to me frozen, black-bordered, flat. He stood pale above the creases of his uniform, framed in the foamy wake of some ship, drops of sunlight caught in the buttons on his jacket. He winked at me from the liberty ports of countless exotic places. In an atrocious hand he scrawled stilted, affectionate words to the stranger that bore his name and his features, telling of adventures far away, misbehavings under suns hotter than that which shone over the Greater German Reich. — Miles Watson

I suppose ... my experience with organized faith of any stripe is somewhat stilted, Baisyl admitted. 'As far as my eyes have seen, it's a conglomeration of power-hungry men who self-appoint themselves the sole dictators of how others should live their lives in order to best please forces far beyond their control.. — Anihyr Moonstar

Don't feel so sad and disappointed when the telephone conversation with a friend starts to slow down and become stilted. Just try to be smart, lay it gentle and see it as a great given opportunity, a set up to draw attention to your long awaited goals. — Euginia Herlihy

Writing becomes a really good creative outlet when you're sitting there and feeling creatively frustrated or stilted, but also you then get to write parts for yourself. — Zoe Lister-Jones

What works in a story is very different than what works in cinema. For example, dialogue in books: If you translate it too faithfully, it sounds a little stilted, because we often don't speak the way we speak in novels. Oral language is much punchier, shorter sentences. — Yann Martel

Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit. — Ludwig Von Mises

George Harrison: Paul transformed me in my bedroom, and it was awkward, to say the least. It was like being on a blind date, complete with stilted conversation and elliptical innuendo. He said, "So." Then I said, "So." Then he said, "So." Then I said, "So." That went on for, I dunno, five minutes or something. — Alan Goldsher

I got tired of doing battle with people thinking I was a little weird because I wasn't in a band making happy, stilted music. The only people who really seem weird to me are people who think they're normal. People who think it's possible to be normal just by doing the same things that most people do. Is there a most people? I don't know. Television makes it seem like there is, but I think that might just be television, — Elliott Smith

As she stared at the restless pixels on the screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though some force was at once goading her and holding her back. How to describe it? A temporal stuttering, an urgent lassitude, a feeling of simultaneous rushing and lagging behind. It was a horrible, stilted, panicky sensation, hard to put into words. — Ruth Ozeki

He pulled her into his arms. Closing his eyes, he savored every inch of her small frame. God, why did she have to be the daughter of the Governor of Fort William? Why could she not be a simple lass from his clan. "Och, mo leannan, what am I to do with you?"
She took in a stilted gasp. "Love me. — Amy Jarecki

Time is a false thing, meaningless when it's not attached to colors and people and light because in the dark there is nothing - only the stilted shadows of lie as they wait for the sun. — Laekan Zea Kemp

You can't think and play. If you think about what you're playing the playing becomes stilted. You have to just focus on the music I feel, concenctrate on the music, focus on what you're playing and let the playing come out. Once you start thinking about doing this or doing that, it's not good. What you are doing is like a language. You have a whole collection of musical ideas and thoughts that you've accumulated through your musical history plus all the musical history of the whole world and it's all in your subconscious and you draw upon it when you play — Joe Pass

Himself had apparently thought the stilted, wooden quality of nonprofessionals helped to strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and to remind the audience that they were in reality watching actors acting and not people behaving. — David Foster Wallace

Beer bottles, whiskey bottles, brown glass, green. They fell to the lawn and I'd feel serene. Adam was king to my stilted queen. — Kate Bernheimer

In so many ways, Ascham thought, she was beyond her years - but in the presence of her father she became a little girl again. So confident and assured in private, now she moved with the stilted awkwardness of every twelve-year-old girl. Ascham's heart went out to her. — Matthew Reilly

His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognised and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feelings that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the 'thirties and 'forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slope of Saturn might boast. — H.P. Lovecraft

To him, a stilted geometric love of arrangement was "system," and indefatigable and feverish interest in the pettiest facets of day-to-day bureaucracy was "industry", indecision when right was "caution", and blind stubbornness when wrong, "determination. — Isaac Asimov

If businesses are to redeem themselves in the eyes of the public and regain the trust that they have lost, they should worry a lot more about what they stand for and entrust those with expertise in communication a much freer rein to express this in ways that people might recognise as being sincere and sympathetic, rather than stilted and formulaic. — Nick Baker

Alice?" She spun toward the door, her skirts whirling softly. "Yes?" she forced out. "Do you know what I am holding in my hand?" "No." "Care to guess?" "A pitchfork?" she asked in a stilted attempt at levity, hoping to invoke his earlier, playful mood. "No, my dear," he answered drily. "A key to your room." "What?"she breathed, aghast. "I should hate to have to use it." "You have a key to this room?" "Mm-hmm." She took a step toward the door, panic rising up in her throat. "You're bluffing!" "Do you wish me to prove it? — Gaelen Foley

You know, making fun of the excessiveness and the priorities that are most stilted out here which does make it difficult to have a very sort of grounded, normal life because there's really nothing normal about Hollywood. — Debra Messing

Nemo suggested that it might be some monster giant but his papa called him a "rattlebrain" and ordered him to pacify his mama who was making elaborate plans to faint. — Winsor McCay

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things. — Joan Baez

Videogames are a little more work and they're a little more stilted. — Carlos Alazraqui

The fact that slang is apt and forceful makes its use irresistibly tempting. Coarse or profane slang is beside the mark, but "flivver," "taxi," the "movies," "deadly" (meaning dull), "feeling fit," "feeling blue," "grafter," a "fake," "grouch," "hunch" and "right o!" are typical of words that it would make our spoken language stilted to exclude. — Emily Post

There seems little or no hope for the adult writer who produces sentences like these: "Her cheeks were thick and smooth and held a healthy natural red color. The heavy lines under them, her jowls, extended to the intersection of her lips and gave her a thick-lipped frown most of the time." The phrase "Her cheeks were thick and smooth" is normal English, but "[Her cheeks] held a healthy natural red color" is elevated, pseudo-poetic. The word "held" faintly hints at personification of "cheeks," and "healthy natural red color" is clunky, stilted, slightly bookish. The second sentence contains similar mistakes. The diction level of "extended to the intersection of her lips" is high and formal, in ferocious conflict with the end of the sentence, which plunges to the colloquial "most of the time. — John Gardner

Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They're all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life. — Will Self

It is one of the talents of great stylists to make obsolete words cease from appearing obsolete through the way in which they introduce them in their writing. Obsolete words which under the pens of others would seem stilted or out of place, occur most naturally under theirs. This is owing to the tact & judgment of the writers who know when
& when only - the disused term can be introduced, when it is artistically agreeable or linguistically necessary; & of course then the obsolete word becomes obsolete only in name. It is recalled into existence by the natural requirements of a powerful or subtle style. It is not a corpse disinterred (as with less skillful writers) but a beautiful body awaked from a long & refreshing sleep. — Constantine P. Cavafy

Our imaginations are so stilted. The very thought of being like Jesus is breathtaking. — Billy Graham

To my way of thinking, the concept drawings that Rembrandt did, the drawings he made that he used to model his artists, to work out the compositions of his paintings: those are cartoons. Look at his sketch for the return of the prodigal son. The expression on the angry younger brother's face. The head is down; the eyebrow is just one curved line over the eyes. It communicates in a very shorthand way. It's beautiful, expressive, and, in a peculiar way, it's more powerful than the kind of stilted, formalized expression in the final painting. — Jim Woodring

A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down the river. — John Steinbeck

If you're locked to the words on the script, as good as those scripted words are, if you didn't have the time to rehearse them correctly or if the perceived dynamic between the actors is different from what the writer imagined, and you're not allowed to stray from that, you're going to have a stilted scene. — Mark Duplass

The male dares to be different to the degree that he accepts his passivity and his desire to be female, his fagginess. The farthest out male is the dragqueen, but he, although different from most men, is exactly like all other dragqueens; like the functionalist, he has an identity - a female; he tries to define all his troubles away - but still no individuality. Not completely convinced that he's a woman, highly insecure about being sufficiently female, he conforms compulsively to the man-made feminine stereotype, ending up as nothing but a bundle of stilted mannerisms. — Valerie Solanas

The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business. Prior to this first weekend in the country, my recollections of that fall are distant and blurry: from here on out, they come into a sharp, delightful focus. It is here that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life. It was months before the gloss and mystery of newness, which kept me from seeing them with much objectivity, would wear entirely off - though their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be - but it is here, in my memory, that they cease being totally foreign and being to appear, for the first time, in shapes very like their bright old selves.
I too appear as something of a stranger in these early memories. — Donna Tartt

I always designed clothes from a very young age because I didn't like the way they were. They were paralyzing; they were stilted. — Mary Quant

That is all the money in the world at my disposition." She dropped the stilted words into the court like pebbles into a calm pool, wrapping her strange dignity around her like a cloak. — Cyril Hare