Stolid Quotes & Sayings

I mean, full stops are quite important, aren't they? Yet by contrast to the versatile apostrophe, they are stolid little chaps, to say the least. In fact one might dare to say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and yon, and succumbing to burn-out from all the thankless effort. — Lynne Truss

Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it. But the nightshade of his friend's listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up, sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms:
The ivy whines upon the wall
And whines and twines upon the wall
The ivy whines upon the wall
The yellow ivy on the wall
Ivy, ivy up the wall.
Did any one ever hear such drivel? — James Joyce

The artist glanced at the inflexible image of king, commander, dame, and allegory, that stood around, on the best of which might have been bestowed the questionable praise that it looked as if a living man had here been changed to wood, and that not only the physical, but the intellectual and spiritual part, partook of the stolid transformation. But in not a single instance did it seem as if the wood were imbibing the ethereal essence of humanity. What a wide distinction is here! and how far the slightest portion of the latter merit have outvalued the utmost degree of the former! — Nathaniel Hawthorne

One day I realized that I no longer dreamed of what I would do when I was whole again. My will burned to reach that point, and then suddenly was nothing. I had become nothing more than my desire to fly. I had adjusted, somehow. I had evolved in that unfamiliar region, plodding my stolid way to where the scientists and Remakers of the world congregated. The means had become the end. If I regained my wings, I would become someone new, without the desire that defined me. I saw in that spring damp as I walked endlessly north that I was not looking for fulfilment but for dissolution. I would pass my body on to a newborn, and rest. — China Mieville

They tended to be stolid, slovenly, heavy, and to my eyes effeminate - not in the sense of delicacy, etc., but in just the opposite sense: a gross, bland fleshiness, a bovinity without point or edge. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I stopped writing at the age of 18. I had written incessantly before that. I read, of course, because I was in university, but I wasn't going to write. I wasn't going to do any of those dangerous things. I was going to be a stolid, bourgeois lawyer. — James Lipton

It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning. — Ray Bradbury

And why should I not confess that this friendship, and the testimony here and there of persons unknown to me, have upheld me in my career, both against myself and against unjust attacks; against the calumny which has often persecuted me, against discouragement, and against the too eager hopefulness whose utterances are misinterpreted as those of overwhelming conceit? I had resolved to display stolid stoicism in the face of abuse and insults; but on two occasions base slanders have necessitated a reply. Though the advocates of forgiveness of injuries may regret that I should have displayed my skill in literary fence, there are many Christians who are of opinion that we live in times when it is as well to show sometimes that silence springs from generosity. — Honore De Balzac

Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron. — Carl Sagan

Though recognition's been delayed by its circuitous construction, now the pattern, long concealed, emerges into view. Is it not fine? Is it not simple, and elegant, and severe? How strange, after the long exacting toil of preparation, it takes only the slightest effort and less thought to send this brief, elaborate amusement on its breathless, hurtling race. The merest touch, no more, and everything falls into place. The pieces can't perceive as we the mischief their arrangement tempts. Those stolid law-abiding queues, so pregnant with catastrophe. Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late. — Alan Moore

Even before the letter he'd been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South. — Garth Risk Hallberg

I know I was alright on Friday when I got up; if anything I was feeling more stolid than usual. — Margaret Atwood

He must be a grown man, stolid, reliably fulfilling his duties, married perhaps, someone's breadwinner - in other words, one of the living dead. — Pessoa, Fernando

I wouldn't want to leave it so long before doing a play again, I get very stolid and sluggish if I do too much telly. — Matthew Macfadyen

But, as I have said, the bugs had no interest in getting us ... and no great curiosity or enthusiasm about us as such; from the cowardly cockroaches to the blind stolid ants they wanted only to be left alone to eat and breed and eat and breed, just like us. — William T. Vollmann

There's a great maze of tunnels, a Labyrinth. It's like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence.'
She spoke if in trance, rapture. Manan watched her. His slabby face never expressed much but stolid, careful sadness; it was sadder than usual now. 'Well, and you're mistress of all that,' he said. 'The silence, and the dark. — Ursula K. Le Guin

the schoolboy had something of the stolid air of a young duke doing the grand tour, while his elderly relative was reduced to the position of a courier, who nevertheless had to pay for everything like a patron. — G.K. Chesterton

Beauty - what is beauty, forsooth? Form and color; that is, surface only. Fortune - what is fortune? Nothing is ever a pleasure or a real profit to him who has to labour for it. Truth - you die in the pursuit, and the sea beats the beach as it did a thousand years ago. The stolid are alone happy. — Richard Jefferies

Her mother had come a week after the baby died, the only time Annie had seen her since she'd left Kansas. Her hair gone white, her dress starched stiff, her small hands as dry as paper. Annie had wanted her mother to make it better. What she got was "God decides what's right for us" and a butter cake she'd packed from home, made by someone in the congregation. Maybe something truthful, some real emotion from her mother, might have been a small bridge Annie could have crossed. But hers had been a family of hidden feelings, held tongues. "Life is so hard out here," her mother had said, unable to wipe the sigh from her voice, the disapproval, as if the Panhandle - Annie's choice - was somehow to blame for the baby's death. Annie had been too grief-tired to get angry, but she had had the thought, when she looked at her mother's stolid face, that she would probably never see her — Rae Meadows

Oh, please could you spare us a little water?" "Certainly," replied the old gentleman; "take as much as you want, and leave the rest." "Thank you so much," murmured George, looking about him. "Where - where do you keep it?" "It's always in the same place my boy," was the stolid reply: "just behind you. — Jerome K. Jerome

In the same way, I saw our General once approach the table in a stolid, important manner. A lacquey darted to offer him a chair, but the General did not even notice him. Slowly he took out his money bags, and slowly extracted 300 francs in gold, which he staked on the black, and won. Yet he did not take up his winnings - he left them there on the table. Again the black turned up, and again he did not gather in what he had won; and when, in the third round, the RED turned up he lost, at a stroke, 1200 francs. Yet even then he rose with a smile, and thus preserved his reputation; yet I knew that his money bags must be chafing his heart, as well as that, had the stake been twice or thrice as much again, he would still have restrained himself from venting his disappointment. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

She couldn't picture anyone falling madly in love with such a person as Fish. What a name, Fish ... Fish: think cold, slippery, detached. Benedict: think dry scholarly monk from the Dark Ages. Denniston: think English preparatory school, stolid country squire. Nothing about his name sounded the least bit romantic. — Regina Doman

The Greeks had had vast experience in this world, their imagination had been fertile and they had created much ... that, in these circumstances, they should fall in with a people imbued with a calm and sometimes stolid and bucolic certainty where its spiritual possessions were concerned, barbarians with no sculpture or breeding, necessarily tinged their contempt with impotent wrath. The inevitably logical result of this attitude on the part of the Greeks was the growth of anti-Semitism, of hatred of the Jews. — Joseph Kastein

On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice. — Albert Camus

All ultimately intermarried to produce a race of many strains, which may account for the paradox that a people famed for stolid, patient, practical common-sense; a nation as Napoleon said, of "shopkeepers", has produced more adventurers, explorers and poets than probably any other in history. — Arthur Bryant

Academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I was called before the head matron, a tall woman with a stolid face. She began taking my pedigree. What religion? was the first question. None, I am an atheist. Atheism is prohibited here. You will have to go to church. I replied that I would do nothing of the kind. I did not believe in anything the Church stood for and, not being a hypocrite, I would not attend. — Emma Goldman

To be a colored man in America ... and enjoy it, you must be greatly daring, greatly stolid, greatly humorous and greatly sensitive. And at all times a philosopher ... — Jessie Redmon Fauset

These Germans seem an odd race, a mixture of clay and spirit - what with their beer-drinking and smoking, and their slow, stolid ways, you would think them perfectly earth; but ethereal fire is all the while working in them, and bursing out in most unexpected jets of poetry and sentiment, like blossoms on a cactus. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

Academics are not intellectuals; they are not curious, they build their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stay securely in them. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Not until the human heart is stolid to poetry, the human eye blind to beauty, not until the intellect ceases its quest for truth and conscience finds its quietus either in universal defeat or in triumphant success, will organized religion cease to be. — Jenkin Lloyd Jones

They always believe that 'things are in a bad way now,' but they 'haven't any faith in these idealists.' One minute they call Wilson 'just a dreamer, not practical'- a year later they rail at him for making his dreams realities. They haven't clear logical ideas on one single subject except a sturdy, stolid opposition to all change. They don't think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won't see that if they don't pay the uneducated people their children are going to be uneducated too, and we're going round and round in a circle. That- is the great middle class. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Sometimes a rut can be a comfortable place to be, but ours was full of too many differences and resentments to be wholly comfortable. I had always had my own way in the marriage - about what we'd do, where we'd do it, when, how. Katharine had always argued, and always given in. In the process she'd become more resentful, I guess, except that I was too busy with my own work to notice. But in turn she was less and less appealing to me. She's a couple of years older than me, I guess you know that, but that wasn't all. Those stolid American middle-class values, her sensible clothes, her sense of responsibility, her moderation in all things - frankly, they bored me. We made love less and less, and she didn't even seem to miss it. I did. — Shashi Tharoor

Stolid pack-animals are much more fit for carrying loads than thoroughbred horses: who ever subdued their noble speed with a heavy burden? — Seneca.

Tony ate the rest of his pie and drank the sweet hot liquor without taking much notice of his surroundings, and the surroundings took little notice of him: he was too small to be a threat, and too stolid to promise much satisfaction as a victim. It — Philip Pullman

The pigeon had been unlucky. Ten birds had been on their way back to their Ilkley coop, flying in stolid, heavy formation; nine had returned home. The tenth, flying low over the moor at the base of this avian wedge, had plummeted soundlessly to the soil, its senses overwhelmed by the tendrils of consciousness which had enwrapped them.

When the pigeon awoke, moments later, all of the rudimentary universal constructs which defined pigeonness in its brain had been carefully swept away, save one. The entity didn't need birdseed; it didn't need a pigeon coup in Ilkley; but it needed to fly.

And it needed as much of the pigeon's cerebral activity as possible to focus on getting it to its desired location, which meant that for the first time in its life, this pigeon was reading roadsigns.

It was also experiencing emotions for which it was somewhat unprepared, most notably an insistent, imperative yearning for Leeds United. — Windsor Holden

Moreover a blunt and stolid regard for literal truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises by which the more judicious Circle can in a moment pacify his consort. The result is massacre; — Edwin A. Abbott

When I was a kid, my goodness, corporate America was a bunch of stolid white guys in gray suits trying to be serious, and now it's stolid white guys in gray suits trying to be funny. — Emo Philips

Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group. We are not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering data in the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or speaking before Congressional committees. Why then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization."21 — Naomi Klein

It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity - the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension - can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion ... — Robertson Davies

How very sad it is to have a confiding nature, one's hopes and feelings are quite at the mercy of all who come along; and how very desirable to be a stolid individual, whose hopes and aspirations are safe in one's waistcoat pocket, and that a pocket indeed, and one not to be picked! — Emily Dickinson

Of course she teased the girls, but it was not the same as having a grown man to work on - she had often felt like pinching Bob for being so stolid. July was no better - in fact, he and Bob were cut from the same mold, a strong but unimaginative mold. — Larry McMurtry

Miami is nothing like me, and that's why I need to be here - it's the opposite. I'm practical, where this place is moody, I'm stolid in my interior, where this place has a certain flair, and I'm materialistic in a sense that this place is fundamentally spiritual - there's a quicksilver quality about this place. — Iggy Pop