Stuffy Quotes & Sayings

He couldn't know that I'd overstayed my welcome one night while creeping through his megaron and had crawled up through the space where the pipes of the hypocaust ran to hide in his treasure room. I had slept for a day in stuffy darkness on the ridged tops of his treasure trunks. — Megan Whalen Turner

If you loved the world the Creator had made for you, you did not shut out the blue heaven and its lights, or lie in foul air in a stuffy room, when in a bed outside you could smell the morning and watch its mother-of-pearl light softly touch the hills. — Vardis Fisher

The room smelled of books, that subtle smell which to some is stuffy and to others intoxicating, and it was silent. — Ursula K. Le Guin

That's what's interesting about the Lower East Side: It's New York, but it's also edgy. It's not as stuffy as Tribeca or Soho. — Daniel Boulud

Being an adult doesn't mean you're suddenly stuffy and boring - it just means you're a little more responsible, a little more considerate. Well, that's my definition of what being an adult means. And I'm always right, so, ya know, that's what it is. — Lindy Zart

That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape
anywhere
for anyone? It was worth murdering a world. — Graham Greene

On Monday last I sat without a murmur in a stuffy theatre on a summer afternoon from three to nearly half-past 6, spellbound by Ibsen; but the price I paid for it was to find myself stricken with mortal impatience and boredom the next time I attempted to sit out the pre-Ibsenite drama for five-minutes. 269 — George Bernard Shaw

Hey Sydney, she said, giving me a small, crooked smile as she entered the room. Her flashing, dark eyes were friendly, but they were also assessing everything in the room, much as Eddie's gaze was. It was a guardian thing. Rose was about my height and dressed very casually in jeans and a red tank top. But, as always, there was something as exotic and dangerous about her beauty that made her stand out from everyone else. She was like a tropical flower in this dark, stuffy room. One that could kill you. — Richelle Mead

Contrary to popular assumption, going on an expedition around the world is not merely a matter of obtaining a ship and charting a course. There are visas to be considered, and bureaucracy to navigate when those visas fail to arrive in time, expire too soon, or meet with blank stares on the receiving end. The politics of nations and their economic markets may interfere with your journey. In short, you may spend an appalling amount of time mired in stuffy little offices, trying to get permission to be where you are. — Marie Brennan

If I were to choose one single thing that that would restore Paris to the senses, it would be that strangely sweet, unhealthy smell of the Métro, so very unlike the dank cold or the stuffy heat of subways in New York. — May Sarton

Classical music is something that we're very passionate about, but we always thought it was presented in a stuffy way. — Aleksey Igudesman

Some period pieces are shot slightly objectively, a little bit, and some call it stuffy or dusty or old fashioned. I always felt that some of the films that I admire the most are the ones where they're intimate with the characters. — Nikolaj Arcel

She'd pulled back her hair to air her neck, just for one second, fanning her flushed cheeks by flapping her other hand. She'd smiled at him and pulled a face at how hot and stuffy the bar was. Miles had thought she was beautiful, the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen, and if you'd told him, in that minute, that he'd be in this beautiful creature's bed tonight, or that in seven years' time he'd be waiting for her at the top of the aisle, he could never have believed you. — Erin Lawless

Childishness? I think it's the equivalent of never losing your sense of humor. I mean, there's a certain something that you retain. It's the equivalent of not getting so stuffy that you can't laugh at others. — Walt Disney

Sleeping in the back of the van was cramped and a little stuffy-like sleeping in a compartment on a train, Kaitlyn guessed. But she didn't really mind being crowded in with Rob. He was warm and nice to hang on to. Comfortingly solid. — L.J.Smith

The night embraces me, cool and endless, and above me the stars are tiny holes in the darkness through which the light of eternity is pouring out. I can almost sense primordial stardust flowing through my veins. People are forever telling me that stars make them feel small, and I always nod noncommittally and wonder at the stuffy confinement of their minds. Stars make me feel vast. — Olga Grushin

A month passed in silence and then came an email asking if Qayennat would care to further amend, fortify or prune various sections of her proposal; Like all communication for them so far, this was well written and polite but abhorrent in its covert attempt to stamp out anything like love, to turn passion into hot air. She wanted to tell them as much, inviting them to take their stuffy foundation and stuff it up their backside — Anjum Hasan

Education doesn't just take place in stuffy classrooms and university buildings, it can happen everywhere, every day to every person. — Richard Branson

Emil and Jack established rival claims to a certain thick patch, and while they were squabbling about, Stuffy quickly and quietly stripped the bushes and fled to the protection of Dan — Louisa May Alcott

One can spend too much of one's life locked in stuffy rooms seeking out obscure truths, searching, researching, until one is too old to enjoy life. — Jimmy Sangster

[About sex]: If we're not intentional about pursuing God's best for our marriages, and grasping the tremendous role intimacy plays in that relationship, what was intended to be deeply enjoyed - a passionate, life-giving love affair... alight with laughter, fiercely protected, and drenched in freedom - becomes a stuffy, awkward thing to be endured. — Joy McMillan

Every generation looks at literature through the lens of their own experience, but with the Bible, everyone gets apprehensive and thinks it'll be too stuffy. — Walter Kirn

Vanity is not having facelifts if you're ugly. Those people who say: 'Oh, I'd never dream of having anything done!' That's rude. It's rude, to other people, to not try and look your best; to not try and stir things up, to not reinvent ... or just invent ... it's one's duty to not get stuffy. — Nicholas Haslam

You know, in a way, 'Dear Santa Claus' is rather stuffy ... Perhaps something a little more intimate would be better ... Something just a shade more friendly ... "
"How about 'Dear Fatty'? — Charles M. Schulz

It seems to me that whether it is recognized or not, there is a terrific frustration which increases in intensity and harmfulness as time goes on, when people are always daydreaming of the kind of place in which they would like to live, yet never making the place where they do live into anything artistically satisfying to them. Always to dream of a cottage by a brook while never doing anything to the stuffy house in the city is to waste creativity in this very basic area, and to hinder future creativity by not allowing it to grow and develop through use. pg 66 — Edith Schaeffer

When he woke up in the darkness of his hot and stuffy room he felt, even before his mind began working again, that painful oppression or malaise of the soul left in us by some grief we have slept on. It seems as though the misfortune which merely grazed us the day before has worked its way during our sleep into our very flesh and is bruising and exhausting it like a fever. — Guy De Maupassant

Social media is the new way to communicate, the new way to show your work. You don't have to rely on stuffy, traditional, and conservative methods to be able to display your work. — Kesh

Through memory to knowledge on the way to stars that are stepping down to the stuffy rooms of modern bureaucrats, illuminating their ceilings, their horizons where everything is easily resolved by the piles of paper and recipes for how to live, create, run, eat, breathe, learn how to love, how to make love, how to sleep, how to dream, how happiness is achieved under the artificial stars of the new sky that emerged from the bureaucratic rooms of aspiring and impotent minds, unable to love, even though they had all their life to learn what they preach. — Dejan Stojanovic

He had an image in his mind of a gaggle of long-necked geese, all done up in petticoats and crinolines, sitting around a stuffy parlor and talking about him. — Stefan Bachmann

Photos always seem to exist as sort of stuffy, unnecessary antiques that we put in a drawer - unless we take them out, put them in current dialogue, and give them relevance. — Mark Klett

Someone whose safety and happiness you put above all others. Even if that meant impressing her particularly stuffy family. — Chloe Neill

SEALs, like the name said, were trained to operate in all conditions - SEa, Air, Land. But Stuffy Victorian Hotel Lobby hadn't made the list. — Laura Griffin

I didn't say, You are such a stuffy asshole. And he didn't say, If you ever burn one of my quarter-of-a-million dollar rugs again I'll take it out of your hide, and I didn't say, Oh, honey, wouldn't you like to? And he didn't say Grow up, Ms. Lane, I don't take little girls to my bed, and I didn't say I wouldn't go there if it was the only safe place from the Lord Master in all of Dublin. — Karen Marie Moning

You're like a big kid, aren't you?" I laugh. "Eh, yeah, I guess so. I don't see the point in acting like a stuffy old fart. Might as well have some fun with life. You're only here once. — Micalea Smeltzer

Like silence after noise, or cool, clear water on a hot, stuffy day, Emptiness cleans out the messy mind and charges up the batteries of spiritual energy. Many people are afraid of Emptiness, however, because it reminds them of Loneliness. — Benjamin Hoff

People sort of accuse Tolkien of not being good with female characters, and I think that Eowyn actually proves that to be wrong to some degree. Eowyn is actually a strong female character, and she's a surprisingly modern character, considering who Tolkien actually was sort of a stuffy English professor in the 1930s and '40s. — Peter Jackson

You size up someone physically in less than one second - too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too old, too young, too stuffy, too scruffy. — Helen Fisher

I'm like the female version of George Clooney in 'Up in the Air.' I have to have an eye mask, and Amore Pacific has this cream face mask that's moisturizing. Moisture is so important in the stuffy, dry air on a plane. — Nina Dobrev

I'm not a big fan of the tchotchkes. It always reminds me of a grandma's stuffy home with a million Santa dolls. — Jeremiah Brent

Both in their origins and effects, boredom and stuffy air resemble each other. They are usually generated whenever a large number of people gather together in a closed room. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Doughboy, we need to talk."
Doughboy opened his wax eyes. "Finally! You realize how stuffy it is in there? At last you've remembered that you need my brilliant guidance."
"Actually we need to become a coat. — Rick Riordan

Your father may never have produced one of those stuffy tomes we call great literature, but he left the world a substantial collection of delightful adventure stories. — David E. Fessenden

The message sent by this policy is that if women are to be accepted into the exclusive ranks of men, then they have to look like men: buttoned up, stuffy, and no-nonsense. As if to show a little cleavage, to highlight a curvaceous figure, or to in any way appear feminine would discount, discredit, and disqualify them.
I strongly disagree with this idea. I feel that women should wear clothes that suit their bodies rather than forcing themselves into unflattering men's suits and that it is feminist to to make a wide range of women's clothes acceptable business attire. — Tim Gunn

You think about D.C. as a boring stuffy place. That's kind of its image. But if you grow up in that, you see all these energetic, fun people and crazy stuff that happens behind the scenes that no one knows about. — Kristin Gore

the company - that at the eleventh hour an old ship with a lower standard of speed had been put on in place of the vessel in which I had taken my passage. America was roasting, England might very well be stuffy, and a slow passage (which at that season of the year would probably also be a fine one) was a guarantee of ten or twelve days of fresh air. I strolled down — Henry James

Likewise, if we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which scepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. — Carl Sagan

He sat down and played again that piece of Scriabin's that Lydia thought he played so badly, and as he began he had a sudden recollection of that stuffy, smoky cellar to which she had taken him, of those roughs he had made such friends with, and of the Russian woman, gaunt and gipsy-skinned, with her enormous eyes, who had sung those wild, barbaric songs with such a tragic abandon. Through the notes he struck he seemed to hear her raucous, harsh and yet deeply moving voice. Leslie Mason had a sensitive ear. — W. Somerset Maugham

There's always someone kicking guns. We wanted ["Badlands"] to be a world without guns and bullets, where martial arts was the form of fighting and defense and attack. Martial arts is king in this world. That was the first thing. We didn't want it to be a period piece either. We felt those are overdone and stuffy. That was what lead us to explore that area of science fiction and future, a world we can create and control. — Miles Millar

The very rich and the very social are, often, the very stuffy. — Edna Ferber

Culture dictated from above is the enemy of folk music. Whether it's stuffy classical music or pre-engineered pop where somebody's paid tons of money to make sure that everyone hears this song a certain number of times a day - that feels like the opposite of folk music. — Will Sheff

She had told Erstwhile too much in the past, and thus he knew that occasionally she did go crazy. Sometimes it was when she felt particularly trapped or hopeless, or when the tunnels were unusually dark or stuffy, or when she got stuck in a crawl-through. Sometimes it happened for no obvious reason at all. She would feel a terrible panic tightening her chest and giving her heart a queasy lollop, she would be fighting for breath ... and then she would be recovering somewhere, shuddering and sick, devastation around her and her fingernails broken from clawing at the rock walls and ceilings. — Frances Hardinge

What were you chanting when you gave me your blood?"
"More of my vampire magic. I cast a healing spell to aid the powers of my blood."
She sniffled, her nose stuffy. "It was better than Vicodin."
"Vicodin?"
"A painkiller from my world."
"A killer of pain. Did you love him?" The words were growled.A burst of unexpected humor gave her strength. "No. In fact, he was hard to shake. He, uh, stalked me, that kind of thing. I had to pretend he didn't
exist."
Nicolai kissed her temple and relaxed against her. — Gena Showalter

God is probably - and very rightly - on the side of the stuffy domesticities. Otherwise — Ford Madox Ford

After another hour in the dark and stuffy gym, I saw my dad appear in the doorway. He gave a little wave, like he showed up at my school every day to take me home after alien attacks. — Rick Yancey

The others followed, and found themselves in a small, stuffy basement, which would have been damp, smelly, close, and dark, were it not, in fact, well-lit, which prevented it from being dark. — Steven Brust

You need a place just a click over middle range. Don't want to go all-out first time, but you don't want to run on the cheap either. You want atmosphere, but not stuffy. A nice established place."
"Bob, you're going to give me an ulcer."
"This is all ammunition, Cart. All ammo. You want to be able to order a nice bottle of wine. Oh, and after dinner, if she says how she doesn't want dessert, you suggest she pick one and you'll split it. Women love that. Sharing dessert's sexy. Do not go on and on about your job over dinner. Certain death. Get her to talk about hers, and what she likes to do. Then - "
"Should I be writing this down? — Nora Roberts

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. — George Orwell

So she made no secret about being gay?"
"Why should she?" the little old lady asked. "Nobody would care but a bunch of stuffy old men. — John Sandford

We need to meet and flesh out the details of our ... you know ... whatever. I don't know what to call it. Our contract."
"I was thinking the same thing. But can we call it our epic summer romance? Contract sounds so stuffy." He smiles again. — Anne Eliot

Georgie Porgie puddin' and pie. Kissed the boys and made them cry. What kind of name is Georgia?"
"My great-great grandma was Georgia. The first Georgia Shepherd. My dad calls me George."
"Yeah. I've heard him. That's just nasty."
I felt my temper rise in my cheeks, and I really wanted to spit on him from where I sat atop my horse, looking down on his neatly shorn, well-shaped head. He glanced up at me and his lips twitched, making me even angrier.
"Don't look at me like that. I'm not trying to be mean. But George is a terrible name for a girl. Hell, for anyone who isn't the King of England."
"I think it suits me," I huffed.
"Oh, yeah? George is the name for a man with a stuffy, British accent or a man in a white, powdered wig. You better hope it doesn't suit you."
"Well, I don't exactly need a sexy name, do I? — Amy Harmon

I don't like clothes shopping and trying on outfits in stuffy cubicles in men's shops, looking hideous in the wrap-round mirrors, is something I attempt as seldom as possible. — Charles Saatchi

Respectability, regularity, and routine - the whole cast-iron discipline of a modern industrial society - have atrophied the artistic impulse, and imprisoned love so that it can no longer be generous and free and creative, but must be either stuffy or furtive. — Bertrand Russell

Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, poked at the ink in his inkwell. There was ice in it.
"Don't you even have a proper fire?" said Hughnon Ridcully, High Priest of Blind Io and unofficial spokesman for the city's religious establishment. "I mean, I'm not one for stuffy rooms, but it's freezing in here!"
"Brisk, certainly," said Lord Vetinari. "It's odd, but the ice isn't as dark as the rest of the ink. What causes that, do you think?"
"Science, probably," said Hughnon vaguely. — Terry Pratchett

When the idea of 'Chopped' surfaced, it was originally meant to be taped at some guy's mansion with him and his crazy Chihuahua. A stuffy fellow in a tuxedo was to host, and the losing chef's dish was then fed to the dog! I am not kidding, I saw it! I think it is genius! Twisted, but genius! — Ted Allen

I love to play characters who are stuffy and nerdy who either then have a dark side or are pushed to a breaking point. — Andy Daly

Jail,' the big cop said in his stuffy, liquid voice. 'Where anything you bray will be abused against you in a sort of caw. — Stephen King

It is an occupational hazard of devout folk to become stuffy bores. This should not be. Of all people, we should be the most free, alive, interesting. — Richard J. Foster

Marie-Laure sits in her customary spot in the corner of the kitchen, closest to the fireplace, and listens to the friends of Melanie Manec complain ... Nine of them sit around the square table, knees pressed to knees. Ration card restrictions, abysmal puddings, the deteriorating quality of fingernail varnish - these are crimes they feel in their souls. To hear so many of them in a room together confuses and excites Marie-Laure: they are giddy when they should be serious, somber after jokes; Madame Hebrard cries over the nonavailability of Demerara sugar, another woman's complaint about tobacco disintegrates mid sentence into hysterics about the phenomenal size of the perfumer's backside. They smell of stale bread, of stuffy living rooms crammed with dark titanic Breton furnishings. — Anthony Doerr

Look, let me give you the CliffsNotes: You're a bitch in this life and Daniel doesn't care. Shocker! He courts you for a few weeks, there's some exchanging of flowers. A big kiss and then kaboom. Okay? Not much more to see.

You don't understand.

What? I don't understand that Victorians are as stuffy as an attic and as boring as watching wallpaper peel? Come on, if you're going to zigzag through your past, make it count. Let's hit some highlights.

Luce didn't budge. Is there a way to make you disappear?

Do I have to stuff you in this Announcer like a cat in a suitcase? Let's move! — Lauren Kate

I'm not a great fan of monarchy in general, but I have to say the Danish monarchy is closer to the people; it's not as stuffy as the English one. — Viggo Mortensen

Another little-known favorite of mine takes some forethought in the early summer. We've all seen ox-eye daisy (Chrysanthemum leucanthemum) in fields and on roadsides; maybe you even grow it in your garden. As long as you can properly identify it, and as long as you can pick some from a safe, pesticide-free area (without secreting it from your neighbor's garden, even if she does grow a ton), snag handfuls of blooms and dry them well before storing them in a clean, dry jar with a tight-fitting lid. When a stuffy nose comes along, make a mug of tea with a heaping teaspoon of dried blooms. In about 30 minutes or less, a stuffed nose will be clear, and it should stay that way effectively for 4 to 6 hours, same as any cold capsule -- without the side effects. This works best with swollen nasal passages or a drippy nose. Drink a cup of the tea up to 4 times a day. — Diane Kidman

We call them taxis where I come from. And bookstores." God, he was stuffy. "We call them manners where I come from, Ms. Lane. Have you any? — Karen Marie Moning

The bar was stuffy and melancholy. It was full of the sadness inherent in all deracinated things. — Paul Bowles

What to do? We yanked the dress up over her lovely attributes and with the addition of a scarf, the problem was solved. Sorry, guys, blame that stuffy censor. He hated surprises. — Audrey Meadows

When the nuns came to be blessed by the Patriarch, who on special holy days, went by my house in a motorboat, I detached the phallus of the horseman and hid it in a drawer. I also did this on certain days when I had to receive stuffy visitors, but occasionally I forgot, and when confronted with this phallus found myself in great embarrassment. The only thing to do in such cases was to ignore it. In Venice a legend spread that I had several phalluses of different sizes, like spare parts, which I used on different occasions. — Peggy Guggenheim

Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond; too arrogant to still our thought, and let divine sensation have its way. It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that transition; for the process involves a veritable spring-cleaning of the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our mental furniture, a wide opening of closed windows, that the notes of the wild birds beyond our garden may come to us fully charged with wonder and freshness, and drown with their music the noise of the gramaphone within. Those who do this, discover that they have lived in a stuffy world, whilst their inheritance was a world of morning-glory:where every tit-mouse is a celestial messenger, and every thrusting bud is charged with the full significance of life. — Evelyn Underhill

They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls. — E. M. Forster

You see, you don't despise money. Nor do I. Wealth is stuffy and stupid and arrogant, and the only good thing about it is that it has money. Money's lovely stuff - just look at this." He held up the owl. "See how it shines? On one side the owl: the male principle. On the other, the Lady of Thought: the female principle." He spun the coin on the table. "Money always gives you something to think about. — Gene Wolfe

Make your copy straightforward to read, understand and use. Use easy words; those that are used for everyday speech. Use phrases that are not too imprecise and very understandable. Do not be too stuffy; remove pompous words and substitute them with plain words. Minimize complicated gimmicks and constructions. If you can't give the data directly and briefly, you must consider writing the copy again. — Jay Abraham

You love Robert, not me. You don't love Lord Stuffy, so I tried to be like Robert."
The sweet idiot! She felt like weeping again. She began to protest, but he cut her off.
"I don't drink and I don't gamble and I don't have a mistress. I'm dull. You told me so, the first time we met. So I tried to change." He frowned. "Not the mistress. I'll never do that."
"Good," she whispered.
"I'm trying to be like Robert, but I'm no good at it. I drank wine. And brandy, lots of it. I didn't like it and it made me sick. I played hazard and I lost." He looked momentarily cheerful and her heart sank. "But I didn't like that either. If I was a real man like Mr. Fox, or Robert, I'd have lost thousands."
The sadder he looked, the more her heart ached, a happy ache.
"I failed you, Caro. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I'll always be Lord Stuffy," he said, and closed his tortured, bloodshot eyes. — Miranda Neville

To spend your days on such work when the world is chockful of amusing things. Life goes roaring by and you only hear the echo in your stuffy rooms. — John Buchan

As when a window is opened a whiff of fresh air from the fields enters a stuffy room, so a whiff of youthfulness, energy, and confidence of success reached Kutuzov's cheerless staff with the galloping advent of all these brilliant young men. — Leo Tolstoy

England has never enjoyed a genuine social revolution. Maybe that's what's wrong with that dear, tepid, vapid, insipid, stuffy, little country. — Edward Abbey

One world: everybody fucks everybody. When he thinks of all the fucking there's been in the world and all the fucking there's going to be, and none of it for him, here he sits in this stuffy car dying, his heart just sinks. He'll never fuck anybody again in his lifetime except poor Janice Springer, he sees this possibility ahead of him straight and grim as the known road. — John Updike

We Catholics have not only to do our best to keep down our own warring passions and live decent lives, which will often be hard enough in this odd world we have been born into. We have to bear witness to moral principles which the world owned yesterday and has begun to turn its back on today. We have to disapprove of some of the things our neighbors do, without being stuffy about it; we have to be charitable towards our neighbors and make great allowances for them, without falling into the mistake of condoning their low standards and so encouraging them to sin. Two of the most difficult and delicate tasks a man can undertake; and it happens, nowadays, not only to priests, to whom it comes as part of their professional duty, but to ordinary lay people...So we must know what are the unalterable principles we hold, and why we hold them; we must see straight in a world that is full of moral fog. — Ronald Knox

The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building. — Mary Oliver

I feel stuffy, as if there were not enough air to breathe - hot, and uneasy. Two months of no exercise have made me weak and plegmatic mentally and physically. On the short walk from here to the libe I drink the cold pure night air and the clear unbelievably delicate crescent-moonlight with a greedy reverence. Days are bizarre collections of hothouse languidities, mystical and poignant sensuous quotations (white thy fambles, red thy gan, and thy quarrons dainty is ... " Dark, liquid loveliness of words half dimly understood.) — Sylvia Plath

An artist should remain true. Otherwise his talent, like his stomach, grows fat and stuffy. — Norman Reilly Raine

If we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which scepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. Figuring out a prudent balance takes wisdom. — Carl Sagan

You mean I might end up like you one day?" I asked, alarmed at the thought of sounding so serious and stuffy.
"You might," Mr Crepsley said, "though I would not bet on it. Seba commanded my utmost respect, so I tried hard to copy what he did. You, on the other hand, seem to be determined to do the opposite of everything I say."
"I'm not that bad," I grinned, but there was some grain of truth in his words. I'd always been stubborn. I admired Mr Crepsley more than he knew, but hated the idea of looking like a pushover who did everything he was told. Sometimes I disobeyed the vampire just so he wouldn't think I was paying attention to what he said! — Darren Shan

I came into the advertising business in 1952, at the age of sixteen, as a delivery boy for a stuffy, old-line advertising agency named Ruthruff and Ryan, which could have served as the setting for the 'Mad Men' television series without moving a desk. — Jerry Della Femina

In some eras, self-control defines the paragon of a decent person: a grown-up, a person of dignity, a lady or a gentleman, a mensch. In others it is jeered at as uptight, prudish, stuffy, straitlaced, puritanical. Certainly the crime-prone 1960s were the recent era that most glorified the relaxation of self-control: Do your own thing, Let it all hang out, If it feels good do it, Take a walk on the wild side. — Steven Pinker

No, this is serious, Ollie. So I'm watching this spider building its web in the corner of the window. First it does the main parts, then the little connector rods. It's like so careful and precise, right? And then just when it's done, Mrs. Halverson comes over and says, 'It's so stuffy in here I can hardly breathe. Let's have some air,' and opens the window. And boom, all the spider's work was gone." He paused. "Made me think, man, that was just like life."
I touched his cheek. "What do you mean, silly boy?"
"You work and work, and all it takes is one bitch to ruin everything."
Ollie stared ahead steadily and said, "I think it shows that sometimes for one person to keep breathing, something else has to stop. — Michele Jaffe

A lot of period dramas can appear quite arch to most people, stuffy. — Emily Blunt