Grotesque Quotes

There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it.

The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and panic.

The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?

Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.

Size without shape is grotesque.

We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.

incurable lover of the grotesque

I know that a translation of a work of literature is like playing a violin concerto on the piano. You can do this. You can do this very successfully on one strict condition: never try to force the piano to produce the sounds of the violin. This will be grotesque.

The grotesque in my poems is the motion I use to put myself and the grotesque world together. So the miserable images I use in my poems are the same as the letters I send into the miserable world.

To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of. I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry may have been the stake (my life) I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!

when the human race is not grotesque it is because it is asleep and losing its opportunity.

Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.

There is beautiful in the grotesque.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

For me, the single word "God" suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque.

This is the golden age of grotesque.

I have a great need to learn what the norm is by dealing with what is not the norm... with the grotesque and the fantastic.

I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.

I'm interested in the crevices, and the grotesque, and the unsavory. That started out when I was young... I've never quite been able to shake that.

In the corporate-owned media, men dressed like Ronald Reagan and women dressed like Rita Hayworth disseminate grotesque exaggerations and gossip in authoritative tones.

The concept of free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms.

It is often said that the modern exhibition has ruined painting. It is an unfortunate fact that it does encourage competition, so that, to attract attention to his work, an artist is tempted to descend to sensationalism, whether it is expressed by strong colour, grotesque handling, unusual subject, or sheer size.

Some couture collections have everything including the kitchen sink! Everything gets thrown on to make it look expensive. I find it grotesque when clothes hit you in the face and there's no room for fault. But I don't expect to turn things around all by myself. I'm not a saint.

Harvey wasn't interested in the clothes, it was the masks that mesmerized him. They were like snowflakes: no two alike. Some were made of wood and of plastic; some of straw and cloth and papier-mâché. Some were as bright as parrots, others as pale as parchment. Some were so grotesque he was certain they'd been carved by crazy people; others so perfect they looked like the death masks of angels. There were masks of clowns and foxes, masks like skulls decorated with real teeth, and one with carved flames instead of hair.

The one thing I'm quite critical of Hillary Clinton for, and it obviously hurt her, is that at some level, the Clintons had to know that she was going to run for president. Why did they feel it necessary to make tens of millions of dollars with speaking engagements? They must have known that it would look grotesque. The word for it is "buckraking." It's beyond me. I don't understand it.

The first rule of life is to reveal nothing, to be exceptionally cautious in what you say, in whatever company you may find yourself. If you have a secret, you have only to whisper it to your dearest friend with the strictest injunction that it will go no further, and within half a day the story is all over town, and when you do make what would seem to be a perfectly sensible remark, you will find it reported in the most grotesque form, thus incurring no end of criticism to rebound upon you.

Children being children, however, the grotesque Hopping Pot had taken hold of their imaginations. The solution was to jettison the pro-Muggle moral but keep the warty cauldron, so by the middle of the sixteenth century a different version of the tale was in wide circulation among wizarding families. In the revised story, the Hopping Pot protects an innocent wizard from his torch-bearing, pitchfork-toting neighbours by chasing them away from the wizard's cottage, catching them and swallowing them whole.

For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

That the Hindus, absorbed in the ideal, lacked in realistic observation is evident from this. Take painting and sculpture. What do you see in the Hindu paintings? All sorts of grotesque and unnatural figures. What do you see in a Hindu temple? A Chaturbhanga Narayana or some such thing. But take into consideration any Italian picture or Grecian statue-what a study of nature you find in them! A gentleman for twenty years sat burning a candle in his hand, in order to paint a lady carrying a candle in her hand.

I came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship. The body that was broken into pieces is a sick body. I put the disease of this world and my sick body together.

Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider.

Christian theology: nothing so grotesque could possibly be true.

I have to be careful to get out before I become the grotesque caricature of a hatchet-faced woman with big knockers.

Salvador Dali has been called kitsch, but, although some of this work may be grotesque, its brazenly self-conscious bad taste saves it from being true kitsch, which always strives to please.

You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It's just grotesque.

In a way Australia is like Catholicism. The company is sometimes questionable and the landscape is grotesque. But you always come back.

Fierce invectives against women form a conspicuous and grotesque portion of the writings of the Church fathers.

This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

Is it not grotesque when the representatives of an antiquated myth-sorcery, who believes in trinity, angels, devils, hell, virgin-birth, bodily Ascension, making of water into wine, wine to blood, - when they want to impress us with their "science"?

Our tolerance of the intolerable found a low threshold as early as the late 1950s with the grotesque excesses of McCarthyism, which destroyed so many honest lives, and then with the insane nuclear arms race and confrontations.

The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.

...I am an anomaly in the system, living proof of how grotesque it is, and every day I mock it gently, deep within my impenetrable self.

I think that, honestly, people's censorship issues are personal but I disagree with most of those personal choices that I see others make. You know, I watch television and there's a grotesque amount of violence on almost every show that you would watch that comes on past 8:00 pm. And I think my dirty brand of humor is far less destructive to a child's mentality.

I think there's an instinct to make grotesque horror films that are purely carnal, like the 'Saw' movies.

It’s a shameful moment for U.S. media when it insists on being subservient to the grotesque propaganda agencies of a violent, aggressive state.

The cause of the attack was not American foreign policy but an amoral disregard for human life.It is grotesque to suggest that a four-year-old girl, making her first and only flight in an aeroplane, should somehow bear responsibility for the actions of a government for whom she was never allowed the chance to grow up and vote either for or against.

Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute.

I believe that there is no test of greatness in periods, nations or men more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention, or incapability of understanding it.