- Knowledge
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- Nov 07, 2020
Banal Quotes
On the flat, predictable, and overly familiar.
These quotes describe banality as something that creeps into daily Life, dating, and even poetry, replacing what once felt mysterious with the merely predictable. One writer contrasts a banal poem with a banal lyric that still lands when performed well.
- Last Updated on Aug 01, 2026
- Boring
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- Nov 07, 2020
'The Sopranos' gets praised as novelistic, but it follows the most banal of life patterns, showing the sheer tedium of being a mobster. It has dead spots, boring plotlines, weak episodes. Characters develop slowly, or don't. Like viewers, a gangster might get bored, fade out of the action, then come back to find none of his debts forgotten.
- Cooking
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- Nov 07, 2020
I was certainly a kid who believed he could make a difference in the world. I was, as a young person, cooking up plans. My hero is Billie Jean King, and the thing that I find so impressive about Billie Jean is that she took something as banal as playing tennis and used it to change the world. She really did.
- Daily
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- Nov 07, 2020
Once, the world was full of mysteries, some of them frightening, some of them wonderful, some of them merely fascinating. Now, it can be a banal and predictable place, the tracks of daily life so well-beaten and defined, our culture awash with the imbecile obvious, our existence suffocating in safety. But mysteries remain.
- Everything
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- Nov 07, 2020
The process of a date, I think, is terrible. Horrible. Because everything is banal and predicted.
- Mother
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- Nov 07, 2020
As a child, the person I admired most in the world was Lana Turner! She seemed the epitome of glamour, and her glitzy surroundings so enviable, the opposite of my mother's extremely banal taste.
- Cords
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- Nov 07, 2020
A banal poem is never more than a banal poem. A banal or trite lyric, however, can be - with the right vocal cords - brilliantly and shatteringly conveyed.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
If you live in a democracy, it's very tiring to be always surrounded by great and high abstract generalisations which are, in fact, the most banal and naive cliches dug out of second-rate movements of the late 19th century.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
Marco Polo has been kind of buried under this cloud of rather banal historical dust, when the true story is so much more exciting.
- Fat
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- Nov 07, 2020
The big curse of America, to me, is skinless, boneless chicken breasts. They're banal and relatively flavorless. The rest of the world's trying to get some fat to eat, and we're trying to ban it from our diet.
- Inside
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- Nov 07, 2020
If, in the very first pages, I'm forced to read gratuitous phrases or banal metaphors, I won't be able to get inside the story. Only if the sentences 'sparkle' can I get hooked.
- Giving
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- Nov 07, 2020
It isn't that I don't tackle issues; it's just that they're secondary to giving somebody an escape route from the banal routine of everyday life.
- Credit
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- Nov 07, 2020
L'Oreal's slogan 'because you're worth it' has come to epitomise banal narcissism of early 21st century capitalism; easy indulgence and effortless self-love all available at a flick of the credit card.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
People wrestle sometimes making movies, and I think that conflict is a very essential thing. I think a lot of very happy productions have produced a lot of very banal movies.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
As anthropomorphic and surreal people have said my early writing was, to me it was really stock and almost banal in the sense that it was just description, the poetry of comparing: 'Your feet are like A, and your eyes like B.'
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020