A Quote by David Foster Wallace

Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

David Foster Wallace

Quote Topics

Abstract Adult Banal Course Day Day-To-Day Death English Existence Fact Hyperbole Importance Just Life Like May Nonsense Platitudes Sentence Sound Stated Trenches

Quote Author

David Foster Wallace
American - Writer
February 21, 1962 - December 12, 2008

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.

Jonathan Miles

I’m a total atheist, and for me it’s just about trying to find something that rises above the banal day-to-day bullshit of living.

Myla Goldberg

They just talk drivel. Whoever is winning is great, whoever isn't, isn't. It's banal. And also semi-literate at times ... they never criticise in an intelligent way. Anything that isn't banal is said to be an outburst. They've created this cartoon world where everyone talks like Lineker and says nothing.

Eamon Dunphy

If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day.

Alexander Payne

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

Joyce Carol Oates

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!

Lewis Thomas

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

David Foster Wallace

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.

John Ralston Saul

We have this wild life experience that is full of fantastic minutiae and banal, huge events at the same time. Yet, all of it shrinks in the shadow of death. It's hard to argue with death as a game-changer.

Bryan Fuller

Banality is like boredom: bored people are boring people, people who think that things are banal are themselves banal. Interesting people can find something interesting in all things.

Idries Shah

The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.

C. S. Lewis

It's an American thing, but it's particularly a southern thing, and its romanticization is hyper-Southern. And it's still irresistible to me, even in middle age. There's something that pulls me to that, but at the same time, I have this increasing awareness of how banal it really is - that evil is inherently banal.

William Gibson

Apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence.

Anthony Giddens

The worst curse to befall anyone is stagnation, a banal existence, the quiet desperation that comes out of a need for conformity.

Deepak Chopra

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.