Top 239 Grotesque Quotes & Sayings

For me, marriage is a grotesque, unforgiving, clunky contrivance. Yet society pushes it as a shimmering ideal.

Christian theology: nothing so grotesque could possibly be true.

There is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible.

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

To find beauty in the most grotesque things is a gift.

For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.

George theThird Ought never to have occurred. One can only wonder At so grotesque a blunder.

incurable lover of the grotesque

Anyone who tells you they know the future is telling you the most grotesque lie, because none of us do.

At six I lived in a graveyard full of dolls, avoiding myself, my body, the suspect in its grotesque house.

As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.

There is beautiful in the grotesque.

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

The more grotesque your boss's pay and the less he has do to earn it, the bigger the motivation for you to work with the aim of being promoted to what he has.

The genres of the fantastic and the grotesque are far more interesting to me than most mnemonic fiction.

The noble grotesque involves the true appreciation of beauty.

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

I think the grotesque can inspire intimacy (it draws us in) as well as awe, like the cabinets of curiosities.

I'm a collector of carvings. I love old, wooden, grotesque Gothic pieces, anything that has cherubs on it, satyrs and carved angels.

We live in a country of grotesque inequalities.

Conservatives should defend free speech - but we must not amplify it when it's blatantly grotesque.

Most of the songs I write are full of power, and I'm suspecting it may come from my love for grotesque Renaissance art and the Eurovision Song Contest.

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.

A farce is that in poetry which grotesque (caricature) is in painting. The persons and actions of a farce are all unnatural, and the manners false, that is, inconsistent with the characters of mankind; and grotesque painting is the just resemblance of this.

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.

The true grotesque being the expression of the repose or play of a serious mind, there is a false grotesque opposed to it, which is the result of the full exertion of a frivolous one.

he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

I find beauty in the grotesque, like most artists.

For me the grotesque is necessary to understand beauty.

I envy people who can just look at a sunset. I wonder how you can shoot it. There is nothing more grotesque to me than a vacation.

After a moment of shrinking back, we domesticate the grotesque.

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

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

To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.

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

The exhibition of real strength is never grotesque. Distortion is the agony of weakness. It is the dislocated mind whose movements are spasmodic.

Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical.

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

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

Football, played at its highest level, is catastrophic. Even relatively minor afflictions are grotesque and bookworthy.

Donald Trump is seriously dark and disturbing. You can't just dismiss it as one more example of American pop culture grotesque.

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.

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.

When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that 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.... Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

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.

I have one aim, the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.

I don't want to be grotesque, but when you're 330 pounds, it's hard to wipe your a-. You know?

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.

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.

Size without shape is grotesque.

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.

perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque.

If you want to see eccentricities, I'll be grotesque before your eyes.

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

I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.

This is the golden age of grotesque.

Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.

You must not believe your own PR; it would be grotesque.

Since art is dead in the actual life of civilized nations, it has been relegated to these grotesque morgues, museums.