Ennui Quotes

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Quotes About Ennui

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The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured- disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui- in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. ~ Henry Miller
Ennui quotes by Henry Miller
Reading for me, was like breathing. It was probably akin to masturbation for my brain. Getting off on the fantasy within the pages of a good novel felt necessary to my survival. If I wasn't asleep, knitting, or working, I was reading. This was for several reasons, all of them focused around the infititely superior and enviable lives of fictional heroines to real-life people.
Take romans for instance. Fictional women in romance novels never get their period. They never have morning breath. They orgasm seventeen times a day. And they never seem to have jobs with bosses.
These clean, well-satisfied, perm-minty-breathed women have fulfilling careers as florists, bakery owners, hair stylists or some other kind of adorable small business where they decorate all day. If they do have a boss, he's a cool guy (or gal) who's invested in the woman's love life. Or, he's a super hot billionaire trying to get in her pants.
My boss cares about two things: Am I on time ? Are all my patients alive and well at the end of my shift?
And the mend in the romance novels are too good to be true; but I love it, and I love them. Enter stage right the independently wealthy venture capitalist suffering from the ennui of perfection until a plucky interior decorator enters stage left and shakes up his life and his heart with perky catch phrases and a cute nose that wrinkles when she sneezes.
I suck at decorating. The walls of my apartment are bare. I am allergic to most sto ~ Penny Reid
Ennui quotes by Penny Reid
To refuse to do something because you've already done it, because you've already been there, rapidly leads to the destruction, for yourself as much as for others, of any reason for living, for any possible future, and it plunges you into an oppressive ennui that will eventually transform into atrocious bitterness, accompanied by hatred and rancor toward those who still belong to the land of the living. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Ennui quotes by Michel Houellebecq
I can worry myself into a state of spiritual ennui over questions like "What good does it do to pray if God already knows everything?" Jesus silences such questions: he prayed, so should we. ~ Philip Yancey
Ennui quotes by Philip Yancey
Music, drawing, books, invention & exercise will be so many resources to you against ennui. ~ Thomas Jefferson
Ennui quotes by Thomas Jefferson
Everything is endured - disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui - in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. ~ Henry Miller
Ennui quotes by Henry Miller
Poesy is a beauteous damsel, chaste, honourable, discreet, witty, retired, and who keeps herself within the limits of propriety. She is a friend of solitude; fountains entertain her, meadows console her, woods free her from ennui, flowers delight her; in short, she gives pleasure and instruction to all with whom she communicates. ~ Miguel De Cervantes
Ennui quotes by Miguel De Cervantes
You wouldn't think you could get bored falling to your death ... But when it's a really, really long drop, there's a definite risk on ennui. ~ Tom Holt
Ennui quotes by Tom Holt
Wallowing on the smooth surface of their self-satisfaction, many are merely counting the shadows on the wall of their ennui, adding up the numerous illusions and indulging in the comforting lies and ignoring the unpleasant truths. ("Bread and Satellite") ~ Erik Pevernagie
Ennui quotes by Erik Pevernagie
Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. The enigmas of the symbolists and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its diverting novelty and appeal. Only the somber philosophy of the decadents could help us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diablism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity
that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing. ~ H.P. Lovecraft
Ennui quotes by H.P. Lovecraft
We crave rich variegations of light. Too much time in one ambience, and we long for something new. Perhaps this explains the sensory ennui of those who live under unchanging skies. The monotony of blank sunny skies or of an endless cloud ceiling deprives us of the visual diversity we desire. ~ David George Haskell
Ennui quotes by David George Haskell
I sit, tired of reading. I am sick of books. I can't tell where I leave off and the books begin. I'm nobody. I'm a polluted nothing. A confessed sin, an open door, the clutterer in the clutter. ~ Katherine Dunn
Ennui quotes by Katherine Dunn
Looking at Tim, one cannot help feeling great waves of uncertainty, an absence of aim, of purpose, as if he is a person who simply doesn't matter. ~ Bret Easton Ellis
Ennui quotes by Bret Easton Ellis
I was always just there. In a perpetual nihilistic malaise of ennui and lots of other SAT words. ~ Aaron Goldfarb
Ennui quotes by Aaron Goldfarb
Anxiety and Ennui are the Scylla and Charybdis on which the bark of human happiness is most often wrecked. ~ William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Ennui quotes by William Edward Hartpole Lecky
He sadly resumes his path toward a desert that he knows is similar to the one he just crossed, escorted by the pale phantom they call Reason, who lights up the aridity of his path with a weak lantern, and who, when the thirst of passion comes back from time to time, quenches it with the poison of ennui. ~ Charles Baudelaire
Ennui quotes by Charles Baudelaire
These women are, quite simply, alive; they know that the source of true values is not in external things but in human hearts. This gives its charm to the world they live in: they banish ennui by the simple fact of their presence, with their dreams, their desires, their pleasures, their emotions, their ingenuities. The sanseverina, that 'active soul' dreads ennui more than death. To stagnate in ennui 'is to keep from dying, she said, not to live'; she is ' always impassioned over something, always in action and gay too '. Thoughtless, childish or profound, gay or grave, daring or secretive, they all reject the heavy sleep in which humanity is mired. And these women who have been able to maintain their liberty- empty as it has been- will rise through passion to heroism once they find an objective worthy of them; their spiritual power, their energy, suggest the fierce purity of total dedication ~ Simone De Beauvoir
Ennui quotes by Simone De Beauvoir
From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic. ~ Beryl Markham
Ennui quotes by Beryl Markham
Antigonus, having taken one of his soldiers into a great degree of favor and esteem for his valor, gave his physicians strict charge to cure him of a long and inward disease under which he had a great while languished, and observing that, after his cure, he went much more coldly to work than before, he asked him what had so altered and cowed him: "Yourself, sir," replied the other, "by having eased me of the pains that made me weary of my life. ~ Michel De Montaigne
Ennui quotes by Michel De Montaigne
Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui - these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real. ~ David Foster Wallace
Ennui quotes by David Foster Wallace
Growing old is a pathetic thing. It is full of limitations and reduction. It happens to us all, I know; but I think that it might not have to. I think it happens to those of us who request it. And in our current mind-set, our collective ennui, it is what we have chosen to do. But one day a mutant child will be born who refuses to age, who refuses to acknowledge the limitations of these bodies of ours, who lives in health until he is done with life, not until his body no longer supports him. He will live for hundreds of years, like Noah. Like Moses. This child's genes will be passed to his offspring, and more like him will follow. And their genetic makeup will supplant the genes of those of us who need to grow old and decay before we die. I believe that one day it will come to pass; however, such a world is beyond my purview. ~ Garth Stein
Ennui quotes by Garth Stein
The state of man is inconstancy, ennui, anxiety. ~ Blaise Pascal
Ennui quotes by Blaise Pascal
Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical. ~ Thomas Jefferson
Ennui quotes by Thomas Jefferson
Boredom looms over the liveliest lessons, seeking to destroy. ~ Marina Leigh Duff
Ennui quotes by Marina Leigh Duff
He feels
ennui
depression
adrift in his life. Purposeless, perhaps because
- dig a well in the Sudan and thejanjaweed come in and shoot the people anyway
- buy mosquito nets and the boys
you save grow up to
- rape women
- set up cottage industries in Myanmar and the army
- steals them and uses the women as slaves and
Ben is starting to be afraid that he is starting to share Chon's opinion of the human species
that people are basically
shit. ~ Don Winslow
Ennui quotes by Don Winslow
Paradise is not the place in which you arrive but the journey toward it. Sometimes I think victories must be temporary or incomplete; what kind of humanity would survive paradise? The industrialized world has tried to approximate paradise in its suburbs, with luxe, calme, volupté, cul-de-sacs, cable television and two-car garages, and it has produced a soft ennui that shades over into despair and a decay of the soul suggesting that Paradise is already a gulag. Countless desperate teenagers will tell you so. For paradise does not require of us courage, selflessness, creativity, passion: paradise in all accounts is passive, is sedative, and if you read carefully, soulless. ~ Rebecca Solnit
Ennui quotes by Rebecca Solnit
The habit of doubt; of distrusting his own judgment and of totally rejecting the judgment of the world; the tendency to regard every question as open; the hesitation to act except as a choice of evils; the shirking of responsibility; the love of line, form, quality; the horror of ennui; the passion for companionship and the antipathy to society
all these are well-known qualities of New England character in no way peculiar to individuals but in this instance they seemed to be stimulated by the fever, and Henry Adams could never make up his mind whether, on the whole, the change of character was morbid or healthy, good or bad for his purpose. ~ Henry Adams
Ennui quotes by Henry Adams
A plague of ennui afflicted London's many prophets. Warning signs were discarded, pamphlets pulped, megaphones thrown into cupboards. Those who could count questionable presences insisted that even since the Architeuthis had disappeared, something new had been walking. Something driven and intense and intent on itself. And since shortly after that, it had unfolded again and become something a little more itself, emerged from a pupa of unspecificity
into sentience, a obsessive moment of now that trod heavy in time.
No, they didn't really know what that mean, either, but that was their very strong impression. And it was freaking them out. ~ China Mieville
Ennui quotes by China Mieville
Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ennui quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
i am awake only in what i love & desire to the point of terror -- everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain ... ~ Hakim Bey
Ennui quotes by Hakim Bey
Gossip, like ennui, is born of idleness. ~ Ninon De L'Enclos
Ennui quotes by Ninon De L'Enclos
The only horrible thing in the world is ennui. ~ Oscar Wilde
Ennui quotes by Oscar Wilde
The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by
their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to
have been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise Solomon prescribed
ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman praetors have
decided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather the
acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that
neighbor." Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut our
nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor
longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have
exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's
capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can
do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy
failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to
thee what thou hast left undone? ~ Henry David Thoreau
Ennui quotes by Henry David Thoreau
For her, life was as cold as an attic with a window looking to the north, and ennui, like a spider, was silently spinning its shadowy web in every cranny of her heart. ~ Gustave Flaubert
Ennui quotes by Gustave Flaubert
Ennui is the disease of hearts without feeling, and of minds without resources. ~ Madame Roland
Ennui quotes by Madame Roland
Oh God, not another fucking beautiful day. ~ James Fox
Ennui quotes by James Fox
You're a wonderful dancer, Ria."
"Mademoiselle Geraldine's takes such things seriously."
"Ah. And how many ways do you know to kill me, while we dance?"
"Only two, but give me time."
"You have lovely eyes. Has anyone ever told you that?"
"What rot. They are a muddy green. What are you about, Lord Mersey?"
Felix sighed, looking genuinely perturbed. His air of ennui was shaken. "I am trying to court you. Truth be told, Miss Temminnick, you make it ruddy difficult!"
"Language, Lord Mersey." Sophronia felt her heart flutter strangely. Am I ready to be courted?
"See! ~ Gail Carriger
Ennui quotes by Gail Carriger
Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair. ~ Gautama Buddha
Ennui quotes by Gautama Buddha
I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right. ~ Gustave Flaubert
Ennui quotes by Gustave Flaubert
Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen. ~ Luke Rhinehart
Ennui quotes by Luke Rhinehart
Way far back in the beginning of the world was the whirlwind warning that we could all be blown away like chips and cry- Men with tired eyes realize it now, and wait to deform and decay- with maybe they have the power of love yet in their hearts just the same, I just don't know what that word means anymore- All I want is an ice cream cone ~ Jack Kerouac
Ennui quotes by Jack Kerouac
Oh, believe me, that when three great passions, such as sorrow, love, and gratitude fill the heart, ennui can find no place." "You ~ Alexandre Dumas
Ennui quotes by Alexandre Dumas
There's so much I should say, so many things I should tell him, but in the end I tell him nothing.
I cut a line and my losses, and I light a cigarette. ~ Clint Catalyst
Ennui quotes by Clint Catalyst
Bringing a child into the world without its consent seems unethical. Leaving the womb just seems insane. The womb is nirvana. It's tripping in an eternal orb outside the space-time continuum. It's a warm, wet rave at the center of the earth, but you're the only raver. There's no weird New Age guide. There's no shitty techno. There's only you and the infinite. ~ Melissa Broder
Ennui quotes by Melissa Broder
I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring. ~ Edward Gorey
Ennui quotes by Edward Gorey
Idleness, ennui, noise, mischief, riot, and a nameless train of mistaken notions of pleasure, are often classed, in a young man's mind, under the general head of liberty. ~ Maria Edgeworth
Ennui quotes by Maria Edgeworth
Ennui, the demon, waited at the threshold of his noiseless refuge, and drove away the stirring hopes and enlivening expectations, which form the better part of life. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Ennui quotes by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Three things make people want to change. One is that they hurt sufficiently. They have beat their heads against the same wall so long that they decide they have had enough. They have invested in the same slot machines without a pay-off for so long that they finally are willing either to stop playing, or to move on to others. Their migraines hurt, their ulcers bleed. They are alcoholic. They have hit the bottom. They beg for relief. They want to change.

Another thing that makes people want to change is a slow type of despair called ennui, or boredom. This is what the person has who goes through life saying, "So what?" until he finally asks the ultimate big "So What?" He is ready to change.

A third thing that makes people want to change is the sudden discovery that they can. This has been an observable effect of Transactional Analysis. Many people who have shown no particular desire to change have been exposed to Transactional Analysis through lectures or by hearing about it from someone else. This knowledge has produced an excitement about new possibilities, which has led to their further inquiry and a growing desire to change. There is also the type of patient who, although suffering from disabling symptoms, still does not really want to change. His treatment contract reads, "I'll promise to let you help me if I don't have to get well." This negative attitude changes, however, as the patient begins to see that there is indeed another way to live. A worki ~ Thomas A. Harris
Ennui quotes by Thomas A. Harris
Her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart. ~ Gustave Flaubert
Ennui quotes by Gustave Flaubert
She told Mik, "You have perfect violin-playing muscles."
"And you, with your mighty puppeteer arms. We put the chimaera to shame."
She stopped fanning and fell backward onto the bed. It was a bad bed in a cheap motel, and the flop jarred her teeth. "Ow," she said without conviction.
"Hey. You're turn isn't even half up."
"I know. I just succumbed to ennui."
"Just now."
"Just exactly now. You saw it happen. ~ Laini Taylor
Ennui quotes by Laini Taylor
German philosophy was almost at the very root of the problem. The sense of neurasthenia felt in the late 19th century was in part created by a weariness of philosophy and not only because there was an awareness that there was so much to think about, but because german thought was already characterized by a weightiness that too easily transferred in weariness, and even fatalism. There are of course many reasons for this, but among them is the peculiarly german pursuit of continuously, relentlessly, pursuing ideas to their endpoint; wherever that might lead. This tendency also has an expression in german: Drang nach dem absoluten ('the drive towards the absolute'). Again it is not a phrase that the English or English philosophy would use, but it aptly sums up that habit of pushing and pushing ideas until they can then reach what can then seem to be an unavoidable and even predetermined endpoint. ~ Douglas Murray
Ennui quotes by Douglas Murray
John had written that normal fantasy ("normal" in the T.S. Kuhn sense) was written for the moderately educated class from suffering ennui. It was for folks stuck doing dull, repetitive work, growing old while not getting laid half often or variously enough, watching other, less deserving people (the privileged and the crooks) scoop up your share of fun. So then the fantasy generates the exciting world where you're given a heroic purpose and an opportunity to use those very powers you have suspected that you had but never have been able to locate and use, except in destructive ways when shit-faced. ~ Don Webb
Ennui quotes by Don Webb
I am fairly tired
bored beyond endurance
by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him. ~ Henry Adams
Ennui quotes by Henry Adams
We are amused through the intellect, but it is the heart that saves us from ennui. ~ Sophie Swetchine
Ennui quotes by Sophie Swetchine
I hate the lackadaisical ennui of a sun too preoccupied with itself to notice the infinite hours we spend in its presence. ~ Tahereh Mafi
Ennui quotes by Tahereh Mafi
After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor. ~ Joseph Brodsky
Ennui quotes by Joseph Brodsky
Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. ~ David Foster Wallace
Ennui quotes by David Foster Wallace
Progress comes by experiment, and this from ennui that leads to voyages, wars, revolutions, and plainly to change in the arts of expression; that cries out to the imagination, and is the nurse of the invention whereof we term necessity the mother. ~ Edmund Clarence Stedman
Ennui quotes by Edmund Clarence Stedman
If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature's larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization. ~ Terence McKenna
Ennui quotes by Terence McKenna
Ennui had more distractions far more amusing than the automatons of a watchmaker in Mühlenberg. ~ Steven Millhauser
Ennui quotes by Steven Millhauser
In the aftermath of 9/11, people had not a good time, but a deep, profound, rousing time, woke up from their ennui and isolation and trivialization to feel engaged, connected, purposeful, ready to give, to engage, to care, to learn. ~ Rebecca Solnit
Ennui quotes by Rebecca Solnit
I find it wholesome to be alone in the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. i never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men then when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervis in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can "see the folks," and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate, himself for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and "the blues;" but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it. ~ Henry David Thoreau
Ennui quotes by Henry David Thoreau
In these days of high-tech video games, it's remarkable that kids once got incredibly thrilled while pushing little metal racing cars around a cardboard track: The toy car was yours, and you invested it with importance and enhanced it with fantasy and pitied it because it was small, like you were. Such games were weapons against the ennui of endless Saturdays. ~ Roger Ebert
Ennui quotes by Roger Ebert
How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave and to say It is over. ~ Edward Thomas
Ennui quotes by Edward Thomas
One of ennui's most terribel components is the overwhelming feeling of ennui that comes over you whenever you try to explain it. ~ Ingmar Bergman
Ennui quotes by Ingmar Bergman
I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture - a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard. ~ David Foster Wallace
Ennui quotes by David Foster Wallace
Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time. ~ Emil Cioran
Ennui quotes by Emil Cioran
The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it. ~ Don DeLillo
Ennui quotes by Don DeLillo
It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty ribcages. ~ Cynthia Ozick
Ennui quotes by Cynthia Ozick
Irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian. ~ David Foster Wallace
Ennui quotes by David Foster Wallace
Was war, then, the big solution after all? Were those crude early theorists right? War the great aphrodisiac, the great source of world adrenaline, the solvent of ennui, Angst, melancholia, accidia, spleen? War itself a massive sexual act, culminating in a detumescence which was not mere metaphorical dying? War, finally, the controller, the trimmer and excisor, the justifier of fertility? ~ Anthony Burgess
Ennui quotes by Anthony Burgess
She is in particular interested in the Ennui predator. She very much likes its demeanor and coloring in the images. She understand she may not get that particular one, but perhaps one that resembles it? A young one?"
The Ennui predator. "Where did she find these images?"
"On your planet's holonet," Nuan Ara said helpfully.
We didn't have holonet. We had internet ... Oh. "So, the esteemed grandmother would like a kitten that looks like Grumpy Cat?" I picked up my laptop, typed in the image search for Grumpy Cat, and showed him the picture.
"Yes!"
"I will see what I can do. ~ Ilona Andrews
Ennui quotes by Ilona Andrews
Patriotism is a hard disease to eradicate, and ennui stamps us all. ~ Adrian McKinty
Ennui quotes by Adrian McKinty
Our job, then, is two-fold: to focus on our own failings as writers. But also to speak more forcefully as advocates for literature. Books are a powerful antidote for loneliness, for the moral purposelessness of the leisure class. It's our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don't read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn't some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui. ~ Steve Almond
Ennui quotes by Steve Almond
And I did nothing, nothing but try to hide from the horror of dying." He stopped, for saying the truth aloud was unendurable. It was not shame that stopped him, but fear, the same fear. He knew now why this tranquil life in sea and sunlight on the rafts seemed to him like an after-life or a dream, unreal. It was because he knew in his heart that reality was empty: without life or warmth or color or sound: without meaning. There were no heights or depths. All this lovely play of form and light and color on the sea and in the eyes of men, was no more than that, a playing of illusions on the shallow void. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
Ennui quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
It is the face of rebellion and determination. It does not show age, terror, or ennui. It is frozen in time, in a moment when you took a stand against a man who abused you. It is a mark of rebellion against man's dominion, even an Ottoman Sultan. What face could be more beautiful, Kucuk? ~ Linda Lafferty
Ennui quotes by Linda Lafferty
TEDIUM, n. Ennui, the state or condition of one that is bored. Many fanciful derivations of the word have been affirmed, but so high an authority as Father Jape says that it comes from a very obvious source
the first words of the ancient Latin hymn _Te Deum Laudamus_. In this apparently natural derivation there is something that saddens. ~ Ambrose Bierce
Ennui quotes by Ambrose Bierce
Well, I'll take these pages and move on. Things are happening elsewhere. Things are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It's in the blood now - misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch, until there's no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want every one to scratch himself to death. ~ Henry Miller
Ennui quotes by Henry Miller
Sealed off from enchantment, the modern buffered self is also sealed off from significance, left to ruminate in a stew of its own ennui. ~ James K.A. Smith
Ennui quotes by James K.A. Smith
Watching TV becomes a full-time job when you can scan 200 channels all day and all night and still have the option of punching Night Dreams into the video machine, if the rest of the world seems dull. ~ Hunter S. Thompson
Ennui quotes by Hunter S. Thompson
I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else. ~ Oscar Wilde
Ennui quotes by Oscar Wilde
If the child has not an object that it can occupy itself with, it feels ennui; for it does not yet know how to occupy itself with itself. ~ Max Stirner
Ennui quotes by Max Stirner
As the gout seems privileged to attack the bodies of the wealthy, so ennui seems to exert a similar prerogative over their minds. ~ Charles Caleb Colton
Ennui quotes by Charles Caleb Colton
Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui. ~ Agnes Repplier
Ennui quotes by Agnes Repplier
There are three cures for ennui: sleep, drink and travel. ~ D.H. Lawrence
Ennui quotes by D.H. Lawrence
Then let me advise you to take up your little burdens again, for though they seem heavy sometimes, they are good for us, and lighten as we learn to carry them. Work is wholesome, and there is plenty for everyone. It keeps us from ennui and mischief, is good for health and spirits, and gives us a sense of power and independence better than money or fashion." "We'll ~ Louisa May Alcott
Ennui quotes by Louisa May Alcott
On top of pique, umbrage, and ennui. Oh, the French diseases of the soul. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
Ennui quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
Just for a while": Death's opening chat-up line in His great seduction, before he drugged you with soporific comforts, distracted you with minor luxuries and ensnared you with long-term payment plans.
Join the Rat Race "just for a while."
Concentrate on your career "just for a while."
Move in with your girlfriend "just for a while."
Find a bigger place, out in the burbs "just for a while."
Lie down in that wooden box "just for a while. ~ Christopher Brookmyre
Ennui quotes by Christopher Brookmyre
Germaine, on the other hand, was a whore from the cradle; she was thoroughly satisfied with her role, enjoyed it in fact, except when her stomach pinched or her shoes gave out, little surface things of no account, nothing that ate into her soul, nothing that created torment. Ennui! That was the worst she ever felt. Days there were, no doubt, when she had a bellyful, as we say – but no more than that! Most of the time she enjoyed it – or gave the illusion of enjoying it. It made a difference, of course, whom she went with – or came with. But the principal thing was a man. A man! That was what she craved. A man with something between his legs that could tickle her, that could make her writhe in ecstasy, make her grab that bushy twat of hers with both hands and rub it joyfully, boastfully, proudly, with a sense of connection, a sense of life. That was the only place where she experienced any life – down there where she clutched herself with both hands. ~ Henry Miller
Ennui quotes by Henry Miller
Another time, twice, in fact, I tried hard to be in love. I suffered, too, gentlemen, I assure you. In the depth of my heart there was no faith in my suffering, only a faint stir of mockery, but yet I did suffer, and in the real, orthodox way; I was jealous, beside myself... and it was all from ENNUI, gentlemen, all from ENNUI; inertia overcame me. You know the direct, legitimate fruit of consciousness is inertia, that is, conscious sitting-with-the-hands-folded. I have referred to this already. I repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all 'direct' persons and men of action are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are at ease and you know that is the chief thing. To begin to act, you know, you must first have your mind completely at ease and no trace of doubt left in it. Why, how am I, for example, to set my mind at rest? Where are the primary causes on which I amto build? Where are my foundations? Where am I to get them from? I exercise myself in reflection, and consequently with me every primary cause at once draws after itself another still more primary, and so on to infinity. That is just the essence of every sort of consciousness and
reflection. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Ennui quotes by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. ~ Henry David Thoreau
Ennui quotes by Henry David Thoreau
A bouquet yellow like remorse
Hurts my view
The cage
The wheel
The vile ennui of all mankind
And no one no one to break my chains!
("Outcries") ~ Helene Baronne D'Oettingen
Ennui quotes by Helene Baronne D'Oettingen
failed to yield to hooded figures, resulting in mandatory citywide ennui for hours. ~ Joseph Fink
Ennui quotes by Joseph Fink
But she'd seen beyond his indifferent mask. She'd realized he was hiding his pain - she understood, because she hid her own. Not behind sullen ennui but by trying to stay quiet, unnoticed. Invisible. ~ Kathy Love
Ennui quotes by Kathy Love
In that moment of educational ennui, a freshman girl says, "I can bring a human brain to school if you want–my father has lots of them." (Talk about a full-scale class alert: "She's going to do WHAT?!") ~ Robert Fulghum
Ennui quotes by Robert Fulghum
Each nugget of information was fascinating. The world was full of new-found marvels and he wanted to share the excitement with everybody. They all did. They had a certain sense. It wasn't a sense of ennui or cynicism. It was ...
A sense of wonder.
That was it. A sense of wonder, in the fine old original meaning of the word. They wondered at their world. Because when you did that, everything was wonder-full. ~ Larry Niven
Ennui quotes by Larry Niven
With the awakening of his emotions, his first perception was a sense of futility, a dull ache at the utter grayness of his life. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald
Ennui quotes by F Scott Fitzgerald
The xcursion helped dislodge your ... sense of ennui? ~ David Mitchell
Ennui quotes by David Mitchell
What happened was that, all unconscious of what this ennui meant, I wearied of the motion, wearied of the jobless seas of alcohol, wearied of the blunt, bluff, hearty, and totally meaningless friendships wearied of wandering through the forests of desperate women, wearied of the work which fed me only in the most brutally literal sense. Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be the only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home, But again, I think I knew, at the very bottom of my heart, exactly what I was doing when I took the boat for France. ~ James Baldwin
Ennui quotes by James Baldwin
She used to test his commitment by hurting him. She threatened to leave him, or cheat on him, then watched his face and measured the depth of his feelings for her by the extent to which it crumbled. He was insecure; prone to worry. If he ever became confident, she thought, it would mean that he no longer loved her, since to love someone is to worry; to need someone is to fear the inevitability of their absence. Without fear, she thought, without drama, there was only the grey blankness of late-middle-age relationships, where, as far as she could make out, concepts like love and passion were replaced by what she saw as the wretched terminology of codependent ennui: companionship, contentment, compromise; where one person's love for another was no longer stated simply because it was no longer questioned; where the key indicator not only of love but also of solidity would simply be the mere fact of the solidity and love that had gone before. No, no, she thought. Better the sense of odds, of struggle; the ongoing and repeated relief of trauma endured and survived. Without it, there was only the security of the unimaginative: an unspokenly dwindling sex life; roiling resentment; his-and-hers facial hair. ~ Sam Byers
Ennui quotes by Sam Byers
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