Fastidious Quotes

Their arrogance protected them against any liking for their fellow-man, against the slightest interest in the strangers sitting all about them, amidst whom M. de Stermaria adopted the manner one has in the buffet-car of a train, grim, hurried, stand-offish, brusque, fastidious and spiteful, surrounded by other passengers whom one has never seen before, whom one will never see again and towards whom the only conceivable way of behaving is to make sure that they keep away from one's cold chicken and stay out of one's chosen corner-seat. ~ Marcel Proust

His hands slipped from his throat, and he crashed to the ground like a tree falling.
"Oh, dear," said Pangborn, gazing at the fallen body of his comrade with fastidious distaste. "How unpleasant. ~ Cassandra Clare

My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

They go to work, attend a meeting
Write an equation, have a beer,
Hail colleagues with a cheerful greeting,
Are conscientious, sane and sincere,
Rational, able and fastidious.
Through hardened casing no invidious
Tapeworm of doubt, no guilt, no qualm,
Pierces to Sabotage their claim.
When something's technically attractive,
You follow the conception through,
That's all. What if you leave a slew
Of living dead, of radioactive
"Collateral damage" in its wake?
It's just a job, for heaven's sake. ~ Vikram Seth

A fastidious taste is like a squeamish appetite; the one has its origin in some disease of the mind, as the other has in some ailment of the stomach. ~ Robert Southey

Before achieving a dream, you need to make very little steps ... People don't understand that when you want to make a big dream you have a lot of fastidious little things you have to do. ~ Bertrand Piccard

I enjoy feeling fastidious and aloof. I enjoy saying no, always no, and I should be afraid of any attempt to construct a finally habitable world, because I should merely have to say - Yes; and act like other people. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Like Elizabeth, all her subjects were fond of the savage pastime of bear and bull baiting. It cannot be denied that this people had a taste for blood, took delight in brutal encounters, and drew the sword and swung the cudgel with great promptitude; nor were they fastidious in the matter of public executions. Kiechel says that when the criminal was driven in the cart under the gallows, and left hanging by the neck as the cart moved from under him, his friends and acquaintances pulled at his legs in order that he might be strangled the sooner. ~ William Shakespeare

Rousseau's tormented and tortured nature made him look with eyes of hatred upon people like Diderot, d'Alembert, Helvétius in Paris, who seemed to him fastidious, sophisticated and artificial, incapable of understanding all those dark emotions, all those deep and torturing feelings which ravaged the heart of a true natural man torn from his native soil. ~ Isiah Berlin

Fastidious attention to detail makes the difference between an OK service and first class service. ~ Ben Elliot

I'm a fastidious bookman and have never liked reading books with library markings or other messy defects. ~ Larry McMurtry

If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race. ~ George Bernard Shaw

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war's brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the "hat trick" with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers' knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table.

It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetr ~ Phillip Gibbs

It is not only a troublesome but slavish to be nice [fastidious]. ~ William Penn

A fastidious taste is best indoors, away from nature and the city. ~ Mason Cooley

Now it becomes clear that he's one of those people who is fastidious about his personal appearance but secretly skivenly about everything else ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Curious how he jibbed away from sight of his wife and child!
One would have thought he must have rushed up at the first moment. On the contrary, he had a sort of physical shrinking from it - fastidious possessor that he was. He was afraid of what Annette was thinking of him, author of her agonies, afraid of the look of the baby, afraid of showing his disappointment with the present and - the future. ~ John Galsworthy

A pretty wife is something for the fastidious vanity of a roue to retire upon. ~ Thomas Moore

You obviously don't know what an Old Man of the Sea great wealth is. It is not a fat purse and time to spend it. Its owner finds himself beset on every side, at every hour, wherever he goes, by persistent pleaders, like beggars in Bombay, each demanding that he invest or give away part of his wealth. He becomes suspicious of honest friendship
indeed honest friendship is rarely offered him; those who could have been his friends are too fastidious to be jostled by beggars, too proud to risk being mistaken for one. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts. ~ Edward Abbey

The politicians of New York as not so fastidious as some gentlemen are, as to disclosing the principles on which they act. They boldly preach what they practice ... if they are defeated, they expect to retire from office. If they are successful, they claim, as a matter of right, the advantages of success. They see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belongs the spoils of the enemy. ~ William L. Marcy

Yes there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

The etiquette question that troubles so many fastidious people New Year's Day is: How am I ever going to face those people again? ~ Judith Martin

Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. 'Ohe, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What-ho, old Chumch.' At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's face. 'Hey, Spoono,' Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, 'Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. ~ Salman Rushdie

Conversation, fastidious goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will. ~ Virginia Woolf

Having a character change during the course of the screenplay is not a requirement if it doesn't fit your character. But transformation, change, seems to be an essential aspect of our humanity, especially at this time in our culture. I think we're all a little like Melvin (Jack Nicholson) in As Good as it Gets. Melvin may be complex and fastidious as a person, but his dramatic need is expressed toward the end of the film when he says, 'When I'm with you I want to be a better person.' I think we all want that. Change, transformation, is a constant of life, and if you can impel some kind of emotional change within your character, it creates an arc of behavior and adds another dimension to who he/she is. ~ Syd Field

He proceeded to cut carefully a thin slice from the loaf, which he quartered in pieces and buttered for her, the whole business very delicately done and in striking contrast to his manner in serving himself - so much so that to Mary there was something almost horrifying in the change from rough brutality to fastidious care. It was as though there was some latent power in his fingers which turned them from bludgeons into deft and cunning servants. Had he cut her a chunk of bread and hurled it at her she would not have minded so much; it would have been in keeping with what she had seen of him. But this sudden coming to grace, this quick and exquisite moving of his hands, was a swift and rather sinister revelation, sinister because it was unexpected and not true to type. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

A "free spirit" - this cool expression does good in every condition, it almost warms. One no longer lives, in the fetters of love and hatred, without Yea, without Nay, voluntarily near, voluntarily distant, preferring to escape, to turn aside, to flutter forth, to fly up and away; one is fastidious like everyone who has once seen an immense variety beneath him, - and one has become the opposite of those who trouble themselves about things which do not concern them. In fact, it is nothing but things which now concern the free spirit, - and how many things! - which no longer trouble him! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Since even the most fastidious among us can rarely escape hearing salacious local gossip, it is as well to enjoy what cannot be avoided. ~ P.D. James

Gradually I came to find Herbert West himself more horrible than anything he did - that was when it dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust; he became, behind his pallid intellectuality, a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment - a languid Elagabalus of the tombs. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

You're a fine fastidious young man, as proud as a lion, as gentle as a girl. You'd make a good catch for the devil. ~ Honore De Balzac

Wouldn't be surprising. Most immortal females behave like they're in heat."
Her brows rose. "You are the one who taught me about pleasure." ... "And now in another lifetime, you ridicule me for missing it? Come on, Chase. Take me to where you live. Scared I'll find some footy pajamas? A fleshlight? I want a bath almost as much as you need to watch me take one. I get so much more talkative when I'm clean. Loreans are really fastidious, you know. ~ Kresley Cole

I'm terribly fastidious. I like symmetry and neatness, but my house is as chaotic as any other family's. ~ Kevin McCloud

I change my hairstyle every day for the show, I'm fastidious and vain about my nails and teeth and grooming and makeup, but a perfect body, forget it. Dust to dust, wuggies to wuggies. ~ Kathie Lee Gifford

Apart from such chaotic classics as these, my own taste in novel reading is one which I am prepared in a rather especial manner, not only to declare, but to defend. My taste is for the sensational novel, the detective story, the story about death, robbery and secret societies; a taste which I share in common with the bulk at least of the male population of this world. There was a time in my own melodramatic boyhood when I became quite fastidious in this respect. I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was. But we all lose a little of that fine edge of austerity and idealism which sharpened our spiritual standard in our youth. I have come to compromise with the tea-table and to be less insistent about the sofa. As long as a corpse or two turns up in the second, the third, nay even the fourth or fifth chapter, I make allowance for human weakness, and I ask no more. But a novel without any death in it is still to me a novel without any life in it. I admit that the very best of the tea-table novels are great art - for instance, Emma or Northanger Abbey. Sheer elemental genius can make a work of art out of anything. Michelangelo might make a statue out of mud, and Jane Austen could make a novel out of tea - that much more contem ~ G.K. Chesterton

Forgetting her promise of no questions, Littlest suddenly asked, "Might we be human?" But Fastidious did not reply. ~ Lois Lowry

The best=laid plans, one's most fastidious contingency strategies have revealed themselves in the cold light of day to be laughably inadequate, no match for the happenstance that seems of late only to promise death, mayhem, poverty, flood. And here you are, having spent all that time protecting your home from the oncoming elements only to find that it has been shored up with crackers. ~ David Rakoff

The fastidious are unfortunate; nothing satisfies them. ~ Jean De La Fontaine

You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful, provided that the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose. ~ P.D. James

Seattle, the mild green queen: wet and willing, cedar-scented, and crowned with slough grass, her toadstool scepter tilted toward Asia, her face turned ever upward in the rain; the sovereign who washes her hands more persistently than the most fastidious proctologist. ~ Tom Robbins

My mother was a fastidious and orderly homemaker. I was the messy but creative type. I picture her following behind me through life with a damp rag and an air of exasperation. ~ Laurie Graham

Sherlock Holmes gets to be brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, a polymath genius. Female characters get to be Strong. ~ Sophia McDougall

Discriminate, discriminate, and again discriminate! Be fastidious. Choose. Select. ~ E. Merrill Root

And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan. ~ Herman Melville

But Lord Arglay, at once in contact and detached, at once faithless and believing, beheld all these things in the light of that fastidious and ironical goodwill which, outside mystical experience, is the finest and noblest capacity man has developed in and against the universe. ~ Charles Williams

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the "massacre of innocent people" or, if you like, "a clash of civilisations" and "collateral damage". The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice. ~ Arundhati Roy

I think it's important to keep things private, and there are certain boundaries I feel very particular about drawing. It may seem fastidious, but my experience of talking to the press is that I need those boundaries to remain very clear. ~ Jodhi May

and his peers are not many. You may like him or not, may attack him or sing his praises, but you cannot ignore him. He is of those that die hard. Be as fastidious as you will; make up your mind to recognize only those who are, without any manner of doubt, beyond and above all others; however few the names you keep, Rabelais' will always remain. ~ Francois Rabelais

They who are not fastidious as to the means, seldom fail of securing the result they aim at. ~ Fanny Fern

Literature is so common a luxury that the age has grown fastidious. ~ Henry Theodore Tuckerman

Isabelle took out her invitation and waved it like a white flag. "I have an invitation. These" - she indicated the rest of the group with a grand wave of her arm - "are my friends."
Magnus plucked the invitation out of her hand and looked at it with fastidious distaste. "I must have been drunk," he said. He threw the door open. "Come in. And try not to murder any of my guests."
Jace edged into the doorway, sizing up Magnus with his eyes. "Even if one of them spills a drink on my new shoes?"
"Even then." Magnus's hand shot out, so fast it was barely a blur. He plucked the stele out of Jace's hand - Clary hadn't even realized he was holding it - and held it up. Jace looked faintly abashed. "As for this," Magnus said, sliding it into Jace's jeans pocket, "keep it in your pants, Shadowhunter. ~ Cassandra Clare

The great man will come when all of us are feeling great, not when all of us are feeling small. He will ride in at some splendid moment when we all feel that we could do without him.
"We are then able to answer in some manner the question, "Why have we no great men?" We have no great men chiefly because we are always looking for them. We are connoisseurs of greatness, and connoisseurs can never be great; we are fastidious, that is, we are small.
"When Diogenes went about with a lantern looking for an honest man, I am afraid he had very little time to be honest himself And when anybody goes about on his hands and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that one man at any rate shall not be great.
"Now, the error of Diogenes is evident. The error of Diogenes lay in the fact that he omitted to notice that every man is both an honest man and a dishonest man. Diogenes looked for his honest man inside every crypt and cavern; but he never thought of looking inside the thief. ~ G.K. Chesterton

What was so painful about Amy's death is that I know that there is something I could have done. I could have passed on to her the solution that was freely given to me. Don't pick up a drink or drug, one day at a time. It sounds so simple; it actually is simple but it isn't easy; it requires incredible support and fastidious structuring. ~ Russell Brand

Napoleon would always be extremely fastidious when it came to other people's morals, although his own were frequently questionable. ~ Leslie Carroll

By this means we presume we have established for ever, a true and legitimate marriage between the Empirical and Rational faculty; whose fastidious and unfortunate divorce and separation hath troubled and disordered the whole race and generation of mankind. ~ Francis Bacon

Sunday: this satisfied procession
Of definite Sunday faces;
Bonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces
In repetition that displaces
Your mental self-possession
By this unwarranted digression.
Evening, lights, and tea!
Children and cats in the alley;
Dejection unable to rally
Against this dull conspiracy.
And Life, a little bald and gray,
Languid, fastidious, and bland,
Waits, hat and gloves in hand,
Punctilious of tie and suit
(Somewhat impatient of delay)
On the doorstep of the Absolute. ~ T. S. Eliot

While she watched them, she reviewed their conversation. "When he said 'Kyr,' did he mean Kyr Zemen, the prime commander of the League?" Maris drained his glass in a way that was more akin to his military training than to the fastidious man she knew him to be. "One and the same. Unfortunately. Bloody damn wanker bastard." The venom behind those words had to spring from a personal grudge between them. She'd never seen so much hatred from Maris before toward anyone. Not even her. "How do you know him?" she asked. "He's my oldest brother." That ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Books, gentlemen, are a species of men, and introduced to them you circulate in the "very best society" that this world can furnish, without the intolerable infliction of "dressing" to go into it. In your shabbiest coat and cosiest slippers you may socially chat even with the fastidious Earl of Chesterfield, and lounging under a tree enjoy the divinest intimacy with my late lord of Verulam. ~ Herman Melville

Right now you're about the least attractive Bird I've ever seen ... But I'll sleep with you just the same. I haven't been fastidious about morality since my husband committed suicide; besides, even if you intend to have the most disgusting kind of sex with me, I'm sure I'll discover something genuine in no matter what we do. ~ Kenzaburo Oe

The fastidious taste will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call slang, which not a few of our writers seem to have affected. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge