Hackneyed Quotes

Would it be too hackneyed to wonder where it all went so wrong? Kitty's ~ Harlan Coben

The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Yet if she did not quite exist in the full flood of sunlight, which is the hackneyed metaphor for good health, she was comfortably and safely far away from that abyssal darkness down into which she had nearly strayed. ~ William Styron

Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist. ~ Mike Birbiglia

For the law is not jurisprudence, not a weighty tome full of articles, not philosophical treatises, not peevish nonsense about justice, not hackneyed platitudes about morality and ethics. The law means safe paths and highways. It means backstreets one can walk along even after sundown. It means inns and taverns one can leave to visit the privy, leaving one's purse on the table and one's wife beside it. The law is the sleep of people certain they'll be woken by the crowing of the rooster and not the crashing of burning roof timbers! And for those who break the law; the noose, the axe, the stake and the red-hot iron! Punishments which deter others. ~ Andrzej Sapkowski

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. ~ George Orwell

The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever. ~ Sinclair Lewis

Just because that was the start of a thousand sentimental stories didn't mean that it didn't actually happen. ~ Iain M. Banks

I question every word; I write 'the' and immediately feel scorn. It's such an ordinary word - everybody uses it - why can't I come up with something original? In the sunlight, every single word seems hackneyed. ~ Jeff Lindsay

Air power speaks a strategic language so new that translation into the hackneyed idiom of the past is impossible. ~ Alexander P. De Seversky

It may be that the invention of the aeroplane flying-machine will be deemed to have been of less material value to the world than the discovery of Bessemer and open-hearth steel, or the perfection of the telegraph, or the introduction of new and more scientific methods in the management of our great industrial works. To us, however, the conquest of the air, to use a hackneyed phrase, is a technical triumph so dramatic and so amazing that it overshadows in importance every feat that the inventor has accomplished. ~ Waldemar Kaempffert

I detest jargon of every kind, and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning. ~ Marianne Dashwood ~ Jane Austen

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox ... ~ Stanislaw Lem

'Pay it forward' has become a hackneyed concept, but I truly believe in it, and it gives me huge satisfaction to be able to help writers in a measurable way. ~ Victoria Strauss

It is now necessary for me to use the rather hackneyed phrase 'meanwhile, back at the ranch.' The word 'hackneyed' here means 'used by so, so many writers that by the time Lemony Snicket uses it, it is a tiresome cliché. ~ Lemony Snicket

But that expression of 'violently in love' is so hackneyed, so doubtful, so indefinite, that it gives me very little idea. It is as often applied to feelings which arise from a half-hour's acquaintance, as to a real, strong attachment. ~ Jane Austen

Moreover, in conversations with women, men do most of the talking (Haas,
1979), and despite hackneyed stereotypes about women being more talkative
than men, we're apparently used to this pattern. When people listen to record-
ings of conversations, they think it's more disrespectful and assertive for a
woman to interrupt a m~ than vice versa (Lafrance, 1992). ~ Rowland S. Miller

Writing is a form of art. Do not use New Times Roman or Arial because it's boring and hackneyed. ~ Natalya Vorobyova

I never take any notice of reviews-unless a critic has thought up some new way of describing me. That old one about my lizard eyes and anteater nose and the way I sleep my way through pictures is so hackneyed now. ~ Robert Mitchum

Since the arrows of criticism aimed at these legendary masters, who directed the workshops of their day now frequently strike me in the back, I want you to know that the hackneyed accusations leveled at us are entirely unfounded. These
are the facts:

1. The reason we don't like anything innovative is that there is truly nothing new worth liking.

2. We treat most men like morons because, indeed, most men are morons, not because we're poisoned
by anger, unhappiness or some other flaw in character. (Granted, treating these people better would be more refined and sensible.)

3. The reason I forget and confuse so many names and faces - except those of the miniaturists I've loved and trained since their apprenticeships - is not senility, but because these names and faces are so
lackluster and colorless as to be hardly worth remembering. ~ Orhan Pamuk

For the hackneyed art of lying without injury to anyone, Rushbrook, to his shame, was proficient. ~ Elizabeth Inchbald

Yet even the most hackneyed, shopworn science fiction or fantasy tale will feel startling and fresh to a naive reader who doesn't know the milieu is just like the one used in a thousand other stories. ~ Orson Scott Card

Sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning ~ Jane Austen

Anger has become one of the trendiest emotions of all. In moderation it can be a righteous force for constructive change. But its hackneyed omnipresence means the vast majority of its outbreaks are trivial. The paucity of colorful obscenities is aggravated by an abundance of frivolous fury. ~ Rob Brezsny

I know not that there is anything in nature more soothing to the mind than the contemplation of the moon, sailing, like some planetary bark, amidst a sea of bright azure. The subject is certainly hackneyed; the moon has been sung by poet and poetaster. Is there any marvel that it should be so? ~ William Gilmore Simms

Before his and Pushkin's advent Russian literature was purblind. What form it perceived was an outline directed by reason: it did not see color for itself but merely used the hackneyed combinations of blind noun and dog-like adjective that Europe had inherited from the ancients. The sky was blue, the dawn red, the foliage green, the eyes of beauty black, the clouds grey, and so on. It was Gogol (and after him Lermontov and Tolstoy) who first saw yellow and violet at all. That the sky could be pale green at sunrise, or the snow a rich blue on a cloudless day, would have sounded like heretical nonsense to your so-called "classical" writer, accustomed as he was to the rigid conventional color-schemes of the Eighteenth Century French school of literature. Thus the development of the art of description throughout the centuries may be profitably treated in terms of vision, the faceted eye becoming a unified and prodigiously complex organ and the dead dim "accepted colors" (in the sense of "idées reçues") yielding gradually their subtle shades and allowing new wonders of application. I doubt whether any writer, and certainly not in Russia, had ever noticed before, to give the most striking instance, the moving pattern of light and shade on the ground under trees or the tricks of color played by sunlight with leaves. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

There were no whys in a person's life, and very few hows. In the end, in search of useful wisdom, you could only come back to the most hackneyed concepts, like kindness, forbearance, infinite self patience. ~ Chad Harbach

There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented writer can't get a good story out of it. ~ Lawrence Watt-Evans

I like the lad who, when his father thought To clip his morning nap by hackneyed phrase Of vagrant worm by early songster caught, Cried, Served him right! it's not at all surprising; The worm was punished, sir, for early rising! ~ John Godfrey Saxe

Obsessing on evil is boring. Rousing fear is a hackneyed shtick. Wallowing is despair is a bad habit. Indulging in cynicism is akin to committing a copycat crime. ~ Rob Brezsny

Cougar jokes are now as hackneyed as airplane food. ~ Felipe Esparza