Playing Mona Lisa Quotes

She arched and farted like Mona Lisa if you really looked at her and for good fruitarian measure. ~ Joseph McElroy

Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it in commerce. Constant's father had done a similar thing when he found he could not buy Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" at any price. The old man had punished Mona Lisa by having her used in an advertising campaign for suppositories. It was the free-enterprise way of handling beauty that threatened to get the upper hand. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Instead, she sat there, smiling that small, small inscrutable smile, like Mona Lisa herself, although I must say that until that moment, I'd never found Mona Lisa's smile particularly interesting or even particularly a smile. Looking at Lake, I understood what probably everyone else already knows about the woman in that painting: we are drawn to her not because of what the smile gives us but because it gives us nothing. We are waiting to get past the smile. We are waiting
we've spent centuries waiting
for the woman to speak. ~ Marisa De Los Santos

We seem to live in a world where you have to walk around grinning like a loon. I can't understand all the fuss about Mona Lisa painting, everyone wondering why she's not smiling, if she's depressed or heartbroken. No, she was just normal!
Emotions are always extreme these days: you either have to be crying with laughter or crying in pain. No wonder water levels are rising. It's not global warming, it's all the tears from crying. ~ Karl Pilkington

Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, Lionel Hampton, the Mills Brothers, Woody Herman, and Nat King Cole. "Mona Lisa, men have named you, ~ George Hodgman

Like the famous lady in the frame (Mona Lisa), to many we remain a mystery ~ Kris Jenner

In Isaac Newton's lifetime, no more than a few thousand people had any idea what he looked like, though he was one of England's most famous men, yet now millions of people have quite a clear idea - based on replicas of copies of rather poorly painted portraits. Even more pervasive and indelible are the smile of Mona Lisa, The Scream of Edvard Munch, and the silhouettes of various fictional extraterrestrials. These are memes, living a life of their own, independent of any physical reality. "This may not be what George Washington looked like then," a tour guide was overheard saying of the Gilbert Stuart painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "but this is what he looks like now." Exactly. ~ James Gleick

Mirror Mirror on the Wall,
Who's fairest of them all?
I'm Mona Lisa and She is plain,
But the truth is - we all are Vain. ~ Saru Singhal

With all due respect, the Mona Lisa is overrated. ~ Paulo Coelho

The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin. ~ Cornell Woolrich

I suggested that it was not enough to add a moustache to the Mona Lisa: it should simply be destroyed. ~ Pierre Boulez

You know, people call mystery novels or thrillers 'puzzles.' I never understood that, because when I buy a puzzle, I already know what it is. It's on the box. And even if I don't, if it's a 5,000-piece puzzle of the 'Mona Lisa', it's not like I put the last piece in and go, 'I had no idea it's the 'Mona Lisa'!' ~ Harlan Coben

I spent all day wandering up and down the hallways, staring at the Mona Lisa and Canova's 'Psyche and Cupid' and the 'Venus de Milo' and Caravaggio's 'The Death of the Virgin' and hundreds of other works in all shapes and sizes and colors. Just before I was about to leave, I was staring at Michelangelo's 'The Dying Slave', and I suddenly realized that every single work I had seen expressed the same thing, the same intense longing for beauty and immortality and justice and compassion. It was as though all of these artists from throughout history were there in those long hallways crying out the same anguished plea in a thousand different languages. ~ Jonathan Hull

The horizon is an imaginary line that recedes as you approach it. ~ Ginnifer Goodwin

Da Vinci painted one Mona Lisa. Beethoven composed one Fifth Symphony. And God made one version of you. ~ Max Lucado

I'm glad you still have your survival instinct."

"We've all got something." I lift my fingertips to the exposed skin on my face. It's colder than the night sea. Cupping my hands, I blow into them, let my breath warm my nose and cheeks. "I apparently still have a face, which is good."

Holden vaults up onto the wooden platform and I step up after him. "That is good," he says, pulling me in close. He lifts his gloved hands to my cheeks. "After all, this is one of my favorite faces."

I scrunch my lips into a pretend pout. "One of?"

He grins. "Well, you know. I'm a sucker for the classics. Helen of Troy, the Mona Lisa, that - "

"Hey. The Mona Lisa isn't even hot." I give him a little shove away from me, toward the edge of the platform.

"Disagree," Holden says. "She's beautiful in her own way. That mischievous smile, those dark, soulful eyes, the way she - "

"Fine, whatever." I cross my arms. "But I insist on being ranked above her."

"Okay, okay," Holden says. "Yours can be my second-favorite face . . . right after that guy from The Scream." He pulls me in close again.

"You're such an ass," I say, as our lips touch.

Holden laughs. "My girl Mona Lisa would never be so rude. ~ Paula Stokes

Then she smiled that subtle, mysterious Mona Lisa smile of hers that tilted the corners of her lush mouth and caused the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes to crease, where that bastard mortality had stroked her velvet skin with skeletal fingers and carved his mark on her before she had kicked him in the balls. ~ Thea Harrison

And yes, okay, I think she's pretty, but so? Lots of people, places and things are pretty. The Mona Lisa is pretty but you don't see me crushing on her. ~ J.C. Lillis

It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. ~ Gillian Flynn

I got incerdibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I exsited at all...
"Well I'm not talking about painting the Mona LIsa or curing limeter."
"Yeah?"
"If you hadn't done it, human history would have been one way..."
"Uh-huh?"
"But you did do it, so...?"
I stood on the bed, pointed my fingers at the fake stars, and screamed: "I changed the course of human history!"
"That's right."
"I changed the universe!"
"You did."
"I'm God!"
"You're an atheist."
"I don't exist!"
I fell back onto the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

You girls," said Miss Brodie, "must learn to
cultivate an expression of composure. It is one of the best assets of a woman, an expression of composure, come foul, come fair. Regard the Mona Lisa over yonder! ~ Muriel Spark

Also, since art is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas through form, the reproduction of the form only reinforces the concept. It is the idea that is being reproduced. Anyone who understands the work of art owns it. We all own the Mona Lisa. ~ Sol LeWitt

Is not gone, you're in the flatness of the deadlands. Time doesn't stop. You watch it move but you are still, like a painting with a Mona Lisa smile. ~ Marlon James

Every work of art belongs to his time. I would not paint again the Mona Lisa in the third dimension. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

Everyone collects souvenirs, whether they call them that or not. They're evidence that we've taken part in the great dance of life – been places, seen things. They're connections between us and something grander and more eternal than we are. And they belong to us. Tourists shooting blurry mobile-phone-camera snapshots of the 'Mona Lisa' or Niagara Falls want to prove they were there, not to have art to hang on their walls. ~ Michael Hughes

Nature had seemed to be closing in on us for a kill, when she suddenly turned her face away and smiled. It was a Mona Lisa smile, the meaning of which no one could figure out. ~ Richard Preston

During that war we had a word for extreme man-made disorder which was fubar, an acronym for 'fucked up beyond all recognition.' Well - the whole planet is now fubar with postwar miracles, but, back in the early 1960s, I was one of the first persons to be totally wrecked by one - an acrylic wall-paint whose colors, according to advertisements of the day, would ' ... outlive the smile on the "Mona Lisa".'
The name of the paint was Sateen Dura-Luxe. Mona Lisa is still smiling. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The curious thing about that moustache and goatee is that when you look at the Mona Lisa it becomes a man. It is not a woman disguised as a man; it is a real man, and that was my discovery, without realising it at the time. ~ Marcel Duchamp

. The tattooed goddess: her breasts have their own driver's licenses, buttocks are cemented on a sidewalk in Hollywood, her legs shine for the glory of God, and her face is the canvas of Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" in heaven. Had Sigmund Freud met her, his book, "The Interpretation of Dreams" would have been rewritten. Rapunzel to this day is jealous of her hair and Sandy Koufax is jealous of her curves, that beautiful, beautiful bitch. ~ Zac Young

Inside the museum infinity goes up on trial. Voices echo, 'This is what salvation must be like after a while.' But Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues; you can tell by the way she smiles. ~ Bob Dylan

One man's Mona Lisa is another man's velvet Elvis. ~ C.M. Bacon

I was sick of people making fun of my hair and so I cut it off and I've got much more attention than ever before. It was like when Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1906 - three times more people came to see where it used to be. ~ Emo Philips

A jostling scrum of office buildings so mediocre that the only way you ever remember them is by the frustration they induce - like a basketball team standing shoulder to shoulder between you and the Mona Lisa. ~ Prince Charles

I feel like vocals are to music what portraits are to painting. They're the humanity. Landscapes are good and fine, but at the end of the day everyone loves the Mona Lisa. ~ Grimes

This is the Mona Lisa of paleontology. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

I believe in the future of humankind. As long as there are children, as long as there are people who look up at the night sky in sheer wonder, as long as there is music and poetry and the Mona Lisa -- and old monasteries and young artists and fledgling scientists and all the other expressions of human creativity -- I will remain optimistic."
- Anton Zeilinger ~ Anton Zeilinger

You have a Mona Lisa smile," he said a few minutes later.
I turned my head to look at him. "What does that mean?"
"Mysterious. Hard-won. It makes me want to do just about anything to see your smile."
"I get the feeling you don't usually have to work that hard."
"I get the feeling you're worth it. ~ Emery Rose

Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face. ~ William S. Burroughs

Anna, Anna," Josh interrupts. "If I had a euro for every stupid thing I've done, I could buy the Mona Lisa. You'll be fine. ~ Stephanie Perkins

You had a smile like the Mona Lisa...
I had a pocket full of drugs
and nothing much to do that day.

And that night I rode my bike
back downtown from Hells Kitchen
and let go of the handlebars...
And I opened the buttons on my shirt
and it flapped around me like wings...
And the city flew away behind me
in a blur of neon, sirens and shattered glass...

And I swear to God every traffic light turned green for me... ~ S. Pierce

A lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original. ~ Louis Armstrong

That's quite all right, I said. Sfumato, that was what the painters called it; a blurring or elision of the lines, the kind Leonardo had used to give his Mona Lisa her beguiling flux. ~ Paul Murray

If I had a euro for every stupid thing I've done, I could buy the Mona Lisa. ~ Stephanie Perkins

How do we imagine a great love?
Perhaps something along the lines of Gone with the Wind or Titanic is what comes to mind. But those aren't really about love itself, but about a situation. Everything becomes more grand when it takes place in the context of a civil war, a shipwreck, or natural catastrophe. But that is like judging the painting by the frame. That the Mona Lisa should be judged a masterpiece largely because of the carvings that surround it.
Love is love. In the dramatic stories, the people involved are physically willing to give up their lives for each other, but that is exactly what happens in the great but everyday love also. You give your lives to each other the whole way and every day, until death. ~ John Ajvide Lindqvist

I really believe that if you practice enough you could paint the 'Mona Lisa' with a two-inch brush. ~ Bob Ross