Stale Quotes

Outsong in the Jungle

[Baloo:] For the sake of him who showed
One wise Frog the Jungle-Road,
Keep the Law the Man-Pack make
For thy blind old Baloo's sake!
Clean or tainted, hot or stale,
Hold it as it were the Trail,
Through the day and through the night,
Questing neither left nor right.
For the sake of him who loves
Thee beyond all else that moves,
When thy Pack would make thee pain,
Say: "Tabaqui sings again."
When thy Pack would work thee ill,
Say: "Shere Khan is yet to kill."
When the knife is drawn to slay,
Keep the Law and go thy way.
(Root and honey, palm and spathe,
Guard a cub from harm and scathe!)

Wood and Water, Wind and Tree,
Jungle-Favour go with thee!

[Kaa:] Anger is the egg of Fear--
Only lidless eyes see clear.
Cobra-poison none may leech--
Even so with Cobra-speech.
Open talk shall call to thee
Strength, whose mate is Courtesy.
Send no lunge beyond thy length.
Lend no rotten bough thy strength.
Gauge thy gape with buck or goat,
Lest thine eye should choke thy throat.
After gorging, wouldst thou sleep ?
Look thy den be hid and deep,
Lest a wrong, by thee forgot,
Draw thy killer to the spot.
East and West and North and South,
Wash thy hide and close thy mouth.
(Pit and rift and blue pool-brim,
Middle-Jungle follow him!)

Wood and Water, W ~ Rudyard Kipling

Writing that flirts with incoherence can just as readily flounder as writing characterized by simplicity and composure. There is no reliable formula for originality, and strategies that are distinguished as innovative in their first incarnation can quickly become stale in the hands of lesser artists. ~ Joanna Scott

Running water never grows stale. ~ Bruce Lee

Pay no heed to the average photographer's remarks upon "flat" and "weak" negatives. Probably he is flat, weak, stale, and unprofitable; your negative may be first-rate, and probably is if he does not approve of it. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Working with the children on 'Matilda' has been a joy. They don't do this professionally - their sense of discovery is instinctive, and the challenge for us adults is to keep that going in ourselves when we're doing it for the fiftieth or the hundredth time. To my delight and amazement, it hasn't gone stale - we discover it freshly every time. ~ Bertie Carvel

An article can be timely, topical, engaged in the issues and personalities of the moment; it is likely to be stale within the month. In five years, it may have acquired the quaint aura of a rotary phone. An article is usually Siamese-twinned to its date of birth. ~ Cynthia Ozick

Water that never moves." I say to him. "Its fine for a little while. You can drink from it and it'll sustain you. But if it sits too long it goes bad. It grows stale. It becomes toxic." I shake my head. "I need waves. I need waterfalls. I want rushing currents. ~ Tahereh Mafi

In next five to 10 years I probably would have done my best work, but I was afraid of having another 10 or 15 years ahead of me and feeling stale, so this was an opportunity to reinvigorate myself. ~ Michael Ritchie

I walked to the windows and pulled the shades up and opened the windows wide. The night air came drifting in with a kind of stale sweetness that still remembered automobile exhausts and the streets of the city. I reached for my drink and drank it slowly. The apartment house door closed itself down below me. Steps tinkled on the quiet sidewalk. A car started up not far away. It rushed off into the night with a rough clashing of gears. I went back to the bed and looked down at it. The imprint of her head was still in the pillow, of her small corrupt body still on the sheets. I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces savagely. ~ Raymond Chandler

The hotel was quaint, and their room had a little balcony over an atrium, which seemingly was home to several stray cats and had the stench of stale urine. Looking down, Lilac felt faint. The hairs on the back of her neck were erect. Sensing a haunting presence in the atrium below her, she quickly stepped back inside and closed the balcony windows to shut out the unwelcoming energy. ~ Lali A. Love

I don't feel sorry for myself, Beck. Lots of people have shitty parents and roaches in the cabinets and stale, raw Pop-Tarts for dinner and a TV that barely works and a dad who doesn't care when his son doesn't come home during a national disaster. The thing is, I'm lucky. I had the bookstore. ~ Caroline Kepnes

Women must find their own answer. That's the important thing. I'm no longer interested in books about women written by men. Even if I could believe in their objectivity, I just can't find their opinions relevant. Now I will only believe what a woman has to say about women, because even if it's not entirely true, it's her struggle and she's on the way to the answer.
Many of you seek masculine approval. Even though you have inside you your way of talking and writing, you have mountains of it inside you, and even though it is enough to begin expressing yourselves so long as it is with your vocabulary, your abstractions, and your own conceptualization, I think you are still afraid of the master: men. Of their judgment. As long as you have this fear, you will not progress. I think the future belongs to women. Men have been completely dethroned. Their rhetoric is stale, used up. We must move on the rhetoric of women, one that is anchored in the organism, in the body. ~ Marguerite Duras

This struggle between good and evil, fresh and stale, new and decrepit,
between the vigor of moral youth and the dotage of senility, is of positive benefit, for it keeps the perennial moral values alive ~ Fazlur Rahman

Cold liquid splashing across his face brought Kevin Temple back to himself. He'd been on the road all night, a dedicated run from Indiana hauling a load of fresh vegetables. Fifteen minutes out of the depot in Cleveland, and he had that stale feel, too much coffee washing down too much beef jerky. What he'd really been craving was a double cheeseburger, but while it would surprise no one to see a trucker gone flabby around ~ Marcus Sakey

I cocked an ear, but there was nothing much to hear. A girl was on the phone next door, complaining about some guy to a girlfriend, and someone down a floor was either talking to his cat or having a psychotic episode, but both voices were clearer than the soft noises coming from the living room. The vamps were presumably cleaning the wounds better than I'd been able to do at the bar, and bandaging him up. I knew nobody was planning a snack– it would be like offering people used to Beluga caviar and Dom Perignon a sack of stale Fritos and a flat Coke. Sloppy seconds weren't likely to appeal. ~ Karen Chance

Some men act upon women like champagne; when they appear the women are sparkling and full of brilliance; when they leave the fair ones grow flat, stale, and most unprofitable companions. ~ Minna Antrim

The faded scent of stale smoke had cured into the gray wood over the years, but it suddenly seems more potent. As are distinct notes of ass and sweat and some combination of the two, drifting up to your newly sensitive sloth nostrils. Did you really smell this bad? Was it noticeable to others? Why the hell do you give a shit about it right now? You're a fucking sloth. Shouldn't you be worrying about that rather than whose olfactory sensibilities you might offend? ~ Steve Lowe

His grip firmed on her arms. "I'm here. You're not alone now."

Hardly poetry, those words. A simple statement of fact. They scarcely shared the same alphabet as kindness. If true comfort were a nourishing, wholemeal loaf, what he offered her were a few stale crumbs.

It didn't matter. It didn't matter. She was a starving girl, and she hadn't the dignity to refuse.

"I'm so sorry," she managed, choking back a sob. "You're not going to like this."

And with that, Kate fell into his immense, rigid, unwilling embrace - and wept. ~ Tessa Dare

Indeed, there is something about reading in a restaurant that is borderline romantic. Leaning back in that corner booth, an evocative title in our hands, a stale cup of java in front of us, every so often bolting forward to jot a phrase onto the napkin, we look like, well, poets-unknown belletrists scraping through the hardscrabble years and awaiting the distinction that is imminent. the waiter of waitress refills our cup, we drop a memorable apothegm or two, share a laugh fraught with meaning, scope out the joint, and return to our tome. Nonbiblioholics strain to espy our title; conversation is struck up on things Kafkaesque and Kierkegaardian; and we forge a genuine biblioholic simpatico with all around. ~ Tom Raabe

Tourists and transients lived in hotels and motels along the waterfront. Behind them a belt of slums lay ten blocks deep, where the darker half of the population lived and died. On the other side of the tracks - the tracks were there - the business section wore its old Spanish facades like icing on a stale cake. ~ Ross Macdonald

You cannot bring the same stale self to the world and expect the world to be new for you. ~ Deepak Chopra

'I Am Number Four' definitely borrows from a whole bunch of genres and has a whole bunch of different themes throughout. And I think if it was just one stale two-dimensional thing then it would be kind of boring. And I think they did a fantastic job. ~ Callan McAuliffe

One of the things I've learned is never to horde ideas, because either they are not so relevant or they've gone stale. Whatever it is, pour it out. ~ Mary Quant

Being a man is the continuing battle for one's life. One loses a bit of manhood with every stale compromise to the authority of any power in which one does not believe. ~ H. Rap Brown

Stale beer sticks to wobbling tables. The cigarette machine flashes in the corner, mocking smokers who never have any change on them. There's no natural light in this pub, so it's dark and gloomy. The pain on the face of the staff tells its own story: overworked, underpaid, exploited and treated as expendable. I feel at home with them. They're so scared they will be fired from their terrible jobs, every time I order a beer they ask me if I want any peanuts or crisps, in case between drinks I've turned into the dreaded mystery shopper. The air is chewy and weighs heavy on the skin. The fruit machines in the corners don't make a sound, aware this is the last stop saloon for the drunk few who can't afford to gamble properly. Everyone here is down to their last pint and pound. ~ Craig Stone

Holy water, a couple cloves of garlic, vials of salt, and iron fillings filled the basket, intended to be door prizes for anything that showed up in an attempt to suck my blood, carry me off to faerieland, or sell me stale cookies. ~ Jim Butcher

It's very true; there are many more iron pots certainly than porcelain. But you may depend on it that every one bears some mark; even the hardest iron pots have a little bruise, a little hole somewhere. I flatter myself that I'm rather stout, but if I must tell you the truth I've been
shockingly chipped and cracked. I do very well for service yet, because I've been cleverly mended; and I try to remain in the cupboard - the quiet, dusky cupboard where there's an odour of stale spices - as much as I can. But
when I've to come out and into a strong light - then, my dear, I'm a horror! ~ Henry James

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

It appears that inherited (I should say stale) evangelical apologetics has almost completely displaced any serious attempt to seek the most likely meaning of gospel texts in their own right, in their ancient contexts. ~ Robert M. Price

Soon, sampled by everyone,
Stale and pallid,
I'll come out
And mumble toothlessly
That today I'm
Remarkably candid. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Wrestling became very stale and boring for me, and I wasn't really making any money with it. So I decided to get into fighting. ~ Josh Koscheck

It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself up out of the dark abyss of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. ~ H.L. Mencken

The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Young love goes stale and slackens. You change, and you shed what you no longer need. It's just part of growing up. ~ Anna Pitoniak

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while. ~ Tom Perrotta

Voltaire, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Rousseau ... established a new connection between mankind and the universe, and the result was a vast release of energy. The sun was reborn to man and so was the moon. To man, the very sun goes stale, becomes a habit. Comes a saviour, a seer, and the very sun dances new in heaven. ~ D.H. Lawrence

To keep from going stale you must forget your professional outlook and rediscover the virginal eye of the amateur. ~ Brassai

This was one of those mid-thirties moments when you take a look at the stale, half-chewed bagel your life has become and kiss jealousy on its smokey mouth. ~ Steve Almond

By all kinds of traps and sign-boards, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, exclude such trespassers from the only ground which can be sacred to you. It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember! If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers. There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed. I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. Our very intellect shall be macadamized, as it were,--its foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over; and if you would know what will make for the most durable pavement, surpassing rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphaltum, you have only to look into some of our minds which have been subjected to this treatment so long. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I arrange to meet Kimmie and Wes before homeroom the following day. The cafeteria serves breakfast for early risers in the form of stale toast, oatmeal sludge, and watered-down orange juice.
"This had better be worth it," Wes says. "By my calculation, I'd say you're denying us at least thirty minutes of sleep."
"Not to mention precious primping time." Kimmie motions to her outfit: a black leather poodle skirt paired with a glittery pink T that reads DEMON IN TRAINING. "Like it? I also have a coordinating pitchfork, but in all this rush I forgot it at home."
"Along with your sense of style," Wes jokes, resting his cheek against her shoulder. ~ Laurie Faria Stolarz

[Someone had left the lid off the big tin of fairies and, if they were to be used up before they went off then lovely, moist, stale-fairy cakes were the only option. Nota bene, years later all of the magic would be taken out of these little confections and they would become known in "global" "English" rather more drearily as "cupcakes". This is why you can no longer buy tins of either fresh or dried fairies except in speciality comestible shops.] ~ Ian Hutson

[...] the thought of entering that stale, tomb-like house again caused my skin to break out into braille. ~ Ronald Malfi

Stale godliness is ungodliness. Let our religion be as warm, and constant, and natural as the flow of the blood in our veins. A living God must be served in a living way. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

We have to face the fact that most men and women out there are more stale than they know, more bored than they care to admit. ~ John W. Gardner

It was a delicious meal
skim milk, wheat middlings, leftover pancakes, half a doughnut, the rind of a summer squash, two pieces of stale toast, a third of a gingersnap, a fish tail, one orange peel, several noodles from a noodle soup, the scum off a cup of cocoa, an ancient jelly roll, a strip of paper from the lining of the garbage pail, and a spoonful of raspberry jello. ~ E.B. White

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry ~ James Shapiro

In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles. ~ Robert Bringhurst

Aurobindo Ghose writes somewhere of the present as 'the pure and virgin moment,' that razor's edge of time and existence which divides the past from the future, and is, and yet, instantaneously is not. The phrase is attractive and yet what does it mean? The virgin moment emerging from the veil of the future in all its naked purity, coming into contact with us, and immediately becoming the soiled and stale past. Is it we that soil it and violate it? Or is the moment not so virgin after all, for it is bound up with all the harlotry of the past? ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

I think writing is a part-time career, because otherwise you get a little stale, maybe even self-indulgent, when you have to fill the hours with sentences. I don't think, if I wrote 12 hours a day, my work would be much better. ~ Cynthia Voigt

Like one of his heroes, Tom Waits, whenever Yorke feels like his songwriting is getting too comfortable or stale, he'll pick up an instrument he doesn't know how to play and try to write with it. This is yet another trait of amateurs - they'll use whatever tools they can get their hands on to try to get their ideas into the world. "I'm an artist, man," said John Lennon. "Give me a tuba, and I'll get you something out of it. ~ Austin Kleon

The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there's nowhere else. It's the top of the world. ~ John Dos Passos

That ideal had become as ossified as the statue of Benjamin Franklin up there. From New York to Los Angeles, American newspapers were yellow and stale before they even came off the press. Dog-beaten by a dwindling readership, financial losses and partisan attacks, editors had stripped them of their personality in an attempt to offend no one. And so there was no more reason to read them. Safety before Truth. Grammar over Guts. Winners before Losers. My eyes traveled down from Franklin to the iron sconces above the entrance. ~ Charlie LeDuff

~Posters with torn edges hanging from rotten walls~

The doctor told me something once
she said
STOP DRINKING
I slapped her across the face with this
NO
I walked right out of that office
went right down to the hole
I told the bartender
WHISKEY, MOTHERFUCKER
he poured and he poured
and I slapped my money down on that bar
the man I had been driving around with
he just sort of sat there next to this hooker
she probably had something rotten
way down there between her legs
her eyes told of no soul
I emptied the bottle down my throat
and ordered some chips
the bartender told me
THEY'RE STALE
and I give him a
I DON'T FUCKIN' CARE,
GIVE ME SOMETHIN'
He slid me a ham sandwich dripping with cheap low-fat mayo and said
ENJOY
I went back to my room
and talked all night
so much conversation
it turned the toilet bowl pale ~ Dave Matthes

Those afternoons in the library, breathing the stale sun-warmed dust of a thousand stories (accented by the collective mildew of a hundred years of rising damp), had been enchanted. Two decades ago now, and yet here, on the No. 168 bus towards Hampstead Heath, Peter was beset with an almost bodily sense of being back there. His lips twitched with the memory of being nine years old and lanky as a foal. His mood lifted as he remembered how large, how filled with possibilities, and yet, at once, how safe and navigable the world had seemed when he was shut within those four walls . ~ Kate Morton

I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that man, that Franco-Hungarian writer... I would rather not dwell upon him at all, but I cannot help it - he is surging up from under my pen. Today one does not hear much about him; and this is good, for it proves that I was right in resisting his evil spell, right in experiencing a creepy chill down my spine whenever this or that new book of his touched my hand. The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates. Lean and arrogant, with some poisonous pun ever ready to fork out and quiver at you, and with a strange look of expectancy in his dull brown veiled eyes, this false wag had, I daresay, an irresistible effect on small rodents. Having mastered the art of verbal invention to perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words, a title he valued higher than that of a writer; personally, I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books, of penning things that had not really happened in some way or other; and I remember once saying to him as I braved the mockery of his encouraging nods that, were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one's personal truth.

I had known his books before I knew him; a faint disgust was already replacing the ~ Vladimir Nabokov

It might be hard to believe, but the air in prison is different. There's like one thousand people sucking on the one little piece of fresh air until it turns stale. ~ Sister Souljah

When all the world is old, lad, And all the trees are brown; And all the sport is stale, lad, And all the wheels run down, Creep home and take your place there, The spent and maimed among: God grant you find one face there You loved when all was young. ~ Susanna Kearsley

It struck me that we-that moth and I-were two opposite extremes. My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in every
way; but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all. While thinking this thought, I reached out a finger to feel the moth's velvety surface; but when I brushed it with my fingertip, it turned all at once into a pile of ash without even a sound, without even a moment in which I could see it crumbling. I was so astonished I let out a cry. The swirling in my mind stopped; I felt as if I had stepped into the eye of a storm. I let the tiny shroud and its pile of ashes flutter to the ground; and now I understood the thing that had puzzled me all morning. The stale air had washed away. The past was gone. ~ Arthur Golden

Many couples permit their marriages to become stale and their love to grow cold like old bread or worn-out jokes or cold gravy. These people will do well to reevaluate, to renew their courting, to express their affection, to acknowledge kindness, and to increase their consideration so their marriage again can become beautiful, sweet, and growing. While marriage is difficult, and discordant and frustrated marriages are common, yet real, lasting happiness is possible, and marriage can be more an exultant ecstasy than the human mind can conceive. ~ Spencer W. Kimball

There's nothing worse than having everybody thinking alike, talking alike and having the same direction in mind. It gets stale that way. ~ Alex Van Halen

Make Jesus Christ your theme! I have seen preachers espouse causes and champion movements, and when the cause died and the movement collapsed, the preacher vanished too. But the man who glories in Christ never grows stale. ~ Vance Havner

Don't pass on your passions, to settle in the stale normality. Endure. Strive. Ensure. ~ Anthony Liccione

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you're better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads. ~ Rosemarie Urquico

Stale artifacts of the past' are always 'active components of the present moment' when they are experienced in the present moment. ~ Walter Darby Bannard

They know they dare not have their stuff stripped down to plain words. These Bishops and parsons with their beloved Christianity are like a man who has poisoned his wife and says her body's too sacred for a post-mortem. Nowadays, by the light we have, any ecclesiastic must be born blind or an intellectual rascal. Don't tell me. The world's had this apostolic succession of oily old humbugs from early Egypt onwards, trying to come it over people. Antiquity's no excuse. A sham is no better for being six thousand years stale. Christianity's no more use to us now than
the Pyramids. ~ H.G.Wells

There had been a cross-fertilizing trickle of researchers moving in both directions on a strictly one-for-one basis for years, dating back to the days of Eisenhower and Krushchev. There were a great many good motives for that: an honest appreciation of the supranational character of science; impulses of friendliness that are hard to wipe out completely in the individual human being; the desire to be exposed to a fresh and interesting outlook and to have your own slightly stale notions greeted by others as fresh and interesting. ~ Isaac Asimov

Emptiness. He saw no one, only a large chamber with pewlike rows of seats and, at the far end, a casket surrounded by flowers. Off in a small sideroom an old-fashioned reed pump organ and a few wooden folding chairs. The mortuary smelled of dust and flowers, a sweet, stale mixture that repelled him. Think of all the Iowans, the thought, who've embraced eternity in this listless room. ~ Philip K. Dick

It's the revelatory aspect, the gradual unfurling of another person, the sense of exploration and discovery that comes from passing a day in the company of a stranger because a stranger cannot judge fully. They're only privy to what another gives them, because the more knowledge one has the less negative space there is - the greater the risk of becoming bland and stale, of being forever trapped inside the box of one's self and never being able to escape it without another wondering what's wrong, wondering why this being they know so well is acting out of character. ~ Adam Gallari

Henry revealed the strategies Entz Media used to break marriages apart. Entz programming pushed the idea of marriage being stale and uneventful and then glamorized a freer and more exciting life outside of marriage. Institutions that upheld chastity before marriage and fidelity within marriage were ridiculed. Storylines relating to religion centered on religious conspiracies and how people gained enlightenment apart from God, not from Him. The idea of commitment -- to a wife, a child, a religion -- was ridiculed. Selfishness was championed. ~ Patrick Ord

She had died, I just never told her. So still, we walk, eat and sleep together, in fear one day she'll come to realize it. ~ Anthony Liccione

Symmetry may have its appeal but it is inherently stale. Some kind of imbalance is behind every transformation. ~ Marcelo Gleiser

Howard was almost as fond of this hall as he was of his own shop. The Brownies used it on Tuesdays, and the Women's Institute on Wednesdays. It had hosted jumble sales and Jubilee celebrations, wedding receptions and wakes, and it smelled of all of these things: of stale clothes and coffee urns, and the ghosts of home-baked cakes and meat salads; of dust and human bodies; but primarily of aged wood and stone. ~ J.K. Rowling

On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man's experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them ; to a man of genius they were interesting adventures; but to the dull perceptions of an ordinary individual they would have been stale, everyday occurrences.
This is, in the highest degree, the case with many of Goethe's and Byron's poems, which are obviously founded upon actual facts; where it is open to a foolish reader to envy the poet because so many delightful things happened to him, instead of envying that mighty power of fantasy which was capable of turning a fairly common experience into something so great and beautiful. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

There is nothing as stale as an empty mind. ~ Daniel Kemp

Sandwiches come in shrink-wrap - therefore, I must masturbate with gloves on. Lunchtime! The coffee's stale but the cream will be fresh. ~ Jarod Kintz

Teams do not go physically flat, they go mentally stale. ~ Vince Lombardi

I feel like people are starting to come around and embrace rock. Because I guess they're getting sick of the stale sounds of certain electronica. They kind of get really bored with the fact that it's so self-indulgent. ~ Jason Reece

What's the point of keeping all your love inside. It'll get stale if you don't use it. ~ Art Hochberg

We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention. ~ Thomas C. Foster

Life, my dear Watson, is infinitely stranger than fiction; stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We could not conceive the things that are merely commonplace to existence. If we could hover over this great city, remove the roofs, and peep in at the things going on, it would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions flat, stale and unprofitable. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

As Wessner struggled to his feet, he resembled a battlefield, for his clothing was in ribbons and his face and hands streaming blood. "I--I guess I got enough," he mumbled. "Oh, you do?" roared Freckles. "Well this ain't your say. You come on to me ground, lying about me Boss and intimatin' I'd stale from his very pockets. Now will you be standing up and taking your medicine like a man, or getting it poured down the throat of you like a baby? I ain't got enough! This is only just the beginning with me. Be looking out there!" He sprang against Wessner and sent him rolling. He attacked the unresisting figure and fought him until he lay limp and quiet and Freckles had no strength left to lift an arm. Then he arose and stepped back, gasping for breath. With his first lungful of air he shouted: "Time!" But the figure of Wessner lay motionless. ~ Gene Stratton-Porter

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. ~ Willa Cather

We should be dissatisfied with the stale, routine way we've been worshiping and seek His presence. We should build the temple and build a relationship with Him that's genuine and real. ~ Lynn Austin

BLOOM: I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
INTERVIEWER: It's always interminable?
BLOOM: I do not know anyone who has ever benefited from Freudian or any other mode of analysis, except by being, to use the popular trope for it, so badly shrunk, that they become quite dried out. That is to say, all passion spent. Perhaps they become better people, but they also become stale and uninteresting people with very few exceptions. Like dried-out cheese, or wilted flowers. ~ Harold Bloom

I never wanted to churn it out. Comedians tend to work all the time. They never put it down like musicians who might make an album then take three or four years off to recharge their batteries. Comedians tend to work straight through and they get stale because of that. Even when I didn't have a lot of money I never ever did it unless I had something new to say. ~ Chris Rock

The librarian, whom I had never seen before, presided over the library like a watchdog, one of those poor dogs who are deliberately made vicious by being chained up and given little to eat; ot better, like the old, toothless cobra, pale because of centuries of darkness, who guards the king's treasure in the Jungle Book. Paglietta, poor woman, was little less than a lusus naturae: she was small, without breasts or hips, waxen, wilted, and monstrously myopic; she wore glasses so thick and concave that, looking at her head-on, her eyes, light blue, almost white, seemed very far away, stuck at the back of her cranium. She gave the impression of never having been young, although she was certainly not more than thirty, and of having been born there, in the shadows, in that vague odor of mildew and stale air. ~ Primo Levi

The wise man is he who is not surprised when he finds stale tea in a beautiful teapot! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The monk in the grip of acedia would find it difficult or impossible to read. Looking away from his book, he might try to distract himself with gossip but would more likely glance in disgust at his surroundings and at his fellow monks. He would feel that things were better somewhere else, that he was wasting his life, that everything was stale and pointless, that he was suffocating. ~ Stephen Greenblatt

For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water conservationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall. ~ Ray Bradbury

Sweat isn't a bad thing," he said, leaning his head against the wall thoughtfully. "Some of the best things in life happen while your sweating. Yeah, if you get too much of it and it gets old and stale, it turns pretty gross. But on a beautiful women? Intoxicating. If you could smell things like a vampire does, you'd know what I'm talking about. Most people mess it all up and drown themselves in perfume. Perfume can be good ... especially if you get one that goes with your chemistry. But you only need a hint. Mix about 20 percent of that with 80 percent of your own perspiration ... mmm." He tilted his head to the side and looked at me. "Dead sexy. ~ Richelle Mead

There is a distinction between a relationship which has a routine and a relationship which becomes routine ~ Johnny Rich

And still I look for the men who will dare to be
roses of England
wild roses of England
men who are wild roses of England
with metal thorns, beware!
but still more brave and still more rare
the courage of rosiness in a cabbage world
fragrance of roses in a stale stink of lies
rose-leaves to bewilder the clever fools
and rose-briars to strangle the machine. ~ D.H. Lawrence

A good engineer gets stale very fast if he doesn't keep his hands dirty. ~ Wernher Von Braun

O the stale old dogs who pretend to guard
the morals of the masses,
how smelly they make the great back-yard
wetting after everyone that passes. ~ D.H. Lawrence

His touch comforted her because for a moment there, she would've actually drifted away in the stale evening wind of Saint County. ~ A.A. Gupte

Tis the gradual furnace of the world,
In whose hot air poor spirits are upcurl'd
Until they crumple, or else grow like steel-
Which kills in us the bloom, the youth, the spring-
Which leaves the fierce necessity to feel,
But takes away the power- this can avail,
By drying up our joy in everything,
To make our former pleasures all seem stale.

- Tristram and Iseult ~ Matthew Arnold

The story of a passionate woman in a stale marriage is as old as Helen of Troy. ~ G. Willow Wilson

You see flaws in every face
If you look long enough.

That's why I'm so afraid
Of the word 'forever'.

Forever is long enough
For sunrises to become stale
For fire to become tame
For a favorite song
To become like nails
On a chalkboard;

Forever is long enough
For passion to waste away
Like grapes into raisins
Under the beating sun
Of countless days. ~ Justin Wetch

Led through lined and grimy streets down to the river and eastward, as he had expected, towards the Isle of Dogs. A raw wind blew up from the water, carrying the smell of salt, stale fish, the overspill of sewage and the cold dampness of the outgoing tide sweeping down from the Pool of London towards the estuary and the sea. Across the gray water endless strings of barges made their heavy way downstream, laden with merchandise for half the earth. Ships passed them outward bound, down towards the docks of Greenwich and beyond. ~ Anne Perry

With every adversity comes a blessing because a shock acts as a reminder to oneself that we must not get stale in routine. ~ Bruce Lee