I have one aim, the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing. — Aubrey Beardsley
I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear. — Flannery O'Connor
Surely the vogue of those twisted and contorted human figures must be as short as it is artificial. — Harriet Monroe
The ugly is very appealing to man. It's instinct. One shrinks from the ugly, yet wants to look at it. There's a devilish fascination in it. We extract pleasure from horror. — Sonya Levien
The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture. — Salvador Dali
There is no beauty without some strangeness — Edgar Allan Poe
You must put the odor of the human body into images describe for me the implacable, the egoistic, the sensual, the cruel there are nothing but disgusting people in this world. — Kenji Mizoguchi
Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque. — U.G. Krishnamurti
An unchurched christian is a grotesque anomaly. The New Testament knows nothing of such a person. For the church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought. It is not an accident of history. On the contrary, the church is God's new community. — John Stott
Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. — Flannery O'Connor
I've seen so many beautiful curvy women gain success in hollywood and then wither into bobble headed stick figures in some grotesque attempt to fit a revolting hollywood trend. I like real women, not the broomsticks that Hollywood has been selling lately. — Matthew Gray Gubler
I have to be careful to get out before I become the grotesque caricature of a hatchet-faced woman with big knockers. — Jamie Lee Curtis
Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE. — Tristan Tzara
It’s a shameful moment for U.S. media when it insists on being subservient to the grotesque propaganda agencies of a violent, aggressive state. — Noam Chomsky
I strenuously object to the very word "grotesque" which has become hackneyed to the point of nausea...I would prefer my music to be described as "Scherzo-ish" in quality, or else by three words describing the various degrees of the Scherzo - whimsicality, laughter, mockery. — Sergei Prokofiev
The grotesque prudishness and archness with which garlic is treated in [England] has led to the superstition that rubbing the bowl with it before putting the salad in gives sufficient flavor. It rather depends whether you are going to eat the bowl or the salad. — Elizabeth David
There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought --a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities! — Mark Twain
The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider. — Tom Morello
The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism. — H. L. Mencken
People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something. — Soren Kierkegaard
I'm a cartoonist, it's what I am at heart, so cartoons take reality and deform it and make it grotesque, you make it funny, but you alter it. If it works, it's based on reality. That's what I try to do. — Terry Gilliam
Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. — Oscar Wilde
I believe that there is no test of greatness in periods, nations or men more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention, or incapability of understanding it. — John Ruskin
In order to win over Paris and appear, in the eyes of all Europe, an absolute innovator, the most advanced of all, I urge you to get to work with all your heart, resolute on being bolder, crazier, more advanced, surprising, eccentric, incomprehensible, and grotesque than anybody else in music. I urge you to be a madman. — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few of them for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate, and the contrast between the popular estimate of my powers and achievements and the reality is simply grotesque. — Albert Einstein
I envy people who can just look at a sunset. I wonder how you can shoot it. There is nothing more grotesque to me than a vacation. — Dustin Hoffman
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself. — H. L. Mencken
All men are somewhat ridiculous and grotesque, just because they are men; and in this respect artists might well be regarded as man multiplied by two. So it is, was, and shall be. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
The moose is singularly grotesque and awkward to look at. Why should it stand so high at the shoulders? Why have so long a head? Why have no tail to speak of? — Henry David Thoreau
Its obvious nonsense, but it makes nice people feel good about themselves to do their bit for the planet. Its vanity of a grotesque kind to believe that mankind, and our carbon footprint, has more impact on the future of Earth than Nature, which bends our planet to its will, as it sees fit. — Charles Saatchi
There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,--when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. — Kate Chopin
Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which like a fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are. — Karl von Clausewitz
As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer. — Victor Hugo
You see we adults have learned how to disguise our terrible characters but a child... well, it's like a grotesque drawing of us. They should be neither seen nor heard. And no one must make another one. — Gore Vidal
My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life. — Max Beckmann
. . . nothing could be more grotesquely unjust than a code of morals, reinforced by laws, which relieves men from responsibility for irregular sexual acts, and for the same acts drives women to abortion, infanticide, prostitution, and self-destruction. — Suzanne La Follette
...I am an anomaly in the system, living proof of how grotesque it is, and every day I mock it gently, deep within my impenetrable self. — Muriel Barbery
At six
I lived in a graveyard full of dolls,
avoiding myself,
my body, the suspect
in its grotesque house. — Anne Sexton
It is often said that the modern exhibition has ruined painting. It is an unfortunate fact that it does encourage competition, so that, to attract attention to his work, an artist is tempted to descend to sensationalism, whether it is expressed by strong colour, grotesque handling, unusual subject, or sheer size. — Walter J. Phillips
Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...sexual intercourse!...His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values. — Mark Twain
Wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions, great in imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and not overborne by an undue or hardened pre-eminence of the mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will exist in full energy. — John Ruskin
The true grotesque being the expression of the repose or play of a serious mind, there is a false grotesque opposed to it, which is the result of the full exertion of a frivolous one. — John Ruskin
In Conclusion
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