Quote/ Passage Thread

[SpaceOddity]

'Cos we need one. From The Secret Garden...

"One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands out and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one's heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun--which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with the millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone's eyes."

[Lucky]

Good idea, I always keep a highlighter in reach when I read. Here's a quote that I felt spoke to me and is a personal flaw of mine that I'm trying to improve...

"It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it." -Into the Wild

[SpaceOddity]

From Brideshead Revisited

"I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember."

"'Perhaps,' I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke - a thought to fade and vanish like smoke without a trace -'perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.'"

"I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world."

"That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty."

"we possess nothing certainly except the past"

[Kurosawa Fan]

This thread is making me want to reconsider my "no highlighting" rule. There are many quotes I love while reading, but I can never remember where they are in the book afterward.

[SpaceOddity]

I don't highlight. *shrug*

[megladon8]

I wouldn't dare post my favorite quotes.

I feel retarded when I look at what I consider "deep", "meaningful" or "evocative"...then see what others like, and it's like a little kid trying to justify his love of Thomas the Tank Engine to Cormac McCarthy.

[Mysterious Dude]

His jaws uplifting from their fell repast,
That sinner wip’d them on the hairs o’ th’ head,
Which he behind had mangled, then began:
“Thy will obeying, I call up afresh
Sorrow past cure, which but to think of wrings
My heart, or ere I tell on’t. But if words,
That I may utter, shall prove seed to bear
Fruit of eternal infamy to him,
The traitor whom I gnaw at, thou at once
Shalt see me speak and weep. Who thou mayst be
I know not, nor how here below art come:
But Florentine thou seemest of a truth,
When I do hear thee. Know I was on earth
Count Ugolino, and th’ Archbishop he
Ruggieri. Why I neighbour him so close,
Now list. That through effect of his ill thoughts
In him my trust reposing, I was ta’en
And after murder’d, need is not I tell.
What therefore thou canst not have heard, that is,
How cruel was the murder, shalt thou hear,
And know if he have wrong’d me. A small grate
Within that mew, which for my sake the name
Of famine bears, where others yet must pine,
Already through its opening sev’ral moons
Had shown me, when I slept the evil sleep,
That from the future tore the curtain off.
This one, methought, as master of the sport,
Rode forth to chase the gaunt wolf and his whelps
Unto the mountain, which forbids the sight
Of Lucca to the Pisan. With lean brachs
Inquisitive and keen, before him rang’d
Lanfranchi with Sismondi and Gualandi.
After short course the father and the sons
Seem’d tir’d and lagging, and methought I saw
The sharp tusks gore their sides. When I awoke
Before the dawn, amid their sleep I heard
My sons (for they were with me) weep and ask
For bread. Right cruel art thou, if no pang
Thou feel at thinking what my heart foretold;
And if not now, why use thy tears to flow?
Now had they waken’d; and the hour drew near
When they were wont to bring us food; the mind
Of each misgave him through his dream, and I
Heard, at its outlet underneath lock’d up
The’ horrible tower: whence uttering not a word
I look’d upon the visage of my sons.
I wept not: so all stone I felt within.
They wept: and one, my little Anslem, cried:
“Thou lookest so! Father what ails thee?” Yet
I shed no tear, nor answer’d all that day
Nor the next night, until another sun
Came out upon the world. When a faint beam
Had to our doleful prison made its way,
And in four countenances I descry’d
The image of my own, on either hand
Through agony I bit, and they who thought
I did it through desire of feeding, rose
O’ th’ sudden, and cried, Father, we should grieve
Far less, if thou wouldst eat of us: thou gav’st
These weeds of miserable flesh we wear,
And do thou strip them off from us again.’
Then, not to make them sadder, I kept down
My spirit in stillness. That day and the next
We all were silent. Ah, obdurate earth!
Why open’dst not upon us? When we came
To the fourth day, then Geddo at my feet
Outstretch’d did fling him, crying, ’Hast no help
For me, my father!’ “There he died, and e’en
Plainly as thou seest me, saw I the three
Fall one by one ’twixt the fifth day and sixth:
Whence I betook me now grown blind to grope
Over them all, and for three days aloud
Call’d on them who were dead. Then fasting got
The mastery of grief.” Thus having spoke,
Once more upon the wretched skull his teeth
He fasten’d, like a mastiff’s ’gainst the bone
Firm and unyielding.

- from Dante's Inferno, Canto XXXIII

[Wryan]

My favorite passage from the audacious Grendel, John Gardner's lunatic re-imagining of Beowulf told from the monster's point of view. Can't figure out how to force indents into the page, so this is the best I could do:

I was sure, going back to my cave (it was nearly dawn), that he wouldn't follow me. They never did. But I was wrong; he was a new kind of Scylding. He must have started tracking me that same morning. A driven man, a maniac. He arrived at the cave three nights later.

I was asleep. I woke up with a start, not sure what it was that had awakened me. I saw my mother moving slowly and silently past me, blue murder in her eyes. I understood instantly, not with my mind but with something quicker, and I darted around in front to block her way. I pushed her back.

There he lay, gasping on his belly like a half-drowned rat. His face and throat and arms were a crosshatch of festering cuts, the leavings of the firesnakes. His hair and beard hung straight down like seaweed. He panted for a long time, then rolled his eyes up, vaguely in my direction. In the darkness he couldn't see me, though I could see him. He closed his hand on the sword hilt and jiggled the sword a little, too weak to raise it off the floor.

"Unferth has come!" he said.

I smiled. My mother moved back and forth like a bear behind me, stirred up by the smell.

He crawled toward me, the sword noisily scraping on the cave's rock floor. Then he gave out again. "It will be sung," he whispered, then paused again to get wind. "It will be sung year on year and age on age that Unferth went down through the burning lake--" he paused to pant "--and gave his life in battle with the world-rim monster." He let his cheek fall to the floor and lay panting for a long time, saying nothing. It dawned on me that he was waiting for me to kill him. I did nothing. I sat down and put my elbows on my knees and my chin on my fists and merely watched. He lay with his eyes closed and began to get his breath back. He whispered: "It's all very well to make a fool of me before my fellow thanes. All very well to talk about dignity and noble language and all the rest, as if heroism were a golden trinket, mere outward show, and hollow. But such is not the case, monster. That is to say--" He paused, seemed to grope; he'd lost his train of thought.

I said nothing, merely waited, blocking my mother by stretching out an arm when she came near.

"Even now you mock me," Unferth whispered. I had an uneasy feeling he was close to tears. If he wept, I was not sure I could control myself. His pretensions to uncommon glory were one thing. If for even an instant he pretended to misery like mine...

"You think me a witless fool," he whispered. "Oh, I heard what you said. I caught your nasty insinuations. 'I thought heroes were only in poetry,' you said. Implying that what I've made of myself is mere fairytale stuff." He raised his head, trying to glare at me, but his blind stare was in the wrong direction, following my mother's pacing. "Well, it's not, let me tell you." His lips trembled and I was certain he would cry, I would have to destroy him from pure disgust, but he held it. He let his head fall again and sucked for air. A little of his voice came back, so that he no longer had to whisper but could bring out his words in a slightly reedy whine. "Poetry's trash, mere clouds of words, comfort to the hopeless. But this is no cloud, no syllabled phantom that stands here shaking its sword at you."

I let the slight exaggeration pass.

But Unferth didn't. "Or lies here," he said. "A hero is not afraid to face cruel truth." That reminded him, apparently, of what he'd meant to say before. "You talk of heroism as noble language, dignity. It's more than that, as my coming here has proved. No man above us will ever know whether Unferth died here or fled to the hills like a coward. Only you and I and God will know the truth. That's inner heroism."

"Hmm," I said. It was not unusual, of course, to hear them contradict themselves, but I would have liked it if he'd stuck to one single version, either that they would know and sing his tragedy or that they wouldn't. So it would have been in a poem, surely, if Unferth were a character, good or evil, heroic or not. But reality, alas, is essentially shoddy. I let out a sigh.

He jerked his head up, shocked. "Does nothing have value in your horrible ruin of a brain?"

I waited. The whole shit-ass scene was his idea, not mine.

I saw the light dawning in his eyes. "I understand," he said. I thought he would laugh at the bottomless stupidity of my cynicism, but while the laugh was still starting at the corners of his eyes, another look came, close to fright. "You think me deluded. Tricked by my own walking fairytale. You think I came without a hope of winning-- came to escape indignity by suicide!" He did laugh now, not amused: sorrowful and angry. The laugh died quickly. "I didn't know how deep the pool was," he said. "I had a chance. I knew I had no more than that. It's all a hero asks for."

I sighed. The word "hero" was beginning to grate. He was an idiot. I could crush him like a fly, but I held back.

"Go ahead, scoff," he said, petulant. "Except in the life of a hero, the whole world's meaningless. The hero sees values beyond what's possible. That's the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile."

I nodded in the darkness. "And breaks up the boredom," I said.

He raised up on his elbows, and the effort of it made his shoulders shake. "One of us is going to die tonight. Does that break up your boredom?"

"It's not true," I said. "A few minutes from now I'm going to carry you back to Hrothgar, safe and sound. So much for poetry."

"I'll kill myself," he whispered. He shook violently now.

"Up to you," I answered reasonably, "but you'll admit it may seem at least a trifle cowardly to some."

His fists closed and his teeth clenched; then he relaxed and lay flat.

I waited for him to find an answer. Minutes passed. It came to me that he had quit. He had glimpsed a glorious ideal, had struggled toward it and seized it and come to understand it, and was disappointed. One could sympathize.
He was asleep.

I picked him up gently and carried him home. I laid him at the door of Hrothgar's meadhall, still asleep, killed the two guards so I wouldn't be misunderstood, and left.

He lives on, bitter, feebly challenging my midnight raids from time to time (three times this summer), crazy with shame that he alone is always spared, and furiously jealous of the dead. I laugh when I see him. He throws himself at me, or he cunningly sneaks up behind, sometimes in disguise--a goat, a dog, a sickly old woman--and I roll on the floor with laughter. So much for heroism. So much for the harvest-virgin. So much, also, for the alternative visions of blind old poets and dragons.

[SpaceOddity]

Duras...

"that she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion."

"In a certain state of mind, all trace of feeling is banished. Whenever I remain silent in a certain way, I don't love you, have you noticed that?"

"they look at each other, endlessly, endlessly, decide that it's impossible to describe, to give an account of those moments, of that evening whose veritable depth and density they, and they alone, are familiar with, that night whose hours they had seen slip by, one by one, until the last had gone"

"she had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become"

"When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them."

"she can remember everyone admiring a rare kind of evening they spoke of as something they ought to save from oblivion to describe to their children later. And that for her part she would have had it hidden, had that late summer evening buried and burned to ashes."

[SpaceOddity]

Peter Pan...

"Stars are beautiful, but they must not take an active part in anything, they must just look on forever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was."

"He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be forever barred."

That was the last time the girl Wendy ever saw him. For a little while longer she tried for his sake not to have growing pains; and she felt she was untrue to him when she got a prize for general knowledge. But, the years came and went without bringing the careless boy; and when they met again Wendy was a married woman, and Peter was no more to her than a little dust in the box in which she had kept her toys. Wendy was grown up. You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes to grow up. In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than other girls.
All the boys were grown up and done for by this time; so it is scarcely worth while saying anything more about them. You may see the twins and Nibs and Curly any day going to an office, each carrying a little bag and an umbrella. Michael is an engine driver. Slightly married a lady of title, and so he became a lord. You see that judge in a wig coming out at the iron door? That used to be Tootles. The bearded man who doesn't know any story to tell his children was once John.

*bawls*

*swears vendetta against age*

[SpaceOddity]

Wuthering Heights...

"I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water and altered the colour of my mind"

"heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out"

"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same"

"The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her."

"I am Heathcliff - he's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself - but, as my own being"

"I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free... Why am I so changed? I'm sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills."

"I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it."



*pines for Heathcliff*

[SpaceOddity]

Edith Wharton...

"They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets."

"It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now."

"There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you -I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you"

"What if 'niceness' carried to that supreme degree were only a negation, the curtain dropped before an emptiness?"


"Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears."
"Well, she has opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say she blinds people. What she does is the contrary - she fastens their eyelids open, so they're never again in the blessed darkness."

"When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed."

[Melville]

From Sartre's Nausea:

"I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other."

"I have never before had such a strong feeling that I was devoid of secret dimensions, confined within the limits of my body, from which airy thoughts float up like bubbles. I build memories with my present self. I am cast out, forsaken in the present."

"I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day."

"I looked around me: the present, nothing but the present... Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be—and behind them... there is nothing."

"My thought is me: that’s why I can’t stop... At this very moment—it’s frightful—if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing."

"'I was just thinking,’ I tell him, laughing, 'that here we sit, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and really there is nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.'"

"Things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things."

"There were those idiots who came to tell you about will-power and struggle for life. Hadn’t they ever seen a beast or a tree?"

[Melville]

From Joyce's Portrait of the Artist:

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...

His father told him that story."


From Pessoa's Book of Disquiet:

"The monotony, the dull sameness of the same days, the absence of difference between today and yesterday-- I hope things stay like that forever, and that I have my soul alert to enjoy the fly that amuses me by flying by chance before my eyes, the peal of laughter that floats up from the street, the vast sense of liberation that it's time to shut up the office, the infinite repose of a day off."

"There are creatures who suffer for hours and hours because they cannot be the figures in paintings or on playing cards. There are souls on whom not being able to be people from the Middle Ages weighs like a malediction. I've had that problem. But not today. I've gone beyond it. But it does pain me, for example, not to be able to dream of two kings in different kingdoms belonging, for example, to universes with different kinds of space and time. Not having achieved this truly saddens me."


From Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway:

"Human nature, in short, was on him—the repulsive brute, with the blood red nostrils."

[Melville]

From Dicken's Great Expectations:

"I therefore hit out at him and was going to hit out again, when he said, 'Aha! Would you?' and began dancing backwards and forwards in a manner quite unparalleled within my limited experience...
He fell to pulling off, not only his jacket and waistcoat, but his shirt too, in a manner at once light-hearted, businesslike, and bloodthirsty...
My heart failed me when I saw him squaring at me with every demonstration of mechanical nicety, and eyeing my anatomy as if he were minutely choosing his bone. I never have been so surprised in my life, as when I let out the first blow, and saw him lying on his back...
But he was on his feet directly, and after sponging himself with a great show of dexterity began squaring again. The second greatest surprise I have ever had in my life was seeing him on his back again, looking up at me out of a black eye.
His spirit inspired me with great respect. He seemed to have no strength, and he never once hit me hard, and he was always knocked down; but, he would be up again in a moment, sponging himself or drinking out of the water-bottle, with the greatest satisfaction in seconding himself according to form, and then came at me with an air and a show that made me believe he really was going to do for me at last."

[Melville]

From Camus' The Stranger:

Gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained was to hope that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration."


From Heller's Catch-22:

"'You have a morbid aversion to dying. You probably resent the fact that you’re at war and might get your head blown off any second.'
'I more than resent it, sir. I’m absolutely incensed.'
'You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don’t like bigots, bullies, snobs, or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate.'
'Consciously, sir, consciously,' Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. 'I hate them consciously.'"

"Yossarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden's flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden's insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out... Here was God’s plenty, all right, he thought bitterly as he stared– liver, lungs, kidney, ribs, stomach and bits of stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch...
'I'm cold,' Snowden whimpered. 'I'm cold'
'There, there,' Yossarian mumbled mechanically in a voice too low to be heard. 'There, there.'
Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.
'I'm cold,' Snowden said. 'I'm cold'
There, there,' said Yossarian.'There, there.'"

[Melville]

From Borges' Pierre Menard:

"Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one be obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes...

It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for example, wrote the following:

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the ‘ingenious layman’ Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth!—the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality."

[Melville]

From Hamsun's Hunger:

"Being in the mood to surmount difficulties, I decided upon a three-part monograph about philosophical cognition. Needless to say, I would have an opportunity to deal a deathblow to Kant’s sophisms."

"In order to seem calm and indifferent I waved my arms absurdly, spat at the ground and cocked my nose in the air, but it was no use."

"These people that I met—how lightly and merrily they bobbed their bright faces, dancing their way through life as though it were a ballroom! There was no sign of grief in a single eye that I saw, no burden on any shoulder, not even a cloudy thought maybe, or a little secret suffering in any of those happy hearts. While I, who walked right beside these people, young and freshly blown, had already forgotten the very look of happiness! Coddling myself with this thought, I found a terrible injustice had been done to me... When I pondered this, it became more and more incomprehensible to me why precisely I should have been chosen as a guinea pig for a caprice of divine grace. To skip a whole world in order to get to me—that was a rather odd way of doing things... I discovered the weightiest objections to the Lord’s arbitrariness in letting me suffer for everybody else’s sake... From that day in May when my adversities had begun I could clearly perceive a gradually increasing weakness, I seemed to have become too feeble to steer or guide myself where I wanted to go... My whole being was at this moment filled with the utmost anguish; even my arms ached, and I could barely endure carrying them in the usual way."

[Melville]

From Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground:

“I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver hurts.”

“His moans acquire a kind of nastiness, they become mean and malicious, and continue day and night. And yet he himself knows that his moans won’t do him any good at all; he knows better than anyone else that he is merely lacerating and irritating both himself and others to no good purpose; he knows that even the audience, for whose benefit he is exerting himself, and his whole family are sick to death of listening to him, that they no longer believe him and know that he could moan quite differently, more simply, without all those flourishes and trills, and that he’s merely indulging himself out of spite and meanness.”

“I remained obstinately silent. I was, of course, the chief sufferer because I was aware of the revolting meanness of my vicious stupidity, and yet I could not control myself.”

[Melville]

Wuthering Heights...

Although I appreciated its absolute devotion to its characters, I remember thinking that the over-the-top melodrama of Wuthering Heights was a bit... well, over the top. But those quotes are pretty intriguing. Maybe I should give the book another perusal.

[Melville]

- from Dante's Inferno, Canto XXXIII

Which translation is that? I definitely read the wrong one.

[SpaceOddity]

From Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground:

I liked...

"We are born dead, and we are becoming more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it."

[Benny Profane]

From Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon:

"You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams, or ghosts are "yours" and which are "mine." It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible."

[SpaceOddity]

We...

"It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about then simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today."

"to be original is to be in some way distinct from others. Hence, to be original is to violate equality. And that which in the language of the ancients was called 'being banal' is with us merely the fulfillment of our duty."

[Wryan]

A Night at the Opera (Wood) - 4
The Sweet Smell of Success (Mackendrick) - 7

/bawls for ugly Opera score and "meh" Success score.