The worst curse to befall anyone is stagnation, a banal existence, the quiet desperation that comes out of a need for conformity.
Dawn was written well before 911. People speak a lot today about the banality of evil, but not all evil is banal. Some of it is carefully structured and well-thought-out. That's where the real danger lies.
We set the actors on the scene through the banal discourse of "conflict" in ways that fully deflect from the history and struggle of colonial resistance, refusing as well by that means to link the resistance to other forms of colonial resistance, their rationale, and their tactics.
What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.
It can stand in the way of narration in cases where we want the protagonist to actually go through some kind of catharsis while our own (non-fictional) experiences and stories lead to something banal or completely uninteresting.
My furniture is banal and my house is pretty empty. The hardest thing to find is a sofa that is comfortable and looks good. The ones I like are never comfortable.
Adultery. . . could be as banal as marriage.
Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.
As anthropomorphic and surreal people have said my early writing was, to me it was really stock and almost banal in the sense that it was just description, the poetry of comparing: "Your feet are like A, and your eyes like B. "
Perhaps if we say it straight, we suspect, if we express our sentiments too excessively or too directly, we'll find we're nothing but banal.
What really is wild about rock 'n' roll? Nothing. It's so banal and so part of corporate culture. It threatens to lose all its life.
In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.
Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.
There has never been an 'original' sin: each is quite banal.
It's nice that I can go down the road of obsessing over this smiley-face bullshit so maybe I can get free from it and think about something else-it's so banal and yet so crazy!
Music is one of my big interests - I once had a rather fanciful ambition to be a singer - and of course music is philosophically fascinating. What it is for music to express emotion strikes me as one of the most difficult questions - it's hard to say what it precisely means, although it plainly does mean something. But whenever I have tried to say something about this, it has come out as either banal or pretentious or both.
I had the feeling I had to stay focused on what's lying under. A big part of the story in Toni Erdmann happens on the sub-level. On the surface, a lot of scenes, it's banal. If the actor starts thinking, "Oh, I'm in a genre, I'm doing a comedy, I'm doing funny things," then you lose.
Governments produced by the most banal of electoral victories, like those produced by the crudest of coups d'état, will always feel obliged to dress themselves up linguistically in some way.
Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable.
