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The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque. -- John Ruskin
I find beauty in the grotesque, like most artists. -- Alexander McQueen
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself. -- H. L. Mencken
Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical. -- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer. -- Victor Hugo
In a way Australia is like Catholicism. The company is sometimes questionable and the landscape is grotesque. But you always come back. -- Thomas Keneally
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
What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth. It has to be truthful and honest, even if it is ugly and grotesque. -- Corin Nemec
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. -- Carl von Clausewitz
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
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
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
Some couture collections have everything including the kitchen sink! Everything gets thrown on to make it look expensive. I find it grotesque when clothes hit you in the face and there's no room for fault. But I don't expect to turn things around all by myself. I'm not a saint. -- Alexander McQueen
There is beautiful in the grotesque. -- Guillermo del Toro
Life is but a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. -- Mark Twain
The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque. -- Ron Wyden
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
I never wanted to do something grotesque. I never wanted to shock. I wanted my audience to be happy, to be kind. -- Eva Zeisel
I remember having to take detours around the Hollywood sign to avoid having to see this grotesque poster of myself on Sunset Boulevard. -- Rachel Ward
In the corporate-owned media, men dressed like Ronald Reagan and women dressed like Rita Hayworth disseminate grotesque exaggerations and gossip in authoritative tones. -- Steven Weber
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I find it grotesque when clothes hit you in the face and there's no room for fault. But I don't expect to turn things around all by myself. I'm not a saint. -- Alexander McQueen
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 like characters with character, not just pretty faces. Anyway, I think people can be both grotesque and beautiful at the same time. Look at Mick Jagger in the seventies. Look at Angelina Jolie. -- Ted Naifeh
The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it histruth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced a falsehood. -- Sherwood Anderson
All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque. -- Tom Stoppard
We will not have humanoid androids. It's interesting: when you start trying to make robots look more human, you end up making them look more grotesque. It takes very little to go from super-attractive robot to hideous robot. -- Colin Angle
I'm not sure I agree with the thesis, because I think that even though something grotesque or gross has been part of film since way back, what we accept or what we can get away with on the screen is broader now. -- Ivan Reitman
Ambition is to be the fastest runner on this planet, to be the first on the South Pole, which is a grotesque perversion of ambition. It's an ego trip, and I'm not on an ego trip. I don't have ambitions - I have a vision. -- Werner Herzog
Taxes are like abortion, and not just because both are grotesque procedures supported by Democrats. You're for them or against them. Taxes go up or down; government raises taxes or lowers them. But Democrats will not let the words 'abortion' or 'tax hikes' pass their lips. -- Ann Coulter
I think one of the few faults in Dickens is that mostly his lead characters are blanks - who is David Copperfield, who is Oliver Twist? And yet he takes such joy in populating the rest of his novels with these fantastic, grotesque people like Pecksmith and so on. -- Mark Gatiss
Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the 'Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,' should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government. -- Elliott Abrams
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
As it is, the grotesque distortions of the global market mean that for every dollar the West dispatches to Africa in the form of aid, two dollars are clawed back through subsidies and tariff barriers: a monumental rip-off by the rich as they instruct the poor to accept 'free' trade or else. -- Jonathan Dimbleby
Considering the popularity of soaps with the African-American audience, it's grotesque that the entertainment industry, for all its vaunted liberalism, is lagging so far behind social changes in the United States. And why has there never been an all-black daytime network soap? It would probably blow the white soaps off the map. -- Camille Paglia
It's obvious nonsense, but it makes nice people feel good about themselves to do their bit for the planet. It's 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
The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception. -- Mark Twain
incurable lover of the grotesque -- H. P. Lovecraft
Size without shape is grotesque. -- Vince Gironda
This is the golden age of grotesque. -- Marilyn Manson
Christian theology: nothing so grotesque could possibly be true. -- Edward Abbey
For me the grotesque is necessary to understand beauty, -- David Altmejd
To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful. -- Eugene Ionesco
The noble grotesque involves the true appreciation of beauty. -- John Ruskin
After a moment of shrinking back, we domesticate the grotesque. -- Mason Cooley
There is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible. -- Arthur Conan Doyle
If you want to see eccentricities, I'll be grotesque before your eyes. -- Michael Jackson
I have one aimâ??the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing. -- Aubrey Beardsley
The concept of free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms. -- Ayn Rand
For me, the single word "God" suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque. -- Andre Breton
There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it. -- Mark Twain
I would much rather have my grotesque products of the imagination compared to your delusional sanity. -- Christopher Page
The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world? -- Wallace Stevens
Laurel Canyon is kind of grotesque. It's this nature-themed place, and everybody is kind of angry. -- J. Tillman
George theThird Ought never to have occurred. One can only wonder At so grotesque a blunder. -- E. C. Bentley
I can overlook the lie; what's harder to ignore is the grotesque way it's marred your character. -- Richelle E. Goodrich
when the human race is not grotesque it is because it is asleep and losing its opportunity. -- Mark Twain
Fierce invectives against women form a conspicuous and grotesque portion of the writings of the Church fathers. -- William Edward Hartpole Lecky
For me, marriage is a grotesque, unforgiving, clunky contrivance. Yet society pushes it as a shimmering ideal. -- George Meyer
I think there's an instinct to make grotesque horror films that are purely carnal, like the 'Saw' movies. -- Amber Heard
I don't want to be grotesque, but when you're 330 pounds, it's hard to wipe your ass. You know? -- Mike Tyson
Anyone who tells you they know the future is telling you the most grotesque lie, because none of us do, -- Tim Waterstone
The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear. -- Charles Baudelaire
The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink. -- Edward Abbey
I think the grotesque can inspire intimacy (it draws us in) as well as awe, like the cabinets of curiosities. -- Anna Journey
At six I lived in a graveyard full of dolls, avoiding myself, my body, the suspect in its grotesque house. -- Anne Sexton
he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Since art is dead in the actual life of civilized nations, it has been relegated to these grotesque morgues, museums. -- Walter Gropius
perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque. -- Salman Rushdie
Asylums are nothing more than gardens of human cabbages, of miserable, grotesque, repugnant human beings watered with the fertilizer of injections. -- Antonio Lobo Antunes
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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
one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul -- Kate Chopin
The exhibition of real strength is never grotesque. Distortion is the agony of weakness. It is the dislocated mind whose movements are spasmodic. -- Robert Aris Willmott
Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung. -- Christopher Hitchens
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 have a great need to learn what the norm is by dealing with what is not the norm... with the grotesque and the fantastic. -- Alfred Brendel
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...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
There is something I have learned since being paralyzed, and that is that in the absence of sensory information, the imagination always tends to the grotesque. -- Patrick McGrath
I'm interested in the crevices, and the grotesque, and the unsavory. That started out when I was young. I've never quite been able to shake that. -- Carrie Brownstein
Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute. -- David Sedaris
I grew up on DC Comics, moral tales where the bad guys got their comeuppance. To me the gory panels or grotesque stuff just made me chuckle. -- George A. Romero
Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity. -- Walt Whitman
Psychological horror I've always appreciated, like 'Rosemary's Baby.' The slasher movies and the grotesque movies are the ones that I've really been off for a while. -- John Carroll Lynch
I don't believe men want women to have grotesque plastic surgery or be undernourished and bony. All the plastic surgery in the world can't stop you getting older. -- Michelle Pfeiffer
The implication strongly is that Osama bin Laden is a Hitler, even though he has no state power at all. It's just grotesque if you seriously think about it. -- Tariq Ali
Photography today appears to be in a state of flight... The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses. -- Dorothea Lange
Salvador Dali has been called kitsch, but, although some of this work may be grotesque, its brazenly self-conscious bad taste saves it from being true kitsch, which always strives to please. -- Denis Dutton
If there were a bunch of Buddhist or Hindus or Roman Catholics carrying out grotesque acts of international terror, I would expect to see their faces on the side of bus. -- Monica Crowley
I've got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it's too late. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good. -- Sylvia Plath
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
The more grotesque your boss's pay and the less he has do to earn it, the bigger the motivation for you to work with the aim of being promoted to what he has. -- Tim Harford
I tend to gravitate toward the realm of superstition (cures and such) and odd scientific facts (like bioluminescent shrimp and fistulated cows). I like the intimacy that I often find in the grotesque. -- Anna Journey
While there are so many beautiful Baroque churches and it's a beautiful artistic tradition, it almost gets hideous and grotesque if you push it further. You can take something beautiful and overdo it. -- Win Butler
Rejecting the notion that democracy and markets are the same, young people are calling for an end to the poverty, grotesque levels of economic inequality, the suppression of dissent and the permanent war state. -- Henry Giroux
All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque. -- Tom Stoppard
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
I came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship. The body that was broken into pieces is a sick body. I put the disease of this world and my sick body together. -- Kim Hyesoon
For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. -- Oscar Wilde

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