Tedium Quotes

“It’s hard to safeguard a genuine life course, when love tips over from endearing care into tedium, through laziness of imagination or loss of interest, and the storyline becomes barren and desolate, insipidly dull, turning into a threadbare act with the same trite modus operandi. “The same procedure as every year, James!” ("Things needing to be changed")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends”
― Milan Kundera

“That the crowd always likes a holiday is a common saying, but when the whole year becomes one long holiday, and nobody has time for attending to his business, and pleasure becomes compulsory, then it is a different matter.”
― Robert Graves, I, Claudius

“When you feel bored, pump your adrenaline!”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“When younger, he had been fun-loving to the point of tedium.”
― Émile Zola, Pot Luck

“The tedium of existence and feeling imprisoned in a deplorable job can cause a person to consider the most expedient escape route from suffering including flirting with suicide. Fernando Pessoa wrote in “The Book of Disquiet” of his own feelings of uneasiness and sense of discouragement. “I suffer from life and from other people. I cannot look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten, and lost, with no connection to anything useful or real – only then do I find myself comforted.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The inartistic methods that we use to blunt anxiety and unartful expedients that we resort to in order to escape pain and numb banality reveals what we dread most, the act of suffering from a mortal loss or the debasement that we earn by wallowing in our decadent acts of escapism.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Boredom and ineffective attempts to escape tedium are the perpetual lot of humankind.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Life can make a person weary and wary, and the body and soul become fatigued. Unalleviated tedium extinguishes the light in the soul.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Boredom – the psychological state that we experience whenever we are uninterested in what we are currently doing – is one of the defining traits of humanity. Time is the psychological nemesis of humankind. Tedium, a fundamental angst of humankind, arises from human beings’ ability to perceive time and our attempts to derive meaning from our personal existence.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“It seemed to her as if it had been an unpleasant day. She went over the actual events in her mind, and was astonished to find that, after all, the day had been like many hundreds before it and many, many more that were yet to come.”
― Arthur Schnitzler, Vienna 1900: Games With Love And Death

“For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash.”
― H.G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly

“Pretentious quotations [are] the surest road to tedium.”
― Henry Watson Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage

“Tedium and boredom are related, but not identical. Tedium comes from a person lacking an ideology to live by; the dulling fear fomented in the soul after confronting the paucity of life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“If you told me I had a week to live, I wouldn’t have the first clue what to do. Maybe I’d just want to die sooner so I wouldn’t have to torture myself over wasting the last week of my life.”
― Peter Mehlman, It Won't Always Be This Great

“What the hell, I don't know, but to me a home in the suburbs is a sort of isolated hell where nothing happens.

[letter to sister Caroline Kerouac Blake, March 14, 1945]”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1940-1956

“I was only ever truly loved once. Everyone has always treated me kindly. Even the most casual acquaintance has found it difficult to be rude or brusque or even cool to me. Sometimes with a little help from me, that kindness could - or at least might - have developed into love or affection. I've had neither the patience nor the concentration of mind to want to make the effort.

When I first noticed this in myself - so little do we know ourselves - I attributed it to some shyness of the soul. But then I realised that this wasn't the case, it was an emotional tedium, different from the tedium of life; an impatience with the idea of associating myself with one continuous feeling, especially if that meant steeling myself to make some sustained effort. Why bother thought the unthinking part of me. I have enough subtlety, enough psychological sensitivity to know how, but the why has always escaped me. My weakness of will always began by being a weakness of the will even to have a will. The same happened with my emotions, my intelligence, my will itself, with everything in my life.

But on the one occasion that malicious fate caused me to believe I loved someone and to recognise that I really was loved in return , it left me at first stunned and confused as if my number had come up on the lottery and I had won a huge amount of money in some inconvertible currency. Then, because I'm only human, I felt rather flattered. However, that most natural of emotions soon passed, to be overtaken by a feeling difficult to define but one in which tedium, humiliation and weariness predominated.

A feeling of tedium as if fate had imposed on me a task to be carried out during some unfamiliar evening shift. As if a new duty - that of an awful reciprocity - were given to me, ironically, as a privilege over which I would have to toil, all the time thanking fate for it. As if the flaccid monotony of life were not enough to bear without superimposing on it the obligatory monotony of a definite feeling.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Pleased? On the contrary. I think you're in the grip of tedium. You're tired of life, you think you've learned all there is to learn, and everything you see around you only increases your sense of tedium. Why, then, should I feel pleased? It isn't always easy to cut off a tentacle. You can always leave a boring job and, even more easily, a boring woman, but tedium, how do you cut yourself off from that?”
― José Saramago, Skylight

“2. The banality of time torments us, the tedium of existence mocks us, and many minor incidences irritate human beings. While we seek to inscribe a personal place in a finite realm, we live in a world without any actual boarders known as the universe. Human wastefulness, suffering, and cruelty know no bounds. Irrespective of all the unfortunate occasions in life that prove painful, stressful, sorrowful, or dreary, all misfortunate setbacks along with the shattering monotony of human existence are part of the vicissitudes of living a sentient life. If a person can view the enigmas of life from a detached perspective that respects life without worrying about the ultimate tragedy of all existence, when we return to the void from which we came, life will appear as a dream, a phantasm.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Terror came. I would fall into a slumber of days, and getting up would go on with the same sad dreams. I was ripe for death and along a road of perils my weakness led me to the confines of the world and of Cimmeria, home of whirlwinds and of darkness.

- Delirium II - Alchemy of the Word”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“Tedium represents the soul’s disaffection with life, the profound heartache that comes from a soul accepting the bareness of existence.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Reading the newspaper is always unpleasant from an aesthetic point of view, and often from a moral point of view as well, even for those who don’t worry much about morality.

Reading about the effects of wars and revolutions--there’s always one or the other in the news--doesn’t make us feel horror but tedium.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Why do you do it? What is it? The girls? The leather? The machismo? Or do you just find coming to terms with the mindless tedium of it all presents an interesting challenge?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

“Once in my room I don't have a goddamn clue what to do.”
― Kelly Thompson, The Girl Who Would Be King

“Mais, j’aurai beau supplier, j’aurai beau me révolter, il n’y aura plus rien pour moi ; je ne serai, désormais, ni heureux, ni malheureux. Je ne peux pas ressusciter. Je vieillirai aussi tranquille que je le suis aujourd’hui dans cette chambre où tant d’êtres ont laissé leur trace, où aucun être n’a laissé la sienne.
Cette chambre, on la retrouve à chaque pas. C’est la chambre de tout le monde. On croit qu’elle est fermée, non : elle est ouverte aux quatre vents de l’espace. Elle est perdue au milieu des chambres semblables, comme de la lumière dans le ciel, comme un jour dans les jours, comme moi partout.
Moi, moi ! Je ne vois plus maintenant que la pâleur de ma figure, aux orbites profondes, enterrée dans le soir, et ma bouche pleine d’un silence qui doucement, mais sûrement, m’étouffe et m’anéantit.
Je me soulève sur mon coude comme sur un moignon d’aile. Je voudrais qu’il m’arrivât quelque chose d’infini !”
― Henri Barbusse, Hell

“But it seems to Samuel that all the school is preparing them for is to sit quietly and fake that they're working. To feign the appearance of concentration when in fact they're checking sports scores or e-mail or watching videos or spacing out. And come to think of it, maybe this is the most important lesson the school could teach them about the American workplace: how to sit calmly a your desk and surf the internet and not go insane.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“to say that, or something similar, might lend colour to the tedium, the way a child draws something then clumsily colours it in, blurring the edges, but to me it's just words echoing around the cellars of thought.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Tedium is lethal to human souls.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Knowledge is many things, but it definitely is not power. “Dread” is a better word for it, I think, though I do understand how that ultimately fails as a slogan.”
― Ben Marcus, Notes from the Fog: Stories

“Only landscapes that don't exist and books I'll never read aren't tedious. Life, for me, is a drowsiness that never reaches the brain. This I keep free, so that I can be sad there.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet