107 Quotes About Clichés

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance (...); as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out [in his History of England], she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

War is full of clichés, because only clichés can match the drama of the moment.

...sayings only become clichés because they're true.

Clichés so often befall vain people.

I know that I'm not the first person in the world to say "I love music; it saved me." But that doesn't make it less true.

Do You Come Here Often?' and 'Be Part of the Action' Have Become Clichéd"Coast Guard Sees Increasing Need for Icebreakers"—headline, Associated Press, March 1

From love's absolutism to love's absolution? No: I don't believe in the cosy narratives of life some find necessary, just as I choke on comforting words like redemption and closure. Death is the only closure I believe in; and the wound will stay open until that final shutting of the doors. As for redemption, it's far too neat, a movie-maker's bromide; and beyond that, it feels like something grand, which human beings are too imperfect to deserve, much less bestow upon themselves.

Monotonous talk of the end of American hegemony, the universal cliché of the period, is mostly a way of avoiding mounting a serious opposition to it.

...he remembered his uncle saying once how little vocabulary man really needed to get comfortably and even efficiently through his life, how not only in the individual but within his whole type and race and kind a few simple cliches served his few simple passions and needs and lusts.