A woman without a past is like a fruitcake without…

Reality is like a fruitcake; pretty enough to look at but with all sorts of nasty things lurking just beneath the surface.

— A. Lee Martinez

“So you, too, like fruitcake? (RW on meeting Lenin in Zurich during World War I.)”

— Robert Walser

Auto da Fay reveals the trickles of a creative sensibility that later became a tide, but essentially, Weldon the writer emerges only at the…

— Joanna Murray-Smith

Don’t you love quotations? I am immensely fond of them; a certain proof of erudition… [I]f you should happen to write an insipid poem...…

— Frances Brooke

Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of…

— Charles Lamb

Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is. To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that remarkable capacity for awakening, that…

— Soren Kierkegaard

England has never enjoyed a genuine social revolution. Maybe that's what's wrong with that dear, tepid, vapid, insipid, stuffy, little country.

— Edward Abbey

Shabbat is a day of rest, of mental scrutiny and of balance. Without it the workdays are insipid.

— Hayim Nahman Bialik

“An insipid voice message or an incongruent emergence from the “other” world may disrupt our whole thinking system. If we are not able to…

— Erik Pevernagie

A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself.…

— William James

“Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word, so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in…

— Alexis de Tocqueville

The bread I eat in London, is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone ashes: insipid to the taste, and destructive…

— Tobias Smollett

Great wits, like great beauties, look upon mere esteem as a flat insipid thing; nothing less than admiration will content them.

— Jeremiah Seed

Water and oil, simply considered, are capable of giving some pleasure to the taste. Water, when simple, is insipid, inodorous, colorless, and smooth; it…

— Edmund Burke

Atheism can benefit no class of people; neither the unfortunate, whom it bereaves of hope, nor the prosperous, whose joys it renders insipid, nor…

— François-René de Chateaubriand