“Distorting hackneyed words in hackneyed songs
He turns revolt into a style, prolongs
The impulse to a habit of the time.”

—  Thom Gunn

"Elvis Presley,", in The Sense of Movement (1957).
Other

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Distorting hackneyed words in hackneyed songs He turns revolt into a style, prolongs The impulse to a habit of the ti…" by Thom Gunn?
Thom Gunn photo
Thom Gunn 7
English poet 1929–2004

Related quotes

Isaac Asimov photo

““Fifty years,” I hackneyed, “is a long time.”
“Not when you’re looking back at them,” she said. “You wonder how they vanished so quickly.””

Isaac Asimov book I, Robot

“Introduction”, p. 8
Source: I, Robot (1950)

“The words, the style always reflects a habit of mind. And the habit of mind comes in from a different angle.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

Interview with Bill Moyers http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_leonard.html, Now, PBS (28 November 2003)
Context: The words, the style always reflects a habit of mind. And the habit of mind comes in from a different angle. The habit of mind uses the colloquial here and uses the joke there. And then creates some discordant music and then something strange and wonderful happens.
And you see things differently. You see a different light is shed on it.

Psy photo

“Song "Gangnam Style" (July 2012)”

Psy (1977) South Korean singer

Ogden Nash photo

“The song of canaries
Never varies,
And when they're moulting
They're pretty revolting.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

"The Canary"
Free Wheeling (1931)

Alberto Moravia photo

“Every true writer is like a bird; he repeats the same song, the same theme, all his life. For me, this theme as always been revolt.”

Alberto Moravia (1907–1990) Italian writer and journalist
Edward VIII of the United Kingdom photo

“Honolulu, Hawaii: (At a luau) "…a unique native stunt though the Hawaiian food we were made to eat was too revolting for words…. One got rather tired of the native songs & longed for some of our tunes"”

Edward VIII of the United Kingdom (1894–1972) king of the United Kingdom and its dominions in 1936

14 April 1920
Around the World with the Prince of Wales

“80: Prolonged contact with the computer turns mathematicians into clerks and vice versa.”

Alan Perlis Epigrams on Programming

Epigrams on Programming, 1982

Albert Camus photo

“Time will prolong time, and life will serve life.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Absurd Man
Context: Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.

Jordan Peterson photo

“The Word that speaks Truth into Chaos at the beginning of time, to generate habitable order that is Good – that's the story.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

J. Howard Moore photo

“Civilisation is not an appeal to nature. It is a revolt against nature—against nature as it has been represented in man in the past. It is supernatural. Civilization is an attempt to subordinate and control those primitive impulses which have reigned in human nature in the less gracious and less rational times gone by—impulses which we have ourselves to-day to a considerable extent inherited.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The Biology of Child Nature, p. 135

Related topics