- WIST is my personal collection of quotations, curated for thought, amusement, turn of phrase, historical significance, or sometimes just (often-unintentional) irony.
WIST currently holds 19,626 quotations by 3,057 authors. Please feel free to browse and borrow.
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Quotations about bore
Note that not all quotations have been tagged, so the Search function may find additional quotations on this topic.
Pity the poor bore. He stands among us as a creature formidable and familiar yet in essence unknowable. We can read of the ten infallible signs whereby he may be recognized and of the seven tested methods whereby he may be rebuffed. Valuable monographs exist upon his dress and diet; the study of his mating habits and migrational routes is well past the speculative stage; and statistical studies abound. One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy adult male bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.
John Updike (1932-2009) American writer
“Confessions of a Wild Bore,” Assorted Prose (1965)
(Source)
BORES: People who talk of themselves, when you are thinking only of yourself.
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington (1789-1849) Irish novelist [Lady Blessington, b. Margaret Power]
Desultory Thoughts and Reflections (1839)
(Source)
A bore: Someone who persists in holding to his own views after we have enlightened him with ours.
Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.
It is the trifles of life that are its bores, after all. Most men can meet ruin calmly, for instance, or laugh when they lie in a ditch with their own knee-joint and their hunter’s spine broken over the double post and rails: it is the mud that has choked up your horn just when you wanted to rally the pack; it’s the whip who carries you off to a division just when you’ve sat down to your turbot; it’s the ten seconds by which you miss the train; it’s the dust that gets in your eyes as you go down to Epsom; it’s the pretty little rose note that went by accident to your house instead of your club, and raised a storm from madame; it’s the dog that always will run wild into the birds; it’s the cook who always will season the white soup wrong — it is these that are the bores of life, and that try the temper of your philosophy.
Ouida (1839-1908) English novelist [pseud. of Maria Louise Ramé]
Under Two Flags, ch. 1 (1867)
(Source)
Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church, or robbing a bank, but never to being bores.
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.
A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.
The self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of all.
A gossip is one who talks to you about others; a bore is one who talks to you about himself; and a brilliant conversationalist is one who talks to you about yourself.
Lisa Kirk (1925-1990) American actress and singer
Quoted in the Cholly Knickerbocker society column, New York Journal American (9 Mar 1954)
(Source)
In that Heart paper at that time, Cholly Knickerbocker was the pen name for Igor Cassini.