Sentence examples for not banal from inspiring English sources

This fact was not banal at all, but unprecedented, shocking, and wrong.

Going by the catalog, the 223 works in the auction were familiar if not banal, compared with the sale's totality as performance art.

There's promise here, shining out of the immediacy and simplicity; even when she's playing chord progressions most beginners would reject, she knows how to be amateurish but not banal.

But on an island where explosions have become commonplace, if not banal, and where people are rarely killed, no one was quite sure where the blast had come from.

He offers little that is not banal; slows his sentences with nervous "ums"; looks too often at his notes rather than at Ripken or the host, Ernie Johnson; and wants to rewrite the record book to reflect his wrongheaded view that the Cubs' Carlos Zambrano throws 120 pitches nearly every game.

That is no good place./ When wind blows up and stormy weather/ makes clouds scud and the skies weep,/ out of its depths a dirty surge/ is pitched towards the heavens.' Where Raffel has the rather tinny 'nor is it/ A pleasant spot!' Heaney has the swallowed emphasis of 'That is no good place.' And while Raffel's language is not banal, he cannot match 'heather-stepper' or 'dirty surge'.

I like to see people who have interests that aren't banal.

Anything that isn't banal is said to be an outburst.

But they certainly weren't banal when he first dreamed them up in the 1940s, or when they were first put in to practice in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s.

But the evil wasn't banal; the methodology was, using not witches' potions or Wagnerian thunderbolts but the order and logic of bureaucracy to violate every boundary of civilized relations.

The seeming banality is partly strategic, because some of what she's saying — "As you think, those thoughts are sent out into the Universe, and they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency" — isn't banal at all.