Understatement Quotes

“L'uovo ha una forma perfetta benché sia fatto col culo.”
― bruno munari

“Unbutton, unzip, unclip, untie, undo, undress.”
“Understood,” she replied.”
― Michael Faudet, Dirty Pretty Things

“The way you walk is slash and burn.
Like understatement's now a crime.”
― Justin Quinn

“As you know, shibumi has to do with great refinement underlying commonplace appearances. It is a statement so correct that it does not have to be bold, so poignant it does not have to be pretty, so true it does not have to be real. Shibumi is understanding, rather than knowledge. Eloquent silence. In demeanor, it is modesty without pudency. In art, where the spirit of shibumi takes the form of sabi, it is elegant simplicity, articulate brevity. In philosophy, where shibumi emerges as wabi, it is spiritual tranquility that is not passive; it is being without the angst of becoming.”
― Trevanian, Shibumi

“Aye, aye, it must be so. I've oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye, he's chasing ME now; not I, HIM--that's bad”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Haydon was more than his model, he was his inspiration, the torch-bearer of a certain kind of English calling which - for the very reason that it was vague and understated and elusive - had made sense of Guillam's life till now.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“Without question, his picture did not do him justice, but again, he was dead when it was taken”
― Loren D. Estleman, The Branch and the Scaffold: The True Story of the West's Hanging Judge

“As Anna poured her heart out over the phone, Ted's own heart lit up like a solar flare. He wanted nothing more than to show Anna how he saw her: how beautiful and perfect she was in his eyes. He needed to let her know that he was going to carry that memory—that knowledge—of her inside him, so that no matter what happened between them, no matter how down she got on herself, he could do this for her: he could love her, selflessly and unceasingly, with total commitment and purity, for the rest of his life.

An hour later, Anna sniffled. 'Thank you for listening, Ted,' she said. 'It really means a lot to me.'

I would die for you, Ted thought.

'No problemo,' Ted said.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories

“3053Geography also gave Russia a rich choice of potential enemies.”
― Margaret MacMillan

“The millions and millions of corpses, the wasted lives that communism left behind as testament to its main accomplishment, were enough to give any sane believer pause. There were some true believers left, like the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, but the world generally reacted to them with the incredulity deserved for a person standing on top of a pile of corpses promising that with just a few more deaths he could make the whole thing right.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“but it seemed to me that there was something fundamentally wrong with a country where citizens asked to buy your underwear”
― Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China

“I truly admire the British for their understatement and subtle sarcasm. A good rule is when using sarcasm is, it is best to "put a little English" on it.”
― C.A.A. Savastano

“I know I’m not the more experienced investigator here,” Stacey said, “but I’m going to go way out on a limb and say the haunting of this estate could be related to this underground death-god temple full of human skulls.”
― J.L. Bryan, The Lodge

“My wife said you would be here,” he muttered lowly. “You and a boy … though I don’t think this counts as a boy.” He flicked a finger at Calder, who scoffed, the sound vibrating against my back.”
― Jane Washington, A Tempest of Shadows

“Ladies & Gentleman, we have a small problem, as in all four of our engines have failed, but we are doing our damnedest to get them working again. I trust that you are not in too much discomfort ...”
― Betty Tottell

“Weapons grade understatement”
― Neal Asher, Owning the Future: Short Stories

“Since the day she threw me into her dungeon, I've noticed something unfriendly about her.”
― Lloyd Alexander, The High King

“Whenever medical people said ‘discomfort,’ she knew what they really meant. If they meant discomfort, they would have just said ‘pinch’ or ‘pressure.’ Jessica imagined they must have a class in medical school called Understatement 101.”
― Daniel Thorman, The Zodiac Quest: A LitRPG Adventure

“Acting in Duck Soup, our last picture for Paramount, was the hardest job I ever did. It was the only time I can remember that I worried about turning in a bad performance. The trouble was not with the working hours, the script, the director, or the falls I had to take (I never used a stunt man or a double). The trouble was Adolf Hitler. His speeches were being rebroadcast in America. Somebody had a radio on the set, and twice we suspended shooting to listen to him scream. Hindenburg had died. Hitler was now absolute dictator of Germany. He threatened to scrap the Versailles Treaty and create a German navy and air force. He threatened to grab off Austria and part of Czechoslovakia. He threatened to go beyond the boycott and revoke the citizenship of all Jews.
I never knew until then what the emotion of pure anger was like, how it felt to be sore enough to want to hit somebody in cold blood. A lot of people I knew were shocked that I was so shocked. Nothing would really come of the dictator’s threats, they said. He was all bluff and hot air. His act was nothing more than a bad imitation of that other comic, Mussolini.
I knew better. I had seen faces, those faces in Germany, that most other people had not seen. And now I remembered: I had been tipped off even earlier than that. It was Sam Harris, sweet, gentle Sam, who had opened my eyes to this evil thing festering in Germany, before I sailed for Hamburg in the fall of ‘33. Sam had been reading the news from there, every word of it in every paper he could get hold of, and he had come to a conclusion.
“Harpo,” he said, “that Hitler is not a very nice fellow.” It was the most vicious thing I had ever heard Sam say about another living person.”
― Harpo Marx, Harpo Speaks!