Images instead? Although peppering of stories with boring stock photos isn't great either. Original art is of course expensive, but that would be best.

If they must be there, a smaller font size would be better. At first glance I ignored them completely, because they looked like ads.

This has long been a pet peeve of mine when it comes to online articles. I see the appeal for printed magazines because, if people are flipping pages, a large pull quote might catch their attention and get them to start reading. But for an online article, the fact that I'm scrolling down means that I am reading. And if I'm reading, there's nothing more annoying than re-reading the exact sentence that I just read.

If you want to do more intelligent pull quotes, paraphrase the quotes and use them as headings. For example:

   ... And then, Reader, I clicked on it.

   <div class="pullquote">The Container Store is my kind of porn</div>

   I'd been looking for a new job for months, the search wasn't going
   as well as I'd planned, and The Container Store, let's be honest, 
   is my kind of porn. ...

This has the advantage of piquing someone's curiosity ("Why is the Container Store a kind of porn for this person?") and they can carry on to read the following paragraph to find out why. For the next pull quote:

   <div class="pullquote">A job with benefits is a unicorn</div>

Of course, it too appears above the paragraph that mentions it. The point is to set the stage for what you're about to read, not just regurgitate in a large, bold font the text you just read... which wastes peoples' time.

There has to be a better way, its really distracting and breaks up all the flow. The article font is already large enough make the page scroll forever, to add large chunks of quotes or images in the made me give up halfway though.

I'm already reading the page. I don't need a pull quote to repeat what I just read. Pull quotes are for magazine layouts when you're flipping through pages. Pull quotes on a web article is a clear sign that the editor is stuck in print media. I'm not 'flipping' through web pages like a magazine, so their usage is a bit passé. Perhaps let's not listen to what the writers like and listen to what readers like. I'm pretty sure the designers aren't making grammar suggestions to the writers, so let's let the designers focus on what they know best: readability and usability.

Putting them inline with the story is bad. Doing so in a way that just repeats the preceding paragraph is terrible. Seriously, read it for yourself all the way through and ask yourself if that's a comfortable flow.