Mundane Quotes - Page 10

• We have higher quality conversations in restaurants than at home. It's as though we rise to the occasion by selecting worthwhile, less mundane subjects to discuss when eating out, just as we dress more carefully.

  Mimi Sheraton

  Home, Quality, Dresses

  Mimi Sheraton (2004). “Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life”, Large Print Press

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• Salinger is a master of the memorable detail, the seemingly random gesture, the debris of mundane daily operations, the stuff that is left out of any analysis.

  Bill Vaughan

  Memorable, Details, Analysis

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• I always end up hurting myself doing something mundane. If I have to do some complicated stunt, I'm fine.

  Lauren Cohan

  Hurt, Complicated, Ends

  "Lauren Cohan of 'The Walking Dead' Admits 'Guts in Your Hair Really Is No Fun'". Interview with Jennifer Hirshlag, www.elle.com. October 13, 2013.

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• I also find doing the mundane, everyday things in life has a calming, creative influence on me. Some of my best ideas come when I'm vacuuming or waiting in lines.

  Gail Tsukiyama

  Everyday Things, Things In Life, Ideas

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• To me, Twitter seems like a way for people to just let the world know about the most mundane bullshit that crosses their mind.

  Phil Elvrum

  People, Bullshit, Mind

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies, and sometimes not.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Apology, Trying, Path

  Khaled Hosseini (2009). “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, p.65, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Even if you do no work that is particularly lofty or far-reaching, if you can shed mundane feelings, that is a great achievement. Even if you do not strive much for progress in learning, if you can minimize the influence things have on you, you will soar into the realm of sages.

  Zicheng Hong

  Achievement, Feelings, Taoism

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• The Shaod, it was called. The Transformation... When it came, the fortuante person's life ended and began anew; he would discard his old, mundane existence and move to Elantris. Elantris, where he could live in bliss, rule in wisdom, and be worshiped for eternity. Eternity ended ten years ago.

  Brandon Sanderson

  Moving, Years, Mundane Life

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• Sloppy language and sloppy ways go together. Those who are truly educated have learned more than the sciences, the humanities, law, engineering, and the arts. They carry with them a certain polish that marks them as loving the better qualities of life, a culture that adds luster to the mundane world of which they are apart, a patina that puts a quiet glow on what otherwise might be base metal.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Art, Engineering, Law

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• Love is tricky. It is never mundane or daily. You can never get used to it. You have to walk with it, then let it walk with you. You can never balk. It moves you like the tide. It takes you out to sea, then lays you on the beach again. Today's struggling pain is the foundation for a certain stride through the heavens. You can run from it but you can never say no. It includes everyone.

  Amy Tan

  Running, Beach, Pain

  "The Hundred Secret Senses". Book by Amy Tan, 2010.

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• That's the beauty of it. Have you seen the contraptions these magicians build to accomplish the most mundane feats? They are a bunch of fish covered in feathers trying to convince the public they can fly, I am simply a bird in their midst.

  Erin Morgenstern

  Bird, Trying, Midst

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• And Harry, with the unerring skill of the Seeker, caught the wand in his free hand as Voldemort fell backward, arms splayed, the slit pupils of the scarlet eyes rolling upward. Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the snakelike face vacant and unknowing. Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse, and Harry stood with two wands in his hands, staring down at his enemy's shell.

  J. K. Rowling

  Eye, Hands, Skills

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• He reads histories and mythologies and fairy tales, wondering why it seems that only girls are ever swept away from their mundane lives on farms by knights or princes or wolves. It strikes him as unfair to not have the same fanciful opportunity himself. And he is not in the position to do any rescuing of his own.

  Erin Morgenstern

  Girl, Opportunity, Knights

  Erin Morgenstern (2016). “The Night Circus”, p.92, Random House

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• She'd never have allowed herself to be held by anything as mundane as a few bars and a reinforced door

  Patricia Briggs

  Doors, Bars

  Patricia Briggs (2008). “Cry Wolf”, p.15, Penguin

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• Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other 'undesirable' side, the bad and the black. That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.

  Chogyam Trungpa

  Spiritual, War, Teaching

  Chogyam Trungpa (2010). “The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume Three: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism; The Myth of Freedom; The Heart of the Bud dha; Selected Writings”, p.86, Shambhala Publications

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• As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.

  Chogyam Trungpa

  Long, Trying, Warfare

  Chogyam Trungpa (2010). “The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume Three: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism; The Myth of Freedom; The Heart of the Bud dha; Selected Writings”, p.86, Shambhala Publications

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• I write like anyone involved with a family and a full time job: in stolen moments. I've had to adapt because I have so little writing time, so I write while dinner bubbles on the stove, and get away to cafes when I can. It is good to have a small laptop to haul around. I wish I could admit to bizarre writing habits, you know, like "I can only write in the presence of my favorite pet elephant, who is my fount of inspiration," but the truth, alas, is far more mundane.

  Vandana Singh

  Inspiration, Writing, Pet

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• Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

  Peter Watts

  Running, Climbing, Dancer

  Peter Watts (2006). “Blindsight”, p.302, Macmillan

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• Simon shook his head."Look,do you know what you want to eat,or do you just want me to keep pushing this cart up and down aisles because it amuses you?" "That and I'm not really familiar with what they sell in mundane grocery stores.Maryse usually cooks or we order in food."said Jace

  Cassandra Clare

  Order, Pushing, Looks

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• Pulvis et umbra sumus. It's a line from Horace. 'We are dust and shadows'. Appropriate, don't you think?" Will said. "It's not a long life, killing demons; one tends to die young, and then they burn your body - dust to dust, in the literal sense. And then we vanish into the shadows of history, nary a mark on the page of a mundane book to remind the world that once we existed at all.

  Cassandra Clare

  Book, Thinking, Dust

  Cassandra Clare (2013). “The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Angel; Clockwork Prince; Clockwork Princess”, p.91, Simon and Schuster

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• The most widely discussed formulation of [the One World model] was the "end of history" thesis advanced by Francis Fukuyama. "We may be witnessing," Fukuyama argued, "the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." The future will be devoted not to great exhilarating struggles over ideas but rather to resolving mundane economic and technical problems. And, he concluded rather sadly, it will all be rather boring.

  Samuel P. Huntington

  Struggle, Government, Ideas

  "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order". Book by Samuel P. Huntington. Chapter 1: "The New Era in World Politics," § 3: "Other Worlds?," p. 31, 1996.

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• Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.

  Walter Benjamin

  Rotten, Mundane Life, Privacy

  Walter Benjamin, Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland (1996). “Selected Writings: 1913-1926”, p.484, Harvard University Press

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• you can't really separate modernity from history or spiritual concerns from mundane ones. Everything feeds into everything else.

  G. Willow Wilson

  Spiritual, Oneness, Concern

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• You can't know how weird your own life is until you get some distance on it. Everything seems mundane or boring or embarrassingly small.

  Kyle Minor

  Distance, Life Is, Boring

  "To Rage Against Meaninglessness". Interview with Matt Bell, logger.believermag.com. February 6, 2014.

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• Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use -- high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject -- there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Book, Beer, Names

  Richard Rodriguez (2003). “Brown: The Last Discovery of America”, p.17, Penguin

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