Ordinary Quotes - Page 18

• It [the scarlet letter] had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Humanity, Letters, Spheres

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (2010). “The Scarlet Letter”, p.45, Bibliolis Books

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• Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

  Anais Nin

  Doe, True Happiness, Moments

  The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932.

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• The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things.

  Hans Christian Andersen

  Miracle, World, Used

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• [Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world.

  Tom Wolfe

  Men, Knowing, Perception

  Tom Wolfe (1999). “The electric kool-aid acid test”, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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• Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior's world.

  Pema Chodron

  Warrior, Inspire, Everyday

  Pema Chodron (2002). “The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times”, p.85, Shambhala Publications

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• What did you put in the fire?" Kaladin said. "To make that special smoke?" "Nothing. It was just and ordinary fire." "But, I saw-" "What you saw belongs to you. A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind." "What does the story mean, then?" "It means what you want it to mean," Hoid said. "The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think , but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that.

  Brandon Sanderson

  Mean, Thinking, Fire

  Brandon Sanderson (2017). “Brandon Sanderson's Fantasy Firsts: (The Way of Kings, Mistborn: The Final Empire, Rithmatist, Alcatraz vs. The Evil Librarians)”, p.1775, Macmillan

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• A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.

  T. S. Eliot

  Giving, Alive, Demand

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• . . . she gave him one of those broad smiles she reserved for strangers, as if she were aware of being able to pass, in their eyes, for an ordinary woman.

  Nicole Krauss

  Eye, Able, Stranger

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• The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

  Stendhal

  Powerful, Grief, Men

  Stendhal (2016). “The Red and the Black”, p.154, Tyché

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• Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.

  Sigmund Freud

  Knowledge, Men, Poetry

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• When ordinary human beings perform extraordinary acts of generosity, endurance or compassion, we are all made richer by their example. Like the rivers that flow out of the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, the inspiration they generate washes down to the rest of us. It waters everyone's fields.

  Greg Mortenson

  Inspiration, Compassion, Rivers

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• This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

  Anne Lamott

  Ocean, Heart, Artist

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• [Jesus] matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weaknesses he gives us strength and and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity." (Dallas Willard in Ruthless Trust - Brennan Manning)

  Brennan Manning

  Jesus, Giving, Promise

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• the way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart

  Charles Bukowski

  Running, Art, Way

  Charles Bukowski (2009). “sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way: New Poems”, p.91, Zondervan

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• Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.

  Gilles Deleuze

  Use, Way, Common

  Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet (2007). “Dialogues II”, p.3, Columbia University Press

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• The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.

  John Fowles

  Men, Civilization, Curse

  John Fowles (1963). “The collector”

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• When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Children, Believe, Mean

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Gilead: A Novel”, p.102, Macmillan

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• Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish'd and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.

  William Shakespeare

  Dark, Love Is, House

  William Shakespeare (1810). “As You Like it: A Comedy”, p.45

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• Ishabal: "If you may correct your vision as you like, why do you wear spectacles?" Tris: "Because I like them. Because I have better things to do with my magic than fixing my vision when ordinary glass will do.

  Tamora Pierce

  Glasses, Magic, Vision

  Tamora Pierce (2010). “The Will of the Empress”, p.105, Scholastic Inc.

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• He stepped into my room with one graceful move, as if entering through bedroom windows was nothing out of the ordinary.

  Amanda Hocking

  Moving, Entering, Rooms

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• Ordinary people simply don't know what books mean to us, shut up here. Reading, learning, and the radio are our amusements.

  Anne Frank

  Book, Reading, Mean

  Anne Frank, General Press (2016). “The Diary of a Young Girl”, p.63, GENERAL PRESS

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• When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.

  Paul Hawken

  Optimistic, Odds, Order

  "Paul Hawken: programming a new operating system for civilization" by James Epstein-Reeves and Ellen Weinreb, www.theguardian.com. September 23, 2013.

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• You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same.

  Deb Caletti

  Past, Bangs, Moments

  Deb Caletti (2012). “Stay”, p.5, Simon and Schuster

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• There is something about wills which brings out the worst side of human nature. People who under ordinary circumstances are perfectly upright and amiable, go as curly as corkscrews and foam at the mouth, whenever they hear the words 'I devise and bequeath.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  People, Foam, Mouths

  DOROTHY L. SAYERS (1963). “STRONG POISON”

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• The world is a place where the extraordinary can sit just beside the ordinary with the thinnest of boundaries; that even in environments inhospitable to man, all sort of entities might thrive.

  Jodi Picoult

  Men, World, Might

  Jodi Picoult (2012). “The Jodi Picoult Collection #2: Perfect Match, Second Glance, and My Sister's Keeper”, p.422, Simon and Schuster

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