Mundane Quotes - Page 10

• On my fortieth birthday, rather than merely bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a midlife crisis I decided it might be more interesting to actually terrify them by going completely mad and declaring myself to be a magician.

  Alan Moore

  Mad, Interesting, Midlife

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• Character cannot be summoned at the moment of crisis if it has been squandered by years of compromise and rationalization. The only testing ground for the heroic is the mundane. The only preparation for that one profound decision which can change a life, or even a nation, is those hundreds of half-conscious, self defining, seemingly insignificant decisions made in private. Habit is the daily battleground of character.

  Dan Coats

  Character, Self, Years

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• I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.

  Donald Miller

  Book, Mean, People

  Donald Miller (2010). “Father Fiction: Chapters for a Fatherless Generation”, p.75, Hachette UK

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• Writers seek to create order out of the chaos of everyday life, and to extract meaning from both the tragic and the mundane

  Hope Edelman

  Order, Everyday, Chaos

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

  Marisha Pessl

  Sweet, Epic, Greek

  Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.84, Penguin

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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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• Well, I’m not kissing the mundane," said Jace. "I’d rather stay down here and rot." "Forever?" said Simon. "Forever’s an awfully long time." Jace raised his eyebrows. "I knew it," he said. "You want to kiss me, don’t you?

  Cassandra Clare

  Humor, Kissing, Eyebrows

  Cassandra Clare (2009). “City of Ashes”, p.171, Simon and Schuster

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• a man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one’s watch, since together with the man, the whole world is destroyed; the last letter is instantly reduced to dust and, with it, all the postmen; and like smoke, vanishes the estate bequeathed to a nonexistent progeny.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Writing, Men, Self

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV' (1965). “THE EYE”

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• The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.

  Douglas Adams

  Ideas, Facts, Fit

  Douglas Adams (2016). “Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul”, p.358, Simon and Schuster

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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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• She would be quiet at first. Then she would say a word about something small, something she had noticed, and then another word, and another, each one flung out like a little piece of sand, one from this direction, another form behind, more and more, until his looks, his character, his soul would have eroded away . . . I was afraid that some unseen speck of truth would fly into my eye, blur what I was seeing and transform him from the divine man I thought he was into someone quite mundane, mortally wounded with tiresome habits and irritating imperfections.

  Amy Tan

  Character, Eye, Men

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• the darkness is a cresting wave. It sweeps me up out of my body until I float among the stars, those tine bright pores on the sky's skin. If only I could pass through them, I would end up on the other side, the right side, shadowless, perfectly illuminated, beyond the worries of this mundane world

  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  Stars, Sky, Worry

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