Ordinariness Quotes - Page 2

• What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, events and gestures.... ordinariness is the most precious thing we struggle for, what the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto fought for. Not noble causes or abstract theories. But the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and a sense of self-worth--an ordinary life.

  Irena Klepfisz

  Grief, Struggle, Ghetto

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• The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Beautiful, Order, Miracle

  Michel de Montaigne (1973). “Selections from the Essays”, Harlan Davidson

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• I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Thinking, Enemy

  Source: www.npr.org

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• Sometimes people go off in a slightly different direction of wanting to be different, of wanting to be special, of wanting to be more, and I think that those people are often - not always, but often - genuinely different in some way. Perhaps their gender orientation is not acceptable or popular, not the norm. Or, their physical design is literally, in some way, setting them apart. Or, in many cases, they feel the burden of their ordinariness so dreadfully that they strive to find some way of being unique. I think that can be a very positive thing, but it also can be negative, destructive.

  Katherine Dunn

  Unique, Thinking, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Expectations are usually predicated on the idea that the everyday things that happen to ordinary people shouldn't happen to you. People hold the idea of being ordinary in absolute contempt, so when they face an illness, poverty, or any kind of catastrophe, they say, 'I can't believe this happened to me.' And who did you think it was going to happen to - the woman across the street?

  Caroline Myss

  Believe, Thinking, Everyday Things

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• In the turbulence of this anxious and active world many people are leading uneventful, lonely lives. To them dreariness, not disaster, is the enemy. They seldom realize that on their steadfastness, on their ability to withstand the fatigue of dull repetitive work, and on their courage in meeting constant small adversities depend in great measure the happiness and prosperity of the community as a whole. ... The upward course of a nation's history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.

  Queen Elizabeth II

  Running, Lonely, Adversity

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• Empower me to be a bold participant, rather than a timid saint in waiting, in the difficult ordinariness of now; to exercise the authority of honesty, rather than to defer to power, or deceive to get it; to influence someone for justice, rather than impress anyone for gain and, by grace, to find treasures of joy, of friendship, of peace hidden in the fields of the daily you give me to plow.

  Ted Loder

  Honesty, Exercise, Giving

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• How I hate the attitude of ordinary people to life. How I loathe ordinariness! How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with their eternal price list. It makes my blood boil.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Attitude, Hate, Nice

  D. H. Lawrence, James T. Boulton (2002). “The Letters of D. H. Lawrence”, p.542, Cambridge University Press

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• One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.

  Glen Duncan

  One Day, Extraordinary

  Glen Duncan (2007). “I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story”, p.155, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• It is the ordinariness of us that is the same in all of us.

  Lorraine Toussaint

  Source: collider.com

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• You turn your life into a work of art in order to redeem the ordinariness - a condition you are stuck with.

  Robert Dessaix

  Art, Order, Stuck

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

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• So much depends, therefore, upon our maintaining gospel perspective in the midst of ordinariness, the pressures of temptation, tribulation, deprivation, and the cares of the world.

  Neal A. Maxwell

  Perspective, Temptation, World

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• I admire photographers who can take much more ordinarily subject matter and make it transcend that ordinariness, so that it becomes something else fresh and new. It opens this doorway. I really admire people who can do that with photography.

  Andy Summers

  Photography, People, Doorways

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• We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Animal, Bears, Daily Life

  Stephen Jay Gould (1990). “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History”, p.70, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I wanted to do something different. Therefore, the first person I thought would have been too exclusionary. It would have said me, me, me, me, me. I, I, I, I, I. As if I were pushing away my experiences from the experiences of others. Because basically what I was trying to do was show our commonality. I mean to say, in the very ordinariness of what I recount I think perhaps the reader will find resonances with his or her own life.

  Paul Auster

  Mean, Thinking, Trying

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

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• in our ordinaryness we are most bizarre.

  Ntozake Shange

  Bizarre

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• It is the love of ordinary people, in Burma, in Japan or anywhere else in the world, for justice and peace and freedom that is our surest defense against the forces of unreason and extremism.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Japan, People, Justice

  Aung San Suu Kyi (1997). “Letters From Burma:”

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• Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born

  Richard Dawkins

  People, Sahara, Evolution

  Unweaving the Rainbow ch. 1 (1998)

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• In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness…It’s not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.

  Anatole Broyard

  People, Different, Want

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• The theme of the collection this time is MONSTER. It's not about the typical Monster you find in sci-fi and video games. The expression of the Monsters I have made has a much deeper meaning. The craziness of humanity, the fear we all have, the feeling of going beyond common sense, the absence of ordinariness, expressed by something extremely big, by something that could be ugly or beautiful. In other words, I wanted to question the established standards of beauty.

  Rei Kawakubo

  Beautiful, Expression, Games

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• We long for simplicity and ordinariness.

  Ursus Wehrli

  Long, Simplicity

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• Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!

  Iris Murdoch

  Sadness, Piercings, Unhappiness

  Iris Murdoch (2008). “A Word Child”, p.3, Random House

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• But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making.

  John Shelton Reed

  Believe, Hero, Poor

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• We have a 'now you see Him, now you don't' God. We have Himself clothed in visions, in dreams, in metaphors, in parables, in the poetry of the Bible, and in all the ordinariness of the lives we live.

  Luci Shaw

  Dream, Vision, Invisible

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• The young artist... will discover out of ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. He will not try to make them extraordinary. Only their real meaning will be stated.

  Allan Kaprow

  Real, Artist, Trying

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