Ordinary Quotes - Page 4

• Zalachenko...you're just an ordinary asshole who hates women.

  Steig Larsson

  Hate

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• Marmee: Oh, Jo. Jo, you have so many extraordinary gifts; how can you expect to lead an ordinary life? You’re ready to go out and – and find a good use for your talent. Tho’ I don’t know what I shall do without my Jo. Go, and embrace your liberty. And see what wonderful things come of it.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Liberty, Use, Talent

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• The good folks mostly win, courage usually triumphs over fear, the family dog hardly ever contracts rabies: these are things I knew at twenty-five, and things I still know now, at the age of 25 x 2. But I know something else as well: there's a place in most of us where the rain is pretty much constant, the shadows are always long, and the woods are full of monsters. It is good to have a voice in which the terrors of such a place can be articulated and its geography partially described, without denying the sunshine and clarity that fill so much of our ordinary lives. (viii)

  Stephen King

  Dog, Rain, Sunshine

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• She stopped at the desk and held up a can for his view. "This looks like an ordinary hairspray can, right?" "Of course." he said though he had no idea what hairspray was.

  Gena Showalter

  Views, Ideas, Looks

  Gena Showalter (2009). “Gena Showalter's Atlantis Series Bundle: Heart of the Dragon\Jewel of Atlantis\The Nymph King\The Vampire's Bride\The Amazon's Curse”, p.173, Harlequin

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• I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for.

  Charles Dickens

  Lying, Mean, Ambition

  Charles Dickens (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Charles Dickens (Illustrated)”, p.5760, Delphi Classics

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• Everything was an adventure, at night, when you were where you shouldn't be, even if it was somwhere you could go perfectly well in daylight, and it was then only ordinary.

  Robin McKinley

  Adventure, Night, Daylight

  Robin Mckinley (2010). “Pegasus”, p.100, Penguin

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• The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one that looks as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more stairways than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

  Terry Pratchett

  Truth, Book, Bad Day

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• If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Years, Stories, Chance

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• 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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