Best ordinary & literature Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“I am only about half alive - a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored & listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me. However - so many things do interest me, & interest me intensely, in science, history, philosophy, & literature; that I have never actually desired to die, or entertained any suicidal designs, as might be expected of one with so little kinship to the ordinary features of life.”

“[T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete.”

Book Literature Effects Style Products Revolution Ordinary Transformation Alterations

Author:Stephen Jay Gould

“Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers.”

Littles Made Literature Tree Strange Flower Ordinary Lovely Forests Grass Lakes Masterpiece Caves Patches Clinging Eloquent Vines Mushrooms Puddles Wildflowers

Author:Roberto Bolano

“Every person above the ordinary has a certain mission that they are called to fulfill.”

Persons Certain Literature Ordinary Missions Self Discovery

Author:Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Publishers, theatrical managers, and critics ask not for the quality inherent in creative art, but will it meet with a good sale, will it suit the palate of the people? Alas, this palate is like a dumping ground; it relishes anything that needs no mental mastication. As a result, the mediocre, the ordinary, the commonplace represents the chief literary output.”

Source: Anarchism: Top Crime Collections

“It is impossible to look into the Bible with the most ordinary attention without feeling that we have got into a moral atmosphere quite different from that which we breathe in the world, and in the world's literature.”

World Looks Different Feelings Literature Attention Moral Impossible Ordinary Bible Breathe Atmosphere

Author:Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine

“Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It's about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.”

People Literature Social Wealth Findings Ordinary Capitalism Hollywood Strive Productions Pursuit Enjoyment Villain Dominance Prestige Egalitarianism Pursuit Of Wealth

Author:Alex Tabarrok

“In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others.”

Source: Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

“Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Dramabegins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.”

Art Reality Artist Choices Literature Social Wealth Deals Conditions Talent Position Pages Ordinary Psychological Realism Exceptional Imaginative Freedom Of Choice

Book:The collected works of Aldous Huxley

Source: The collected works of Aldous Huxley

“Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience.”

World Way Trying Art Hands Moving Law Science Literature Speak Language Imagination Accepting Models Ordinary Mathematics Data Constructs Interpreting Literature And Music

Author:Northrop Frye

“Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.”

Literature Language Speech Ordinary Everyday Quietness Deviate

Book:Literary Theory: An Introduction

Source: Literary Theory: An Introduction

“A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.”

Ifs Men World Literature Ordinary Murder Good Man Conventional Murderer Monstrous Ordinary Man

Author:Graham Greene

“I really am just trying to tell stories. But stories are often grounded in larger events and themes. They don't have to be - there's a big literature of trailer-park, kitchen-table fiction that's just about goings-on in the lives of ordinary people - but my own tastes run toward stories that in addition to being good stories are set against a backdrop that is interesting to read and learn about.”

“The foot of the heavenly ladder, which we have got to mount in order to reach the higher regions, has to be fixed firmly in every-day life, so that everybody may be able to climb up it along with us. When people then find that they have got climbed up higher and higher into a marvelous, magical world, they will feel that that realm, too, belongs to their ordinary, every-day life, and is, merely, the wonderful and most glorious part thereof.”

People World Feels May Able Order Literature Wonderful Feet Higher Ordinary Fixed Realms Glorious Climbs Heavenly Regions Marvelous Ladders Day Life

Author:E. T. A. Hoffmann

“That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.”

Men Humans Literature Given Human Beings Equal Ordinary Equality Sane Propositions Equality Of Man

Author:Aldous Huxley

“It is right here, all of it, here for the taking, right before our eyes - happiness, fulfillment, hope, peace, justice. And most of all, there is truth, ordinary and simple, just sitting there to be plucked, if only we get our lazy rear ends off the pillow of complacency. But first, we need to open our eyes to this banal fact. And for that we need a periodic bit of shakeup in the form of an infusion of wonder - fantastic literature.”

Ifs Needs Firsts Ends Facts Eye Form Literature Bits Justice Simple Wonder Ordinary Sitting Fantastic Fulfillment Lazy Complacency Pillow Peace Justice Infusion

Author:Vera Nazarian

“It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.”

Men Literature Race Ordinary Mark Flight Giants Great Men Touching Sublime Calculations Childlike

Book:Letters of Two Brides

Source: Letters of Two Brides

“What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.”

People Book Whole Past Literature Realizing Serious Ordinary Ordinary People

Author:Doris Lessing

“The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.”

Men Different Certain Literature Personality Intellectual Ordinary Intelligent Sections Ordinary Man

Book:A Collection of Essays

Source: A Collection of Essays

“If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?”

Ifs Literature Materials Prove Draws Ordinary Advantage Vegetarian Creeds Dirtiness

Book:All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays

Source: All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays

“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.”

People Art Literature Ordinary Extraordinary Discovering Ordinary People Discovering Something

Author:Boris Pasternak

“Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.”

Men Literature Seeing Genius Ten Ordinary Capacity Ordinary Man Talent And Genius Artistic Genius

Author:Ezra Pound

“Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.”

People Art Sometimes Passion Literature Secret Mystery Effects Ordinary Intellect Veils Ordinary People Mystery Of Life

Book:The Essential Oscar Wilde

Source: The Essential Oscar Wilde

“For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.”

Source: Angela Carter's Book Of Fairy Tales

“The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.”

Men Literature Essentials Ordinary Mere Association Aquariums Swept Away

Author:Gilbert K. Chesterton

“All I try to do is portray Indians as we are, in creative ways. With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new.”

“One function of the librarian, as he saw it, was to blunt the edge of these differences and to provide a means whereby the rich and poor could live happily side by side. The public library was a great leveler, supplying a literature by which the ordinary man could experience some of the pleasures of the rich, and providing a common ground where employer and employee could meet on equal terms.”

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