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Ordinary Quotes

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Ordinary Quotes

“There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and "live" with the characters.”

Needs Character Stories Seems My Own Space Ordinary Everyday Abandon Take Me Everyday Life Retreat Time And Space Ordinary Life

Author:Margaret Mahy

“You see, years ago I was just an ordinary bee minding my own business, smelling flowers all day, and occasionally picking up part-time work in people's bonnets. Then one day I realized that I'd never amount to anything without an education and, being naturally adept at spelling, I decided that—”

People Years My Own Flower Amount One Day Ordinary Years Ago Decided I Realized Bees Own Business Spelling Part Time Adept Bonnets Minding My Own Business

Book:The phantom tollbooth

Source: The phantom tollbooth

“End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them, but as I wrote my own, I found surprising pleasure in creating a world that is so radically changed, yet where there's so much meaning and value in every small and ordinary thing we have, and take for granted: hot showers, enough food, friends, routines.”

World Ends Enough Stories Values Found My Own Pleasure Changed Creating Ordinary Hot Rings Granted Surprising Showers End Of The World Ordinary Things

Author:Karen Thompson Walker

“The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people ... have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across. Did they really think I'd rather be camping by a polluted river than sitting in my own flat with my things about me?”

People Thinking Made My Own Trouble Objects Ordinary Sitting Rivers Ruins Flats Ordinary People Scorn Camping Apathetic

Book:Sexing the Cherry

Source: Sexing the Cherry

“Dachau has been my own lifelong point of no return. Between the moment when I walked through the gate of that prison, with its infamous motto, 'Arbeit Macht Frei,' and when I walked out at the end of a day that had no ordinary scale of hours, I was changed, and how I looked at the human condition, the world we live in, changed ... Years of war had taught me a great deal, but war was nothing like Dachau. Compared to Dachau, war was clean.”

“It's unsettling, to lose the safety of the familiar, even when what's disrupted is an ordinary routine. When I began this poem, I was grieving for the loss of my old barbershop in Manhattan, and wondering at the strangeness of my new one. I didn't have any idea the poem would break into the underworld, opening a deeper subject: the continuing force of the old griefs routine helps to mediate, and my strange, sheer wonder at my own survival. Where's home now? In the contingent present, in which anything can disappear, and where we're sometimes granted some form of grace.”

“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.”

“One of the things that I noticed with my own eyes was Nelson Mandela ability to engage with kings and queens and heads of state on the one hand, and his ability to engage with ordinary people, equally comfortably.”

People States Hands Eye My Own Ability Kings Ordinary Queens Ordinary People Nelson Head Of State Kings And Queens

Author:Kumi Naidoo

“I didn't have a perfect model, but I wanted to try to blend my own personal reflections and experiences with this broader canvas to see how a lot of the narratives we have about economy and foreign policy got stuck. Because we have these categories of liberal, conservative, free marketer, open government - all these stereotypes about our politics and the categories we try to put things in are inadequate to this sort of complex, ambiguous, sometimes contradictory experience we have as ordinary people and that I have as an elected official.”

“There's a constant conflict, really, within me. As much as I really enjoy what I do at home... I play on my own little soccer team and I've been taking part in the community and living the life of any ordinary guy, I always find myself wistful and enveloped in a feeling I can't really get out of my system.”

Littles I Can Play Feelings Home Guy Enjoy Community My Own Team Conflict Ordinary Constant Soccer Live Life Soccer Team

Author:Robert Plant

“Little bits of things make me do it; — perhaps a word that I said and ought not to have said ten years ago; — the most ordinary little mistakes, even my own past thoughts to myself about the merest trifles. They are always making me shiver.”

Years Littles Said Past Bits My Own Mistake Ought Ten Little Bit Ordinary Years Ago Trifles Shiver

Book:Can You Forgive Her?

Source: Can You Forgive Her?

“I am not, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, a good-natured man; that is, many things annoy me besides what interferes with my own ease and interest. I hate a lie; a piece of injustice wounds me to the quick, though nothing but the report of it reach me. Therefore I have made many enemies and few friends; for the public know nothing of well-wishers, and keep a wary eye on those who would reform them.”

Source: The plain speaker: opinions on books, men, and things [by W. Hazlitt].

“My own view, which does not rely solely on religious faith or even on an original idea, but rather on ordinary common sense, is that establishing binding ethical principles is possible when we take as our starting point the observation that we all desire happiness and wish to avoid suffering.”

Source: Ancient Wisdom, Modern World: Ethics for the New Millennium