Ordinary Lives Quotes & Sayings

The people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. — Christina Baker Kline

The Christian life begins not with high deeds and achievements but with the most simple and ordinary act of humble asking. Then the life and joy grow in us over the years through commonplace, almost boring practices. Daily obedience, reading and prayer, worship attendance, serving our brothers and sisters in Christ as well as our neighbors, depending on Jesus during times of suffering. And bit by bit our faith will grow, and the foundation of our lives will come closer to that deep river of joy. Don't — Timothy J. Keller

Ours is no ordinary calling. Great opportunities and privileges have been bestowed upon us. To us, as a people, has been entrusted the grand and glorious labor of laying the foundation of the kingdom of God upon the earth. Every act of our lives should be performed with this in view. Nothing should be done by anyone calling himself a Latter-day Saint that will conflict with the policy which God has announced as proper to be adopted in establishing that kingdom (The Discourses of Wilford Woodruff, p. 125). — Wilford Woodruff

Ordinary people, caught in the trap of their routine lives, are not villains any more than eccentrics or rebels are villains. Essentially, both kinds of people are struggling to be good, through a maze of conflicts and a haze of shadows. — Sydney J. Harris

I've seen and met angels wearing the disguise of ordinary people living ordinary lives. — Tracy Chapman

On the human imagination events produce the effects of time. Thus he who has travelled far and seen much is apt to fancy that he has lived long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity. In no other way can we account for the venerable air that is already gathering around American annals. When the mind reverts to the earliest days of colonial history, the period seems remote and obscure, the thousand changes that thicken along the links of recollections, throwing back the origin of the nation to a day so distant as seemingly to reach the mists of time; and yet four lives of ordinary duration would suffice to transmit, from mouth to mouth, in the form of tradition, all that civilized man has achieved within the limits of the republic ... Thus, what seems venerable by an accumulation of changes is reduced to familiarity when we come seriously to consider it solely in connection with time. — James Fenimore Cooper

Do you believe in spirits? Or ghosts? ... Yes, I do. I believe in ghosts ... They're the ones who haunt us. The ones who have left us behind."
"Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn the corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles."
"The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin. — Christina Baker Kline

Whenever I hear of someone else's tragedy, I do not dwell on the accident or diagnosis, or even the initial shock waves or aftermath of grief. Instead, I find myself reconstructing those final ordinary moments. Moments that make up our lives. Moments that were blissfully taken for granted
and that likely would have been forgotten altogether but for what followed. The before snapshots. — Emily Giffin

Ordinary points of bravery, the synchronistic moments we all engage in, and the transformative power of minding our voices, forgiving, trusting, and learning to love ourselves and our lives, while we wait. — Andrea T. Goeglein

Everyone seems to see bleakness and despair in my books. I don't read them that way. I see myself as writing comic books, books about ordinary people trying to live ordinary, dull, happy lives while the world is falling to pieces around them. — J.M. Coetzee

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce ... The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State. — James Madison

What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I'm interested in how ordinary people live their lives. — Tracy Kidder

Fashion is only complete when it is worn by ordinary people who exist now, managing their lives, loving and grieving. — Yohji Yamamoto

But there's a world beyond what we can see and touch, and that world lives by its own laws. What may be impossible in this very ordinary world is very possible there, and sometimes the boundaries between the two worlds disappear, and then who can say what is possible and impossible? — David Eddings

There was that in the atmosphere of San Salvatore which produced active-mindedness in all except the natives. They, as before, whatever the beauty around them, whatever the prodigal seasons did, remained immune from thoughts other than those they were accustomed to. All their lives they had seen, year by year, the amazing recurrent spectacle of April in the gardens, and custom had made it invisible to them. They were as blind to it, as unconscious of it, as Domenico's dog asleep in the sun. The visitors could not be blind to it - it was too arresting after London in a particularly wet and gloomy March. Suddenly to be transported to that place where the air was so still that it held its breath, where the light was so golden that the most ordinary things were transfigured - to be transported into that delicate warmth, — Elizabeth Von Arnim

The rest-the vast majority, tens of thousands of days-are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. We glide through them then instantly forget them. We tend not to think about this arithmetic when we look back on our lives. We remember the handful of Big Days and throw away the rest.
We organize our long, shapeless lives into tidy little stories ... But our lives are mostly made up of junk, of ordinary, forgettable days, and 'The End' is never the end. — William Landay

Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself. — William Martin

The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one. — Anna Quindlen

Ordinary people who are just kind of just going about their lives are transformed into heroes because they have the courage to put their voices out there. I think that's a powerful message in this time of political strife. — Viola Davis

She had thought herself trapped in a place outside the ordinary feeling lives of people; she had not noticed how many other people were trapped in that same place. — Kristin Cashore

So closely interwoven have been our lives, our purposes, and experiences that, separated, we have a feeling of incompleteness
united, such strength of self-association that no ordinary obstacles, difficulties, or dangers ever appear to us insurmountable. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Pain and betrayal and then nothingness. That's the death and she's almost welcoming it. — M.C. Frank

The cinema should be human and be part of people's lives; it should focus on ordinary existences in sometimes extraordinary situations and places. That is what really motivates me. — Claire Denis

In thinking about miracles, I believe that our frame of reference has been too dramatic. We have been looking for the burning bush, the parting of the sea, the bellowing voice from heaven. Instead we should be looking at the ordinary day-to-day events in our lives for evidence of the miraculous, maintaining at the same time a scientific orientation. — M. Scott Peck

Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary. We must not permit anything to stand between us and the book that could change our lives. — Jim Rohn

The truth is that History, with its imposing capital H, is simply the amalgamation of many quotidian lives lived in very ordinary ways. History is always personal. If you read Holocaust survivor or American slavery survivor narratives, you realize all too well that these great Historical moments were personal to someone at some time. — Chris Abani

When the war started, religion and superstition (whatever the difference is) permeated the lives of ordinary soldiers, who lived in a thought world not too far removed from the seventeenth century. — Philip Jenkins

If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary people who are turning around in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims, if he could understand what they are losing, he would understand that there can only be one thing that is serious for him - to escape from the general law, to be free. What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death? Only one thing: How to save himself, how to escape: nothing else is serious. — G.I. Gurdjieff

If we see their (Navajo) lives and festivals as fantastic and our lives as ordinary, we come to writing with a sense of poverty. We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. — Natalie Goldberg

There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words. — Anonymous

Embedded in the larger story of redemption is a principle we must not miss: God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things in the lives of others. — Paul David Tripp

I suppose this is what I meant when I wrote what I did, sweet pea, about how it is we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren't and people we didn't know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things. — Cheryl Strayed

I was angry about injustice
about the uncaring way the world works. I knew a lot of ordinary people had died that day, not because of fire or falling masonry but because of their compassion. It was their desperate attempts to save other human being
often total strangers
that ended up costing them their own lives. — Terry Hayes

We shall do even greater things because the love that lived in the radical Christ now lives within millions of ordinary radicals all over the planet. — Shane Claiborne

History is about ordinary people living their ordinary lives, just as we do today, while all around the world is changing. It makes heroes out of some people and victims out of others. — Vicky Adin

Since most of us spend our lives doing ordinary tasks, the most important thing is to carry them out extraordinarily well. — Henry David Thoreau

Most Christians seem to have two kinds of lives, their so-called real life and their so-called religious one. Not (C. S.) Lewis. The barrier so many of us find between the visible and the invisible world was just not there for him. It had become natural for Lewis to live ordinary life in a supernatural way. — Walter Hooper

We expect our spouses to fill voids in our lives or hearts that only God can fill. Unmet expectations reduce a journey expected to be amazing to ordinary. Unmet expectations breed hurt feelings, misunderstanding, and unresolved conflict. — Justin Davis

Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot. — Jane Hirshfield

What simple and
ordinary lives we live,
underneath the shadows
of projection screen
artists — Phil Volatile

Although we tend to think about saints as holy and pious, and picture them with halos above their heads and ecstatic gazes, true saints are much more accessible. They are men and women like us, who live ordinary lives and struggle with ordinary problems. What makes them saints is their clear and unwavering focus on God and God's people. — Henri Nouwen

Yet the scene around me had its influence, and a guilty feeling possessed me as I realized that of all present in that place of peace and clean content, I was the only profane thing, an ogre lurking to destroy. The half-grown ferns and evergreen sedge grasses through which the early breeze whispered, would, if I had my way, soon be smeared with the blood of some animal, who was viewing, perhaps with feelings akin to my own, the dawning of another day; to be is last. Strange thoughts, maybe, coming from a trapper, one whose trade is to kill;but be it known to you that he who lives much alone within the portals of the temple of Nature learns to think, and deeply, of things which seldom come within the scope of ordinary life. Much Killing brings ine time, no longer triumph, but a revulsion of feeling. — Grey Owl

But what I do believe is that if you're a girl who was born in Homsea, a girl who lives in a nothing kind of house with an ordinary kind of family, then you can't know everything about the world and that it's probably good to keep an open mind about things, just in case. — Karen Tayleur

Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It projects them into another world, parallel to but apart from their ordinary lives. They know perfectly well that this fictional realm is not 'real' and yet while they are reading it becomes compelling. A powerful novel becomes part of the backdrop of our lives, long after we have laid the book aside. — Karen Armstrong

Our own egos are so fragile we cannot bear to give our lives to the raising of children only to have them become ordinary people. There, I said it. The worst thing a 21st-century child of interesting parents could be: ordinary. Like us. — Heather Choate Davis

I think that those of us who are ordinary disappear easily into the backdrop of life and we take things for granted. We often wake up in our lives and wonder how we got there. But the characters I create, the people I am drawn to, are quite extraordinary (and not always in wholesome ways), and they offer us the chance to understand who we really are and how we became who we are. — Chris Abani

And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within, and from the habitual union of their souls with God in deep faith and charity. — Thomas Merton

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. — John Updike

Film critics said I gave a voice to the fear we all have: that we'll reach a certain point in our lives, look around and realize that all the things we said we'd do and become will never come to be - and that we're ordinary. — Ann Bancroft

What's usual for us may not be the same for everyone. I'm inspired by lives and stories of all those amazing people who overcome extraordinary challenges each day to live what we see as an ordinary life. — Sharad Vivek Sagar

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives. — Stephen King

There are ancient and modern poems which breathe, in their entirety and in every detail, the divine breath of irony. In such poemsthere lives a real transcendental buffoonery. Their interior is permeated by the mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above everything limited, even above the poet's own art, virtue, and genius; and their exterior form by the histrionic style of an ordinary good Italian buffo. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

It is not reserved for those who are well-known mystics or for those who do wonderful things for the poor. ... [It is for] those poor enough to welcome Jesus. It is for people living ordinary lives and who feel lonely. It is for all those who are old, hospitalized or out of work, who open their hearts in trust to Jesus and cry out for his healing love.[1] - Jean Vanier — Brennan Manning

Everybody, every single person, has a story to tell. Every single ordinary person has an extraordinary story. We might all think that we are unremarkable, that our lives are boring, just because we aren't doing ground-breaking things or making headlines or winning awards. But the truth is we all do something that is fascinating, that is brave, that is something we should proud of. — Cecelia Ahern

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art. — Russell Banks

What do people do with their lives? I mean seriously, literally, hour for hour, what does everyone do? When I was at school I felt perfectly ordinary, just like anyone else, but now it is as if I have forgotten how. I have to do impersonations of a real human being to fit in anywhere or even get served in the supermarket. I have lost my instinct and taste for life, and my days feel like eating with a cold now, knowing you need soup, swallowing, not being able to taste it. — Barney Norris

Who are you not to be great? You, with the imagination of a brilliant child and the powers of an ancient god.
Who are you to be ordinary? You, who can resend life or raise the dead.
Who are you to be afraid? You, who can serve as judge and jury while hoarding infinite lives.
Who are you to be a slave to the past? You who can travel time like the oceans or rewrite history with a single word.
Who are you to be anonymous? You whose names should be spoken in reverend tones or terrified whispers.
And who are you to deny greatness? If you would deny it to yourself, you deny it to the entire world.
And we will not be denied. — Official PlayStation Greatness Awaits Trailer

You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would know she was part of you. — Iain Banks

Renewal is brought by the Holy Spirit. Believers will learn what it means to minister to one another and build each other up. No longer will our lives seem ordinary and indistinguishable from the rest of the world. — Billy Graham

People in their houses at night. These ordinary lives. Passing without their knowing it. Bid hoped to recapture something.
The officer stared at him.
The precious ordinary. — Kent Haruf

Then there are also the quiet deaths. How about the day you realized you weren't going to be an astronaut or the queen of Sheba? Feel the silent distance between yourself and how you felt as a child, between yourself and those feelings of wonder and splendor and trust. Feel the mature fondness for who you once were, and your current need to protect innocence wherever you make might find it. The silence that surrounds the loss of innocence is a most serious death, and yet it is necessary for the onset of maturity.

What about the day we began working not for ourselves, but rather with the hope that our kids have a better life? Or the day we realize that, on the whole, adult life is deeply repetitive? As our lives roll into the ordinary, when our ideals sputter and dissipate, as we wash the dishes after yet another meal, we are integrating death, a little part of us is dying so that another part can live. — Matthew Sanford

The civil-rights movement was completely impossible to achieve. But look at what ordinary people were able to do because they were willing to sacrifice their lives to stay with it. They didn't expect a political process to respond to them. They made the political process respond to them. To say "It's so bad I won't bother" is to give up on your children and give up on your future. — Marian Wright Edelman

But women like Tess didn't seem to have that need to share the ordinary facts of their lives, and that made Cecilia desperate to know them. — Liane Moriarty

People who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn a corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles. — Christina Baker Kline

Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference. — Aldous Huxley

With ordinary men the moments which are united in a close continuity out of the original discrete multiplicity are very few, and the course of their lives resembles a little brook, whereas with the genius it is more like a mighty river into which all the little rivulets flow from afar; that is to say, the universal comprehension of genius vibrates to no experience in which all the individual moments have not been gathered up and stored. — Otto Weininger

...the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It projects them into another world, parallel to but apart from their ordinary lives. They know perfectly well that this fictional realm is not 'real' and yet while they are reading it becomes compelling. A powerful novel becomes part of the backdrop of our lives, long after we have laid the book asie. It is an exercise of make-believe that, like yoga or a religious festival, breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies, so that we are able to empathise with others lives and sorrows. It teaches compassion, the ability to 'feel with' others. And, like mythology, an important novel is transformative. If we allow it to do so, it can change us forever. — Karen Armstrong

Outward simplicity befits ordinary men, like a garment made to measure for them; but it serves as an adornment to those who have filled their lives with great deeds: they might be compared to some beauty carelessly dressed and thereby all the more attractive. — Jean De La Bruyere

[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) — Dallas Willard

These students of mine, like the rest of their generation, were different from mine in one fundamental aspect. My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exile in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare with the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry. — Azar Nafisi

I think the ordinary is a very under-exploited aspect of our lives because it is so familiar. — Martin Parr

I know for myself how the fruits of the gospel of Jesus Christ can transform lives from the ordinary and dreary to the extraordinary and sublime. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

This is the difference between an ordinary scribe and a literary writer. The highest level of literary creation is when the characters in a novel possess life in the mind of the writer. The writer is unable to control them, and might not even be able to predict the next action they will take. We can only follow them in wonder to observe and record the minute details of their lives like a voyeur. — Liu Cixin

The reason Dick's physics was so hard for ordinary people to grasp was that he did not use equations. The usual theoretical physics was done since the time of Newton was to begin by writing down some equations and then to work hard calculating solutions of the equations. This was the way Hans and Oppy and Julian Schwinger did physics. Dick just wrote down the solutions out of his head without ever writing down the equations. He had a physical picture of the way things happen, and the picture gave him the solutions directly with a minimum of calculation. It was no wonder that people who had spent their lives solving equations were baffled by him. Their minds were analytical; his was pictorial. — Freeman Dyson

For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events. — Orson Scott Card

Joy comes to us in moments - ordinary moments. We risk missing out on joy when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary. Scarcity culture may keep us afraid of living small, ordinary lives, but when you talk to people who have survived great losses, it is clear that joy is not a constant. — Brene Brown

We Catholics have not only to do our best to keep down our own warring passions and live decent lives, which will often be hard enough in this odd world we have been born into. We have to bear witness to moral principles which the world owned yesterday and has begun to turn its back on today. We have to disapprove of some of the things our neighbors do, without being stuffy about it; we have to be charitable towards our neighbors and make great allowances for them, without falling into the mistake of condoning their low standards and so encouraging them to sin. Two of the most difficult and delicate tasks a man can undertake; and it happens, nowadays, not only to priests, to whom it comes as part of their professional duty, but to ordinary lay people...So we must know what are the unalterable principles we hold, and why we hold them; we must see straight in a world that is full of moral fog. — Ronald Knox

I love to hear about ordinary people's lives and interests and what motivates them. — Jane Clayson

The Next Big Thing is Christ's return. Until then, we live in hope that changes our ordinary lives here and now. — Michael S. Horton

All our lives, we're told work hard, strive for more, do all you can to live that life less ordinary. Money, power, fame, everyone wants it. But you get there and suddenly you're supposed to be ashamed, be humble?" He shakes his head. "Fuck that noise. I say live your life on your terms. If someone judges you about material things, that's their problem. — Kristen Callihan

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. — Sherman Alexie

Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kind of people they are becoming and for the kind of history-making in which they might take part. — C. Wright Mills

We meet no ordinary people in our lives. — C.S. Lewis

To do what you want is not a privilege. It is a curse. It is the curse of ordinary men. Men with no responsibilities do whatever they want. Common men with no value and self worth do whatever they want. Men whose lives have no worthy purpose are free to do whatever they want. Not you. You are a prince for whom a heavy crown and a powerful throne await. You do not do whatever you want; you do what must be done.- King Chuka — Ray Anyasi

His constant references to the ancient world have the effect of giving ordinary soldiers a sense of their lives. — Andrew Roberts

Terrorism isn't insanity. It grows out of social conditions that are well known: poverty, social oppression, dictatorship, and a void of meaning in the lives of ordinary people. — Deepak Chopra

We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. — Michael Cunningham

Most people live out ordinary lives by denying death. Others live more completely because they're aware of it. I choose the second group. — Alan Joshua

Golosh Street is an interesting locality. All the oddities of trade seemed to have found their way thither and made an eccentric mercantile settlement. There is a bird-shop at one corner. Immediately opposite is an establishment where they sell nothing but ornaments made out of the tinted leaves of autumn, varnished and gummed into various forms. Further down is a second-hand book-stall. There is a small chink between two ordinary-sized houses, in which a little Frenchman makes and sells artificial eyes, specimens of which, ranged on a black velvet cushion, stare at you unwinkingly through the window as you pass, until you shudder and hurry on, thinking how awful the world would be if everyone went about without eyelids. Madame Filomel, the fortune-teller, lives at No. 12 Golosh Street, second storey front, pull the bell on the left-hand side. Next door to Madame is the shop of Herr Hippe, commonly called the Wondersmith.
("The Wondersmith") — Fitz-James O'Brien

After all, the function of a vacation is regenerative, not luxurious. It's to restore our equipment so that we can live our ordinary lives better. — Malcolm Bradbury

Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn a corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles. Vivian — Christina Baker Kline

His life was unrecorded; who is there to write down the lives of ordinary people? — Alexander McCall Smith

I thank God for having given the Company subjects who belong more to Him than to themselves, and who serve the neighbor at the risk of their lives! They are like unrefined gold, which becomes visible in fire and which would otherwise remain hidden under ordinary actions and sometimes under faults and failings. — Vincent De Paul

Interference is a terrific page-turner, but it's also a haunting, powerful look at the way families and friendships entangle us all. Berry is a sharp-eyed, engaging writer, and she deftly captures the terrors, ruptures and intimacies of one seemingly ordinary neighborhood, always finding a precarious beauty in her characters' lives. This is a book that is terrifying, startling, and very hard to put down. — Rebecca Godfrey

Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives. — Pema Chodron

We often don't realize that the extraordinary is to be found in the lives of ordinary people. — Paulo Coelho

As for the cages themselves, an ordinary citizen who kept dogs in similar conditions for their entire lives would risk prosecution for cruelty. A pig producer who keeps an animal of comparable intelligence in this manner, however, is more likely to be rewarded with a tax concession or, in some countries, a direct government subsidy. — Peter Singer

The custom to put others in the line of fire is a recurring theme in Judaism. It boils down to the Levite Korahites' willingness to sacrifice their ordinary Jewish subjects in order to ensure their own survival. This should be a historic warning to modern-day Israelites: their orthodox government would not hesitate to risk the lives of the many for the sake of the survival of the few in the orthodox elite. The citizens of Israel will have to think about how to remove the systemic threat that comes from within their own ranks. — A.J. Deus

We all lead double lives. It's a privilege for the artist and a curse for the ordinary man. One has to get used to it."
"It's a terrible thing to know too much. In life, our words are improvisations and our actions careless mistakes that end up by becoming habits. Fate beign the distraction of the gods, I distract myself by evading questions that I never asked myself in the past. We are in the hands of the improbable, are we not, my dear Cosette?"
- Monsieur Verjat- — Victor Hugo

If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone. — George Will