Quotes & Sayings About Ordinary Woman

That woman - the me that had married Charlie - had tried and failed to find a gap in all of this that was so ordinary, to take some instrument to the gap and shape it, widen it until it got big enough to slip through. She'd wanted to make a beautiful thing, like the Flax Hill natives did. But not a lantern or a bookcase, a life. Not to have what it takes, and to be surrounded by witnesses too. The man you tried with. The children. A boy version of you, or a girl version of him, or both, looking at you with clear, pitiless eyes. — Helen Oyeyemi

What separates an ordinary woman from an extraordinary one? The belief that she is ordinary. — Jody Williams

The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs. — William Osler

I'd spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny. — Michael Chabon

Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. 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 still know she was part of you. — Iain Banks

Consider also the special word they used: survivor. Something new. As long as they didn't have to say human being. It used to be refugee, but by now there was no such creature, no more refugees, only survivors. A name like a number
counted apart from the ordinary swarm. Blue digits on the arm, what difference? They don't call you a woman anyhow. Survivor. Even when your bones get melted into the grains of the earth, still they'll forget human being. Survivor and survivor and survivor; always and always. Who made up these words, parasites on the throat of suffering! — Cynthia Ozick

An Attempt at Jealousy"

How is your life with an ordinary
woman? without the god inside her?
The queen supplanted -

How do you breathe now?
Flinch, waking up?
What do you do, poor man?

How's your life with a tourist
on Earth? Her rib (do you love her?)
is it to your liking?

How do you live with cheap goods: is the market rising?
How's kissing plaster-dust?

Are you bored with her new body?
How's it going, with an earthly woman,
with no sixth sense?

Are you happy?
No? In a shallow pit - how is your life,
my beloved? Hard as mine
with another man? — Marina Tsvetaeva

Enter Justine Putet, of whom it is now time to speak. Imagine a swarthy-looking, ill-tempered person, dried-up and of viperish disposition, with a bad complexion, an evil expression, a cruel tongue, defective internal economy, and (over all this) a layer of aggressive piety and loathsome suavity of speech. A paragon of virtue of a kind that filled you with dismay, for virtue in such a guise as this is detestable to behold, and in this instance it seemed to be inspired by a spirit of hatred and vengeance rather than by ordinary feelings of kindness. An energetic user of rosaries, a fervent petitioner at her prayers, but also an unbridled sower of calumny and clandestine panic. In a word, she was the scorpion of Clochemerle, but a scorpion disguised as a woman of genuine piety. — Gabriel Chevallier

From the first moment a woman dared to speak that hope - dared to believe that the American Dream was meant for her too - ordinary women have taken on extraordinary odds to give their daughters the chance for something else; for a life more equal, more free, and filled with more opportunity than they ever had. In so many ways we have succeeded, but in so many areas we have much work left to do. — Barack Obama

Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound. God may have made men and women, but Colt made them equal. Anon totalitarian regimes and genocides can't happen without gun control Ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State. — Heinrich Himmler

He wondered if maybe just occasionally the gods designed a woman fit for a king or a prince and then gave her to an ordinary man. Maybe they did such a thing once in a while, knowing an ordinary man would treasure her more, love her better. Maybe they even let him keep her - for a while. — Ellen O'Connell

There in the city's steam-and-smoke-smudged harbor is the most extraordinary sight of all: a great copper-clad lady with a torch in one hand and a book in the other. It is not a statesman or a god or a war hero who welcomes us to this new world. It is but an ordinary woman lighting the way- a lady offering us the liberty to pursue our dreams if we've the courage to begin. — Libba Bray

When a man says to a woman, "You are my anima," she should quickly scream and run out of the room. The word anima has neither the greatness of the Woman with Golden Hair nor the greatness of an ordinary woman, who wants to be loved as a woman. — Robert Bly

Two hours later he was ready to kill her. Even his outraged mind, however, recognized that murder was not a viable option, and so he contented himself with devising various plans to make her suffer.
Torture was probably too trite, he decided, and he didn't have the stomach to use it on a female. Although ... He looked over at the person in the baggy breeches. She appeared to be smiling as she lugged the stones. She was no ordinary female.
He shook his head. There were other ways to make her miserable. A snake in her bed perhaps? No, the blasted woman probably liked snakes. A spider? Didn't everyone hate spiders? — Julia Quinn

I'd seen better days, but I wasn't about to instigate widespread panic with my appearance, either. I made a show of washing up and pretending that I was an ordinary, civilized woman who was, perhaps, recovering from a bad date - and who had most certainly not been hiding bodies in anybody's basement. — Cherie Priest

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

There is nothing called 'Extraordinary', it is just the way the World defines an 'ordinary' man or woman , who has recognized his own 'power to achieve' the IMPOSSIBLE ! Let us be ORDINARY, but an 'aware' ordinary , aware of our own selves ! — Abha Maryada Banerjee

This is not really me. I am not like this. I am like you. I am not a patient from a mental hospital. I am just an ordinary woman whose mind has gone temporarily wrong. — Sally Brampton

Show, Trisha. Dennis had seen a Trisha episode about people with depression, and thought maybe his dad had that. Dennis loved Trisha. It was a daytime talk show where ordinary people were given the opportunity to talk about their problems, or yell abuse at their relatives, and it was all presided over by a kindly looking but judgemental woman conveniently called ... Trisha. For a while Dennis thought life without his mum would be some kind of adventure. He'd stay up late, eat take-aways and watch rude comedy shows. However, as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, and the months turned into years, he realised that it wasn't an adventure at all. — David Walliams

Think you it is easy to get a well-known and beautiful woman alone, away from her husband, at so public a gathering? Think you that, in the company of dozens of guests and nearly as many gossipy servants, a man can just pull such a woman aside into a private closet? It would not be easy for any ordinary man
at least I suspect it would not. I cannot say how ordinary men go about their business. — David Liss

It seemed that a woman should remember the night a new life began inside her. Such a miracle should not be the result of routine or an ordinary coming together. Life should begin in a cataclysm of heat and fury bathed in the sweat of passion and urgency. — Maggie Osborne

What makes a woman into a doormat? What makes her see some quite ordinary other person as a looming Goliath? And are not these relationships such an outrage to reality that they cannot last a lifetime? — Nuala O'Faolain

A renaissance man or woman in purpose of deed is the reflection of a person filled with a myriad of inventions.
That is noteworthy to a society at large in need of them from the ordinary to the extraordinary array of activities that may be sourced from them. An inventor is the lightning bolt to Zeus own right hand of creation. — Ivan Alexander Pozo-Illas

Believe like every Hindu in God and His oneness, in rebirth and salvation ... I can no more describe my feeling for Hinduism than for my own wife. She moves me as no other woman in the world can. Not that she has no faults; I daresay she has many more than I see myself. But the feeling of an indissoluble bond is there. Even so I feel for and about Hinduism with all its faults and limitations. Nothing delights me so much as the music of the Gita, or the Ramayana by Tulsidas. When I fancied I was taking my last breath, the Gita was my solace. Hinduism is not an exclusive religion. In it there is room for the worship of all the prophets of the world. 11 It is not a missionary religion in the ordinary sense of the term. It has no doubt absorbed many tribes in its fold, — Paramahansa Yogananda

A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling. We storytellers are all ancient mariners, and none of us is justified in stopping wedding guests, unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experiences of every average man and woman. — Thomas Hardy

The mind never puts forth greater power over itself when in great trials, it yields up calmly its desires, affections, and interests in God. There are seasons when to be still demands immeasurably higher strength than to act. Composure is often the highest result of power. Do you think it demands no power to calm the stormy elements of passion, to moderate the vehemence of desire, to throw off the load of dejection, to suppress every repining thought when the dearest hopes are withered, and to turn the wounded spirit from dangerous reveries and wasting grief, to the quiet discharge of ordinary duties? Is there no power put forth, when a {woman}, stripped of {her} property, of the fruits of a life's labors, quells discontent and gloomy forebodings, and serenely and patiently returns to the tasks which Providence assigns? — William Ellery Channing

Listening with absorbed attention more to her voice than to what she was saying, and thinking how like she was, flowering through her voice into beauty in the darkness, to some butterflies he had come across in the Swiss mountains the summer before. When they were folded up they were grey, mothlike creatures that one might easily overlook, but directly they opened their wings they became the loveliest things in the world, all rose-colour or heavenly blue. So had she been to him in the daylight that afternoon,
an ordinary woman, not in any way noticeable; but now listen to her, opening into beauty on the wings of her voice! — Elizabeth Von Arnim

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. — Virginia Woolf

One ordinary woman connected to an extraordinary God can make a difference — Pam Farrel

The Ephebians believed that every man should have the vote (provided that he wasn't poor, foreign, nor disqualified by reason of being mad, frivolous, or a woman). Every five years someone was elected to be Tyrant, provided he could prove that he was honest, intelligent, sensible, and trustworthy. Immediately after he was elected, of course, it was obvious to everyone that he was a criminal madman and totally out of touch with the view of the ordinary philosopher in the street looking for a towel. And then five years later they elected another one just like him, and really it was amazing how intelligent people kept on making the same mistakes. — Terry Pratchett

The rake himself lived up to Amy's expectations, however, when he came out to greet his guests. Tall, dark, handsome, and dressed with devastating informality in an open-necked shirt, sleeves rolled up to expose his arms like a laborer. No one could fair to be aware of a lithe body beneath the slight amount of clothing, and there was a wicked gleam in his eye even if he was supposed to have been tamed by matrimony.
Amy found it difficult to believe that the very ordinary woman by his side had achieved such a miracle. Lady Templemore was short and her gown was a simple green muslin. Her face was close to plain and her brown hair was gathered into a simple knot at the back.
But then she smiled at her guests and was beautiful. When she turned to her husband with a comment, she was dazzling, and the look in his eye showed he was tamed indeed, if devotion so heated could be called tame at all. — Jo Beverley

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess. — H.L. Mencken

She was an extraordinary woman, and I went to bed that night feeling like I was perhaps more than ordinary myself. This was the effect she had on me. — Khaled Hosseini

So a contemporary wedding is like the Olympic Games, a spectacle of detailed research and preparation but lasts only a short time. Even if it all goes according to plan, a wedding is over in a day, much of it spent being ordered around by photographers, and when the audience is gone and the costumes returned to their boxes (never again to be taken out), an ordinary man and woman look to each other and think: 'Is this all it is? — Michael Foley

What restricts the use of the word 'lady' among the courteous is that it is intended to set a woman apart from ordinary humanity, and in the working world that is not a help, as women have discovered in many bitter ways. — Judith Martin

Women are really strange, if you think about it. But this was no ordinary woman. This was a succubus - a life sucking monster. — Justin Villanueva

There are two kinds of women: those who marry princes and those who marry frogs. The frogs never become princes, but it is an acknowledged fact that a prince may very well, in the course of an ordinary marrige, gradually, at first almost imperceptibly, turn into a frog. Happy the woman who after twenty-five years still wakes up beside the prince she fell in love with. — Stephen Mitchell

She was very fond of thinking and getting at the truth of things, but was so far from being pedantic, so full of youthful ways that from the first moment one began to love all these originalities in her, and to accept them. [ ... ] This naive combination in her of the child and the thinking woman, this childlike and absolutely genuine thirst for truth and justice, and absolute faith in her impulses
all this lighted up her face with a fine glow of sincerity, giving it a lofty, spiritual beauty, and one began to understand that it was not so easy to gauge the full significance of that beauty which was not all at once apparent to every ordinary unsympathetic eye. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can't I just be an ordinary woman? — Marilyn Monroe

But there is no such being as an ordinary man or woman if by ordinary you mean what so many people mean: negligible. Each human being is so tremendous that he or she merits a reverence that is really religious. For each is a creation of God; each a mirror of Divinity; each a feature or a facet on the Face of Christ; each an object of constant care and concern to the Trinity. There is nothing ordinary in the sense that so many of us use that word, about any human being. — M. Raymond

Chretien speaking to Dominic:
'Magda is no ordinary young woman. There is a blood price on her head way beyond that upon any Cathar, indeed way beyond mine. I advise you most strongly to think with your head, not your loins.'
'I am thinking,' Dominic said softly, 'with my heart. — Elizabeth Chadwick

We're never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we're bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives - although that's what we tell ourselves - but because we're wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger. — Barack Obama

Mr. Jackaby, really! Jenny isn't some scientific oddity--she's your friend!"
Jackaby raised an eyebrow. "In point of fact, Miss Rook, she's both, and that's nothing to be ashamed of. All exceptional people are, by definition, exceptions to the norm. If we insist on being ordinary, we can never be truly extraordinary."
"That is a very well-rehearsed and eloquent excuse for being an absolute brute to a sad, sweet woman. — William Ritter

No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children; for upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour of the day but often every hour of the night. — Theodore Roosevelt

At the Sandwich Islands, Kaahumanu, the gigantic old dowager queen - a woman of nearly four hundred pounds weight, and who is said to be still living at Mowee - was accustomed, in some of her terrific gusts of temper, to snatch up an ordinary sized man who had offended her, and snap his spine across her knee. Incredible as this may seem, it is a fact. While at Lahainaluna - the residence of this monstrous Jezebel - a humpbacked wretch was pointed out to me, who, some twenty-five years previously, had had the vertebrae of his backbone very seriously discomposed by his gentle mistress. The — Herman Melville

It was always the best way of finding out information; just go and ask a woman who keeps her eyes and ears open and who likes to talk. It always worked. It was no use asking men; they simply were not interested enough in other people and the ordinary doings of people. That is why the real historians of Africa had always been the grandmothers, who remembered the lineage and the stories that went with it. — Alexander McCall Smith

He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making
love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a
time when that seemed ordinary? — George Orwell

She was the kind of elegance
That would never tarnish.
A mixture of lace and mesh,
Like a classic heirloom that begged to be worn.
She was sharp intellect and quick wit.
The type of woman that spoke her mind,
Even if it shook.
(Or even if no one was listening.)
She was beautiful.
But not someone you'd see in magazines,
Her hips were too wide, her hair a mess of wispy tendrils,
(Rather, she was actually very ordinary.)
My, was she stubborn! She'd drive you mad!
(Sometimes, you'd probably call her crazy.)
But mostly, her laughter was a joyful moments.
Like a warm towel fresh from the dryer,
Or finding a twenty-dollar bill in your winter coat.
And that was the true revelation.
That magic does exist,
It ran through her like a wild, fiery current. — M.J. Abraham

Ifemelu would come to realize later that Kimberly used "beautiful" in a peculiar way. "I'm meeting my beautiful friend from graduate school," Kimberly would say, or "We're working with this beautiful woman on the inner-city project," and always, the women she referred to would turn out to be quite ordinary-looking, but always black. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Can he find it in his heart to love this plain, ordinary woman? Can he love her enough to write a music for her? If he cannot, what is left for him? — J.M. Coetzee

Everybody knocks my female figures. They say they're overblown, that women don't look like that. And I agree. certainly all women don't look like my paintings. But you cant deny some women do look like that. I don't want to paint just another woman. A painting, it's something important; you want to look at it, maybe forever. Who wants to look at just an ordinary hero forever? You want the ultimate, you pull out the stops and do everything in extremes. The extreme in beauty, if it fits; the extreme in ugliness if it fits; the extreme in terror if this is what's required. You know, I think this is one reason that so many people enjoy my stuff, because all of these extremes are jammed into it. — Frank Frazetta

I myself am just an ordinary woman. I simply had no choice. — Miep Gies

The woman is not just a pleasure, nor even a problem. She is a meniscus that allows the absolute to have a shape, that lets him skate however briefly on the mystery, her presence luminous on the ordinary and the grand. Like the odor at night in Pittsburgh's empty streets after summer rain on maples and sycamore. — Jack Gilbert

I'm just an ordinary woman who has somehow managed to do some extraordinary things! — Fiona Roberts

I feel like I'm playing more of a role walking down the red carpet than when I'm playing an ordinary woman covered in sweat. — Kate Winslet

One advantage to being a despised species is that you have freedom, freedom to be any crazy thing you want. If you listen to a group of housewives talk, you'll hear a lot of nonsense, some of it really crazy. This comes, I think, from being alone so much, and pursuing your own odd train of thought without impediment, which some call discipline. The result is craziness, but also brilliance. Ordinary women come out with the damnedest truth. You ignore them at your own risk. And they are permitted to go on making wild statements without being put in one kind of jail or another (some of them, anyway) because everyone knows they're crazy and powerless too. If a woman is religious or earthy, passive or wildly assertive, loving or hating, she doesn't get much more flak than if she isn't: her choices lie between being castigated as a ball and chain or as a whore. — Marilyn French

The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity. But an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children literally alter the destiny of nations. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

A hero is no braver than an ordinary woman, but she is brave five minutes longer. (That's me piggybacking on Emerson.) — Camille Perri

A democracy without faith is just a machine without power. Nothing can make it function except faith in itself, in the ordinary man and woman. — Eleanor Dark

As we cannot afford to squander our natural resources of minerals, food, and beauty, so we cannot afford to discard any human resources of brains, skills, and initiative, even though it is women who possess them ... a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I just see myself as just an ordinary chick from Florida, not some beautiful woman. — Jennifer Sky

How strange," she said, "not to recognize one's own face."
"You have no cause for complaint," Grant said huskily. Even bruised and pale and ravaged, her face was incomparable.
"Do you think so?" She stared into the looking glass without a trace of self-satisfactionshe had displayed at the ball. *That* Vivien had had no doubt of her many attractions. This woman was far less confident.
"Everyone thinks so. You're known as one of the great beauties of London."
"I don't see why." Catching his skeptical expression, she added, "Truly, I'm not fishing for compliments, it's just... seems a very ordinary face." She produced a comical, clownish expression, like a child experimenting with her reflection. A shaken laugh escaped her. "It doesn't seem to belong to me. — Lisa Kleypas

The kind of young woman who can be a terrific torchbearer has high standards all the time, not just in her prom dress, but every, ordinary day. — Margaret D. Nadauld

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus. — Marcel Proust

She's a smart woman. I love that. Intelligence is a wonderful and powerful aphrodisiac. To me, it enhances beauty, makes an ordinary woman look like a movie star. — Eric Jerome Dickey

I sing of a woman with ink on her hands and pictures hidden beneath her hair. I sing of a dog with skin like velvet pushed the wrong way.I sing of the shape a fallen body makes in the dirt beneath a tree, and I sing of an ordinary man who is wanted to know things no human being could tell him.This is the true beginning. — Carolyn Parkhurst

My mother is not a woman of ordinary culture. She knows literature and speaks Spanish better than I do. She even corrected my poems and gave me advice when I was studying rhetoric. — Jose Rizal

For me, it is exciting to see a woman take a chance and wear something out of the ordinary. — Narciso Rodriguez

There was a natural resource in the affective devotion to the saints and to Jesus, and a similar intensity of devotion inevitably became directed to the ordinary human.7 Eleanor of Aquitaine, the paragon of courtly love at the courts of Angers and Poitiers, was a grandchild of Guillaume, duke of Aquitaine, the first known troubadour. In many of Guillaume's love songs 'the vocabulary and emotional fervor hitherto ordinarily used to express man's love for God are transferred to the liturgical worship of woman, and vice versa.'8 The layering of Christian feeling and the new romantic spirit is also witnessed in the roman courtois, the epic stories filled with legendary material and hinged on figures of woman, mystery and quest. — Anthony Bartlett

I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child. — Joseph Campbell

If she were here I wouldn't be able to keep my hands off her. I would hold her so close she'd beg me to let her breathe. I'd kiss her so hard she'd plead for mercy. I'd unfasten her clothing and lie with her on that hard bed, and what was between us would be as far above the ordinary congress between man and woman as the stars are above their pale reflections in the lake below. — Juliet Marillier

But there isn't going to be any First Lady. There is just to be plain, ordinary Mrs. Roosevelt ... I never wanted to be the president's wife, and don't want it now. You don't quite believe me, do you? Very likely no one would-except possibly some woman who had had the job. — Eleanor Roosevelt

He studied the woman before him, not as lovely as she once was, ordinary in appearance, scarred by living, abandoned by many, breathtakingly to be near and altogether unforgettable. "I have no friends," she spoke forth hauntingly. "I am alone." He couldn't believe it. But then he could for the rare creature near enough to touch was out of their league. She wasn't envied for the shallowness of appearance or the superficiality of status or possessions; she was envied for being uncommon and for possessing indomitable strength, something only a lifetime of suffering could shape. — Donna Lynn Hope

Reviewers claimed that she could see a way through any emotional conflict; more often than not, they mentioned the purity of her heart. But they were wrong. It was the impurity in her heart that made her successful. She was an ordinary woman who'd made extraordinary mistakes. She understood every nuance of need and loss. — Kristin Hannah

It might sound ordinary for a woman to find out her husband's cheating on her, but not if you're the woman and it's your husband. — Melissa Bank

It matters not at all that I do not want to marry, that I am afraid of the wedding, afraid of consummating the marriage, afraid of childbirth, afraid of everything about being a wife. Nobody even asks if I have lost my childhood sense of vocation, if I still want to be a nun. Nobody cares what I think at all. They treat me like an ordinary young woman, bred for wedding and bedding, and since they do not ask me what I think, nor observe what I feel, there is nothing that gives them pause at all. — Philippa Gregory

It is the ordinary woman who knows something about love; the gorgeous ones are too busy being gorgeous. — Katharine Hepburn

At first he thought she was an ordinary woman. Well, an ordinary dead woman anyways. — Lori Lamothe

In reaction against the age-old slogan, "woman is the weaker vessel," or the still more offensive, "woman is a divine creature," we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that "a woman is as good as a man," without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: ( ... ) that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I envisaged a woman of the late nineteenth century marrying into this milieu, finding it unendurable and fleeing back with her child to the more ordinary hazards of London: of that child, given at her christening the ancient Roman name for the island, Sarnia, but reared in ignorance of her paternal background, discovering, after her mother's death, that she was an heiress, and being bidden back to claim her patrimony. Skulduggery followed naturally.
(On the writing of SARNIA) — Hilary Ford

A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also. — Dorothy L. Sayers

She tried to live like an ordinary woman, but some women cannot live an ordinary life. — Philippa Gregory

Monks committed all the same sins that ordinary people did. He had just been shocked by the woman's shamelessness. The sight of her nakedness remained with him, the way the hot heart of a candle flame, stared at for a few moments, would burn on behind closed eyelids. — Ken Follett

For seventy-five years I've made ladies dresses. That means that for seventy-five years I have made women happy. For seventy-five years I have made mature women spin around in front of the mirror like young girls. For seventy-five years I have made young girls look in the mirror and for the first time see a woman staring back at them. I have made young men's eyes pop out. I've made old men's eyes pop out. Because the right dress does that. It makes ordinary women feel extraordinary. — Jane L Rosen

All nuns, by the very fact of their monastic profession, are exceptional people. No ordinary woman could live such a life. There must inevitably be something, or many things, that are outstanding about a nun. — Jennifer Worth

Deep within everyone's heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming. For several weeks or months, rarely longer, a beautiful young woman lives outside ordinary life. She is intoxicated. She feels as if she exists beyond time, beyond its laws; she experiences not the monotonous succession of days passing by, but moments of intense, almost desperate happinness. — Irene Nemirovsky

If I could give you information of my life it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do in His service what He has done in her. And if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all, and I nothing. I have worked hard, very hard, that is all; and I have never refused God anything. — Florence Nightingale

Not that she's a political animal, she's just an ordinary woman, but as a woman she's of the view that you don't bring children into the world to have them shot. — Hans Fallada

Embrace the common: a Sunday afternoon watching sports, Starbucks with a friend, cooking dinner for a neighbor, taking the dog for a walk, heading to a job that is making you more humble and needy because it is so unfulfilling, or working through conflict with a friend you have offended. This and more is all part of it. So do your everyday and your ordinary. Godliness is found and formed in those places. No man or woman greatly used by God has escaped them. Great men and women of God have transformed the mundane, turning neighborhoods into mission fields, parenting into launching the next generation of God's voices, legal work into loving those most hurting, waiting tables into serving and loving in such a way that people see our God. — Jennie Allen

An ordinary woman who makes herself available to an extraordinary God can do amazing things for God. — Elizabeth George

The Ordinary is Extraordinary ..." my motto for life as a writer/Mom/woman — Lisa Barr

Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extravagant compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while he is talking. — G.K. Chesterton

It is true that going out on to the street implies the risk of accidents happening, as they would to any ordinary man or woman. But if the church stays wrapped up in itself, it will age. And if I had to choose between a wounded church that goes out on to the streets and a sick, withdrawn church, I would definitely choose the first one. — Pope Francis

Sometimes I'm more true when I'm up onstage than I'm able to be in my regular life. It's not as exciting to be at home, but I've got to learn how to make that work, and then I will be an ordinary woman. — Bonnie Raitt

A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour - all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest. — H.L. Mencken

The Oakland chapter's "bondsman" is a handsome middle-aged woman with platinum-blond hair named Dorothy Connors. She has a pine-paneled office, drives a white Cadillac and treats the Angels gently, like wayward children. "These boys are the backbone of the bail-bond business," she says. "Ordinary customers come and go, but just like clockwork, the Angels come down to my office each week to make their payments. They really pay the overhead. — Hunter S. Thompson

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

The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children. — G.K. Chesterton

There is nothing wrong with being a woman, and doing ordinary things. Sometimes small deeds can show big ideas. — Judith Merkle Riley

Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces.
You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew.
I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. — Iain Pears