Quotes About Ordinariness

#1. We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives.

Stephen Jay Gould

#2. It is human nature to instinctively rebel at obscurity or ordinariness.

Taylor Caldwell

#3. Our everyday lives are filled with complex decisions. We long for simplicity and ordinariness.

Ursus Wehrli

#4. When you're being truly creative, time stands still, and you enter a dimension that can carry you beyond the ordinariness of everyday life.

Denise Linn

#5. Even if there are moments during the day when all seems normal and when every action of your own and of those around you seems to be unremarkable, the appearance of ordinariness is an illusion, and just below the placid surface, the world is seething.

Dean Koontz

#6. I now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imagination.

Kurt Vonnegut

#7. There is no better point of entry to the religious experience than the Sabbath, for all its apparent ordinariness. Because of its ordinariness. The extraordinariness of the Sabbath lies in its being commonplace.

Judith Shulevitz

#8. You turn your life into a work of art in order to redeem the ordinariness - a condition you are stuck with.

Robert Dessaix

#9. It's just like the reviews promised - other people's ordinariness is more rewarding than your own. Their banality is soothing to your own sense of failure. Because being you is so much more interesting than being me.

Neal Stephenson

#10. Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!

Iris Murdoch

#11. The young artist ... will discover out of ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. He will not try to make them extraordinary. Only their real meaning will be stated.

Allan Kaprow

#12. I love the razor's edge. I want to be cut open. My terror is of a bourgeois, ordinary life. I can't bear the everyday constraint. I believe that ordinariness would put out my spark, such as it is.

Hanif Kureishi

#13. In 1976, Jimmy Carter - peanut farmer; carried his own suitcase, imagine that - somewhat tapped America's durable but shallow reservoir of populism. By 1980, ordinariness in high office had lost its allure.

George Will

#14. We have a 'now you see Him, now you don't' God. We have Himself clothed in visions, in dreams, in metaphors, in parables, in the poetry of the Bible, and in all the ordinariness of the lives we live.

Luci Shaw

#15. In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They're elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness ... It's not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.

Anatole Broyard

#16. Wisdom is the aristic craving for extraordinary insights, for incandescent revelations that have the power to burst through banausic and doulic ordinariness: wisdom is the lust to be transfigured, transvaluated.

Kenny Smith

#17. Maybe we all just want to feel special, even for a little while, to be fooled for a bit into feeling something besides the truth of our own ordinariness.

Deb Caletti

#18. I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.

Katherine Dunn

#19. While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences but in our simple presence in life.

Brennan Manning

#20. How I hate the attitude of ordinary people to life. How I loathe ordinariness! How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with their eternal price list. It makes my blood boil.

D.H. Lawrence

#21. It is the ordinariness of us that is the same in all of us.

Lorraine Toussaint

#22. His was a psychological and emotional disturbance of untold, awful depth, mundane and yet tragic in that very ordinariness.

John Connolly

#23. I did it because you are the epitome of ordinariness.

Markus Zusak

#24. Sometimes when you need to feel the all-embracing nature of God, paradoxically you need to hang out in the ordinariness, in daily ritual and comfort.

Anne Lamott

#25. [...] sometimes mystery defies what our head knows and we feel God reach down into the ordinariness of nightly ritual and speak to our heart with a whisper.

Lindsey O'Connor

#26. You wanted to live inside the lines where the ordinariness of everything would protect you from the dragons that lay at the edge of the map ready to blow fire in your face if you strayed off course, to the edge of the known world.

Anne Roiphe

#27. And I think as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault

Sylvia Plath

#28. Maybe when we see things all the time, we stop really looking at them. And it takes an artist, someone who can look past the ordinariness, to remind us how special they really are" -Lily

Cynthia Lord

#29. I admire photographers who can take much more ordinarily subject matter and make it transcend that ordinariness, so that it becomes something else fresh and new. It opens this doorway. I really admire people who can do that with photography.

Andy Summers

#30. The Virtue and unpretentiousness of the wise man, which I am talking about, goes unnoticed because of its transparent ordinariness.

Alan Jacobs

#31. Own your extraordinariness and Your ordinariness

Danielle LaPorte

#32. But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making.

John Shelton Reed

#33. This is the ordinariness of the Present, without anything special, mystic or mysterious, it simply exists!! One should live through one's life from moment to moment, and allow things happen the way they want to happen. Abandon yourself into the Present! Be consciously present in every moment!

Frank M. Wanderer

#34. One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.

Glen Duncan

#35. For me, Superman's greatest contribution has never been the superhero part: it's the Clark Kent part - the idea that any of us, in all our ordinariness, can change the world.

Brad Meltzer

#36. So much depends, therefore, upon our maintaining gospel perspective in the midst of ordinariness, the pressures of temptation, tribulation, deprivation, and the cares of the world.

Neal A. Maxwell

#37. On my own, the ordinariness of the moment is almost too much to stand. I glance around the restaurant, taking in the faces of the waiters, the customers. Two dozen noisy conversations mixing into a kind of meaningless roar. I think, What if you people knew what I knew? -

Blake Crouch

#38. But I think you have to - whatever the environment looks like, it does enter into people's art work one way or another; it's very remote or it isn't. It's remote in my work but it has to have a certain degree of ordinariness.

Donald Judd

#39. I can't actually read interviews with thesps now because they're almost always fantastically predictable, the men especially. Actors are forever stressing their ordinariness, their beer and football-loving commitments.

Peter York

#40. It was something to do with her sense of always feeling separate from everybody else, as if things that worried them couldn't possibly worry her, as if she were immune from the ordinariness of life.

Liane Moriarty

#41. Becoming the beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am, in fact, thinking of, talking about and doing from hour to hour.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

#42. The ordinariness of living to be old is too novel a thing to appreciate.

Ronald Blythe

#43. In our ordinaryness we are most bizarre.

Ntozake Shange

#44. I don't work at being ordinary.

Paul McCartney

#45. With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.

Orhan Pamuk

#46. Tea with milk and sugar is so ordinary. We want to see a change, feel the necessity to bring colours other than the ordinary, in our lives. We feel liberated, enriched, superior. But we lose a part of nature, the ordinary beautiful essential nature in doing so.

Anuradha Bhattacharyya

#47. It's like I'm trying to distract him with something shiny." Cath circled her spoon hand in front of her face, accidentally flicking cottage cheese on her sweater. "He already knows about all this. This is what I look like." She tried to scrape the cottage cheese off without rubbing it in." (pg. 290)

Rainbow Rowell

#48. Alex understood such discipline. He knew the rarity of it, and the cost. And on the rare occasions when he happened to touch her, he did wonder what else she might have been, if she had not been so determined to be typical.

Meredith Duran

#49. Ordinary is a word that has no meaning.

Robin Morgan