Ordinariness Quotes

“The pretty ones are usually unhappy. They expect everyone to be enamored of their beauty. How can a person be content when their happiness lies in someone else's hands, ready to be crushed at any moment? Ordinary-looking people are far superior, because they are forced to actually work hard to achieve their goals, instead of expecting people to fall all over themselves to help them.”
― J. Cornell Michel, Jordan's Brains: A Zombie Evolution

“I don't work at being ordinary.”
― Paul McCartney

“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, The Dream of Scipio

“Yet he was still out there blending in, a man whose ordinariness was his mask.”
― Michelle McNamara, I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

“There is, indeed, nothing more vexing than to be, for example, rich, of good family, of decent appearance, fairly well educated, not stupid, rather good-hearted even, and at the same time to possess no talent, no special quality, no eccentricity even, not a single idea of one's own, to be precisely "like everyone else."
One is rich, but not so rich as Rothschild; of a good family, but one which has never distinguished itself in any way; of decent appearance, but an appearance expressive of very little; well educated, but without knowing what to do with that education; one is intelligent, but without one's own ideas; one is good-hearted, but without greatness of soul, and so on and so forth. There are a great number of such people in the world, far more than it appears.”
― Dostoyevsky

“There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical and characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called "ordinary" and accounted as "the majority," and who actually do make up the great majority of society. In their novels and stories writers most often try to choose and present vividly and artistically social types which are extremely seldom encountered in real life, and which are nevertheless more real than real life itself. Podkolyosin, viewed as a type, in perhaps exaggerated, but he is hardly unknown. How many clever people having learned from Gogol about Podkolyosin at once discover that great numbers of their friends bear a terrific resemblance to Podkolyosin. They knew before Gogol that their friends were like Podkolyosin, except they did not know yet that that was their name...
Nevertheless the question remains before us: what is the novelist to do with the absolutely "ordinary" people, and how can he present them to readers so that they are at all interesting? To leave them out of a story completely is not possible, because ordinary people are at every moment, by and large, the necessary links in the chain of human affairs; leaving them out, therefore, means to destroy credibility. To fill a novel entirely with types or, simply for the sake of interest, strange and unheard-of people, would be improbable and most likely not even interesting. In our opinion the writer must try to find interesting and informative touches even among commonplace people. When, for example, the very nature of certain ordinary persons consists precisely of their perpetual and unvarying ordinariness, or, better still, when in spite of their most strenuous efforts to life themselves out of the rut of ordinariness and routine, then such persons acquire a certain character of their own-the typical character of mediocrity which refuses to remain what it is and desires at all costs to become original and independent, without having the slightest capacity for independence.”
― Dostoevsky

“Just stick to the ordinary circumstances without labeling them ordinary. Be open to them with no desire to change them in any way. They are, in fact, already magical and miraculous. They are the revelation of the Absolute. The mountains, for instance, are already miracles. We don’t need a little angel on top of the mountain to make it more miraculous, so don’t make one up.”
― Francis Lucille, The Perfume of Silence

“Jane remembers those years, though, as if they had been [a movie]--in part because her friends...always talked about everything as if it was over ("Remember last night?"), while holding out the possibility that whatever happened could be rerun. Neil didn't have that sense of things. He thought people shouldn't romanticize ordinary life. "Our struggles, our little struggles," he would whisper, in bed, at night. Sometimes he or she would click on some of the flashlights and consider the ceiling, with the radiant swirls around the bright nuclei, the shadows like opened oysters glistening in brine. (In the '80s, the champagne was always waiting.)”
― Ann Beattie, Walks With Men

“How many stopped-up men and women does it take to produce one Einstein? Ten? A thousand? A hundred thousand? ... So this is what Einstein meant when he looked me in the eye that day and said, I would be nothing without you. It was not success he saw written in my face. He saw, rather, that I would never accomplish anything at all.”
― Rana Dasgupta, Solo

“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, Deeply Odd

“We can not all love in the same way -
for the feeling would be called ordinariness instead.
And of that, the world has too much already.”
― Laura Chouette

“Life, we imagine, is familiar enough until we begin to tell it to another. Then, observe the wonder on their faces--sometimes it is wonder, often it is horror. Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary. In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“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, Wicked Becomes You

“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.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“Not only the ships sink but minds also sink, most especially the minds who does not know the secrets of being happy with all kinds of ordinariness in life!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Simple things are found in ordinariness - but extraordinariness lives inside things that are loved.”
― Laura Chouette

“For a moment I felt a vicious hatred for him and his quiet ways, his mundane stroll through the summer, his ordinariness, the banality of everything he had become. He should have been a hero or a seer. He should have told me some incredible story that I could carry with me forever. After all, he had been the one who had run along the beach parallel to a porpoise, who filled his pockets full of pebbles, who could lift the stray orange cat in his fingers.”
― Colum McCann, Fishing the Sloe-Black River

“His was a psychological and emotional disturbance of untold, awful depth, mundane and yet tragic in that very ordinariness.”
― John Connolly, The Wolf in Winter

“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, One Word

“The Virtue and unpretentiousness of the wise man, which I am talking about, goes unnoticed because of its transparent ordinariness.”
― Alan Jacobs, Socrates Without Tears

“He invented ordinary things, and I stress, ordinary. Not brilliant, just ordinary, and that's exactly what humanity needs. Brilliant inventions might be good for brilliant people, but how many brilliant people are there? On the other hand, ordinary inventions are good for everyone.”
― Etgar Keret, The Nimrod Flipout

“Let those who are looking for some extraordinary people must know that all the extraordinariness is hidden in the ordinary people!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Those who are looking for some extraordinary people must know that all the extraordinariness is hidden in the ordinary people!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“She was just ordinary. From her horse's-mane hair to her sturdy, practical feet, she'd never turned men's heads. Oh, she wasn't ill-favored- her features were regular enough- but she knew, too, that she wasn't the sort of woman whom men flirted with. Whom men stared at. She'd had a few admirers in the past, but they hadn't been a multitude.
She was unremarkable.
The Duke of Montgomery was anything but.
Perhaps, then, that was what drew him to her- her very normality. Val was just quixotic enough to become fascinated- for a short time- by the prosaic.
That was quite a depressing thought, but Bridget faced it practically. She knew that whatever else happened they were not meant to be together for any length of time.”
― Elizabeth Hoyt, Duke of Sin

“Sometimes, small minds seem to take the day.

Election fraud. A migratory plague.
Less and less surprises us as odd.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

“How did I get so bogged down in ordinariness that even this once I couldn't do the spontaneous thing, the thing I really wanted to do. The future is forbidden to no one. Unless we forbid it ourselves.”
― Brian Moore, The Doctor's Wife

“Simple things are found in ordinariness - but extraordinary things live inside things that are loved.”
― Laura Chouette

“Simple things are found in ordinariness - but extraordinary things live inside love.”
― Laura Chouette

“You always went through ordinary roads, what did you gain? Just ordinariness! Try an extraordinary road, your reward will be big, you will win extraordinariness!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Each woman's story, Edith's especially but Rose's too, is a kind of English story told over and over in fiction and film but rarely in works of history; the tragicomedy of someone who could not perform the ordinariness expected of them.”
― Christopher Hilliard, The Littlehampton Libels: A Miscarriage of Justice and a Mystery about Words in 1920s England