Stripped of its plot, the ‘Iliad’ is a scattering of names and biographies of ordinary soldiers: men who trip over their shields, lose their courage or miss their wives. In addition to these, there is a cast of anonymous people: the farmers, walkers, mothers, neighbours who inhabit its similes.
It’s jarring to go from one amazing experience to another that feels ordinary. I don’t quite know how to explain it. You see the uniqueness of what you’ve been doing, and disassociating yourself from it and going back to the ‘normal’ life is tough.
There is no doubt that this film is autobiographical, but at the same time it also tries to portray an ordinary couple in a language that everyone can understand.
Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
In the course of American history, great steps are taken by ordinary people, and ordinary people are not perfect.
The comments I most appreciate come from ordinary readers who’ve happened on one of my books at some time of stress in their lives, and who actually credit the book with helping them through a bad time. It’s happened a few times in forty years.
My basic mistake in ‘The World’s Greatest Lover’ was that I made the leading character a neurotic kook and sent him to Hollywood. I should have made him a perfectly normal, sane, ordinary person, and sent him to Hollywood. The audience identifies with the lead character.
Well, first of all, I think that a lot of the voters who are voting for the tea party candidates have really good impulses. That is, they believe that for years and years and years, the people with wealth and power or government power have done well and ordinary people have not. That’s true.
Who does not delight in oratory? How we gather to hear even an ordinary speaker! How often is a jury swayed and controlled by the appeals of counsel!
If you are from an ordinary working class family, life is just much harder than many people in politics realise.
There are lots of things about millionaires that make them pretty ordinary, but what’s not ordinary is their ability to accumulate wealth, how hard they work, and what they do for a living.
There was a time when an ordinary American could close the door and keep the world at bay. Now the world comes elbowing in every time you go online.
Moses became America’s true founding father because he evangelized action; he justified risk. He gave ordinary people the courage to live with uncertainty.
9/11 allowed us to witness the ordinary face of goodness in the love that those about to die brought with them to work that day. It is fitting that we refer to a large segment of the church year as Ordinary Time because it describes the look of the true faith that, as we read of the Kingdom, is spread about us.
My books are about ordinary people placed in extraordinary situations who are able to draw upon their inner reserves to challenge the status-quo in life and navigate compelling human relationships.
Even we schoolchildren know that ordinary diplomats don’t drive around in unmarked cars carrying Glock pistols.
I want ordinary people to enjoy a decent standard of living, with ever increasing security, comfort and joy.
I’m not Meryl Streep. My God – she’s the greatest actor that ever lived. It’s sad that ordinary actors like me are compared to her.
If I seem to write most happily about the ordinary things that boys do who live in the country, it is because this is the part of my childhood that I look back upon with the greatest affection.
I’m saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.
The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.
Tom Hanks has built his career playing ordinary men.
It has always been a wonder to me where my conversational power has gone: at the present time, I cannot impress the most ordinary men.
You may be modest and un-egotistical in your life; I’m quite ordinary. But I play big egotistical parts.
I like human stories. I like stories about situations we can relate to. I like movies like ‘Ordinary People’ or ‘Terms of Endearment.’ Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, boyfriends, girlfriends. The stories to me that are worth telling are almost simple ones, but very relatable.
I kind of like the idea of living a rather ordinary life as a shopkeeper, and I examine that possibility as one of the outcomes of the young Gerald Bostock growing older.
When I’m playing a character like Jonathan in Ripley’s Game I want to be in the moment when he’s feeling pain; this very ordinary person who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances.
Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they’re the things that sustain us. And they’re the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.
Without concentration, a business will be ordinary in every respect, because it will have no presence, no inner force, no way to attract the people upon whom it depends for its very existence – employees, customers, suppliers, and lenders.
What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can’t I just be an ordinary woman?
Anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.
Since truffle oil and caviar aren’t always in the budget, learning to tweak and enhance just a few ingredients and flavor combinations can help you transform those ordinary ingredients into the extraordinary!
Remembrance Day is a timely reminder that, in what may be some of Britain’s darkest hours, it is the bravery of millions of ordinary people from all races, religions, and backgrounds that have kept our country’s flame burning and stood up for the values we hold dear.
I’m just an ordinary person.
I think if you touch ordinary people, they’re simply ordinary people, the way they’ve always been. They work hard, they don’t have really as much as they should.
There’s not one part of me that wants to go crazy and do anything out of the ordinary, but it would be nice to do something and not have it spread all over the place. But that’s the world we live in now, and you either have to accept it or figure it out – or become a villain, I guess.
In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine.
I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.
Millions of ordinary Americans may suffer from a toxic combination of ignorance and amnesia, but the victims of U.S. coups, invasions, and bombing campaigns across the globe tend not to. Ask the Iraqis or the Iranians, ask the Cubans or the Chileans. And, yes, ask the North Koreans.
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
Basically, Urban Fantasy means D&D in New York. Ordinary people have no idea that they share the world with fantastic, supernatural creatures. It can’t just be vampires or werewolves; it has to be a whole continuum of fantastic beings, with their own society within society.
In the business of politics, emotions and productive dissatisfaction with the world in which we live today are gradually being covered up by the minutiae of ordinary life.
Certainly being proficient in an instrument does have its problems. Because the better you get, the more you just start sounding like an ordinary guitarist. There are certainly guitarists that transcend that and do really find their sound and all that sort of stuff.
Give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same things as rich people.
Writing about conflict has provided these dramatic opportunities to talk about really substantial moments in a person’s life. I’m not writing about superheroes; I’m writing about ordinary people.
It is questionless desirable in all ordinary cases, wherever positive law is established, to restrain ourselves within the letter of that law and to allow the criminal all the benefit, if benefit to him shall result, of any evasion or escape that the law shall afford him.
There’s this unspoken club where you say to each other: Oh God, if they only knew how ordinary I was, they wouldn’t be interested. That includes movie stars and politicians.
Many people – when they think about North Korea and the dictatorship, or the military or nuclear weapons, nuclear missiles, those things – tend to forget ordinary citizens are living there.
Trump has the courage to stand up to Wall Street, to the K Street lobbyists, and say our trade deals have not been best for the ordinary, average citizen American.
Trump Tower is no ordinary property: It is the jewel in Donald Trump’s brass crown.
I love this life. I feel like I am always catching my breath and saying, ‘Oh! Will you look at that?’ Photography has been my way of bearing witness to the joy I find in seeing the extraordinary in ordinary life. You don’t look for pictures. Your pictures are looking for you.
