I was 19 when I got my first passport as an adult. I had moved from California to New York City and was living out of a suitcase, staying with friends. I’d just finished filming my first movie, ‘Ordinary People,’ but I didn’t know whether acting was what I wanted to do with my life.
My father was very clear; I had to have an ordinary upbringing. I was put to work as a lowly-paid trainee after college. I didn’t like it at the time, but I can’t help but feel that that was probably the best thing for me.
Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It’s about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.
The world needs many more dreamers. Unreasonable souls who fight the urge to be ordinary.
I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.
My family is out of the ordinary in our physical lifestyle and the day-to-day things that we deal with, but my approach to them is pretty rational and sound. And I’m the quiet one! It’s very different from my performing life.
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.
At any rate, girls are differently situated. Having no need of deep scientific knowledge, their education is confined more to the ordinary things of the world, the study of the fine arts, and of the manners and dispositions of people.
Ordinary people want good government.
Even now, I have traces of the good little girl. When I am not performing, for instance, I am really very quiet and ordinary.
When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.
The next time you check your moves in the mirror and reflect on how special you are, consider that somewhere in this universe or in another parallel universe, your double might be doing the same. This would be the ultimate Copernican Revolution. Not only are we not special, we could be infinitely ordinary.
Everything has a sort of double meaning for me, there’s the ordinary everyday meaning of things, and the imaginary meaning about it all, and I wanted to bring these things together, and in this first big Resurrection of mine you have a good example of this sort of thing.
The tantalizing discomfort of perplexity is what inspires otherwise ordinary men and women to extraordinary feats of ingenuity and creativity; nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution.
Ordinary language carries with it conditions of meaning which it is easy to recognize by classifying the contexts in which the expression is employed in a meaningful manner.
If I’m shopping at the Gap or Old Navy, I’m saying that I’m an ordinary person: I don’t want to be seen; I don’t want to stand out. That’s a statement. If I’m wearing a leather jacket, there’s something about me that’s kind of a rebel. So everybody says something, whether they want to or not.
The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.
We must investigate without fear or favour the so-called ‘accounting irregularities’ that cause turmoil in the markets and wipe billions off the investments of ordinary South Africans.
I like writing people from a slightly sharp angle and then throwing more light on them. I think in life we see somebody and make judgments very quickly about who they are and what they are. Or we think people are boring because they appear ordinary.
The courage of very ordinary people is all that stands between us and the dark.
We are not a TV station that only concentrate on those who are always under light. We are not a TV station for celebrities and for grand politicians and superstars. We are a TV station for the ordinary person. The normal people, ordinary people in the Arab world sees Al Jazeera as their voice.
Isn’t that what love means, to fill ordinary, commonplace, conventional things with magic and significance, not to need the moon and white scent-heavy flowers at night?
Authors are ordinary people who usually start to live apart, in the imagination, because they don’t fit in with normal, healthy people.
I make the most money, I think, in Russia and Paris, for the people of those countries are so willing to be amused, so eager to see something new and out of the ordinary.
If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.
I’m not a writer who looks for the fantastic and the sensational. I like the world we’ve got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.
Who wants to be ordinary? Be extraordinary.
I am an ordinary woman from a Tamil family.
I look forward to playing characters where I want to play the ordinary, to be honest… Farmer’s wife, tailor’s daughter, the teacher characters that exist for real emotions.
Saints are ordinary people who do what they do for the love of Jesus, say what they must say without fear, love their neighbor even when they are cursed by him, and live without regret over yesterday or fear of tomorrow.
I’m a quiet person, and I live a quiet, pleasant, ordinary, simple life.
Saints are ordinary people who love Jesus, try to be like him, are faithful to the duties of their state in life, sacrifice themselves for their neighbor, and keep their hearts and minds free of this world.
The genius of the American system is that through freedom we have created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people.
Given a fair shot, given a fair chance, Americans have never, ever, ever, ever let their country down. Never. Never. Ordinary people like us. Who do extraordinary things.
The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men.
There is no more reason why the features belonging to a picture should be distorted for the purpose of such imaginative suggestion than that the poet’s metaphors should spoil his words for the ordinary uses of man.
Glamour is a beautiful illusion – the word ‘glamour’ originally meant a literal magic spell – that promises to transcend ordinary life and make the ideal real. It depends on a special combination of mystery and grace. Too much information breaks the spell.
For me, insomnia was something ordinary, and it came and went for ordinary reasons.
Conservatives reveal themselves through their care for ordinary human things, and their recognition of the fragility of decency and the need to protect it.
I do feel as if… Look, I think I’m a very kind of ordinary person, and it seems to me that things that are of interest to me will probably be of interest to other people. I’m not exceptional; I don’t have exceptional thoughts.
It’s the quality of the ordinary, the straight, the square, that accounts for the great stability and success of our nation. It’s a quality to be proud of. But it’s a quality that many people seem to have neglected.
People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.
Juries are the constitutional institution designed to protect ordinary citizens against the wealthy and powerful.
Now, occultism is not like mystic faculty, and it very seldom works in harmony either with business aptitude in the things of ordinary life or with a knowledge of the canons of evidence in its own sphere.
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
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.
Interestingly, simple and ordinary experiences often provide the most important learning opportunities we ever have.
I’ll stick to finding the funny in the ordinary because my life is pretty ordinary and so are the lives of my friends – and my friends are hilarious.
The hatred and the vitriol against Donald Trump has nothing to do with Donald Trump. It has to do with the fact that the academic priesthood lost control of what they call quote-unquote ‘ordinary rednecks’ – that they’re stupid, they don’t understand. The fact is, those people actually understand a lot.
People often think that people like me don’t have ordinary lives. I have the greatest pleasure, and in fact, the greatest success in my career is having been a mother.
One of the things that frequently gets lost in descriptions of depression is that the depressed person often knows that it is a ludicrous condition to feel so disabled by the ordinary business of quotidian life.
There is little or no point being chair of the Labour Party and being ignored when engaging with Labour ministers when you’re trying to articulate something that affects ordinary people in society.
If an actor can emotionally bond with the viewer, then it does not matter if he is handsome or ordinary looking.
