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.
Angela Hayes: Yeah? Well, at least I'm not ugly! Ricky Fitts: Yes, you are. And you're boring, and you're totally ordinary, and you know it.
For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
Youth is the most suitable age to enjoy the life completely or to work diligently for the life, what you decide makes your rest of the life ordinary or legendary respectively.
The idea is to take the most ordinary things and make them extraordinary, as Gerard Manley Hopkins does in his poems.
The consideration of the quantity often takes the precedence over that of the quality in many significant activity of the society as the ordinary minds are in the great majority and the extraordinary brains are in the giant minority.
If you're running a dictatorship, you don't really have to worry about the welfare or the property rights of the ordinary citizen. Only the people who keep you in power, a very small group, matter.
I certainly think it's very important that writers as citizens - not necessarily as writers, but just as ordinary citizens - should talk about things that matter to them.
The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.
I am attracted to certain types of people: the outrageous, outstanding and the one's pegged as odd. The 3 O's remind me not to be ordinary.
That is, we are bombarded by all kinds of images and influences and we have to fend some of them off if we're to take in any of them, or to carry through just our ordinary day's work, or really deepen whatever we have to do or say.
Bad things do happen in the world, like war, natural disasters, disease. But out of those situations always arise stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
A well mannered man does not step on the shadow of his fellow man.
A married man has many sorrows -- an unmarried man has one more.
A blind man who sees is better than a sighted man who is blind.
One man's beard is on fire, and another man warms his hands on it.
When a blind man carries a lame man, both go forward.
When a blind man carries the lame man, both go forward.
Willing is a good man, but Able is a better one.
I can't be a man. But I can embrace the head of a man, the intelligence of a man, the spirit of a man.
There's many a good man to be found under a shabby hat.
