The ordinary traveler, who never goes off the beaten route and who on this beaten route is carried by others, without himself doing anything or risking anything, does not need to show much more initiative and intelligence than an express package," Ro...
I would not wish depression on anybody. And yet, it taught me a lot. I have not become suddenly mawkishly grateful for my life but I am more interested in it, more engaged you might say. When you have spent long years in the dark, there is joy in see...
It’s a popular fact that 90 percent of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. . . . It is used. One of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, to turn the unusual into the usual. Otherwise, human beings, fac...
Heroes didn't leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn't wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even i...
Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-mak...
I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the p...
For too many generations of the common people of Rome were allowed no hand in governing, and their state religion had long since mummified into dry rituals that never touched ordinary passions. It was inevitable, proclaimed the dour scholars of the p...
Stairs," Valkyrie said, disappointed. "Not just ordinary stairs," Skulduggery told her as he led the way down. "Magic stairs." "Really?" "Oh, yes." She followed him into the darkness. "How are they magic?" "They just are." "In what way?" "In a magick...
... endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now sl...
Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep uppin...
Me, I've seen 45 years, and I've only figured out one thing. That's this: if a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn...
Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplis...
It pleased Aliena that they were all together: she and Jack and their children, and Jack's mother, and Aliena's brother, and Martha. It was quite like an ordinary family, and Aliena could almost forget that her father had died in a dungeon, and she w...
He came face-to-face with the rude paradox fame had dealt him: The secret of his extraordinary art had been his ability to observe human interaction anonymously, thereby gaining insight into the emotions on display in ordinary life--it was his abilit...
He became convinced that ordinary commercial financing could be done for a service charge plus an insurance fee amounting to much less that the current rates of interest charged by banks, whose rates were based on supply and demand, treating money as...
In situations like this - when you meet somebody who isn't an ordinary human - people like me have two choices. One: to exhibit plain and obvious hostility towards that person; or two: to feel a strong affinity for that person. I always choose the la...
I run because if I didn’t, I’d be sluggish and glum and spend too much time on the couch. I run to breathe the fresh air. I run to explore. I run to escape the ordinary. I run…to savor the trip along the way. Life becomes a little more vibrant,...
When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquer...
I have not led an ordinary life, nor a life that would suit everyone. I took great risks, but because I did, I also earned great reward. I found the way to show my true face freely, without fear. Because of this, I found true love.
How does one develop compassion for someone with a completely different set of values without reading something from their point of view? Books are one of the ways in which we can truly get into the heads of people we would never meet in our ordinary...
In real life people do occasionally act out of character or do things we wouldn’t normally expect them to do. In fiction, there should be a good reason for a character to do something outside of the ordinary.
