Ordinary Events Quotes

Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.

Christianity makes of life a moral drama in which we play a starring role and in which the most ordinary events take on a grand significance.

And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.

Millions of people are married. I've never picked up a paper and seen a headline that says, Man Gets Married!

Every so often my life will feel like a story. It doesn't have to be a big thing; in fact, most often, it's just the opposite.

As a matter of fact, I deliberately look for the mundane, because I feel these stories are ignored. The most influential things that happen to virtually all of us are the things that happen on a daily basis. Not the traumas.

Why are there not positive mysteries? It's always who stole the diamond, or who killed the butler? How about... who made cookies, somebody cleaned my room.

I think you can find all the elements that you can find in great literature in mundane experiences.

The events of my life are too unimportant, and have too little interest for any person not of my immediate family, to render them worth communicating or preserving.

Idiot people like Angel Delaporte who look for a supernatural reason for ordinary events, those people drive Misty nuts.

Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time.

In thinking about miracles, I believe that our frame of reference has been too dramatic. We have been looking for the burning bush, the parting of the sea, the bellowing voice from heaven. Instead we should be looking at the ordinary day-to-day events in our lives for evidence of the miraculous, maintaining at the same time a scientific orientation.

As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them --"ordinary things" is a better expression. That is the way the world is.

Noble acts and momentous events happen in the same way and produce the same impression as the ordinary facts.

There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.

The main of life is composed of small incidents and petty occurrences; of wishes for objects not remote, and grief for disappointments of no fatal consequence.

I tend to avoid melodrama. I try to create very realistic settings and very realistic experiences and realistic responses to these experiences. Melodrama is the use of really big events that may or may not happen in real life - certainly they do, but they're not events that are common to most people. Most of the things that happen in my novels are things that could happen to people in real life.

We have the wrong impression of life. We think the very big incidents of our lives are consequences of huge dilemmas or major decisions. If we paid attention, we'd realize that the determining incidents in our lives are ordinary things.

My themes will not be far-fetched. I will tell of homely every-day phenomena and adventures.

Regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.

We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.