Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.
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.
You know, I always wondered what it would have been like to just go to school, play football with the guys and go to the prom. Just like a 'regular person.'
I feel 80% of my life is completely normal.
If you want reality take the bus.
You know, sometimes I wonder what things would be like if I just ... met you one day. Like normal people do. If I just walked by you on some street one sunny morning and thought you were cute, stopped, shook your hand, and said, "Hi, I'm Daniel.
I have the ordinary experience of being anonymous when I'm in an airplane talking to air-traffic control, and they don't know who they're talking to. I have a lot of common experiences.
It's always bitterly disappointing to people to see how normally one can live.
I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.
Theory may be deliberate, as in a chapter on chemistry, or it may be second nature, as in the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring middle-sized physical objects.
What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted something alive and shocking enough that it could be a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that.
Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.
I try to connect with the everyday, every guy.
Our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena.
I don't really think I got the full high school experience, only because when I got to high school for the first year, it was grades 9-10. We didn't have older grades. But besides that, it was normal. It was a regular public school. We didn't have much going on. It wasn't too crazy.
You ride in a limousine the first time, it's a big thrill but after that it's just a stupid car.
There was nothing exceptional about growing up as the son of a congressman.
One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.
The thing is I don't feel like my story is special. I don't feel like it's different to anybody else.
If you don't live a normal life, how do you relate to people?
I always think the everyday is more relevant than anything too grand because we all have to deal with it.
I don't think people are averse to thinking about things in a deep way, but we have limited time and opportunity to think about things in a deep way. I think that's why there is an appetite for non-fiction - it gives people the opportunity to reexamine ordinary experience and be smarter about it.
For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.
Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.
My coming out was just so boring.
