Ordinary Experiences Quotes

Miracles happen every day. Not just in remote country villages or at holy sites halfway across the globe, but here, in our own lives.

God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

I had a normal life; we didn't meet movie stars. We lived in Texas where you had rollerskates, and if you got a bicycle, that was a very big gift.

Day-to-day things, the mundane, are what keeps the motor running. How extraordinary the ordinary really is, a tool we all use to keep going, a template for sanity.

I haven't isolated myself. I am not living on a yacht somewhere. I am not tucked away or behind a gate somewhere. I am not flying on a private plane. I am going to the airport, I am with people, some of the interactions are good, some of them are not so good, but it keeps me in touch with being, you know, part of society.

If you want to write what the world is about, you have to write details...real life is in the dishes. Real life is pushing strollers up the street, folding T-shirts, the alarm clock going off early and you dropping into bed exhausted every night. That's real life.

Right now, musically I'm inspired by everyday people.

We’re conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unaware – beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.

It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us.

We think that it's the big moments that define our lives-the wedding, the baby, the new house, the dream job. But really, these big moments of happiness are just the punctuation marks of our personal sagas. The narrative is written every day in the small, the simple, and the common. In your tiny choices, in these tiny changes. In the unconsidered. The overlooked. The discarded. The reclaimed.

So much of life is in the smallness of moments...but they are harder to mark. So we need the grander celebrations and occasions. People like to feel significant.

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.

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.

The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being

Life is not all high emotion. Some of the most interesting things are when its not highly emotional: little details of relationships and body language.

I already had a lot of friends at school who didn't care about the whole acting thing, so there was no reason for me to not be in school.

I have the ordinary experience of having the blender bottom come off in my room upstairs. 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. What's important is to be able to see yourself, as having commonality with other people and not determine, because of your good luck, that everybody is less significant, less interesting, less important than you are.

Black people loving and losing is something we don’t see enough of. We’re always in these heightened situations like something big is happening, something funny or something violent. And you know what? Sometimes we die of breast cancer or a broken heart. Things happen that are just not being explored cinematically. It’s time we reinvigorated that type of film.

Most of us live our lives devoid of cinematic moments.

My life is extraordinary because it's so normal, but it's so 'extra' for some reason.

I always spend a good deal of time with the people I write about. I try and smell the normalcy of their lives. I try to look at the normal rhythm of their life.

All the stories I'll ever need are right here on Main Street.

The working-class folks and the poor, and those normal people living their lives out in the world without the glitter and the fanfare. There is a lot to learn from them.

That's what life is, it's the small struggles. You walk down the street for half an hour, you see half an hour of drama. You don't need convoluted plot lines. You don't need long-lost brothers. You don't need it's set on the future; it's set on the moon.

When the will to learn from the ordinary is present, a seeker may indeed gain entrance into levels of awareness that are extraordinary.