In my research, what I found most interesting was how common and ordinary magic was to people in the past.
An ordinary life used to look something like this: born into a growing family, you help rear your siblings, have the first of your own half-dozen or even dozen children soon after you're grown, and die before your youngest has left home.
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
George Bush ran a campaign where he bragged about being an anti-intellectual, dismissing his Harvard and Yale pedigree, pretending he was an American every day, ordinary everyman, and as a result of that, played up his fumbling speech because it signified that he was a good guy. That is deeply and profoundly anti-intellectual.
Looking back on humanity's battle with pollution, history has been made by thousands of ordinary people who one day say, 'No. I'm not satisfied. I don't want to wait, and I don't want to pass the buck. I want to stand up and do something. I want to do it here, and I want do to it now.'
If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life.
When I cast great actors, I try to make extraordinary people ordinary, dealing with these extremely small intimate details of interpersonal relationships against an epic backdrop.
The role of social media is critical because it helps to spread cognitive dissonance by connecting thought leaders and activists to ordinary citizens rapidly expanding the network of people who become willing to take action.
I just love the idea of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, whether it's the success of 'Cool Runnings,' which is the success of four guys from Jamaica who had never seen snow, or whether it's my success, just as a human being.
I enjoyed living in Canada, where my husband comes from, because I was treated like any ordinary person. I became a volunteer at my children's school; I went into the classroom. It was very grounding. I got sick of being famous.
Given appropriate social conditions, decent, ordinary people can be led to do extraordinarily cruel things.
Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.
Ordinary citizens are obliged and, if need be, compelled by force to meet their commitments. But let higher obligations of an international order be involved, and governments repudiate them, more often than not with a disdainful shrug of the shoulders.
Desire, burning desire, is basic to achieving anything beyond the ordinary.
Mrs. Miniver was an ordinary middle-class English housewife, a character created by Jan Struther when she was commissioned by the 'Times of London' to write a weekly 'cheer-up' article in 1937.
I've been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I'm quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I'm one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.
I am just as ordinary as anyone else, and I also have my problems, but I also am responsible for my own health. So I'll be on that exercise bike, I'll be out there walking and try to improve my health and diet as much as I'm expecting of other Tasmanians.
In the course of American history, great steps are taken by ordinary people, and ordinary people are not perfect.
Sometimes I'm more true when I'm up onstage than I'm able to be in my regular life. It's not as exciting to be at home, but I've got to learn how to make that work, and then I will be an ordinary woman.
Southall Broadway, in west London, has been a constant part of my life from the day I arrived in England as a baby from Kenya in 1962. My parents rented a room in one of the terraces off the Broadway, and I've seen it change from an ordinary English high street to what is now 'Little India.' with a confident Asian community.
Being in a band is not about reality - it's a bit of a fantasy. I can't go on stage as my ordinary self and just play - I've got to become my 'superhuman self.'
I think a 23-page ordinary comic is an investment for the artist, but if you're doing something 60 to 104 pages, that's a really big investment for an artist. So unless you've got someone who wants to pay you while you're doing it or up front, it's kind hard to get someone to do that with you, unless you're the artist yourself.
I think that a lot of things are hard to read if you're not in the vocabulary flow of that particular discourse. I sometimes forget that even though the words I'm using are fairly ordinary words, the concepts around which they cluster, which are the long concepts of literary tradition, may not be familiar to an audience.
Wine lovers have known for centuries that decanting wine before serving it often improves its flavor. Whatever the dominant process, the traditional decanter is a rather pathetic tool to accomplish it. A few years ago, I found I could get much better results by using an ordinary kitchen blender.
I'm probably not your typical business person in many ways. I don't wear a suit. I don't carry a briefcase. I don't wear a tie. I'm fairly casual. I haven't got a big office, and it's in a very ordinary part of town. I'd much prefer to downplay than impress.
The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.
For days after the launch, Sputnik was a wonderful curiosity. A man-made moon visible by ordinary citizens, it inspired awe and pride that humans had finally launched an object into space.
It is true that going out on to the street implies the risk of accidents happening, as they would to any ordinary man or woman. But if the church stays wrapped up in itself, it will age. And if I had to choose between a wounded church that goes out on to the streets and a sick, withdrawn church, I would definitely choose the first one.
As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.
Since cowardice must occur at a time and place where an enemy either has already appeared or may yet turn up, servicemen in peacetime - and ordinary civilians - can breathe a sigh of relief. If you are yellow-bellied back home, you're not technically a coward.
I like the way Quentin Tarantino creates a scene using a series of close-ups or showing very cool images of a person or people walking on some ordinary street in slow motion. I wish I could achieve that kind of slow-motion effect in manga, but it's rather difficult to draw; the only things we can play with are tones of black and white.
Basically, Urban Fantasy means D&D in New York. Ordinary people have no idea that they share the world with fantastic, supernatural creatures. It can't just be vampires or werewolves; it has to be a whole continuum of fantastic beings, with their own society within society.
I prefer to write about ordinary people who find themselves in a singularly bizarre situation - that is to say, the one moment in their lives when they are forced to confront danger or mystery.
I hate being called spoilt. My life is ordinary.
My parents were no ordinary people. My mother turned Gandhian, and my father was a staunch communist. They named me after the great saint as a symbol of communal harmony.
