First, you hand over some basics-overwhelming joy, existential angst, a giving-in to desire, etc. And then you promise to withstand talking idly about the weather, to encourage cliché, to uphold the virtues of average. You hand over the need to be understood and, in return, you get a bar of Normal soap. And you can wash in it and be daily reborn to a safe world of modest, enduring love or, at least, mild, well-mannered bonding.
One quarter of Medicare beneficiaries have five or more chronic conditions, sees an average of 13 physicians each year, and fills 50 prescriptions per year.
In normal times all of us know, whether consciously or not, that there is no love which can't be bettered; nevertheless, we reconcile ourselves more or less easily to the fact that ours has never risen above the average.
Figuring the average poet starts at 16, I am 23.
The average man believes a thing first, and then searches for proof to bolster his opinion
When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states.
It is so easy to be average. It takes a little something to be special. Why be around average?
The shelf life of the average trade book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.
The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem. If you choose your subject selectively—intuitively—the camera can write poetry.
And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference.
The average vice-president is a form of executive fungus that attaches itself to a desk. On a boat this growth would be called a barnacle.
When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.
The freedom of patient speech is necessary if the doctor is to get clues about the medical enigma before him. If the patient is inhibited, or cut off prematurely, or constrained into one path of discussion, then the doctor may not be told something vital. Observers have noted that, on average, physicians interrupt patients within eighteen seconds of when they begin telling their story.
When I started my last business, I didn't receive a paycheck for 13 months. The average person can't handle that pressure.
The average American salesmen keeps 33 men and women at work - 33 people producing the product he sells. . . and is responsible for the livelihood of 130 people.
When you go to bat as many times as I do, you're bound to get a good average. That's why I keep my projects diversified.
People's perceptions of me have nothing to do with reality. I'm basically just your average dork.
Abortion. . . was probably regarded by the average Roman of the later days of Paganism much as Englishmen in the last century regarded convivial excesses, as certainly wrong, but so venial as scarcely to deserve censure.
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future.
Most people I meet are secretly convinced that they’re a little crazier than the average person. People understand the energy necessary to maintain their own shields, but not the energy expended by other people. They understand that their own sanity is a performance, but when confronted by other people they confuse the person with the role.