Most people are middle class. Most people do wish their lives were better than they are. And I think by making my main characters ordinary, average guys, it helps readers identify with their problems. It also helps ground the supernatural events that follow in a recognizable reality and perhaps gives some of my wilder scenarios a little verisimilitude.
Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.
I am perplexed at the stupidity of the ordinary religious being. In the most practical of all matters he will talk and speculate and try to feel, but he will not set himself to do.
I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
Hunter S. Thompson brings a lunatic genius to ordinary events, and I bring an ordinary sensibility to lunatic events.
We bless the life around us far more than we realize. Many simple, ordinary things that we do can affect those around us in profound ways: the unexpected phone call, the brief touch, the willingness to listen generously, the warm smile or wink of recognition. All it may take to restore someone's trust in life may be returning a lost earring or a dropped glove.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
If, in the very intense electric field in the neighbourhood of the cathode, the molecules of the gas are dissociated and are split up, not into the ordinary chemical atoms, but into these primordial atoms, which we shall for brevity call corpuscles; and if these corpuscles are charged with electricity and projected from the cathode by the electric field, they would behave exactly like the cathode rays.
Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
These are not ordinary human beings. They are criminals. As a matter of fact, they are criminals, both by nature and by training. By nature, because they are not decent. They are criminals.
The rule of law does not guarantee freedom, since general law as well as personal edicts can be tyrannical. But increasing reliance on the rule of law clearly played a major role in transforming Western society from a world in which the ordinary citizen was literally subject to the arbitrary will of his master to a world in which the ordinary citizen could regard himself as his own master
The Apple II was not designed like an ordinary product. It used crazy tricks everywhere
Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.
Heisenberg has discussed the coupled double harmonic oscillator, and has shown that the ordinary rules of quantization lead to two non-combining sets of states in one of which the electrons are in phase and out of phase. The energy of the system is successively transferred from one to the other - resonance!
I would not take for granted that my personal life - because I knew better than anybody - that it was just a life. It was surprisingly an ordinary life.
The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.
In my research, what I found most interesting was how common and ordinary magic was to people in the past.
A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog.
Marriage was contrived for ordinary people, for people who are capable of neither great love nor great friendship, which is to say, for most people--but also for those exceptionally rare ones who are capable of love as well as of friendship.
Ordinary men live in fear all the time. Didn't you know that? We're afraid of the weather, we're afraid of powerful men, we're afraid of the night and the monsters that lurk in the dark, we're afraid of growing old and of dying. Sometimes we're even afraid of living. Ordinary men are afraid almost every minute of their lives.