Encyclopedia Of An Ordinary Life Quotes

I am a slow reader, and fast eater; I wish it were the other way around.

I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story.

A good soup attracts chairs. This is an African proverb. I can hear the shuffling and squeaking on the wood floor, the gathering 'round. This, from just five well-chosen words.

My brother, who grew up with three sisters, was I won't say how many years old when he finally realized that he did not have to wrap the towel around his chest when he came out of the shower.

In most cases, it is more satisfying to get a friend's answering machine and leave a cheery, tangible trace of your sincere commitment to the friendship than it is to engage in actual conversation.

On the occasions where we do have to participate, to do more than nothing, it is desirable to have a glass of wine to soften all the everything.

To get a true sense of the book, I have to spend a few moments inside. I'll glance at the first couple pages, then flip around to somewhere in the middle, see if the language matches me somehow. It's like dating, only with sentences......It could be something as simple yet weirdly potent as a single word (tangerine). We're meant to be, that sentence and me. And when it happens, you just know.

A friend sat next to a nun on a plane. He asked her what she missed most. "Wearing blue jeans," she replied.

When I am feeling dreary, annoyed and generally unimpressed by life, I imagine what it would be like to come back to this world for just a day after having been dead. I imagine how sentimental I would feel about the very things I once found stupid, hateful or mundane. Oh, there’s a light switch! I haven’t seen a light switch in so long! I didn’t realize how much I missed light switches! Oh! Oh! And look – the stairs up to our front porch are still completely cracked! Hello cracks! Let me get a good look at you. And there’s my neighbor, standing there, fantastically alive, just the same, still punctuating her sentences with you know what I’m saying? Why did that bother me? It’s so… endearing.

It would be difficult to convince me that leaning has no effect whatsoever on the outcome of my bowling.

If you really love someone, you want to know what they ate for lunch or dinner without you.

I think 90 percent of what/who we are is never really verbally communicated....

Work must reflect the randomness of life, with its incessant, merciless, almost humorous bombardment of highly contrasting emotions and experiences.

A rainy day comes as a relief. Rain is your pass to stay inside, to retreat. It's cozy and safe, hanging out on this side of the gray. But then the sun comes out in the afternoon, and there's disappointment, even fear, because the world will now resume, and it expects your participation. People will get dressed and leave their houses and go places and do things. Stepping out into the big, whirling, jarringly sunny world--a world that just a few minutes ago was so confined and still and soft and understated, and refreshingly gloomy--seems overwhelming.

Who am I? Oh, yes: I'm the kind of person who doesn't like fiction, country music, or cilantro. We use these defining truths to help us stay in the lines of ourselves. We think we have to hold on to these labels, we feel comfortable holding on to these labels, but it turns out the labels are removable, you can peel them right off.

There are proponents of New Year's Eve, and there are proponents of regular Tuesday nights. I am one of the latter, much happier residing in the wake of the mundane.

WABI-SABI: As a single idea, wabi-sabi fuses two moods seamlessly: a sigh of slightly bittersweet contentment, awareness of the transience of earthly things, and a resigned pleasure in simple things that bear the marks of that transience.

It is curious to note how slowly the mechanism of the intellectual life improves. Contrast the ordinary library facilities of a middle-class English home, such as the present writer is now working in, with the inconveniences and deficiencies of the equipment of an Alexandrian writer, and one realizes the enormous waste of time, physical exertion, and attention that went on through all the centuries during which that library flourished. Before the present writer lie half a dozen books, and there are good indices to three of them. He can pick up any one of these six books, refer quickly to a statement, verify a quotation, and go on writing. Contrast with that the tedious unfolding of a rolled manuscript. Close at hand are two encyclopedias, a dictionary, an atlas of the world, a biographical dictionary, and other books of reference. They have no marginal indices, it is true; but that perhaps is asking for too much at present. There were no such resources in the world in 300 B.C. Alexandria had still to produce the first grammar and the first dictionary. This present book is being written in manuscript; it is then taken by a typist and typewritten very accurately. It can then, with the utmost convenience, be read over, corrected amply, rearranged freely, retyped, and recorrected. Fig 00346

What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I’m essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous—not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slapstick comedy, but rather in the sense of a ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and most ordinary gestures. For example, I can never shave without starting to laugh; it seems so idiotic.

I have remembered, I suppose, what I wanted to remember; many ridiculous things for no reason that makes sense. That is the way we human creatures are made.

As kids, our stock answer to most every question was nothing. What did you do at school today? Nothing. What’s new? Nothing. Then, somewhere on the way to adulthood, we each took a 180-degree turn. We cashed in our nothing for busy.

First (but not last) lesson about futility of trying to replicate good thing or good experience—never as good second time, only causes disappointment.

When I read a magazine, I feel connected to the world, in on everything. When I read a book, I feel removed from the world, isolated, as if I’ve slipped off into a soundproof booth. It is the same with listening to the radio (connected) versus listening to a CD (removed). Both fill a certain need, balance the other out. There’s the getting away, and then there’s the coming back.

DOING SOMETHING It is so much easier to not do something than to do something. Even the smallest task, like filling out a Scholastic Books order form or putting away the butter, requires time, focus, and follow-through. It’s astounding, actually, that anything gets done at all, by anyone. But then, let’s say you finally are prepared and determined to do that thing, whatever it is, but you wake up to find that your basement has flooded and you must spend your day making phone calls to the contractor, plumber, and carpet people. Or not that but something else—perhaps you must stand before a committee for approval, a committee that neither grasps your intent nor appreciates your ingenuity, and anyway, they are in a bit of a hurry to break for lunch. Yet. Still. Somehow. I am encouraged to see that despite the colossal effort, despite the odds against one, despite the mere constraints of time and schedules and sore throats, houses do get built, pottery gets glazed, e-mails get sent, trees get planted, shoes get reheeled, manifestos get Xeroxed, films get shot, highways get repaved, cakes get frosted, stories get told.

HAPPINESS I’m turning left. Look, everyone, my blinker is on, and I’m turning left. I am so happy to be alive, driving along, making a left turn. I’m serious. I am doing exactly what I want to be doing at this moment: existing on a Tuesday, going about my business, on my way somewhere, turning left. There is nothing disconcerting or unpleasant or unfortunate about this moment. It is exceptionally nice, plain, and perfect.

Being yourself seems like the most effortless thing in the world—duh, who else are you going to be? But it’s deceiving, tricky, a summons laden with meandering and failed attempts—and then at last, so wondrously simple.

OTHER PEOPLE It’s hard to accept that other people’s lives are as full and real and now as yours. You look at someone and sort of think, against your intellectual knowing better, that they have a less complex life, they’re able to flit about, their lives aren’t clogged with the same kind of pressing deadlines, they don’t really have cousins like you have cousins, they are free tonight, of course they are free, or if they have plans they can easily break them to be with you. Our lives just feel so impossibly big to us; we’re breathing versions of that Saul Steinberg poster, where New York is in the foreground, prominent and massive and drawn in colored-pencil detail, and the other states and Asia and Africa are tiny lumps fading into the horizon. This egocentric/inner bigness

Hold on to what is good, even if it is a handful of earth. Hold on to what you believe, even if it is a tree which stands alone. Hold on to what you must do, even if it is a long way from here.

When we were speaking on the phone, I envisioned not a distinct person with a face and body, but rather a vague, faceless essence, as if their whole personality manifested itself into an aura that wasn't exactly physical as we know it.

But writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that impossible prose is a hallmark of intelligence.

In most cases, it is more satisfying to get a friend’s answering machine and leave a cheery, tangible trace of your sincere commitment to the friendship than it is to engage in actual conversation.

It is weird and unsettling that a person who is hired to handle your money, make wise decisions about it, and, ostensibly, keep you from losing it is called a broker.

You agree that, yes, it is astounding, the human ability to eat at seemingly inappropriate times, like after a funeral, or at a charity luncheon featuring a Holocaust survivor flown in from Amsterdam.

As kids, our stock answer to most every question was nothing. What did you do at school today? Nothing. What's new? Nothing. Then, somewhere on the way to adulthood, we each took a 180-degree turn. We cashed in our nothing for busy.

What does sensitive mean exactly? he asked, and I tried to explain it to him as best I could: Let's say you see someone crying, and you don't even know them, but you kind of catch their sadness, it somehow jumped into your heart, and this makes you understand a bit how they feel.

I always got the words pedestrian and Presbyterian confused. I didn't understand why Presbyterians always had the right of way.