Commonplace Quotes

“I have seen so many extraordinary things, nothing seems extraordinary any more”
― Lewis Carroll

“We never come out untouched from the spell of beauty. While we break away from the commonplace, upscaling and veering from the trodden path, it challenges the ordinary. On the broken pieces of the humdrum of our lives, beauty conjures up poetry and infinity.( "Absence of beauty was like hell")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine-- the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.”
― Raymond Carver

“My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built. Life is commonplace; the papers are sterile; audacity and romance seem to have passed forever from the criminal world. Can you ask me, then, whether I am ready to look into any new problem, however trivial it may prove?”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes: Volume II

“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.”
― John Locke

“Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of an entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that has seams tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.

But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks.

The drinks, people.

That was me on the staircase to Chicago-Over-Chicago. Yes, I was standing on nothing but congealed starlight. Yes, I was walking up through a savage storm, the wind threatening to tear me off and throw me into the freezing waters of Lake Michigan far below. Yes, I was using a legendary and enchanted means of travel to transcend the border between one dimension and the next, and on my way to an epic struggle between ancient and elemental forces.

But all I could think to say, between panting breaths, was, 'Yeah. Sure. They couldn’t possibly have made this an escalator.”
― Jim Butcher, Summer Knight

“Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in you humdrum routine, the true poetry of life - the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary person, of the plain, toilworn, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and griefs.”
― Sir William Osler

“After another few days, I noticed I became annoyed whenever I would actually have to ask Asshole for something. How quickly the creepy becomes commonplace.”
― John Scalzi, Old Man's War

“Whether people see you as a shadow or as an invisible or stupid sort of thing, a time will come when that Image of yours will never be seen by commoners.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Infinity Sign

“Here march the eaters of earth,
the swallowers of rain.”
― J. Aleksandr Wootton, Forgetting: impressions from the millennial borderland

“Friends, we have a hero living among us.”
― Jorge Amado , Home Is the Sailor

“That’s the problem, of course. At least, part of the problem. In Madison, regrets are as commonplace as wishes. And there’s no such thing as do-overs.”
― Chelsea Sedoti, As You Wish

“Some want, to be exempt. They do not want to excel, they do not want to exert. They want to be considered excellent, for desiring to be held exempt, from all accountability.”
― Justin K. McFarlane Beau

“Oh Lord! Don't, don't start rhapsodising over that cod again, darling! I can't bear it and I know you are going to!"
She laughed.
"You don't understand. It was because it was so typically English.”
― Georgette Heyer, Instead of the Thorn

“I tell myself I have reached an age, the age of unreliable menace. The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Adults have this neurotic relationship with death, it gets blown out of all proportion, they make a huge deal out of it when in fact it’s really the most banal thing there is.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“I'm sorry."

"Sorry? For what?" He straightened and moved a bit closer, sounding honestly puzzled.

"I am not much of a conversationalist, I'm afraid. I am not used to - to any of this. You must find this terribly..."

"Terribly what?"

"Boring." She faced him squarely then, for she refused to shy away from difficulties.

He let out a short bark of laughter. "Boring? My dear Miss Bainbridge, boring is definitely something you are not."

"I don't know how you can say that," she retorted somewhat crossly. "There is really no need for you to be polite. I haven't said any of the things I should. I have been blunt and no doubt impolite. I have never danced before with any man I haven't known since I could toddle. And now I cannot even come up with the most commonplace remark."

His chuckle was low and warm [...].

"Oh, you know what I mean." Really the man was maddening. "You shouldn't laugh at someone who is admitting their grievous social ineptitude."

"What else should I do?" His teeth glinted in the darkness. "Let me assure you that I have danced with a great many girls whom I have not known since childhood. And I have heard a great many commonplace remarks. It is, quite frankly, a relief to enjoy the quiet and cool of the garden without hearing that the weather is quite nice this evening or that the breeze is most refreshing or that the party is so enjoyable.”
― Candace Camp, A Winter Scandal

“Consider it commonplace, the self-proclaimed empaths who cannot empathize with those individuals most antithetical to their politics.”
― Criss Jami