Ordinary Streets Quotes

To find extraordinary things, go to the ordinary streets! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole. ~ Orhan Pamuk

Let us go to an ordinary street to feel that life is beautiful with all the ordinary things, with cats around, with children playing, with laundries hanged out, with people wandering aimlessly! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The real explanation of this failure of Hindu-Muslim unity lies in the failure to realize that what stands between the Hindus and Muslims is not a mere matter of difference, and that this antagonism is not to be attributed to material causes. It is formed by causes which take their origin in historical, religious, cultural and social antipathy, of which political antipathy is only a reflection. These form one deep river of discontent which, being regularly fed by these sources, keeps on mounting to a head and overflowing its ordinary channels. Any current of water flowing from another source however pure, when it joins it, instead of altering the colour or diluting its strength becomes lost in the main stream. The silt of this antagonism which this current has deposited, has become permanent and deep. So long as this silt keeps on accumulating and so long as this antagonism lasts, it is unnatural to expect this antipathy between Hindus and Muslims to give place to unity. ~ B.R. Ambedkar

I have walked around the same streets so many times, and then seen a place that had been hidden to me. I now know the sites in a way that makes me think I could have made better use of the connections between place and snowball. ~ Andy Goldsworthy

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days. ~ Alain De Botton

In order fully to transcend the artificial opposition that tends to be established between structures and representations, one also has to break away from the mode of thought that Cassirer calls substantialist and which leads people to recognize no realities except those that are available to direct intuition in ordinary experience, individuals and groups. ~ Pierre Bourdieu

I had wanted to come back to Greenwich Village ever since I had left Waverly Place, and since moving to West Eleventh Street, I have never lived anyplace else. I do not want to. That is not because of what the Village is but because of what I have made it, and what I have made it depends on who I am at the time. ~ Mary Cantwell

I had a problem with cops pulling me over all the time for speeding. When I was doing Hill Street Blues, the cops said how much they loved the show as they were writing me up; meanwhile my insurance went through the roof. ~ Jennifer Tilly

As we cannot afford to squander our natural resources of minerals, food, and beauty, so we cannot afford to discard any human resources of brains, skills, and initiative, even though it is women who possess them ... a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

This is not an academic book. I have not written it for professional theologians. I have tried to write a practical book for ordinary Christians who want to hear God's voice above the clamor of everyday life. The still, small voice that spoke to Elijah in the cave is far more powerful than many of us realize. It can keep us from being bound by tradition or driven by circumstance. The voice can give us more than our own abilities to understand the Bible. Many Christians have wandered into a spiritual wilderness devoid of passion and power. Those who hear and obey the voice of God will escape that wilderness or see it changed into a garden. ~ Jack S. Deere

The sun dropped beneath the horizon and then detonated, torching the racks of clouds stacked up above the downtown skyline. Wyatt had forgotten how quickly, in the vast empty sky of the southern plains, the ordinary could turn so flamboyant. ~ Lou Berney

Did you know the bear idea of courtship is to kidnap their mates off the streets? Surely not. Surely yes. ~ Nalini Singh

While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than those to whom he is bound by organic and physical relationship, there are definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals which makes it impossible for them to grant to others what they claim for themselves. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

I find myself drunk in the streets again.
A glass of wine and so my thoughts begin.
I smile at passersby to and fro,
Faces like blank slates minutes ago,
Now emotions readily painted on canvases:
Grief, despair, joy, and madnesses.

At this time, the clouds are sweating sweet water
And you can smell the scent of each corner:
Fish, dirt, rotten apples, and burning tires.
Close your eyes here to smell all your heart desires.
Everything is more colourful when you're not yourself.
So long as you're sound body and mind, you have your wealth.

I am now treading almost fleeting.
Birds singing, bicycle bells ringing.
I have lost my way but not my heart.
Have my head, those two are apart.
Take care dear city, I must soon head home.
Until tomorrow evening when again I will roam. ~ Kamand Kojouri

It must be those brief moments when nothing has happened - nor is going to. Tiny moments, like islands in the ocean beyond the grey continent of our ordinary days. There, sometimes, you meet your own heart like someone you've never known. ~ Hans Borli

I hate ordinary people! ~ Louisa May Alcott

My grandfather was an ordinary British citizen in the time of British Raj. He used to have Bengali friends from whom I learnt Bengali. ~ Fahmid Hassan Prohor

All nuns, by the very fact of their monastic profession, are exceptional people. No ordinary woman could live such a life. There must inevitably be something, or many things, that are outstanding about a nun. ~ Jennifer Worth

I believe in the brotherhood of all men, but I don't believe in wasting brotherhood on anyone who doesn't want to practice it with me. Brotherhood is a two-way street. ~ Malcolm X

Fleas know not whether they are upon the body of a giant or upon one of ordinary size. ~ Walter Savage Landor

The killer had stepped over the line of ordinary life to destroy people physically, trampling their identity and dignity. Like inside a nightmare, we could not look away. ~ Otsuichi

Genius is nothing more than common faculties refined to a greater intensity. There are no astonishing ways of doing astonishing things. All astonishing things are done by ordinary materials. ~ Benjamin Haydon

She raised her eyes to his. They had both come from misery, she thought, and survived it. They had been drawn together through violence and tragedy, and had overcome it. They walked different paths and had found a mutual route.
Some things last, she thought. Some ordinary things. Like love. ~ J.D. Robb

I had never been so close to death before.
For a long time, as I lay there trying to clear my mind, I couldn't think coherently at all, conscious only of a terrible, blind bitterness. Why had they singled me out? Didn't they understand? Had everything I'd gone through on their behalf been utterly in vain? Did it really count for nothing? What had happened to logic, meaning and sense?
But I feel much calmer now. It helps to discipline oneself like this, writing it down to see it set out on paper, to try and weigh it and find some significance in it.
Prof Bruwer: There are only two kinds of madness one should guard against, Ben. One is the belief that we can do everything. The other is the belief that we can do nothing.
I wanted to help. Right. I meant it very sincerely. But I wanted to do it on my terms. And I am white, and they are black. I thought it was still possible to reach beyond our whiteness and blackness. I thought that to reach out and touch hands across the gulf would be sufficient in itself. But I grasped so little, really: as if good intentions from my side could solve it all. It was presumptuous of me. In an ordinary world, in a natural one, I might have succeeded. But not in this deranged, divided age. I can do all I can for Gordon or scores of others who have come to me; I can imagine myself in their shoes, I can project myself into their suffering. But I cannot, ever, live their lives for them. So what else could come of it but failure?< ~ Andre Brink

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets
returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted
stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one
eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from
one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of
the barbers who complain that men don't shave as much after an economic crisis; of the
children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women
who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they
wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of
the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up
and down the city's greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken
tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of
the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas' mansions,
all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking
through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the
evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, a ~ Orhan Pamuk

The more thoughtful the man, the more complicated will be the streets in his brain, and the more easily he will take to new ideas, and understand them. So with every fresh idea, we make a new impression in the brain, cut new channels through the brain-stuff, and that is why we find that in the practice of Yoga (it being an entirely new set of thoughts and motives) there is so much physical resistance at first. That is why we find that the part of religion which deals with the world-side of nature is so widely accepted, while the other part, the philosophy, or the psychology, which clears with the inner nature of man, is so frequently neglected. ~ Swami Vivekananda

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce ... The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State. ~ James Madison

What matters are those ordinary acts of kindness and of love, not vaulting ambition with its attendant hubris and smugness. ~ Michael Dirda

I have named you queen.
There are taller than you, taller.
There are purer than you, purer.
There are lovelier than you, lovelier.
But you are the queen.
When you go through the streets
No one recognizes you.
No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks
At the carpet of red gold
That you tread as you pass,
The nonexistent carpet.
And when you appear
All the rivers sound
In my body, bells
Shake the sky,
And a hymn fills the world.
Only you and I,
Only you and I, my love,
Listen to it. ~ Pablo Neruda

A dead end street is a good place to turn around. ~ Naomi Judd

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly. ~ Virginia Woolf

Mostly, though, he made people laugh, with wicked impersonations of everyone around him: clients, lawyers, clerks, even the cleaning woman. When Pickwick Papers came out, his former colleagues realized that half of them had turned up in its pages. His eyes - eyes that everyone who ever met him, to the day he died, remarked on - beautiful, animated, warm, dreamy, flashing, sparkling - though no two people ever agreed on their colour - were they grey, green, blue, brown? - those eyes missed nothing, any more than did his ears. He could imitate anyone. Brimming over with an all but uncontainable energy, which the twenty-first century might suspiciously describe as manic, he discharged his superplus of vitality by incessantly walking the streets, learning London as he went, mastering it, memorizing the names of the roads, the local accents, noting the characteristic topographies of the many villages of which the city still consisted. ~ Simon Callow

I have seen what the days of tribulation can do to people. I have seen hunger stalk the streets of Europe. I have witnessed the appalling, emaciated shadows of human figures. I have seen women and children scavenge army garbage dumps for scraps of food. Those scenes and nameless faces cannot be erased from my memory. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches! ~ Geert Wilders

Even though Cammie is fluent in fourteen languages and capable of killing a man seven different ways with her bare hands, she has no idea what to do when she meets an ordinary boy who thinks she's an ordinary girl. ~ Ally Carter

Rationalizing him and the glass pipe, Dad smoked crack, but he was not a crackhead; it was just something he did. To do something didn't define you, I thought.
I saw Dad through a dusty lens that distorted our relationship, as tarnished as his pipe. He was no longer just our father; he was his own person, with an identity and label and body separate from his relationship with us. He was someone who was judged outside of the lens of fatherhood, outside of our connection. When he was in the streets, he was not Dad. He was Charlie the crackhead. ~ Janet Mock

Then Ordinary understood why he hadn't recognized his Big Dream when it was right in front of him. The lovely city he'd imagined all along was not his Dream - but a picture of what his Dream would accomplish. ~ Bruce H. Wilkinson

Heroes are often the most ordinary of men. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Two Metro lines, two trains, two carriages, two people walking in parallel streets, two lives, couples criss-crossing without seeing each other, potential encounters, meetings which shall never take place. The imagination rewrites history. It modifies the local directory and the roll-call of those who frequent a town, a street, a house, a woman. It transfixes reflections in the mirror for all eternity. It hangs entire portrait galleries from the wall of our future memory on which magnificent strangers use a sharp knife to engrave their initials and a date. ~ Robert Desnos

In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.

A girl comes along, twirling a parasol on her shoulder, and twirling slightly also her rounded hips. A woman in black comes along, showing her full age, her eyes restless beneath her veil, her lips trembling. At tattooed giant comes along; a young man with white hair; a female dwarf; two girls, twins, dressed in coral. Something runs among them, an exchange of glances link lines that connect one figure with another and draws arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene: a blind man with a cheetah on a leash, a courtesan with an ostrich-plume fan, an ephebe, a Fat Woman. And thus, when some people happen to find themselves together, taking shelter from the rain under an arcade, or crowding beneath an awning of the bazaar, or stopping to listen to the band in the square, meetings, seductions, copulations, orgies are consummated among them without a word exchanged, without a finger touching anything, almost without an eye raised.

A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste of cities. If men and women began to live their ephemeral d ~ Italo Calvino

Love is nothing out of the ordinary, even if we think it is; even if we idealise it, celebrate it in poetry, sentimentalise it in coy valentines. Love happens to just about everyone; it is like measles or the diseases of childhood; it is as predictable as the losing of milk teeth, or the breaking of a boy's voice. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

How many cities of forty thousand, which is the population of Burlington, have a foreign policy? Well, we did. During my tenure as mayor we made the point that excessive spending on the military and unnecessary wars meant fewer resources to address the needs of ordinary people. Somewhere in the Reagan Library, or wherever these things are kept, there is a letter from the mayor of Burlington opposing the U.S. funding of contras in Nicaragua. The letter stated, "Stop the war against the people of Nicaragua. Use our tax dollars to feed the hungry and house the homeless. Stop killing the innocent people of Nicaragua." As ~ Bernie Sanders

Broken locks and bruised knees and borrowed lipgloss and rain on the streets ~ Rebecca Godfrey

You shudder beneath the orange glow, the wet reptile streets, while heading back to the muted torture of your dirty room, where some cruel memory sours the walls, viciously, like wisps of a flaming hell. ~ Brian Alan Ellis

Streets paved with opal sadness,
Lead me counterclockwise, to pockets of joy,
And jazz. ~ Bob Kaufman

He didn't like the earth, much less forests. He didn't like the sea either, or what ordinary mortals call the sea, which is really only the surface of the sea, waves kicked up by the wind that have gradually become the metaphor for defeat and madness. ~ Roberto Bolano

I'm a business man and the reason I linked up with a major was because I understand they have that reach that I can't get no matter how hot I get in the streets. It's not always about money because I been had money. I want to be on TV and win awards. I want to be number one. You need a label to get through barriers. ~ Yo Gotti