Quotes from Ordinary People

263 pages

Rating: (16.5K votes)


“People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.”
― quote from Ordinary People


“Feeling is not selective, I keep telling you that. You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna feel anything else, either.”
― quote from Ordinary People


“Riding the train gives him too much time to think, he has decided. Too much thinking can ruin you.”
― quote from Ordinary People


“. . . crazy world or maybe it's just the view we have of it, looking through a crack in the door, never being able to see the whole room, the whole picture.”
― quote from Ordinary People


“Depending on the reality one must face, one may prefer to opt for illusion.”
― quote from Ordinary People



“The small seed of despair cracks open and sends experimental tendrils upward to the fragile skin of calm holding him together.”
― quote from Ordinary People


“Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningles actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.”
― quote from Ordinary People


“And do not be paralyzed. It is better to move than to be unable to move, because you fear loss so much: loss of order, loss of security, loss of predictability.”
― quote from Ordinary People


“People have a right to be the way they are.”
― quote from Ordinary People


“And what about tomorrow then? And all the tomorrows to come? Why can't we talk about it? Why can't we ever talk about it?”
― quote from Ordinary People



“She hands him his coffee; crosses to the doorway; motes of dust flutter nervously in her wake.”
― quote from Ordinary People


“with grief? There is no dealing; he knows that much. There is simply the stubborn, mindless hanging on until it is over. Until you are through it. But something has happened in the process. The old definitions, the neat, knowing pigeonholes have disappeared. Or else they no longer apply. His eyes move again to the calendar. Wednesday, November fifth. Of course. Obvious. All the painful self-examination ; the unanswered questions. At least he knows what is wrong today. Today is Jordan’s birthday. Today he would have been nineteen.”
― quote from Ordinary People


“He hangs on now, pressing his hand lightly against the wall, below the window, waiting for the familiar arrow of pain. Only there is none. An oddly pleasant swell of memory, a wave of warmth flooding over him, sliding back, slowly. It is a first”
― quote from Ordinary People


“Everything seems excessive, now, and too intense, too important.”
― quote from Ordinary People


“People use people according to their own needs. Or don't use them. When a primary need is one of safety.”
― quote from Ordinary People



“Because it has always been easier to believe himself capable of evil than to accept evil in others.”
― quote from Ordinary People


“It has always been easier to believe himself capable of evil than to accept evil in others.”
― quote from Ordinary People


“And once I wanted to be a fireman. Then”
― quote from Ordinary People


“Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.”
― quote from Ordinary People


“fast. Get those months, days, hours, minutes out of the way, it can’t be quick enough.”
― quote from Ordinary People



Popular quotes

“At that age I once stabbed my best friend, Fred, with a pair of pinking shears in the base of the neck, enraged because he had been given the comprehensive sixty-four-crayon Crayola box—including the gold and silver crayons—and would not let me look closely at the box to see how Crayola had stabilized the built-in crayon sharpener under the tiers of crayons.”
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“Simon called you 'Machiavelli disguised as a debutante.'" "Gosh," I said, not sure whether to feel flattered or insulted.”
― quote from The FitzOsbornes in Exile


“A life passed amid gangsters, thieves, smugglers, and gamblers had granted Amelia an unerring nose for greed, vanity, and other assorted venal characteristics, and in Miss Sparrow, she smelled rancid pride combined with the bitter char of unrequited love. She smelled the lemon tang of loneliness mingling with despair. Just under Priscilla Sparrow's skin, Amelia could tell, a rosemary blast of judiciousness rippled, followed by the must decay of jealousy and a lingering note of envy - in short (and in spite of all of Miss Sparrow's better attempts with Dick Crane), the odors of a lifelong spinster.”
― Tiffany Baker, quote from The Little Giant of Aberdeen County


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