ordinary life Quotes

“In my little street, however, domesticity prevailed. The house painter was descending his ladder; the nursemaid was wheeling the perambulator.”

“Imagination can’t create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions. So when we think we’ve escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it’s really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.”

“With you, my life felt indeed like a fantastic adventure-despite our ordinary circumstances, your love imbued everything we did with secret riches.”

“I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.”

“So that is how Her Serene and Royal Highness, Amethyst Alexandra Augusta Araminta Adelaide Aurelia Anne, Princess of Phantasmorania, became an ordinary kitchen maid in the royal castle of Amber. She was soon to find out that a great deal of work was expected in return for two pfennigs a week and her keep.”

″‘I’ve heard of you. And if it hadn’t been for you, Godmama, I wouldn’t be here at this minute.’ ‘Does that make you glad or sorry?’ asked the old lady. ‘Glad!’ said the Ordinary Princess promptly. ‘Though I ought to say,’ she added truthfully, ‘that there have been times when I’ve wished I was a really proper kind of princess ... but not very often.’ The old lady laughed a high cackling sort of laugh. ‘You’re a sensible child,’ she said. ‘Come and sit beside me and tell me all about it.‘”

“For the little hut was still standing in spite of the winter storms and snow. The moss was greener than ever, and primroses, windflowers and wild cherry brightened all the forest. The Ordinary Princess, who had once been an ordinary kitchen maid and was now Queen Amethyst of Ambergeldar, wore Clorinda’s ragged dress, which she had most carefully mended, and cooked the brown trout that Peregrine—who was always Peregrine—caught in the forest streams for their dinner.”

“And once again it seemed to the Ordinary Princess as though the sky had fallen into the Forest of Faraway, as she lay on her back in a sea of bluebells and watched a pair of orioles building their nest in the branches over her head.”

“It has been reserved for us to see flying a commonplace and ordinary event.”

“That’s another tiresome thing about having rich parents- you have what grown-ups call ‘advantages’. They think that you are very lucky and ought to be grateful, but I have tried both and I can tell you that it is much more fun to go to an ordinary school and have a bad French accent like other children.”

“Yesterday seemed unreal and wasted. Those pirates, the gun in Houseboat Bay, the chase up the lake to Rio were a sort of dream. He woke in ordinary life.”