Ordinary People Book Quotes

“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.”

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

“People use people according to their own needs. Or don’t use them. When a primary need is one of safety.”

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

“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.”

“People have a right to be the way they are.”

“. . . 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.”

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

“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.”

“People who keep stiff upper lips find that it’s damn hard to smile.”

“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.”

“Everything seems excessive, now, and too intense, too important.”

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

“Depending on the reality one must face, one may prefer to opt for illusion.”