Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's a lot harder to find fault with the mundane details of daily existence when you really, really know on a cellular level that you're going to go, and that this moment, right now, is life. Life isn't what happens to you in 20 years. This moment, right now, is your life.
My first job was at the BBC but was really dull. I was working in the BBC's reference department, where I did a lot of filing. I had always been interested in films and theatre, so I thought that getting a job at the BBC would be a good idea, but the job was really mundane.
I find so often, you know, just on a very mundane level; you've got a meeting and your child's acting in a school play. You can't do both things. And it's not simply that you can't do both, but whatever you do, you're going to be neglecting something that's really important.
I almost always start with setting! I have to know the world before I know how to populate it. I have a tendency to play with doors - between life and death, human and monster, mundane and magic - and with 'ADSOM,' I knew I wanted to play with the physical doors between worlds.
I always feel trepidation at the beginning of every project. I worry about so many things. Time to get it right, the skill to do it justice, the will to finish. I also worry about more mundane things, like what if my computer crashes and I've forgotten to back up the manuscript?
Only a reader can become a writer. Develop a lively intellect and the ability to become interested in anything, no matter how mundane it might seem at first. Look for the story. Develop an eye for detail. Feed your mind and your brain: learn as much as you can about everything you can.
People are fascinated by evil because it's mysterious and it doesn't seem to have a rationale behind it, and the second you say that Hannibal Lector was abducted as a child and he had to eat his sister or something like that, it becomes immediately mundane. The character becomes mundane.
There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death. Whether it's the mundane violence we do to our bodies by overeating toxic food or drink or the extreme violence of child abuse, domestic warfare, life-threatening poverty, addiction, or state terrorism.
I wouldn't mind working in restaurants again because you build up a relationship with the customers. I'm really inspired by the mundane - it's often the most ordinary-looking people who have the best stories - and you can watch diners and study their idiosyncrasies without them being aware of it.
We think that democracy can change a lot of things, but we're being fooled, because democracy is not the election. We've been taught that democracy is having elections. And it isn't. Elections are the most horrendous aspect of democracy. It's the most mundane, trivial, disappointing, dirty aspect.
Airline glamour never promised anything as mundane as elbow room, much less a flat bed, a massage, or an arugula salad. It promised a better world. Service and dress reflected the more formal era, but no one expected air travel to be comfortable. It was amazing just to have hot food above the clouds.
We always see Aung San as a strong, tough woman. There are two stories running in parallel. You see the contradictions between the East and the West, and you see someone who does mundane and normal things - someone who's supposed to be a housewife - and then someone who's become important and imprisoned.
The heart of the theater is the play itself, how it dramatizes life to make it meaningful entertainment. To achieve depth and universality, the playwright must subject himself to intense critique, to know human character and behavior, and finally to construct art from the most mundane of human experience.
As a child, these colourful superheroes that could fly, or were horrifying like Ghost Rider and the Hulk, with this tremendous rage or these supernatural powers, provided an escape for me from my mundane existence, from my lack of friends or my inability to communicate well with people. They liberated me.
I have a fascination with the nasty things people do to each other and the way relationships go wrong, and how there can be this very dark underbelly to seemingly normal, mundane domestic life. They're the stories in the newspapers I always find interesting. That's not a very nice thing to admit to, is it?
One of the things I've started doing lately is tracking my dreams. I feel like there's a lot of information there and you can really bring those emotions to the situations that may feel mundane or familiar. That gives them new life and gives you a new relationship with it - if that makes any sort of sense.
I pretty much learned not to fight with it a long time ago and let it do what it likes to do. Otherwise, my shaving techniques are pretty mundane. I tend to do it in the shower because it makes the bristles soft and keeps the razor from building up the hairs inside it, and the mustache is dealt with with scissors.
Major power and telephone grids have long been controlled by computer networks, but now similar systems are embedded in such mundane objects as electric meters, alarm clocks, home refrigerators and thermostats, video cameras, bathroom scales, and Christmas-tree lights - all of which are, or soon will be, accessible remotely.
Judging by the volume of titles published each year, mystery readers are restless in their pursuit of literary escape. They might travel to far-flung places or stick close to home with their favorite hobbies. They can solve the world's greatest conspiracies or root for a lone wolf grappling with personal problems mundane and bleak.
It is so basic as to be mundane, but in disaster relief, all the good will in the world can go to hell in a hand basket if the logistics don't work. In Ethiopia at the best of times, the logistics are difficult. It is a huge country - about the same size as Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma combined. It is also a transportation nightmare.
I remember taking a space walk on the ISS. There I was, wrench in hand, tightening bolts on a new module. It was such a mundane task. But when I looked in one direction, there was Earth floating in vivid blues and greens. In the other direction, I could see the blackest black conceivable, punctured by unwavering pinpoints of starshine.
When you say 'failure,' that seems really dramatic, but a lot of failure is just really depressing and mundane. I remember the first time I ever played a concert in Italy. I played a venue that held 900 people, and I think five people showed up. It wasn't a big, 'John Carter of Mars' type failure. It wasn't dramatic; it was just depressing.
I very, very, very rarely lose my temper. I do get cross sometimes when encountering something that I feel is improper, that I feel is lacking in justice and equity, and this all sounds very pompous and over the top - but these are the things that really upset me: intolerance, prejudice etc. I suppose in more mundane matters, I'm impatient.
The California tract houses are like the mundane meeting the mystical. Sometimes if you're driving at twilight, and you see those houses, and they're starting to light up, there's something so beautiful, so ethereal about the fact that they're all pretty similar, set against this desert landscape and the light just hitting them a certain way.
Going to grocery stores is almost my favorite thing to do to calm myself down. There's something about just walking aisle after aisle making mundane choices. 'Do I want that? No, I want the one that has the low sodium.' And that feels like a good exercise to be doing when there isn't anything to be doing. It's like a kick-starter in some way.
There are things which happen through effort, and there are things which happen only through effortlessness. There are things which will never happen through effort, and there are things which will never happen through effortlessness. All that is mundane happens through effort; all that is worldly happens through effort. And all that is sacred, other-worldly, happens through effortlessness.
