Quotes on Usual

As usual, it occurred to me that words were the only thing that could possibly save me from this situation. This was a characteristic misunderstanding on my part. When action was needed, I was absorbed in words; for words proceeded with such difficulty from my mouth that I was intent on them and forgot all about action. It seemed to me that actions, which are dazzling, varied things, must always be accompanied by equally dazzling and equally varied words.

Sometimes I would get invited to a party or to go out to dinner by one of them and I would decline. Part of me wanted to go, but those kind of outings always made me feel even more alienated than usual. Hearing them talk made me feel lonely and hateful at the same time. Lonely because I didn't fit in, never did. When I was reminded, it hurt. And hateful because it reaffirmed what I already knew, that I was alone and on the outside.

Nobody had noticed, nobody had paid attention, but, as usual, the essential part of the matter had been settled before the story had begun, and by then it was too late.

I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within.

All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class -herself alone- had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.

A novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.

How can non-existence get sick of itself? Everytime you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning waking with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don't even have the instrument to do it, because our mind & our world are the same thing.

The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.

Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.

Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?

He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.

I had all the usual ambition growing up. I wanted to be a writer, a musician, a hockey player. I wanted to do something that wasn't nine to five. Acting was the first thing I tried that clicked.