Ordinary

Famous quotes containing the word ordinary:

    Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quite well developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don’t think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you’ll see what I mean.
    Northrop Frye (1912–1991)

    Lord, have mercy on us.
    [Kyrie, eleison.]
    Missal, The. The Ordinary of the Mass.

    Missal is book of prayers and rites used to celebrate the Roman Catholic mass during the year.

    He was not in the least a rhetorician, was not talking to Buncombe or his constituents anywhere, had no need to invent anything but to tell the simple truth, and communicate his own resolution; therefore he appeared incomparably strong, and eloquence in Congress and elsewhere seemed to me at a discount. It was like the speeches of Cromwell compared with those of an ordinary king.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)