How many stopped-up men and women does it take to produce one Einstein? Ten? A thousand? A hundred thousand? ... So this is what Einstein meant when he looked me in the eye that day and said, I would be nothing without you. It was not success he saw written in my face. He saw, rather, that I would never accomplish anything at all.
einstein failure genius ordinariness success
Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces.You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew.I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it.
barbarism civilization denunciation evil good jews nazis ordinariness pettiness resentment war wwii
With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.
change death meaning mementos ordinariness tso-life
A man who goes into a restaurant and blatantly disrespects the servers shows a strong discontent with his own being. Deep down he knows that restaurant service is the closest thing he will ever experience to being served like a king.
attention attention-seekers being blatant discontent disrespect eating eating-out experience food food-industry food-service honest impatience inconsiderate insecurity king labor laziness lazy ordinariness ordinary ordinary-people restaurants royalty selfish selfishness server service ungrateful unhappy waiter waiting waitress
Alex understood such discipline. He knew the rarity of it, and the cost. And on the rare occasions when he happened to touch her, he did wonder what else she might have been, if she had not been so determined to be typical.
discipline ordinariness typical
