“Gotanda swung by at either-forty. He was wearing a perfectly ordinary gray V-neck sweater over a perfectly ordinary blue button-down shirt with- you got it - perfectly ordinary cotton slacks. And still he looked striking. Extraordinarily so.”

“I'm just ordinary guy, ordinary family, ordinary education, ordinary face, ordinary exam results, ordinary thought in my head”

“He found it increasingly difficult to accept the strict codes of the sect that clashed with ordinary values.”

“I've got tons of things I don't understand about myself. We're both normal "ordinary”

“Everyone may be ordinary, but they're not normal.”

“The sky was painted over, a perfect uniform gray. On days like this the clouds probably absorbed the sounds from the surface of the earth. And not just sounds. All kinds of things. Perceptions, for example.”

“For instance, supposing that the planet earth were not a sphere but a gigantic coffee table,how much difference in everyday life would that make? Granted, this is a prettyfarfetched example; you can't rearrange facts of life so freely. Still, picturing the planetearth, for convenience sake, as a gigantic coffee table does in fact help clear away theclutter—those practically pointless contingencies such as gravity and the internationaldateline and the equator, those nagging details that arise from the spherical view. I mean,for a guy leading a perfectly ordinary existence, how many times in the course of alifetime would the equator be a significant factor?”