Do not ask your childrento strive for extraordinary lives.Such striving may seem admirable,but it is the way of foolishness.Help them instead to find the wonderand the marvel of an ordinary life.Show them the joy of tastingtomatoes, apples and pears.Show them how to crywhen pets and people die.Show them the infinite pleasurein the touch of a hand.And make the ordinary come alive for them.The extraordinary will take care of itself.
Seven years, Dawn. Working with the Slayer. Seeing my friends get more and more powerful... a witch. A demon. Hell, I could fit Oz in my shaving kit, but come a full moon, he had a wolfy mojo not to be messed with. Powerful, all of them. And I'm the guy who fixes the windows. They'll never know how tough it is, Dawnie, to be the one who isn't Chosen, to live so near the spotlight and never step in it. But I know. I see more than anybody realizes because nobody's watching me. I saw you last night, and I see you working here today. You're not special; you're extraordinary.
The pretty ones are usually unhappy. They expect everyone to be enamored of their beauty. How can a person be content when their happiness lies in someone else's hands, ready to be crushed at any moment? Ordinary-looking people are far superior, because they are forced to actually work hard to achieve their goals, instead of expecting people to fall all over themselves to help them.
God can take the ordinary and create the extraordinary. Our incredible God has the power to transform your simple life and give you the life of your dreams. Remarkable things happen in your life when you believe.
To be ordinary, be normal; to be original, be different; to be valuable, be unique; to be priceless, be yourself.
You are an ordinary person till the day you realise that you have the power to change the world!
I think part of your attraction to him is the draw of the unknown, of being different, even special. He is so out of the ordinary that you feel pulled to that because you yourself are not so ordinary. You're alone. And sometimes the pain of so much loss is written across your face. You wear it like an adornment and that causes other people to wonder about you; they can't relate to you and what you've been through, but you can relate to him in his dark state.
Successful people are defined as ordinary people who never gave up on their dreams and passion is the secret of that persistence!
Ordinary men earns responsibility towards their family, extraordinary men earns duty towards their nation.
There was nothing Mandy had wanted more than to give her full attention to the world of Personifications and ignore those who ignored her in society. She’d wanted to talk out loud to Alecto, to have conversations in front of other ordinary people. Unfortunately, to do that in front of ordinary people would only prove her insanity, and although Mandy was naïve at times, she wasn’t stupid.
A person’s words reflect the image of his character and the amount of truth and lies in it is always visible to the human heart than ordinary eyes.
Oh, trust me Sydney Tar Ponds, you aren’t the first Personification to be forgotten by somebody ordinary,” Mearth sighed with a falsely-reassuring smile. Alecto stepped back from her, glaring hatefully. “Sydney Tar Ponds,” Mearth added, “I’ve had so many ordinary people as friends in my life that by now I’ve forgotten all their names. At first it was difficult… very sad… to see them always leaving, dying, disappearing, ignoring, but after a while I realized that they weren’t worth the trouble. I’d rather be in the company of other Personifications. At least they aren’t always dropping dead like houseflies or sailing away to parts unknown. Nil sa saol seo ach ceo, i ni bheimid beo, ach seal beag gearr. Wouldn’t you agree?”“No,” Alecto told her. “I think you’re insane.
It was a very ordinary day, the day I realised that my becoming is my life and my home and that I don't have to do anything but trust the process, trust my story and enjoy the journey. It doesn't really matter who I've become by the finish line, the important things are the changes from this morning to when I fall asleep again, and how they happened, and who they happened with. An hour watching the stars, a coffee in the morning with someone beautiful, intelligent conversations at 5am while sharing the last cigarette. Taking trains to nowhere, walking hand in hand through foreign cities with someone you love. Oceans and poetry. It was all very ordinary until my identity appeared, until my body and mind became one being. The day I saw the flowers and learned how to turn my daily struggles into the most extraordinary moments. Moments worth writing about. For so long I let my life slip through my fingers, like water. I'm holding on to it now,and I'm not letting go.
And once their imaginations are liberated, they begin glimpse the grand interconnectedness of all things. Eternity begins to peek out from behind the everyday things and they see the trappings of any earthly moment as the stage and props for Heaven to reveal itself. There is now nothing ordinary. Everything is being used and spun out for His vast scheme and in His eternal economy, nothing is wasted. Suddenly, all the myriad moments and minutiae of a lifetime show their orchestration —there was nothing that did not lead to this! They look over all their time to find that His redemption has always been rushing, swooping, swerving through their experience, racing to and fro to intervene and infuse Grace.
A celebrity starts being a cele-crazy when he's seen often, he's just like the ordinary man in the streets. Without much ado to shout his name, i go my way.
It embarrassed her, as a child, to think that her father had fallen in love, or, if men must love, then it should have been someone else, someone dark, mysterious and profoundly clever, not an ordinary person who was impatient for no reason and cross when one was late for lunch.
There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she's no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won't remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal's thong between her toes, the summer's warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already.
I have come to believe that we steer our individual spheres of being through the spectra of possible worlds via the choices we make, the acts we perform. Most people stick to known routes, and therefore cannot travel far. They live too modestly, and perhaps too privately. Only by being strange can we move, for strange acts cause us to be rejected by whatever normality we have offended, and to be propelled towards a normality that can better accommodate us.
I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways.
By doing ordinary actions efficiently you will become the best among ordinary, but you will not be an extraordinary.
But what I do believe is that if you're a girl who was born in Homsea, a girl who lives in a nothing kind of house with an ordinary kind of family, then you can't know everything about the world and that it's probably good to keep an open mind about things, just in case.
An ordinary man gets arrogant with beauty, conceited with knowledge and ruthless with power.
Youth is the most suitable age to enjoy the life completely or to work diligently for the life, what you decide makes your rest of the life ordinary or legendary respectively.
He held her face in his hands, and stared into her eyes, and said that she was his for only a while anyway, and that it wasn’t his going to Cranwell that would split them up. “You’re destined for greater things, Susannah Hammond. I see it in you. You’re so clever, so bright. So beautiful. So special. I’m not any of those things. Except when I’m flying, maybe. Down here, I’m ordinary. I’m going to be just a memory for you. A sweet one, I hope. Happy. But just a part of your past. I might be good enough for now, but I’m not good enough forever. Not for you.
In a nice little house in Atro City there lived a man called Doktor Gleichstein. He was a kind of scientist, and he was very good at his job, which is why he always worked from home. He looked a little funny because he kept losing his eyebrows. Quantum Physics, is sort of like ordinary Physics, only you tend to spend a lot more time looking for the cat. He worked in the sitting room because he’d blown the garage up once already. Apparently a lot of things happened by accident in Quantum Physics.
If you read fairy tales carefully, you’ll notice they are mostly about people who aren’t heroes. They don’t have special powers, or gifts. Often they are despised as stupid, They are bullied, beaten up, robbed, starved. But they find they are stronger than their misfortunes.
If you're nice, decent, attractive, get good grades and are talented, no one wants to read about that...They want to read what's out-of-the-ordinary, the scandalous, the shocking and the tragic. They want a story; they want to be captivated and what's typical does not give them that...unless, of course, that person ends up a victim, commits a crime or loses their minds via a love affair.
One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests- wife, children, snug little home. That's where we practical fellows'- he smiled-'are more tolerant than you intellectuals. We live and let live, and assume that things are jogging on fairly well elsewhere, and that the ordinary plain man may be trusted to look after his own affairs.
Indeed if they ever once saw the endless supply of eternal opportunities The Adversary offers them every temporal moment of day after day of their fuddled little lives, they would stagger at the sheer industry and prodigality of His efforts. Conversely, if they ever gained a glimpse of how their ordinary actions actually effect and shape things not only under time but without, the very vast weight of that would almost certainly end in their becoming humble.
No one is ordinary because every person carries the wisdom of his own unique path!
There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways.
All that Delaura noticed, though, was the uproarious crowing of the roosters.'There are only six of them, but they make enough noise for a hundred,' said the Abbess. 'Furthermore, a pig spoke and a goat gave birth to triplets.' And she added with fervor: 'Everything has been like this since your Bishop did us the favor of sending us his poisoned gift.'She viewed with equal alarm the garden flowering with so much vigor that it seemed contra natura. As they walked across it she pointed out to Delaura that there were flowers of exceptional size and color, some with an unbearable scent. As far as she was concerned, everything ordinary has something supernatural about it.
APPROACHRain is falling. Winter approaches. I drive towards it. In the slow rain. In the semi-darkness. Cello music is playing in the car. The deep sad sound of the cello. It almost swamps me. Routine endeavours to swamp me. The everyday paying of bills.But I paint men walking in a city of icebergs and crystal. Some of the icebergs are red. I paint a woman swimming in green wavy water. Surrounded by desert mesas. Bright orange in the sunlight. With darker orange for shadows. I paint two people. With purple and pink and yellow and blue circles overlapping the boundaries of their bodies. Dancing.Life is not ordinary. When I see you tonight I will press my lips to your eyelids. Each one in turn. I will rub my fingertips over the skin on the back of your hands and around your wrists. I will sigh. I will growl. I will whinny. I will gallop into your smile. One sharp foot after the other.
Holiness has most often been revealed to me in the exquisite pun of the first syllable, in holes- in not enough help, in brokenness, mess. High holy places, with ethereal sounds and stained glass, can massage my illusion of holiness, but in holes and lostness I can pick up the light of small ordinary progress, newly made moments flecked like pepper into the slog and the disruptions.
Texting and phone calls, fireworks, blends, café au lait, and music. Yesterday's television. Work and beer. The neighbor's dog, or those strange flowers, the way it smells at Maisen. Those ordinary things I talk about with you. With you... I want to talk about love with you.
Alecto… what do you think would happen if people found out about you? Your abilities, your life, Mearth’s super 8 films, those powers of yours… how would they react?”“I don’t know,” said Alecto, “but ordinary people like a show, especially when it’s a disturbing one. They enjoy seeing misery… probably because it allows them to pretend that they themselves are not so miserable, too. Also, they would probably find out about you, how you know about Personifications, how you saw the films… they would put us in cages and throw peanuts at us, I guess.”“All joking aside, Alecto.…”“Who is joking, Mandy Valems?
The most interesting people are the unusual. No one writes about or discusses the average, the ordinary, or the common; they write about and discuss the weird, the mad and the different, so if you are one, even though the opinions of others are of no importance, you are, in their eyes, significant enough to notice and remember.