extraordinary Quotes

“The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret... but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know.”

″... he was ordinary in a world that loved the extraordinary.”

″When you use money to fight poverty, it can be of great value, but too often, you’re working at the margins. When you’re putting people on the moon, you’re inspiring all of us to achieve the maximum of human potential, which is how our greatest problems will eventually be solved.″

“It’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary; only wise men are able to understand them.”

“His appetite for the marvelous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary.”

“You’re not average. You’re not ordinary. You’ve been custom-made. You are one of a kind...He looks right at you and says, ‘There’s my masterpiece. That’s my son. That’s my daughter. That’s what brings the most joy to my heart.‘”

“I don’t think anyone aims to be typical, really. Most people even vow to themselves some time in high school or college not to be typical. But still, they just kind of loop back to it somehow. Like the circular rails of a train at an amusement park, the scripts we know offer a brand of security, of predictability, of safety for us. But the problem is, they only take us where we’ve already been. They loop us back to places where everyone can easily go, not necessarily where we were made to go. Living a different kind of life takes some guts and grit and a new way of seeing things.”

“Sometimes the most ordinary things could be made extraordinary, simply by doing them with the right people.”

““I am tired of feeling inadequate, imperfect, desperate for approval, and chronically insecure. I’m exhausted from feeling like I’m always falling behind in some invisible race against the clock, against other women and even against myself. It is a race I don’t remember beginning, but one that I’ve decided to stop running. I decided, instead, to learn how to be who I am and to understand that that itself is more than enough, it’s extraordinary.”

“I’ll be a great doctor with excellent bedside skills. I’ll be perfectly happy. But something about Natasha makes me think my life could be extraordinary.”

“The impression of strength came from an extraordinary vitality that seemed to pulse in the very air around him”

“The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary.”

“All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class--all the girls in the world except her, and those girls with all sorts of human weaknesses, and very ordinary girls: the other class--she alone, having no weaknesses of any sort and higher than all humanity.”

“But why do only unimportant things?”

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, *Principiis obsta* and *Finem respice*—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men?”

“There are no ordinary moments.”

″ But in this enlightened age to hope to dupe the people by the arts they are practicing is still more extraordinary.”

“Tickles are small and round and they have arms that stretch and stretch and stretch. Extraordinary long arms!”

“He reached out one of his extraordinary long arms, opened the bedroom door, reached down the stairs, opened the kitchen door, reached into the kitchen cupboard, opened the biscuit tin, took out a biscuit, brought it back upstairs, in through the bedroom door and back to Mr Tickle in bed.”

“Inside he could see a classroom. There were children sitting at their desks, and a teacher writing on the blackboard. Mr Tickle waited a minute and then reached in through the window. Mr Tickles extraordinary long arm went right up to the teacher, paused, and then – tickled! The teacher jumped in the air and turned round very quickly to see who was there.”

“It is most extraordinary to find a new sea.”

“Sitting in his armchair in his small house at the other side of the wood, he laughed and laughed every time he thought about all the people he had tickled. So, if you are in any way ticklish, beware of Mr Tickle and those extraordinary long arms of his. Just think. Perhaps, he’s somewhere about at this very moment while you’re reading this book.”

“You would never have found out how extraordinary it was if it hadn’t hindered you from doing what you wanted to do. You see how self-love keeps us from knowing our own defects of mind and body. Our reason tries in vain to show them to us; we refuse to see them till we find them in the way of our interests.”

They stand eye-to-eye on either side of the wolf’s enclosure and, slowly, each makes his own extraordinary story known to the other.

“Was it a bad thing or good? Who can say? Cosimo’s life was so far out of the ordinary, mine so orderly and modest, and yet our childhood was spent together, both of us indifferent to the adults’ obsessions, as we sought pathways different from those trodden by other people.”

″..and in the four extraordinary days that followed, bringing intruders of a different kind, Amy discovered that her grandmother’s instinct had been right.”

″‘That’s most extraordinary,’ said the Hemulen. ‘But I’m so used to your doing extraordinary things that nothing surprises me.‘”

“And then the most extraordinary thing of all happened! The chair they were in began to creak and groan, and suddenly it rose up in the air, with the two children in it!”