Extraordinary Quotes - Page 28

• Use them with care, and use them with respect as to the transformations they can achieve, and you have an extraordinary research tool. Go banging about with a psychedelic drug for a Saturday night turn-on, and you can get into a really bad place, psychologically. Know what you're using, decide just why you're using it, and you can have a rich experience. They're not addictive, and they're certainly not escapist, either, but they're exceptionally valuable tools for understanding the human mind, and how it works.

  Alexander Shulgin

  Night, Drug, Understanding

  47 Copy quote

• I think it is one of the most extraordinary elections, a turning point for our country and for the world. That remarkable young man [Barack Obama] has kept his demeanor, kept his temperament and has shown a power to inspire. I see what energy that he has inspired among the young. Well, it inspires us old goats too.

  David McCullough

  Country, Men, Thinking

  8 Copy quote

• Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace

  Marquis de Sade

  Simple, Imagination, Ordinary

  Sade (marquis de), Marquis de Sade (1987). “The 120 days of Sodom and other writings”, Grove Pr

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.

  Barry Lopez

  Land, Community, Needs

  8 Copy quote

• What I bring to the interview is respect. The person recognizes that you respect them because you're listening. Because you're listening, they feel good about talking to you. When someone tells me a thing that happened, what do I feel inside? I want to get the story out. It's for the person who reads it to have the feeling . . . In most cases the person I encounter is not a celebrity; rather the ordinary person. "Ordinary" is a word I loathe. It has a patronizing air. I have come across ordinary people who have done extraordinary things. (p. 176)

  Studs Terkel

  Air, Talking, People

  "Touch and Go: A Memoir". Book By Studs Terkel, 2007.

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• ... suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us extraordinary

  Dorothy Allison

  Lying, Self, Hatred

  Dorothy Allison (2013). “Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature”, p.25, Open Road Media

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Family, Christian, Prayer

  34 Copy quote

• It would need someone very remarkable to recover your name, Stephen, someone of rare perspicacity, with extraordinary talents and incomparable nobility of character. Me, in fact.

  Susanna Clarke

  Character, Names, Needs

  Susanna Clarke (2009). “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell”, p.405, Bloomsbury Publishing

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mrs. Murdo, walkind even more briskly to keep her spirits up, was crossing Harken Square when something fell to the pavement just in front of her with a terrific thump. How extraordinary, she thought, bending to pick it up. It was sort of a bundle. She began to untie it.

  Jeanne DuPrau

  Squares, Bending, Pavement

  Jeanne DuPrau (2016). “The City of Ember Complete Series”, p.198, Random House Books for Young Readers

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You make me tremendously happy to hold me undivided - to let me be the artist, as it were, and yet not forgo the man, the animal, the hungry, insatiable lover. No woman has ever granted me all the privileges I need - and you, why you sing out so blithely, so boldly, with a laugh even - yes, you invite me to go ahead, be myself, benture anything. I adore you for that. That is where you are truly regal, a woman extraordinary. What a woman you are! I laugh to myself now when I think of you. I have no fear of your femaleness.

  Henry Miller

  Artist, Animal, Men

  Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller (1989). “A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• Love, I thought to myself abstractedly. Not 'This is love' or 'Is this love?' Not a sentence, not a certainty, not a thought with moving parts or direction. Just love, all of it, as it is. Whether it's enough or not. Wthether it's real or we're making it up. However shoddy it gets, or bent out of shape. It's still extraordinary. However foolish, however vain. However badly it ends. Love.

  Julian Gough

  Real, Moving, Shapes

  4 Copy quote

• We may seem the weakest and most insignificant of all the Realms, but our strength comes in other ways. We have what no other race has: imagination. Any one of us, even the lowliest, can create worlds within ourselves; we can people them with the most extraordinary creatures, the most amazing inventions, the most incredible things. We can live in those worlds ourselves, if we choose; and in our own worlds, we can be as we want to be. Imagination is as close as we will ever be to godhead, Poison, for in imagination, we can create wonders.

  Chris Wooding

  Race, People, Imagination

  4 Copy quote

• In other words, a considerable portion of your extraordinary gift comes from the simple fact that you very much want to do good." -Master George

  James Dashner

  Simple, Want, Facts

  4 Copy quote

• Living to an extraordinary age, she mourned them all equally as she buried her husband and, one by one, her children. In this suffering she found the best sort of perfection--the kind that never demands it of others.

  Martine Leavitt

  Children, Husband, Perfection

  Martine Leavitt (2016). “Keturah and Lord Death”, p.92, Highlights Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.

  Pablo Neruda

  Writing, Humanity, Earth

  Pablo Neruda, Mark Eisner (2004). “The essential Neruda: selected poems”, p.7, City Lights Books

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• He sat on as the sun's rays came slowly down through the trees, lower and lower, and when the lowest reached a branch not far above him it caught a dewdrop poised upon a leaf. The drop instantly blazed crimson, and a slight movement of his head made it show all the colours of the spectrum with extraordinary purity, from a red almost too deep to be seen through all the others to the ultimate violet and back again.

  Patrick O'Brian

  Tree, Red, Violet

  8 Copy quote

• It wasn't because they had extraordinary powers, really, but because of how well they used the ordinary powers everyone had: the power of courage, the power of kindness, the powers of curiosity and knowledge.

  Jeanne DuPrau

  Kindness, Curiosity, Ordinary

  Jeanne DuPrau (2016). “The City of Ember Complete Series”, p.641, Random House Books for Young Readers

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Maybe we're all like that with our mothers. They seem ordinary until one day they're extraordinary.

  Lisa See

  Mother, One Day, Ordinary

  Lisa See (2010). “Shanghai Girls”, p.42, A&C Black

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike "identity", must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ("gay", "black", "Muslim", whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity.

  Philip Pullman

  Passion, Gay, Thinking

  6 Copy quote

• They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Self, Hands, Brave

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.365, e-artnow

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• you have often seen in the cinema, erich, haven't you, that between extraordinary people extraordinary things like for example extraordinary love can arise. so we only have to be extraordinary and see what happens.

  Elfriede Jelinek

  People, Example, Cinema

  Elfriede Jelinek, Martin Chalmers (1994). “Women as Lovers”, p.57, Profile Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Home, Night, Names

  Barbara Kingsolver (2009). “High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never”, p.11, Harper Collins

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice.

  Anne Michaels

  Gratitude, Sweet, Book

  6 Copy quote

• Magic exists. Who can doubt it, when there are rainbows and wildflowers, the music of the wind and the silence of the stars? Anyone who has loved has been touched by magic. It is such a simple and such an extraordinary part of the lives we live.

  Nora Roberts

  Inspirational, Life, Positive

  Nora Roberts (2012). “Charmed: The Donovan Legacy”, p.13, Penguin

  85 Copy quote

  Show source

• Buffett found it 'extraordinary' that academics studied such things. They studied what was measurable, rather than what was meaningful. 'As a friend [Charlie Munger] said, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

  Roger Lowenstein

  Meaningful, Men, Nails

  Roger Lowenstein (2013). “Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist”, p.318, Random House

  6 Copy quote

  Show source