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Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.
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advice
children
extraordinary
life
lives
ordinary
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William Martin |
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You can find something truly important in an ordinary minute.
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important
ordinary
time
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Mitch Albom |
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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
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buffy-the-vampire-slayer
extraordinary
inspirational
observation
ordinary
power
seeing
underdog
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Joss Whedon |
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No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
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life
ordinary
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H. P. Lovecraft |
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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.
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ordinary
strange
wonder
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Richard Dawkins |
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It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.
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extraordinary
life
ordinary
truth
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Jodi Picoult |
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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.
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ordinary
self
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Anne Lamott |
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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.
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live
nothing
ordinary
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E.M. Forster |
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...and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.
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life
ordinary
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Bill Bryson |
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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.
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faith
holiness
holy
ordinary
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Anne Lamott |
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I don't really know that this story has a whole lot of things happen in it. It doesn't really. It's just a record of how things were in my life during this last winter. I guess things happened, but nothing out of the ordinary.
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life
ordinary
record
story
winter
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Markus Zusak |
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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.
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clever
dark
embarrass
embarrassment
father
impatience
impatient
late
love
mediocrity
men
mother
mysterious
mystery
ordinary
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Daphne du Maurier |
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You soon get tired of what's extraordinary, dragon rider. It's often the most ordinary things that bring great happiness.
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dragon-rider
extraordinary
happiness
ordinary
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Cornelia Funke |
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It's never hard to act ordinary if you feel ordinary.
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heaven
life
ordinary
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Mitch Albom |
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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 naive at times, she wasn't stupid.
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conversation
friend
friendship
insane
insanity
mental-illness
ordinary
personification
psychology
talk
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Rebecca McNutt |
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"All that Delaura noticed, though, was the uproarious crowing of the roosters.
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ordinary
supernatural
superstition
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Gabriel García Márquez |
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"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."
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death
dying
forget
friend
friendship
housefly
human
insane
irish
loss
memory
mother-earth
ordinary
personification
pollution
sad
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Rebecca McNutt |
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"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?"
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film
humor
joke
misery
ordinary
peanuts
powers
psychokinesis
psychokinetic
pyrokinesis
pyrokinetic
show
super-8
super-8-film
super-eight
telekinesis
throw
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Rebecca McNutt |