#ordinary

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. ↗

— William Martin

#advice #children #extraordinary #life #lives

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. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#faith #holiness #holy #ordinary #faith

There was an outburst of noise and protests, and Jeremy announced I wasn't being logical, of course they wouldn't sell me, because it was illegal, for heaven's sake. Alexa gave him a look that said you're not helping, and Gil smacked him on the back of the head, and Olivia said, yes, that was the only reason they weren't going to sell me. ↗

— Caitlen Rubino-Bradway

#family #ordinary-magic #siblings #family

Speech was given to the ordinary sort or men, whereby to communicate their mind; but to wise men, whereby to conceal it. ↗

— Robert South

#conceal #given #men #mind #ordinary

Everything has a sort of double meaning for me, there's the ordinary everyday meaning of things, and the imaginary meaning about it all, and I wanted to bring these things together, and in this first big Resurrection of mine you have a good example of this sort of thing. ↗

— Stanley Spencer

#big #bring #double #double meaning #everyday

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is. ↗

— Bruce Lee

#arts #aspect #closer #easy #easy way

By choosing to live above the ordinary level we create extraordinary problems for ourselves. ↗

— Henry Miller

#life #life

The trouble in life is not that you are extraordinarily or ordinarily talented but you are read posthumously. ↗

— Santosh Kalwar

#life #ordinary #read #talent #trouble

Jane remembers those years, though, as if they had been [a movie]--in part because her friends...always talked about everything as if it was over ("Remember last night?"), while holding out the possibility that whatever happened could be rerun. Neil didn't have that sense of things. He thought people shouldn't romanticize ordinary life. "Our struggles, our little struggles," he would whisper, in bed, at night. Sometimes he or she would click on some of the flashlights and consider the ceiling, with the radiant swirls around the bright nuclei, the shadows like opened oysters glistening in brine. (In the '80s, the champagne was always waiting.) ↗

— Ann Beattie

#ordinariness #ordinary-life #men

Ordinary people believe only in the possible. Extraordinary people visualize not what is possible or probable, but rather what is impossible. And by visualizing the impossible, they begin to see it as possible ↗

— Cherie Carter-Scott

#impossible #ordinary #possible #visualization