“If everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture?”
Source: Parable of the Sower (1993), p. 115
“And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?”
—
Jonathan Franzen
,
book
The Corrections
Source: The Corrections (2001)
Context: All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary - of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn't have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?
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Jonathan Franzen 50
novelist 1959Related quotes
“The most ordinary things could be made extraordinary.”
Variant: Even the most ordinary things can be made extraordinary simply by doing it with the right people.
Source: The Lucky One
Elizabeth Green, Chapter 15, Beth, p. 274
Variant: Sometimes the most ordinary things could be made extraordinary, simply by doin them with the right people.(Elizabeth Green)
Source: 2000s, The Lucky One (2008)
Variant: Because the world isn’t divided into the special and the ordinary. Everyone has the potential to be extraordinary. As long as you have a soul and free will, you can be anything, do anything, choose anything.
Source: City of Heavenly Fire
“I wish everyone would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think”
Rose Macaulay
(1881–1958) English novelist and writer
Potterism (1921) p.196. https://books.google.com/books?id=9tDSm2WzQxsC&pg=PA196
Context: Jane: What do you think of his book Arthur?
Gideon: I don't think of it. I've had no reason to, particularly. I've not had to review it.... I'm afraid I'm hopeless about novels just now, that's the fact. I'm sick of the form—slices of life served up cold in three hundred pages. Oh, it's very nice; it makes nice reading for people. But what's the use? Except, of course, to kill time for those who prefer it dead. But as things in themselves, as art, they've been ruined by excess. My critical sense is blunted just now. I can hardly feel the difference, though I can see it, between a good novel and a bad one. I couldn't write one, good or bad, to save my life, I know that. And I've got to the stage when I wish other people wouldn't. I wish everyone would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think...
