“Heroes do extraordinary things. What I did was not an extraordinary thing. It was normal.”
Irena Sendler (1910–2008) Polish resistance fighter and Holocaust rescuer
Quoted in "Irena Sendlerowa: Warsaw social worker who rescued thousands from the Jewish ghetto" by Rupert Cornwell in The Independent (14 May 2008)
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author
On the character "Thunder Jim Wade" in "The Poison People" in Thrilling Adventures (July 1941) using the pseudonym "Charles Stoddard."
Short fiction
Context: A casual eye might have seen nothing extraordinary in Wade as he moved lithely across the meadow toward the Thunderbug. He was tall, lean and rangy, looking rather like a college boy on a vacation, with his brown, almost youthful face and tousled dark hair, so deep-black that it was almost blue.
A closer inspection would have shown more significant details. There was an iron hardness underlying Wade’s face, like iron beneath velvet. His jet eyes were decidedly not those of a boy. There was a curious quality of soft depth to them, although sometimes that black deep could freeze over with deadly purpose.
Mark Twain book Following the Equator
Ch. LVII http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2895/2895-h/p6.htm <br class="br">Following the Equator (1897)
“People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.”
Edmund Hillary (1919–2008) New Zealand mountaineer
Though widely attributed to Hillary on the internet, this appears to have originated as a quote about him in a Rolex advertisement.
Disputed
Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author
Let's Be Frank (1957)
Context: It was extraordinary to be in two places at once, doing two different things — extraordinary, but not confusing. He merely had two bodies which were as integrated as his two hands had been.
Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770) English poet, forger
William Hazlitt Lectures on the English Poets (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1818) p. 243.
Criticism
“The extraordinary patience of things!”
Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet
"Carmel Point"
Context: The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses —
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 78
Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer
p 50
21 Yaks And A Speedo (2013)
