“It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.”

Variant: Even the most ordinary things can be made extraordinary simply by doing it with the right people.
Source: The Lucky One

Source: Upon the Midnight Clear

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)

My Days Among the Dead Are Past http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1957.html, st. 1 (1818).

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?

Preface of M. Quetelet
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)
Context: Limits... seem to me of two kinds, ordinary or natural, and extraordinary or beyond the natural. The first limits comprise within them the qualities which deviate more or less from the mean, without attracting attention by excess on one side or the other. When the deviations become greater, they constitute the extraordinary class, having itself its limits, on the outer verge of which are things preternatural... We must conceive the same distinctions in the moral world.

Source: Shanghai Girls