A Quote by Susan Orlean

An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain.

Susan Orlean

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Both Closely Complicated Exceptional Exquisite Heroic Itself Life Managing Ordinary Ordinary Life Plain Reveals Somehow

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Susan Orlean
American - Journalist
Born: October 31, 1955

In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one's eyes. It becomes its symbol.

Charles Baudelaire

Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Dramabegins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.

Aldous Huxley

I’m “exceptional”- a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of “gifted” and “deprived” (which used to mean “bright” and “retarded”) and as soon as “exceptional” begins to mean anything to anyone they’ll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression as long as it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. “Exceptional” refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I’ve been exceptional.

Daniel Keyes

Meditation speaks. It speaks in silence. It reveals. It reveals to the aspirant that matter and spirit are one, quantity and quality are one, the immanent and the transcendent are one. It reveals that life can never be the mere existence of seventy or eighty years between birth and death, but is, rather, Eternity itself.

Sri Chinmoy

If we have plain old ordinary fear then we are within reach of a solution. Fear has been with humankind for millennia and we do know what to do about it-pray about it, talk about it, feel the fear, and do it anyway. Artistic fear, on the other hand, sounds somehow nastier and more virulent, like it just might not yield to ordinary solutions-and yet it does, the moment we become humble enough to try ordinary solutions.

Julia Cameron

Managing a country is like managing a company in many ways. It maybe involves more complicated issues, but its the same skills.

Mohamed ElBaradei

Managing a country is like managing a company in many ways. It maybe involves more complicated issues, but it's the same skills.

Mohamed ElBaradei

The test of a man’s religious life and character is not what he does in the exceptional moments of life, but what he does in the ordinary times, when there is nothing tremendous or exciting on. The worth of a man is revealed in his attitude to ordinary things when he is not before the footlights.

Oswald Chambers

He had heard that women often love plain ordinary men, but he did not believe it, because he judged by himself and he could only love beautiful mysterious exceptional women.

Leo Tolstoy

When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all.

Mark Twain

Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos.

Kenneth Tynan

As a person, I'm not that hopeful, but somehow the hopeful part of me reveals itself through my songs.

David Friedman

Many people worry so much about managing their careers, but rarely spend half that much energy managing their LIVES. I want to make my life, not just my job, the best it can be. The rest will work itself out.

Reese Witherspoon

I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.

Dorianne Laux

People presume we've been somehow monitoring the entire sky at all frequencies, all the time, but we haven't yet been able to do any of those things. The fact is, all the SETI efforts to date have only closely examined a couple thousand nearby stars, and we're only just now learning which of those might have promising planets.

Frank Drake

A Quote by Susan Orlean

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