The most absurd and reckless aspirations have sometimes led to extraordinary success.
If my father Ninoy Aquino were alive today, he would say that he is not superman or superboy. In effect, heroes are really just ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times and respond properly.
And I think that even today, New York still has more of this unexpected quality around every corner than any place else. It's something quite extraordinary.
I am writing more than I have ever done. My life has come back to me in the most extraordinary way.
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
'Canticum Sacrum' is wonderfully archaic. What Stravinsky does is extraordinary. It takes you on a journey from Gregorian chant right through to the modernism of Webern - and all in 17 minutes.
I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.
The moral effect of the thundering of one's own artillery is most extraordinary, and many of us thought that we had never heard any more welcome sound than the deep roaring and crashing that started in at our rear.
You don't have to be rich and famous. You just have to be an ordinary person, doing extraordinary things. I'd like more people to know that it's there. Women's achievements still aren't recognised enough in many areas.
The ballets you do make you into the final product you are. And I had extraordinary partners.
Whereas painting is a more rarefied art form, with a limited audience, I recognized film as this extraordinary social tool that could reach tremendous numbers of people.
Reality is always extraordinary.
To be old is to be part of a huge and ordinary multitude... the reason why old age was venerated in the past was because it was extraordinary.
You stop planetary exploration, those people who do that extraordinary work are going to have to go do something else.
The Industrial Revolution was another of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization.
It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.
McDonald's has been extraordinary at site selection; it was a pioneer in studying the best places for retail locations. One of the things it did is study very carefully where sprawl was headed.
For the past 25 years as an adoption attorney, I have witnessed the extraordinary courage and compassion of women - from age 14 to 40 - facing unplanned pregnancy. Not once did I believe that the government should interfere with their personal and private decision.
Gena Rowlands is my all-time love. Nicole Kidman, Michelle Pfeiffer. I grew up watching their work; they are extraordinary.
Where the stakes are the highest, in the war on terror, we cannot possibly succeed without extraordinary international cooperation. Effective international police actions require the highest degree of intelligence sharing, planning and collaborative enforcement.
Don't underestimate Laura Antonelli. She's burning to do well. And then she has an extraordinary face, even without make-up. It's not with her that I'd discuss literature. I speak only of the film 'L'Innocente,' and what she does she does well.
I've been wrong so often, I don't find it extraordinary at all.
I am, as I've said, merely competent. But in an age of incompetence, that makes me extraordinary.
I seem to have been everywhere in the last 30 years, maybe not in the epicenter but flying around the periphery of extraordinary events and equally extraordinary people.
The idea is to take the most ordinary things and make them extraordinary, as Gerard Manley Hopkins does in his poems.
One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
Think of energy almost like emotional electricity. It has a powerful way of uniting ordinary people, their connected spirit, to do extraordinary things.
We think machine learning, as it relates to healthcare and life sciences, is extraordinary.
The beauty of 'The Hunger Games' and also 'Game of Thrones,' in fairness, both projects have really complex, three-dimensional, contradictory, strong women... The writing of female characters is extraordinary and equal to the men.
Certainly Nancy Reagan had an extraordinary effect on her husband. I'm truly not sure that, say, Laura Bush had that much effect on the Bush administration. She certainly, you know, seems to be a nice person who I think the public likes. But I can't really put my finger on any huge impact she's had.
If I am to be known for anything, I would like it to be for encouraging Canadians, for knowing a little bit about their daily, extraordinary courage. And for wanting that courage to be recognized.
The genius of the American system is that through freedom we have created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people.
I have a sense of destiny because of my mother, who was an extraordinary person but a terrible candidate for mother. She was like the god Cronus, who gave birth to his children in the morning and then ate them at night.
Many expanded-time schools have generated extraordinary results. In some cases, they have completely closed the achievement gap, all while installing curricula with a richness rivaled only by elite private schools and those in the most upscale suburbs.
The idea of the extraordinary happening in the context of the ordinary is what's fascinating to me.
There is an extraordinary degree of amity among Washington poets. They hang together. You would be hard pressed to find that in Manhattan.
