Bryan Magee Quotes

I have an appetite for the normal in my life, as well as the abnormal.

My life is extraordinary because it's so normal, but it's so 'extra' for some reason.

He was a great thundering paradox of a man.

I think the ordinary is a very under-exploited aspect of our lives because it is so familiar.

Here's the deal: the extraordinary becomes ordinary really quickly. One minute, everything is new and amazing, the next it's expected.

Life itself is controversy.

I'm like every waitress in every diner; I'm like every mom driving her kids to school. I'm nothing special at all.

Life is as horrifyingly frightening as it is hilarious.

Everything in life is a double-edged sword.

I want to be Willy Wonka. He has a really fun spirited side but also a dark, justice-giver side.

He needs both patience and speed.

Life forgets me but will not let me forget Holds me down and tells me that I'm free.

This living stuff is a lot. Too much, and not enough. Half empty, and half full.

It was a curious feeling, that something could be so close and so distant at the same time.

It is not that I love contradictions: life is contradictory. Existence itself is possible only through contradictions.

Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria. Wait a minute. "Once upon a time" is how all the best children's stories begin, and "prostitute" is a word for adults. How can I start a book with this apparent contradiction? But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let's keep that beginning.

I want to appear ordinary, but I have it understood that I am not.

I wasn't really quite sure where Heath Ledger came from, and I think that's the feeling most people got when they were around him and why he was so extraordinary.

The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes and stenches.

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both...Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both.

Intelligence is: (a) the most complex phenomenon in the Universe; or (b) a profoundly simple process. The answer, of course, is (c) both of the above. It's another one of those great dualities that make life interesting.

I loved feeling special. I hated feeling special.

[…] but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.

Everything that kills me , makes me feel alive

To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.