Quotes About Specialness

I've worked on all sorts of things, like the sci-fi stuff for Vin Diesel, where the script is numbered and is in unphotocopy-able colours and your name is stamped into every page. And it doesn't really help because it creates a false sense of specialness about the thing.

They're all about being the special one, the chosen one. 'Only you can save the world from Evil.' That kind of thing. And never mind that specialness stops meaning anything when every kid is special. I remember watching those movies and thinking about all the unspecial characters in the chorus or whatever. The people just doing the hard work of belonging to society. They're the ones my heart really goes out to. The movie should be about them.

The only thing that is necessary is that we take another look at the less favored child, seek out her specialness, then reflect the wonder of it back to her.

If man is not special, if he's not deeply different from any other thing, then there's no good reason not to treat him just like any other thing when it's convenient for us to do so.

So who are you then, Todd Hewitt?" he says. "What makes you so special?" Now that, I think, is a very good asking.

Why fit in when you were born to stand out?

No one is like me, Sadie agreed. My amazingness is unique.

Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms. The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One's own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one's sphere of control. There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.

Junk the self-esteem emphasis and teach self-control and good behavior. Self-esteem has limited benefit, whereas self-control is linked to success in life. Leave behind the obsession with specialness and uniqueness. Do not automatically side with your child.

I cannot think of a day in my life when the library didn't exert a potent attraction for me, offering a sense of the specialness of each individual's curiosity and his or her quest to satisfy it.

In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope.

Monogamy is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal, for it confirms our specialness. Infidelity says, You're not so special after all. It shatters the grand ambition of love.

All that work and then, finally, something levitates. When the minute stresses of practice fade, the specialness emerges. There is a quotation from On Directing Film by David Mamet that I underlined in 1993 and have never forgotten: Stanislavsky wrote that the difficult will become easy and the easy habitual, so that the habitual may become beautiful.

I think of the limitations that specialness requires: doing a series of very unspecial things, very well, over and over (...) (P223)

I'd been a snowflake. Without my specialness, I melted," she says.

But to be constantly noticed, to achieve specialness, doesn't come cheap. Apart from a few reality TV stars and accidental celebrities, success is brutal work and takes sacrifices.

Not only did he choose divine fulfillment over worldly specialness, he became an expert in this distinction. In his view, people who opt for the worldly path choose "substitutes for God": idols that objectify the idolater and never satisfy the craving for happiness.[5] Even if you are not a religious believer, his list rings true as the idols that attract us.

I was convinced that I would be, that I was already, one in a million.

It may have lost its special-ness forever and the clubs might not being doing well but I think standup is in the best shape it has been in a long time.

But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.

Monogamy, it follows, is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal, for it is the marker of our specialness: I have been chosen and others renounced. When you turn your back on other loves, you confirm my uniqueness; when your hand or mind wanders, my importance is shattered. Conversely, if I no longer feel special, my own hands and mind tingle with curiosity. The disillusioned are prone to roam. Might someone else restore my significance

I'm not sure plays tell people anything. I think plays include an audience in an experience that is happening in that moment, and that's the specialness. What people take away has almost as much to do with what they bring as what we do.

I went to Northwestern because I had gone to a really nontraditional high school. I was like, 'It'd be cool to have a traditional college experience.' Then I was like, 'Oh, but none of these people understand what's cool about me. My specialness is not appreciated in this place.'

There's a lot of cultural pressure around specialness and seeing your family. I feel like everything gets jacked up a little bit because of all of these expectations of love and family bonding.