The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary Quotes

“Life moves fast – evolution is slow,”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

“Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change’.”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

“The treadmill metaphor Adaptation lends itself to a treadmill metaphor, because the quest for satisfaction is a neverending belt. Every buzz tends to wear off, every high swoops back down, every whoop of triumph fades, which means this: we’re never quite sated. Our happiness tends to readjust to baseline, no matter what. No matter how hard you run, you never complete the race. There’s always more belt to pound.”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

“Love is] a verb….It’s an active engagement with all kinds of feelings. Positive ones and primitive ones and loathsome ones. But it’s a very active verb. And it’s often surprising how it can kind of ebb and flow. It’s like the moon. We think it’s disappeared, and suddenly it shows up again. It’s not a permanent state of enthusiasm.”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

“If I just work a bit more, I’ll do better!”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.’ Seneca”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

“If everyone likes you, you’re not doing it right.’ Bette Davis”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

“The more stuff you have, the more you have to lose.”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

“there are starving children in...’ vein. Yes, there are, and we damn straight shouldn’t forget it, and we should stay aware and donate money/help if we can, but that does not mean that people in the first world are disallowed from having negative feelings.”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

“Instead, I struggled to make friends in the mega-tropolis of faceless London, where it’s illegal to look strangers in the eye.”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

“I have my sights set on a constantly shifting target. And who’s moving it? I am. Nobody else but me.”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

“Hedonic adaptation is a wildly interesting quirk that humans possess to adapt to both positive and negative experiences. Victory wears off; agony does too. Euphoria fades; despair too. Love wanes; heartbreak too. And life events that we expect to clinch eternal happiness, or spell cataclysmic lifelong doom, just…don’t.”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

“In Britain, we spend an average of five years of our lives bored.”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

“hedonic adaptation’.”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

“The overwhelming and inevitable life-lean towards the ordinary is why true deep-pile contentment is found when you re-enchant the everyday.”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

“Kindness is free, hate is expensive”
― Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary