"The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things."
— Hans Christian Andersen
The Whole World Is A Series
The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things.
About this quote
Associated with Andersen's autobiography The Fairy Tale of My Life (1855), this reflects a theme central to his worldview: that habit and familiarity blind people to the strangeness of existence. Andersen's fairy tales consistently worked by defamiliarizing the commonplace — animating toys, shadow selves, darning needles — and this sentence articulates the perceptual principle behind that technique.
Source
The Fairy Tale of My Life, 1855
