Familiarity Quotes

“Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table ....”
― W.H. Auden, Collected Poems

“When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you've worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recogonize so well you could draw it by heart and for this very reason keep it with you on journeys at all times. And yet, when you least expect it, one day you open your eyes and there is an unfamiliar turnoff, a vantage point taht wasn't there before, and you have to stop and wonder if maybe this landmark isn't new at all, but rather something you have missed all along.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

“(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.

How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“His beard was all colors, a grove of trees in autumn, deep brown and fire-orange and wine-red, an untrimmed tangle across the lower half of his face. His cheeks were apple-red. He looked like a friend; like someone you had known all your life.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“The world needs someone they can admire from a distance; from a very far distance.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.”
― Don DeLillo

“There is something particularly fascinating about seeing places you know in a piece of art - be that in a film, or a photograph, or a painting.”
― Sara Sheridan

“When you’re in love with two people, always choose the second. The fact that you are constantly thinking of the second person makes it obvious that the first will never fulfill you, unless the second person did not fulfill you either. At this point, you have to choose the third person because God is getting a little tired of your inattention and indecisiveness, and is planning on sending a fourth person into your life just to slap you around with the bible for not entering the promised land.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“It's weird when you hear teachers call each other by their first names. It's like they're friends or something.”
― Brian Francis

“Even in the familiar there can be surprise and wonder.”
― Tierney Gearon

“One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That's what you wanted to write about, about what you didn't know. So. What mysterious time and place don't we know?"

[Remember This: Write What You Don't Know (New York Times Book Review, December 31, 1989)]”
― Ken Kesey

“The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur. ”
― Julian Barnes

“Inside the person you know, there is a person you do not know.”
― Christy Lefteri, The Beekeeper of Aleppo

“Just because something is familiar, doesn't mean it's safe. And just because something feels safe, doesn't mean it's good for you.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“Doesn't being over-familiar put you at a disadvantage? A more formal way of speaking doesn't just mean you're being polite, it's also a way of protecting yourself.”
― Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years

“किनकिन मलाई आँसु भरिएका ती आँखा एकदमै परिचित झेँ लागे ।”
― Sanu Sharma, एकादेशमा [Ekadeshma]

“What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to 'Know' - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as 'outside us'.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“Anne’s is a world very like this one, and you can move about in it with familiarity - but not freedom: it is a place of rigorous consequence, where the weak have to give way to the strong, where her governess heroine Agnes must walk as best she can in the cold shade of money and masculinity.”
― Jude Morgan, The Taste of Sorrow

“Try not to drive yourself crazy attempting to be completely original. People need at least a portion of familiarity in order to relate.”
― Aegelis, Specks of Shadows, Flecks of Light

“Il n'y a que le timbre des voix familières, les visages amis que ma mémoire recompose pour préserver une continuité à ma longue vie.”
― Marceline Loridan-Ivens, L'Amour après

“It suddenly hits me that I'm allowing my life to fall back into exactly the same shape it was the first time round: gravitating toward familiarity and repetition, the way I always do. Encouraging the sameness, because even when it's awful, I still like it more than change. Slipping back into time as if it's an old pair of comfy slippers I refuse to throw away, even though they're not even that comfortable anymore and my toes are sticking out and getting cold.

And this wasn't the point of what it is I'm trying to do.

I'm supposed to be taking risks, making changes, and if I don't--if I simply wrap myself in the comfort of a timeline I already know--I'll just end up where I was at the beginning, and I'll have wasted my time.

Worse: I'll have wasted all of them.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“No real dream is safe.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“You can see so much of the world through others' memories, places you've never been, faces you've never seen and never will, weather you've never felt and food you've never tasted, that sometimes it's hard not to want to just feel, taste, see those familiar things over and over. Truly new things become alien, other, not to be trusted. There are those who know their village so well, through the eyes and hearts of so many before them, that they can't leave it to go somewhere else, they can't bear to place their feet on a path that they have never trodden, on soil they have never planted with a thousand seeds in some past life as lover or child. Some become unable to leave their lodge or tent, or can't sail past the sight of familiar cliffs.”
― Nicola Griffith, Ammonite

“People fall in love because they don't know each other yet.”
― Fran Lebowitz

“Every bookstore, everywhere, smelled the same.
It smelled like home.”
― Jennifer Hillier, Things We Do in the Dark

“شاید ہم لوگوں سے کہیں زیادہ ان کے معمولات سے مانوس اور آشنا ہو جاتے ہیں۔ ہماری ذاتی اشیاء، اوقات کار اور ع��دات ہماری پہچان بن جاتے ہیں اور خود ہم اس پہچان میں کہیں کھو سے جاتے ہیں۔”
― Hashim Nadeem, Parizaad / پری زاد