The Familiar Quotes

#1. Sometimes, Harold, the way forward takes you by surprise. You try to force something in the familiar direction and discover that what it needs is to move in a different dimension. The way forward is not forward, but off to one side, in a place you have not noticed before.

Rachel Joyce

#2. The road to wisdom is paved with excess.
The mark of a true writer is their ability to mystify the familiar and familiarize the strange.

Walt Whitman

#3. I will not be afraid, she vowed, wrapping the familiar words around her heart.

Sarah J. Maas

#4. Silas straightened in his seat, clearly uneasy. "This is so bad for my asthma," he said, the familiar phrase coming from him startling her.

Kim Harrison

#5. But in marketing, the familiar is everything, and that is controlled by the studio. That is reaching its apogee now.

Nicolas Roeg

#6. I am never so calm as after I have written. And the next morning I will feel the familiar anxiety and I will have to begin the process all over again.

Erica Jong

#7. For we form so extravagant an idea of certain characters that we would be incapable of identifying one of them with the familiar features of a person of our acquaintance.

Marcel Proust

#8. Women survive their men. Men
men like him
don't live long when their women are gone. You'll see
he'll just start wandering, all the familiar things are going to be gone with her. He gets tired and he fades and then he gives up and then he's gone.

Neil Gaiman

#9. She put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it, tasting the familiar taste of nicotine, smoke, and impending lung cancer. It felt good. She

Mike Omer

#10. The familiar is by far the most beautiful.

Marty Rubin

#11. The familiar writer is apt to be his own satirist. Out of his own mouth is he judged.

Edwin Percy Whipple

#12. A trite word is an overused word which has lost its identity like an old coat in a second-hand shop. The familiar grows dull and we no longer see, hear, or taste it.

Anais Nin

#13. Every great artist gives birth to a new universe, in which the familiar things look the way they have never before looked to anyone.

Rudolf Arnheim

#14. How wrong we are to ignore our hearts to follow the familiar path.

Nikki Rowe

#15. The familiar photographs that many people carry with them always obviously belong to the order of fetishes in the ordinary sense of the word.

Christian Metz

#16. So we were back in the Children's Pavilion, and there was again the familiar scene: the mothers with their nearly dead, the false face of mercy, the Slaughter of the Innocents.

Peter De Vries

#17. There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.

Cynthia Ozick

#18. Victoria closes her eyes, breathing in the familiar scent, and for a moment it's as if they've never been apart. They're still Vixen and Cassandra, summer sisters forever. The rest is a mistake, a crazy joke.

Judy Blume

#19. The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music ... The trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words.

Rabindranath Tagore

#20. We will have to take risks, to chance failure, to be willing to walk away from the familiar paths that have brought us to this point.

Alan Hirsch

#21. But as much as we like the familiar, as leaders we must be willing to learn, and learning many times requires stretching, growing, and becoming a bit uncomfortable in the process.

Teresa Hampton

#22. 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.

Novalis

#23. The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.

Joseph Campbell

#24. I lost something recently," he tells me.
My heart swells at the familiar voice, and I spin around to drop-dead-gorgeous cheekbones, a ruby-red visor, and lips that pull into a breathtaking smile.
"Found her," he says.

Krista Ritchie

#25. they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes.

C.S. Lewis

#26. Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.

Eric Hoffer

#27. In the pseudoiterative, one performs the ritual of the day attentive to both the joy of the familiar and the shiver of the accidental.

Kim Stanley Robinson

#28. The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?

Stewart O'Nan

#29. He could taste the familiar tang of museum air - an arid, deionized essence that carried a faint hint of carbon - the product of industrial, coal-filter dehumidifiers that ran around the clock to counteract the corrosive carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors.

Dan Brown

#30. Having a cellmate might be okay. Talking to a real human being might make things easier. I practice using my voice, shaping my lips around the familiar words unfamiliar to my mouth. I practice all day. I'm surprised I remember how to speak.

Tahereh Mafi

#31. Death looked up angirly, and found himself staring into eyes that were black as the inside of a cat and full of distant stars that had no counterpart among the familiar constellations of the realtime universe.

Terry Pratchett

#32. Before familiarity can turn into awareness the familiar must be stripped of its inconspicuousness; we must give up assuming that the object in question needs no explanation. However frequently recurrent, modest, vulgar it may be it will now be be labeled as something unusual.

Bertolt Brecht

#33. You'll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar.

Ed Catmull

#34. Children Katy's age had no problem with monotony. In fact they embraced it, diving into it and wrapping the familiar words round their tongues as if they were a candy that could last forever.

Alice Munro

#35. I was always interested in finding ways of meeting the familiar very differently, specifically the feminine familiar.

Francesca DiMattio

#36. What do we do after things fall apart? Do we run to the familiar once again? Do we attempt to numb the pain with distractions? What do we do after things fall apart?

Benyf

#37. To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.

Hal Borland

#38. When I've tried to reinvent the wheel, I get bashed for not doing the familiar things.

Billy Corgan

#39. It's impossible to feel homesick with the familiar weight of the book in my hands.

Paige McKenzie

#40. Many of the familiar little things that we use every day have typically evolved over a period of time to a state of familiarity. They balance form and function, elegance and economy, success and failure in ways that are not only acceptable, but also admirable.

Henry Petroski

#41. What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#42. There is something nice about a library, isn't there?" Mr. Curtis said. He nodded and took in the familiar scenery. "The scent of ink and worn, dusty pages.

Ilana Waters

#43. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience
buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello
become new all over again.

Anthony Doerr

#44. Don't hold together what must fall apart. The familiar life crumbles so the new life can begin.

Bryant H. McGill

#45. There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.

George Santayana

#46. We stay in the same old situations because we're comforted by the familiar, even if the familiar is terrible.

Nancy Levin

#47. Is not our chief neurosis - by which I mean our estrangement from nature - our desire to hold fast to what is forever transforming, to freeze the familiar, to submit motion to stasis, to solicit immortality through rigidity.

James Hollis

#48. Though the familiar use of things about us take off our wonder, yet it cures not our ignorance.

John Locke

#49. It must happen to us all ... We pack up what we've learned so far and leave the familiar behind. No fun, that shearing separation, but somewhere within, we must dimly know that saying goodbye to safety brings the only security we'll ever know.

Richard Bach

#50. That is something we shouldn't forget: we have an eye for that which is foreign to us, but are blind to the familiar.

Pablo De Santis

#51. I was certain t find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea.

Monique Truong

#52. Through the window of my mask I see a wall of coral, its surface a living kaleidoscope of lilac flecks, splashes of gold, reddish streaks and yellows, all tinged by the familiar transparent blue of the sea.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau

#53. The familiar smells of a busy tavern at an hour closer to dawn than dinner. Sweat, scalded meat, puke, blood, smoke, and a dozen kinds of bad ale and wine: the bouquet of the civilized nightlife.

Scott Lynch

#54. In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.

George Santayana

#55. I must absorb everything while I'm still singing and step onto the stages of my many homes, and look out at the familiar surroundings, at the people who have come to hear me, to hear music.

Marilyn Horne

#56. Our most serious obstacle is the uncontrollable urge to convert everything to the familiar, to reduce it all to the level of the primate brain; to reject the living, breathing reality of the totality of all possible attention.

E. J. Gold

#57. Insight is 'mental vision,' one of the ways in which the mind escapes the limits of the obvious or the familiar.

Jennifer James

#58. Let us say that science fiction is a kind of conceptual disorientation of the familiar.

Adam Roberts

#59. He shrugged, facing the fire. But we are all creatures of habit. It is far too easy to stay in the familiar ruts we dig for ourselves.

Patrick Rothfuss

#60. She was so tired of the old way of telling stories, all those too-worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, something sharper, something like a bomb going off.

Lauren Groff

#61. Photography today appears to be in a state of flight ... The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.

Dorothea Lange

#62. What a dynamic, handsome object is a path! How precise the familiar hill paths remain for our muscular consciousness! Oh, my roads and their cadence.

Gaston Bachelard

#63. Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

Virginia Woolf

#64. If they could swing it, most parents visited during meals to try to make their child's hospital room into a piece of the familiar by eating with them, and the kids - without exception - were too kind to tell them it only made home look that much farther away.

Kim Harrison

#65. After much diligent research, aided by other women, I gradually came to understand that beneath the familiar Goddesses of the patriarchy, there is a much more ancient Goddess.

Carol P. Christ

#66. A world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there's nothing to learn,

Yanko Tsvetkov

#67. Although we love the idea of choice - our culture almost worships it - we seek refuge in the familiar and the comfortable.

Hugh Mackay

#68. Slowly, though, my fingers savoring the familiar soft skin. And then I let her go. I let her go all the way then, because she's my best friend. And because I care way too much to hurt her any more than I already have by keeping her close.

Lauren Layne

#69. But basically courage is risking the known for the unknown, the familiar for the unfamiliar, the comfortable for the uncomfortable, arduous pilgrimage to some unknown destination. One never knows whether one will be able to make it or not. It is gambling, but only the gamblers know what life is. THE

Osho

#70. Too many films today feel formulaic and familiar. I prefer it when the familiar is made to feel strange.

Nicolas Roeg

#71. Faced with parts of ourselves that we do not recognize, would like perhaps not to recognize, we deny the kinship, and often lean away from the new and into the old, accentuating the familiar qualities that complement the strange new ones.

Thomas Van Nortwick

#72. I think I hear someone on the stairs. The old wooden boards creak like crazy, and I hear the tell-tale sound of someone walking up the stairs. My heart is practically in my throat now. Then I hear the familiar sound of my old mahogany bedroom door swinging slowly open on squeaky hinges.

April Wilson

#73. For that is the power of the camera: seize the familiar and give it new meanings, a special significance by the mark of a personality.

Alfred Stieglitz

#74. The Social Security Act offers to all our citizens a workable and working method of meeting urgent present needs and of forestalling future need. It utilizes the familiar machinery of our Federal-State government to promote the common welfare and the economic stability of the Nation.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#75. Adam Nevill a spine-chiller in the classic tradition, a writer who draws you in from the world of the familiar, eases you into the world of terror, and then locks the door behind you. The House of Small Shadows grows darker and takes on more menacing life with each step forward.

Michael Koryta

#76. Leaving the familiar for unknown terrain is like a death - and feeling this level of finality should snap one back to life for life has greater meaning in the face of death.

Donna Lynn Hope

#77. The little princess, like an old war horse that hears the trumpet, unconsciously and quite forgetting her condition, prepared for the familiar gallop of coquetry, without any ulterior motive or any struggle, but with naive and lighthearted gaiety.

Leo Tolstoy

#78. What I'd had with most of my school friends hadn't been friendship at all. That had been the habit of the familiar, the reassurance of the unchanged.

Rebecca Starford

#79. It is the mystery of the unknown
That fascinates us; we are children still
Wayward and wistful; with one hand we cling
To the familiar things we call our own,
And with the other, resolute of will,
Grope in the dark for what the day will bring

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#80. Now and again we would happen to step out of the familiar universe into a sudden sharp shock of sweetly scented air, sudden as spilled perfume, piercing as crystal, dark and sweet as the sound of oboes.

Steven Millhauser

#81. Quite possibly, this depressive illness was the familiar sort that grew from perfectionist expectations.

Paul C. Nagel

#82. To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to provoke thoughts about one's own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory. The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.

Barry Lopez

#83. I flip off Pigpen. He suggests something anatomically impossible, and as the familiar ribbing begins[--}

Katie McGarry

#84. I suppose a body gets used to laying under a sheet at night and when it doesn't feel the familiar weight of fabric pressing down over it, it can suddenly feel exceedingly unnatural.

Jason McIntyre

#85. To grasp the essence of chirality, it is instructive to withdraw for a moment from the familiar three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional one, into a plane, and enquire what chirality means there.

Vladimir Prelog

#86. The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

Toni Morrison

#87. Adam felt the familiar pang. Not jealousy, just wanting. One day, he'd have enough money to have a place like this. A place that looked on the outside like Adam looked on the inside.

Maggie Stiefvater

#88. We take our reflections for granted all our lives, until the hour comes when our eyes search for the familiar features and find instead the image of a stranger.

George R R Martin

#89. It's about finding meaning through light. I'm always interested in tensions. A primary one is the collision between the familiar and the strange.

Gregory Crewdson

#90. She'll be willing to meet someone who can hold her interest for more than a few months, and that guy will teach her about domestic deepenings, the modest reliable thrill of the familiar, which as almost everyone but Liz knows has been the way of human happiness since humanity was born.

Michael Cunningham

#91. It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful.

Alan Cohen

#92. A reader can only embrace the open-armed Dear Everybody ... In Benders unsent letters of apology or thanks, Michael Kimball transforms the familiar into the strange again and the simplest confessions are made moments of sublime wonder. Hold on to this book.

Christine Schutt

#93. We must pose the familiar question about how far our civil liberties have been eroded by the national security state ... Somehow it is always a choice between habeas corpus and hundreds of corpses.

Niall Ferguson

#94. We can't solve modern problems by going back in time. Retreating to the safety of the familiar is an understandable response, but God has called us to a life of faith. And faith requires us to face the unknown while trusting Him completely.

Charles R. Swindoll

#95. Since the familiar particles and the objects they compose - stars, planets, people, etc. - amount to less than 5 percent of the mass of the universe, such a disruption would not affect the vast majority of the universe, at least as measured by mass.

Brian Greene

#96. The house was cozy, with a fire burning in every fireplace. The familiar scents of tea brewing in the samovar and Maman's warmed cherry brandy smelled like love to me.

Robin Bridges

#97. The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

H.L. Mencken

#98. Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large; the mundane world of the familiar.

Richard Dawkins

#99. We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#100. Definition, like poetry, is the project of revivifying the familiar. Making things we think we know seem newly strange. To estrange, according to Hegel, is requisite to practicing consciousness.

Alena Graedon