Familiar Things Quotes

We have to give up so many things when the people we love die. So we hang on to other familiar things. ~ Corey Ann Haydu

New things are easier to do than old familiar things when there's going to be a change, Betsy decided profoundly. ~ Maud Hart Lovelace

Initially children use just a few names, mostly for familiar things and people. But when they are still just beginning to talk, many babies will suddenly start naming everything and asking for the names of everything they see. In fact, what'sat? is itself often one of the earliest words. An eighteen-month-old baby will go into a triumphant frenzy of pointing and naming: "What'sat! Dog! What'sat! Clock! What'sat juice, spoon, orange, high chair, clock! Clock! Clock!" Often this is the point at which even fondly attentive parents lose track of how many new words the baby has learned. It's as if the baby discovers that everything has a name, and this discovery triggers a kind of naming explosion. ~ Alison Gopnik

unfamiliar things least produces familiarity. Familiarity only gets closer to you when you open your doors to familiar things ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Living as she did in a state of perpetual nervous exhaustion, always driving herself beyond her strength lest the tasks of home and parish accumulate beyond her ability to cope with with them, afraid to relax lest she collapse altogether, she had largely lost the power of wonder, and with it the power of looking at familiar things with fresh appreciation. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

In a world of change and decay not even the man of faith can be completely happy. Instinctively he seeks the unchanging and is bereaved at the passing of dear familiar things. Yet much as we may deplore the lack of stability in all earthly things, in a fallen world such as this the very ability to change is a golden treasure, a gift from God of such fabulous worth as to call for constant thanksgiving. For human beings the whole possibility of redemption lies in their ability to change. To move across from one sort of person to another is the essence of repentance; the liar becomes truthful, the thief honest, the lewd pure, the proud humble. The whole moral texture of the life is altered. The thoughts, the desires, the affections are transformed, and the man is no longer what he had been before. ~ A.W. Tozer

While it may not heighten our sympathy, wit widens our horizons by its flashes, revealing remote hidden affiliations and drawing laughter from far afield; humor, in contrast, strikes up fellow feeling, and though it does not leap so much across time and space, enriches our insight into the universal in familiar things, lending it a local habitation and a name. ~ Marie Taylor Collins Swabey

Caring for the soul requires that we be fully present in situations we cannot control and patient as a genuine meaning and a direction unfold. It means seeing familiar things in new ways, listening rather than speaking, learning from patients rather than teaching them, and cultivating the capacity to be amazed. It means recognizing the power of our own humanity to make a difference in the lives of others and valuing it as highly as our expertise. Finally, it means discovering that health care is a front-row seat on mystery and sitting in that seat with open eyes. ~ Christina M. Puchalski

DURING THAT YEAR, and especially in the winter months, he found himself returning more and more frequently to such a state of unreality; at will, he seemed able to remove his consciousness from the body that contained it, and he observed himself as if he were an oddly familiar stranger doing the oddly familiar things that he had to do. It was a dissociation that he had never felt before; he knew that he ought to be troubled by it, but he was numb, and he could not convince himself that it mattered. ~ John Edward Williams

New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new. ~ Samuel Johnson

I was feeling everything much too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools. I sat on terraces and stared for afternoons at mediocre views. I was feeling overjoyed for happy couples. I would see or hear about people, usually people I hardly knew or didn't even like, getting together, finding each other after so much groping, and I would feel bliss. I was blindsided by familiar things. ~ Dave Eggers

In our everyday lives, if we intentionally set out to learn new things or do familiar things in new ways (such as commuting to work via a new route or taking the bus instead of a car), we effectively rewire our brains and improve them. A physical workout builds muscle; a mental workout creates new synapses to strengthen the neural network. ~ Deepak Chopra

None of us, she thought, wants the world we know to come to an end; we do not want familiar things to be taken from us. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

I believe in a set of values I cannot live by. I set high goals for myself, I seek perfection, dream of exotic faraway places. But ultimately, what I long for isn't far away at all. It's in my own backyard. Imperfection charms me, familiar things move me ... a celebration of what we have, instead of what we long for. That for me, is glamor. ~ Isabella Rossellini

Relax and give the play a chance to strut its stuff - relax, stop wondering what it's all 'about' - like many strange and familiar things, Life included, this Play isn't 'about,' it simply is. Don't try to enjoy it, let it try to enjoy you. Don't try to understand it, let it try to understand you. ~ E. E. Cummings

There's a great body of people who flower at night, who feel night is their time. Night is the time people truly become individuals, because all the familiar things are dark and done, all the restrictions on freedom are removed. Many artists work at night - it is particularly conducive to creative work. Many of us attuned to night are not artists but are embattled against the official, organized, righteous day people who are completely bound by their switchboards and their red tape. ~ John Crosby

I'd always worried about being practically empty, about having no serious reason for living. And now, confronted with the facts, I was sure of my individual nullity. In that environment, too different from the one where my petty habits were at home, I seem to have disintegrated, I felt very close to nonexistence. I discovered that with no one to speak to me of familiar things, there was nothing to stop me from sinking into irresistible boredom, a terrifying, sickly sweet torpor. Nauseating. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

I have had playmates, I have had companions; In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days - All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. ~ Charles Lamb

All the familiar things were getting different meanings. ~ Jeanette Winterson

It often happens that when you look at familiar things through someone else's eyes you see them as you have never seen them before. ~ John Mole

And that was is. Life sometimes flips on you like that. One minute you're looking at your reflection in the water, not entirely sure you like what you see, and the next minute you are upside down, submerged in a world where even familiar things look new. ~ Vicki Pettersson

It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young; afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive. (Mr. Bell) ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

There are good books, indifferent books, and bad books. Amongst the good books some are honest, inspiring, moving, prophetic and improving. But in my language there is another category: there are Ah! Books. This is one of them. Ah! Books are those which induce a fundamental change in the reader's consciousness. They widen his sensibility in such a way that he is able to look upon familiar things as though he is seeing and understanding them for the first time. Ah! Books are galvanic. They touch the nerve centre of the whole being so that the reader receives an almost palpable physical shock. A tremor of excited perception ripples through the person. ~ Vernon Sproxton

There's beauty all around our paths,
If but our watchful eyes
Can trace it 'midst familiar things,
And through their lowly guise. ~ Felicia Hemans

Zajonc was able to make people like any word or image more just by showing it to them several times.9 The brain tags familiar things as good things. Zajonc called this the "mere exposure effect," and it is a basic principle of advertising. ~ Jonathan Haidt

The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination. p. 919 ~ Wallace Stevens

But whatever he spoke he knew would be but another name for the wildness that he sought. It was a freedom and a goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous. What he sought was the source and preserver of his world, a world which seemed to turn ever in fear away from its source, rather than search it out, as the prairie grass around him sent down its fibered roots into the rich dark dampness, the Wildness, and thereby renewed itself, year after year. ~ John Edward Williams

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

I turn away reluctant from your light,
And stand irresolute, a mind undone,
A silly, dazzled thing deprived of sight
From having looked too long upon the sun.
Then is my daily life a narrow room
In which a little while, uncertainly,
Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,
Among familiar things grown strange to me
Making my way, I pause, and feel, and hark,
Till I become accustomed to the dark. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Rest you here, enchanter, while the light fades,
Vision narrows, and the far
Sky-edge is gone with the sun.
Be content with the small spark
Of the coal, the smell
Of food, and the breath
Of frost beyond the shut door.
Home is here, and familiar things;
A cup, a wooden bowl, a blanket,
Prayer, a gift for the god, and sleep.
(And music, says the harp, And music.)
Rest here, enchanter, while the fire dies.
In a breath, in an eyelid's fall,
You will see them, the dreams;
The sword and the young king,
The white horse and the running water,
The lit lamp and the boy smiling.
Dreams, dreams, enchanter! Gone with the harp's echo
when the strings
Fall mute; with the flame's shadow when the fire
Dies.
Be still, and listen.
Far on the black air Blows the great wind, rises
The running tide, flows the clear river.
Listen, enchanter, hear
Through the black air and the singing air
The music…. ~ Mary Stewart

Simon had perfected the art of seeing what he wanted to see, because it's easier to go through life like that, to see the world as a series of familiar things, a place where everyone feels how you feel and sees what you see. ~ Catherine Lacey

The idea that at each successive moment he was deeper into the Sahara than he had been the moment before, that he was leaving behind all familiar things, this constant consideration kept him in a state of pleasurable agitation. ~ Paul Bowles

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

Many of us find comfort and interest in old, familiar things, while others seek inspiration or stimulation in the blatantly new or unconventional." Charity Davis-Woodard ~ Kevin A. Hluch

Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can. ~ Charles Handy

You cannot step twice into the same river, said Herakleitos. People in the past were not just like us; to pretend so is an evasion and a betrayal, turning our back on them so as to be easy among familiar things. ~ Mary Renault

Usually when someone says a thing is too simple, they're saying that certain familiar things aren't there, and they're seeing a couple maybe that are left, which they count as a couple, that's all. ~ Donald Judd

My Childhood Home I See Again
by Abraham Lincoln


My childhood home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There's pleasure in it too.

O Memory! thou midway world
'Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise,

And, freed from all that's earthly vile,
Seem hallowed, pure, and bright,
Like scenes in some enchanted isle
All bathed in liquid light.

As dusky mountains please the eye
When twilight chases day;
As bugle-notes that, passing by,
In distance die away;

As leaving some grand waterfall,
We, lingering, list its roar--
So memory will hallow all
We've known, but know no more.

Near twenty years have passed away
Since here I bid farewell
To woods and fields, and scenes of play,
And playmates loved so well.

Where many were, but few remain
Of old familiar things;
But seeing them, to mind again
The lost and absent brings.

The friends I left that parting day,
How changed, as time has sped!
Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray,
And half of all are dead.

I hear the loved survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.

I range the fields with ~ Abraham Lincoln

I did not think I had been so old,' said Margaret after a pause of silence; and she turned away sighing. 'Yes!' said Mr. Bell. 'It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young, afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

A fine artist is one who makes familiar things new and new things familiar. ~ Louis Nizer

The extent to which perception and, consequently, vision are dependent upon memory and imagination is a matter of every day experience. We see familiar things more clearly then when we see objects about which we have no stock of memories. The old seamstress, who cannot read without glasses, can see to thread needle with the naked eye. Why? Because she is more familiar with needles then with print. In man who can work all day at the office without undue fatigue of the eyes is worn out by an hour at the museum and comes home with a splitting headache. Why? Because in the office he is following a regular routine and looking at words and figures, the bike of which he looks at every day; whereas in the museum everything is strange novel, and outlandish. ~ Aldous Huxley

People prefer remembering to imagining. Memory deals with familiar things; imagination deals with the unknown. Imagination can be frightening - it requires risking a departure from the familiar. ~ Shimon Peres

I never really noticed it any more, in the way that one often ignores familiar things, like seat cushions or loved ones. ~ John Boyne

I don't just want to sing about simplistic things all the time. It's good to have a mix of songs that have a real depth, and that provoke and challenge people, and then songs that are fun and people can enjoy. ~ Marina And The Diamonds

And like any group thrown together in a strange situation, we developed the sort of we're-in-this-together, for-better-or-for-worse camaraderie that I found appealingly familiar. It was something I missed, the sense of sharing those small, daily experiences that, as far as I can tell, are really what life boils down to. ~ Alice Steinbach

Some things just feel so intense. I'm not
over reacting. My sensory processing
is unique to me. ~ Tina J. Richardson

I always see people tweeting about these crazy amazing things their boyfriend or girlfriend did for them. You shouldn't have to constantly be trying to prove your love when you're in a relationship. ~ Matt Prokop

I haven't done any genealogical exploring myself, though members of my family and also of my husband's family have traced things back. I have a great grandfather on my mother's side who was a musician, and I'd like to know more about his life. ~ Kim Edwards

I guess good things come to those who wait. ~ Kurt Busch

Now it is evident from the covenant of grace, that the smoking flax cannot be quenched. "The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but the covenant of my peace shall not be removed, says the Lord" (Isaiah 54:10). If there is falling from grace, how is it an immovable covenant? If grace dies and the smoking flax is quenched, how is our state in Christ, better than it was in Adam? The covenant of grace is called "a better covenant" (Heb. 7:22). How is it a better covenant than that which was made with Adam? Not only because it has a better Surety and contains better privileges - but because it has better conditions annexed to it: "It is ordered in all things, and sure" (2 Sam. 23:5). Those who are taken into the covenant shall be like stars fixed in their orbit and shall never fall away. If grace might die and be quenched, then it would not be a better covenant. ~ Thomas Watson

I am aware it's easy and may be fashionable to pose with a slum child, and the irony of getting the media along means that it can come across as disingenuous. But you take these things on board, and you hope you mean it whenever you get stuck into something. ~ Erin O'Connor

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honored poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

The masses are only to be regarded as one of three things: either as copies of great personalities, bad copies, clumsily produced in a poor material, or as foils to the great, or finally as their tools ~ Georg Brandes

Everything in the world starts small and then becomes bigger - except bad things. They start big, and then get smaller. ~ Warren St. John

These I have loved:
Pork with apple sauce; tea in a heavy mug;
The smell of new books, and musty ones;
A girl with red coils for curls
--Her scream--Her smile;
The slap of a blonde dog's tongue
Against my face; and an old face--Nana's;
A broken fence--a secret pathway between two houses;
The sinking into a familiar bed;
Sheets white and crispy clean;
The return of a woman in a green coat--
Imperfect and human; The sound of poetry;
And of pencil lead scuffing the page as I write;
Made-up stores; and Truth.
These I have loved. ~ Sarah Crossan

If you're trying to figure out why something's not working," Old Lou had explained, "just focus on the things that do work. Move through those things first and eventually you'll find the one part that's stuck. ~ Danika Stone

There are things that can harm a lot more than physically. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

In Turkey, you're not allowed to be left alone in the hospital. The nurse teaches the family how to do things, and somebody is always there with the patient. ~ Mehmet Oz

Good grief," Alec muttered.
"Be afraid," Katie quoted. "Be very afraid."
Alec squinted at her. "That sounds familiar. Revelations?"
"David Cronenberg. It's a long, scary story."
"I like scary stories. ~ Cecily White

Few things are more bitter than to feel bitter. ~ Charles Buxton

We are never really in control. We just think we are when things happen to be going our way. ~ Byron Katie

The difference between you, if you consider yourself not enlightened, and an enlightened master is not that the enlightened master has more knowledge. University professors have knowledge, and many enlightened masters have very little knowledge. Jesus probably had less knowledge than any university professor alive today in terms of raw information. Even a relatively uneducated person has more information than Jesus or Buddha ever had about things, such as political things and so on. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Why science? Many people, with the best intentions, like to give parents advice about raising a child, including parents, non-parents, health visitors, friends, celebrities, bloggers and next-door neighbours. Unfortunately, much of this advice can be completely wrong or based on archaic ideas and practices that have since been disproved or debunked. Some of this advice can even be damaging. In addition, some parents say that they advocate using 'common sense' or 'intuition' in raising their children, but what do those things mean? How is intuition classified, when it differs so greatly from one person to another? Some people do the 'common sense' thing only to find out it was wrong later in life, which is why it is altogether better to be guided by the latest scientific research. In order to learn how to filter the good advice from the bad, I believe that new parents need science-based evidence in their corner. You'll find it in this book. ~ Zion Lights

I'd like to thank Sony for their gracious hospitality, and for not repeatedly punching me in the face. If I seem a little nervous, it's because Kevin Butler was introduced to me backstage as the VP of sharpening things. ~ Gabe Newell

The perfect life, the perfect lie … is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances. It is a very elaborate, extremely simple procedure, arranging this web of self-deceit: contriving to convince yourself that you were prevented from doing what you wanted. Most people don't want what they want: people want to be prevented, restricted. The hamster not only loves his cage, he'd be lost without it. That's why children are so convenient: you have children because you're struggling to get by as an artist - which is actually what being an artist means - or failing to get on with your career. Then you can persuade yourself that your children prevented you from having this career that had never looked like working out. So it goes on: things are always forsaken in the name of an obligation to someone else, never as a failing, a falling short of yourself. ~ Geoff Dyer

There's a lot of other artists doing things outside of that depth that I enjoy - that music that I can actually have fun to, and not be in depth and think about, then I appreciate that. ~ Kendrick Lamar

Few things are as bad as a guilty conscience. ~ Buchi Emecheta

Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. ~ Alan Turing

We need to steer clear of this poverty of ambition, where people want to drive fancy cars and wear nice clothes and live in nice apartments but don't want to work hard to accomplish these things. Everyone should try to realize their full potential. ~ Barack Obama

Her depressive tendency, the flip side of her manic streak, was stirring. Why were they even doing this? it wanted to know. What a waste of time, of effort. Of pencils. Plum needed to get moving, but she was having trouble attaching meanings to things; the meanings kept peeling off like old stickers. ~ Lev Grossman

We did not, of course, speak Mandarin, but the question "What the hell do you think you're doing?" has a familiar ring in any language. The mere idea of even attempting to account for ourselves defeated us. We settled instead for explaining, by means of elaborate mime and sign language, that we were barking mad. This worked. He accepted it, but then hung around in the background to watch us anyway. ~ Douglas Adams

The most rewarding things you do in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done. ~ Arnold Palmer

I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian. ~ William Safire

Let your mind wander in the pure and simple. Be one with the infinite. Let all things take their course. ~ Zhuangzi

When we consider the being and substance of that universe in which we are immutably set, we shall discover that neither we ourselves nor any substance doth suffer death. For nothing is in fact diminished in its substance, but all things, wandering through infinite space, undergo change of aspect. ~ Giordano Bruno

As you become known, the demands on you are such that you get less and less time to do the things you want to do. But if there are no demands, then that means nobody wants to read what you're doing anyway, so you're stuck. ~ Iain Sinclair

I still do one song by myself onstage. it gives people the extremely personal thing where it's just me on guitar. But, I think the songs are better as a band. I think with all of the extra little hooks and backing vocals, it just adds to what my initial idea was. ~ Butterfly Boucher

Sometimes my mother did practice but one thing led to another and sometimes she did not. The advice of the homely man was something of a curse. She would not practice at all if she could not practice right so that gradually she played less and less and sometimes not at all.
I used to think that things might have been different. Gieseking never played a scale and Glenn Gould hardly practiced at all, they would just look at the score and think and think and think. If the homely man had said to go away and think this would have been every bit as revolutionary a concept for a Konigsberg. Perhaps he even thought that you had to think. But you can't show someone how to think in an hour; you can give someone an exercise to take away. ~ Helen DeWitt

Anywhere there is life, there are eyes. And things, too, speak to those who have ears to hear. ~ Eiji Yoshikawa

You never know how long you have-there might not BE a later-so don't let things go unsaid or unforgiven. ~ Dawn Metcalf

I'm partly somebody else trying to fit in and say the right things and do the right thing and be in the right place and wear what everybody else is wearing. Sometimes I think we're all trying to be shadows of each other, trying to buy the same records and everything even if we don't like them. Kids are like robots, off an assembly line, and I don't want to be a robot! ~ Beatrice Sparks

In normal life people say, 'You're so different than on stage!' Offstage I'm down to earth, simple and a very goofy girl ... I like to make goofy faces, be dorky and not take things too seriously. I just love to laugh. ~ Nicole Scherzinger