Quotes & Sayings About Familiar Things

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

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

Peace, a commodity purchased with friendship and safety and anything comfortable and all things familiar; peace that was a pleasant melody playing through the moments of their day; a chord striking only the notes of security and agreement and understanding and order. — Dan Groat

Ah walk doon Hammersmith Broadway, London seeming strange and alien, after only a three-month absence, as familiar places do when you've been away. It's as if everything is a copy of what you knew before, similar, yet somehow lacking in its usual qualities, a bit like the wey things are in a dream. They say you have to live in a place to know it, but you have to come fresh tae really see it. — Irvine Welsh

I grew up on movie sets, so it was something I just found familiar. When I was growing up also, in high school, I would audition for things and my parents let me audition for things - with the thought that I wouldn't get them. And then I would get them ... sometimes, and it would surprise them. — Jake Gyllenhaal

The passion for naming things is an odd human trait. It is strange that men always feel so much more at ease when they have put appellations on the things around them and that a wild, new region almost seems familiar and subdued once enough names have been used on it, even though in fact it is not changed in the slightest. Or, on second thought, it is perhaps not really strange. The urge to name must be as old as the human race, as old as speech which is one of the really fundamental characteristics by which we rise above the brutes, and thus a basic and essential part of the human spirit or soul. The naming fallacy is common enough even in science. Many a scientist claims to have explained some phenomenon when in truth all he has done is to give it a name. — George Gaylord Simpson

She has a scent that is familiar and comforting, like all the things you wish you could take with you on your travels to make you feel less alone. — Libba Bray

There is a lot of melody and things that sound familiar in hundreds of songs. — Wayne Coyne

So when she seemed distracted or absent-minded, it was in fact, I think, that she was aware of too many things, having no principle for selecting the more from the less important, and that her awareness could never be diminished, since it was among the things she had thought of as familiar that this disaster had taken shape. — Marilynne Robinson

Are broken windows a new decorating theme around here?" Archer asked, coming up behind Jenna and me and poking his head into the parlor.
"So it would seem," I said. I was still looking outside when a faint light appeared in the gloom. It took me a minute to realize that it was from Cal's cabin. Was someone out there? Was Cal out there?
But just as quickly as it had appeared, the light went out again. Frowning, I turned from the doorway, and I went to slip my arm through Archer's. Then I remembered what Nausicaa had said earlier. Now wasn't exactly the best time for PDA, probably.
The three of us trailed behind everyone else into the ballroom. Here, at least, things looked more or less the same. Of course, the ballroom had always been one of the more bizarre rooms at Hex Hall, so that didn't say much. Still, I was relieved to see the familiar jumble of tables and chairs and not, like, tree stumps or whatever. — Rachel Hawkins

The more familiar that a place becomes, the more mysterious it becomes, as well, if you are alert to the truth of things. I have found this to be the case all of my life. — Dean Koontz

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

Suddenly street and city became transformed, had the unfamiliar face that familiar things take on when our heart has taken leave of them. He looked back at the door of the house: it had become the door to a strange house that was now closed to him. — Hermann Hesse

This is therefore a time, not for unkindly criticism of fellow Christians, but for friendly conference; not for disputing over divergent views, but for united action; not for dogmatic assertion of prophetic programs, but for the humble acknowledgment that "we know in part;" not for idle dreaming, but for the immediate task of evangelizing a lost world. For such effort, no one truth is more inspiring, than that of the return of Christ. None other can make us sit more lightly by the things of time, none other is more familiar as a Scriptural motive to purity, holiness, patience, vigilance, love. — Charles R. Erdman

My ability to adapt has always stood out. I've been immersed in many worlds and have had the influence of many things in my upbringing so I'm familiar with so many styles of living, so many characters, so many life paths and its just easy to simulate for me. — Aeriel Miranda

These are all good things, I said. But no one knows where your country is or who you are. You don't have a familiar ethnic cuisine; your diaspora , from what I understand, is mostly in Southern California, three time zones removed from the national media in New York; and you don't have a recognizable, long-simmering conflict like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, where people in the richer nations can take sides and argue over at the dinner table. The best you can do is get the United Nations involved, as in East Timor. Maybe they'll send troops."
"We don't want the United Nations" Mr. Nanabragov said. "We don't want Sri Lankan troops patrolling our streets. We're better tan that. We want America. — Gary Shteyngart

This all feels so familiar. Jackson said a lot of these things to me the first time I got pulled. I didn't understand any of it then. I didn't understand him. But now I do. He'll tell each of us to be selfish, to watch our own backs and no one else's, but he'll be wholly unselfish, watching out for all of us, expecting no one to watch out for him. — Eve Silver

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

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

Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade," she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. "Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue."
Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue.
"But I think the writers had their turn," she says, "and now it's programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system."
I am definitely talking to a girl from Google. "So what's the next upgrade?"
"It's already happening," she says. "There are all these things you can do, and it's like you're in more than one place at one time, and it's totally normal. I mean, look around."
I swivel my head, and I see what she wants me to see: dozens of people sitting at tiny tables, all learning into phones showing them places that don't exist and yet are somehow more interesting ... — Robin Sloan

The sight of Florence below, the cluster of churches and towers and palaces tiered up on either side of the river, is as familiar as his own hand, as surreal as any nightmare. The setting of many of the most intimate and heartening moments of his life. Taunting him now with a spell of inaccessibility. Since the advent of war many things have happened to him that he could not possibly have imagined. He wonders if this is one of the subliminal reasons men wage war. To increase the daily frequency of surprise and shock. The forerunners of revelation. — Glenn Haybittle

At the end of this lifetime, you will leave this world. Your awareness field will stay together in a certain sense and then it will seek to return to things that are familiar. You will reincarnate. — Frederick Lenz

She often spoke to falling seeds and said, "Ah hope you fall on soft ground," because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman. — Zora Neale Hurston

Here are a few of the mantras I commonly received - see if any of them sound familiar: "Make sure you can support yourself; it's a tough world out there!" "You're so smart; you don't want to waste your intelligence [implied: by getting married too soon]." "We're expecting big things from you." "You have your whole life ahead of you - have fun while you can!" "Relax; marriage will happen when it happens." "I wish I'd had all the opportunities you have. — Lisa Anderson

As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer's because it attacks the two things most central to a writer's craft - language and memory, which together make up an individual's identity. Alzheimer's makes a new character out of a familiar person. — Charlie Pierce

People think they understand things because they become familiar with them. This is only superficial knowledge. It is the knowledge of the astronomer who knows the names of the stars, the botanist who knows the classification of the leaves and flowers, the artist who knows the aesthetics of green and red. This is not to know nature itself- the earth and sky, green and red. Astronomer, botanist, and artist have done no more than grasp impressions and interpret them, each within the vault of his own mind. The more involved they become with the activity of the intellect, the more they set themselves apart and the more difficult it becomes to live naturally. — Masanobu Fukuoka

What Larry McCaslin saw in Rahel's eyes was not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where Estha's words' had been. He couldn't be expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers' bodies. — Arundhati Roy

As an actor the best thing you have is your imagination. You're not going to have all the experiences, but you draw on the things that you know. So I think you definitely use the things that you're familiar with to your advantage. — Vince Vaughn

The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses. — Ernst Mach

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

It's like they say about soldiers coming back from war. People all around you are dying. Really dying, Eric. You go in for a week's chemotherapy and you're in a ward with people who are really, actually dying, there and then and doing their best to come to terms with it. When the week's up, you go home and you see your family and your friends and everything's normal and familiar. It's too much. You think - one world can't possibly hold both these lives and you feel like you're going to go crazy when you realise the world is that big and it can fill with the most terrible things whenever it wants to. — Steven Hall

And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns ... that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn't have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale ... that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorientate myself. p.71 — Bob Dylan

He stretches his legs out underneath the table and checks Facebook on his phone. It tells him things he doesn't need to know about people he hasn't seen in years. He absorbs their aggressively worded opinions and quasi-political hate-speak. He sees a photograph of his ex-girlfriend with her new boyfriend smiling at a picnic and he realises, with a strange cascade of emptiness, that she is pregnant and wearing an engagement ring. The comments are jubilant. He reads every word before he forces himself to put his phone down. A loneliness descends. He feels its familiar talons grabbing him violently out of his chair and hanging him, swinging, up by the ceiling. Pete — Kate Tempest

Your brain secretly wants that song, because it's so familiar to everything else you've already heard and liked. It just sounds right." There is evidence that a preference for things that sound "familiar" is a product of our neurology. — Charles Duhigg

Though the familiar use of things about us take off our wonder, yet it cures not our ignorance. — John Locke

I was beginning to taste it. Something bitter, but warm.
A flavor that woke me up and let me see things clearly. A flavor that made me feel safe, so I could let those things go. A flavor that held my hand and walked me across to the other side of loss, and assured me that one day, I would be just fine. A flavor for a change of heart- part grief, part hope.
Suddenly, I knew what that flavor would be. I padded down to the kitchen and cut a slice of sour cream coffee cake with a spicy underground river coursing through its center, left over from an order that had not been picked up today.
One bite and I was sure. A familiar flavor that now seemed utterly fresh and custom-made for me.
Cinnamon.
The comfort of sweet cinnamon. It always worked. I felt better. Lighter. Not quite "everything is going to be all right," but getting there. One step at a time. — Judith Fertig

Night is the permanent revolution, that of the globe. Every sundown the streets change, becoming sinister or libidinous, or, for that matter, longer or narrower or unexpectedly twisted. The familiar rebels against those who presume to know it. The map is altered and time is telescoped. Daylight restores things to their normal condition, or is that really their normal condition? The map of the city wrinkles and unfolds, wrinkles and unfolds. — Luc Sante

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

Things like the financial markets - a proper grounding in mathematics could help the common man. I believe that if people are more familiar with mathematical concepts ... it can help deal with modern life, which is increasingly complex. — Viswanathan Anand

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading ... is the search for a difficult pleasure. — Harold Bloom

Like the bat, the Sufi is asleep to 'things of the day' - the familiar struggle for existence which the ordinary man finds all-important - and vigilant while others are asleep. In other words, he keeps awake the spiritual attention dormant in others. That 'mankind sleeps in a nightmare of unfulfillment' is a commonplace of Sufi literature — Idries Shah

During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions. — Jean Piaget

I don't have time to celebrate accomplishments. When good things happen, it's great, and obviously I get excited inside. But soon I gotta do something else; I gotta keep doing more stuff. The whole world will never be familiar, so I'm constantly going to be on a quest to get familiar. — Clinton Sparks

It's funny how you can't ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal. The trouble with you and me is we are used to what is happening to us. We grew into our lives like a kernel beneath the earth, never able to process the enigma of our composition ... Nothing is normal. It is all rather odd, isn't it, our eyes in our heads, our hands with five fingers, the capacity to understand beauty, to feel love, to feel pain. — Donald Miller

We in politics are accustomed to seeing reality firsthand and then watching its distant cousin, events as portrayed by the media, unfold on our televisions. We know that what happened in Congress and what is reported to have taken place are two very different things. But that disjuncture, so familiar to politicians, is new to the viewing public. By seeing war and war coverage juxtaposed nightly on their screens, Americans have learned the crucial lesson: not to trust the news anchors. — Dick Morris

...it pointed to an alternative approach, a 'negative path' to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions - or, at the very least to learn to stop running quite so hard from them. — Oliver Burkeman

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

January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory: [ ... ]Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester's bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define. — Patricia Highsmith

I think in my life I have so many things that changed so much with work and my career, and I don't really get to plan out a lot of my days. So when I have something that's familiar - just something that's there - I don't really like to switch it up. — Sevyn Streeter

There are moments in 'Body Snatchers' that touch the sort of thing that I find scary ... like isolation and the inability to trust even familiar things. But - is that a horror movie - or a thriller? I don't really know the difference. — Christine Elise

Things go wrong for me all the time with technology. I'm not familiar enough with it, and I'm too old-school a brain to be able to figure it out. I'm dumb. Anything that I have to attack with my thumbs, for any period of time, makes me feel stupid. So, I try to avoid it, as much as possible, to protect my thumbs. — Johnny Depp

Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory. — Andrew Sean Greer

A habit that had become one of those necessary things for the night ... surely a body-friendly if not familiar-lying next to you. Someone whose touch is a reassurance, not an affront or a nuissance. Whose heavy breathing neither enrages nor discusts you, but amuses you like that of a cherished pet. — Toni Morrison

Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible, are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we are sad ... it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change. — Donna Tartt

The trouble is that organizations like processes. They are warm, familiar things and can be rolled out fairly easily. It is therefore tempting to understand strategy execution as a process, distribute the forms, get everyone to fill them in, and relax. The result will be resentment, rigidity, and stagnation. — Stephen Bungay

When cleaning I do it the way people go to church - not so much to discover anything new, although I'm alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. It's nice to go over familiar paths. — Robert M. Pirsig

There aren't weird things; there are only familiar and unfamiliar things! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Any doubt Gavin Kinshield had that he was in the right place vanished the moment he dismounted. The poplars and sweetgums, the shape of the cave mouth, the dirge-like song of a lone hermit thrush echoing through the trees - these things were as familiar as the boots on his feet. He gave Golam's flank an absent pat, and the horse ambled away to nibble a nearby bush. — K.C. May

The most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles. — Michel De Montaigne

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

And the truth is, sometimes my sisters and I do get jealous, and sometimes we do say things to-and about-one another that are thoughtless and rude. We don't meant them, though. It's just whenever we're together, we slip into our old familiar roles. — Jillian Medoff

As Harold took a bite of Bavarian Sugar cookie, he finally felt as if everything was going to be okay. Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy ... there are Bavarian Sugar cookies. And, fortunately, when there aren't any cookies we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin ... or a kind and loving gesture ... or a subtle encouragement ... or a loving embrace ... or an offer of comfort ...
And we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties which we assume only accessorize our days, are in fact here for a much nobler and larger cause. They are here to save our lives. — Zach Helm

Don't we all discover, at some stage or another that there are some things we'll never get any better at, even though we have no idea why and hardly ever notice it when it happens, even though we may have enjoyed these things and might not have been lagging behind last time we checked? Learning to draw, for instance, was a familiar catastrophe - all of a sudden, unaware, you just stop getting any better at it, your drawings never progress beyond those of a four-year-old or a six-year-old, you're left behind by those who "can draw," condemned to producing flat, doughy figures on the page, with no sense of perspective to them and (this was what really struck me) no resemblance to the outside world: condemned by your ruined self to a shameful childhood. — Jean-Christophe Valtat

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which t hings as they are make sense, and that includes the physical world, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind. — Thomas Nagel

Before you ever get the person you really want in your life, you will be tested with every person that was wrong for you. You will be tempted with what was easy, what was familiar, what was only physical, what was safe and what was simply a friend to pull you out of a difficult situation because you didn't want to be alone. When you finally meet the person you were meant to be with you won't have to guess, decide or choose. You will be drawn to them. They will seem to fit who you are, but at the same time have the missing pieces that makes you want to become a better person. There is no need to be guarded because this soul is like your own and talking to them about the deepest things in life are effortless. They won't be like any other you have met and you will find yourself looking for parts of them in everyone you meet. — Shannon L. Alder

The single best piece of advice I give to aspiring writers is to always write about things that they know. I suggest that they write about people and places and events and conflicts they are familiar with. That way their writing will be real and hopefully readers will respond to it. I try to take my own advice. — D.J. MacHale

We must all be fighters and strugglers, Lewie, and it is better to wear out than to rust out. It is bad to let choice things become easily familiar; for, you know, familiarity is apt to beget a proverbial offspring. The — John Buchan

Even the most egregious captive state, bound and gagged on her damp bunk, felt eerily familiar to her. With nothing to do but lie there and think of things, she reflected that captivity took many different forms. A woman under the domination of her father or husband was as much a prisoner as a hostage on a boat. She had merely traded one form of servitude for another. — Susan Wiggs

In a way, the fearful fundamentalists are right: globalism does undermine systems of absolute value and belief. But in a way they are wrong: the systems of value and belief do not immediately disappear - people simply inhabit them in a different fashion, and sometimes the old ways turn out to have a surprising amount of life left in them. The human mind has a great repertoire of ways to accept and honor social constructions of reality without swallowing them whole. Globalizing processes require us to renegotiate our relationships with familiar cultural forms, and remind us that they are things made by people: human, fallible things, subject to revision. Globalism — Walter Truet Anderson

Ahead of me lies the familiar litany: weakening of the heart, hardening of the arteries, increasing brittleness of bones, decreases in kidney filtration rates, lower resistance of the immune system, and loss of memory. The list could be extended almost indefinitely. Evolution seems indeed to have arranged things so that all our systems deteriorate, and that we invest in repair only as much as we are worth. — Jared Diamond

And here's the shock
when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, you do not experience great joy and huge energy.
You are unhappy. Things get worse.
It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded.
And then all the cowards come out and say, 'See, I told you so.'
In fact, they told you nothing. — Jeanette Winterson

This wish to satisfy someone greater than the Self, to be found acceptable, to belong at last, is a struggle familiar to many psychotherapy patients. In their lives they waste themselves on wondering how they are doing, on trying to figure out the expectations of others so that they can become someone in the eyes of others. They try to be practical, to be reasonable, to figure it all out in their heads. It is as though if only they could get the words straight in their heads, if only they could find the correct formula, then everything else in their lives would be magically straightened out. They are sure there is a right way to do things, though they have not yet found it. Someone in authority must know ... It is as thought if it were discovered that two and two really did not equal four (but five), then at that moment all over the world every machine would stop operating, all of the lights would go out. (110) — Sheldon B. Kopp

Only after the trial did things come into focus, that night taking on the now familiar arc. Every detail and blip made public. There are times I try to guess what part I might have played. What amount would belong to me. It's easiest to think I wouldn't have done anything, like I would have stopped them, my presence the mooring that kept Suzanne in the human realm. That was the wish, the cogent parable. But there was another possibility that slouched along, insistent and unseen. The bogeyman under the bed, the snake at the bottom of the stairs: maybe I would have done something, too. Maybe it would have been easy. — Emma Cline

Love has been many things throughout history: the simple comfort of the familiar, having a person to know and being known by that person in return; a connection born of shared experiences, an irrational joy in another's presence; a particular calming influence that one member of the couple may exert on the other, or that they both provide to one another. A combination of all these and myriad other things can go into making one person wish to stay tied to another. Anyone who is not in the couple--that is, everyone else in the world--will not understand precisely how or why it works for two people. — Annette Gordon-Reed

I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager ... and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that. — Ntozake Shange

Most of us lead far more meaningful lives than we know. Often finding meaning is not about doing things differently; it is about seeing familiar things in new ways. — Rachel Naomi Remen

On days like this you can see into the bluest depth of things, their previously unknown, astonishing equations - you see them in even the most familiar everyday thing. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

I miss how things were familiar with him, even if it was the familiar feeling of being let down. — Samantha Schutz

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

She had just realized there were two things that prevent us from achieving our dreams: believing them to be impossible or seeing those dreams made possible by some sudden turn of the wheel of fortune, when you least expected it. For at that moment, all our fears suddenly surface: the fear of setting off along a road heading who knows where, the fear of a life full of new challenges, the fear of losing forever everything that is familiar. — Paulo Coelho

And so he will see even the real gaping jaws of wild beasts with no less pleasure than those which painters and sculptors show by imitation; and in an old woman and an old man he will be able to see a certain maturity and comeliness; and the attractive loveliness of young persons he will be able to look on with chaste eyes; and many such things will present themselves, not pleasing to every man, but to him only who has become truly familiar with nature and her works. — Marcus Aurelius

The house, the pond, the tree - it was all both overwhelmingly familiar and different from what she remembered - smaller and shabbier, somehow. It was like waking up to find that your reflection in the mirror had aged overnight, or had sprouted a new mole: You were forced to admit that things changed, whether you gave them permission to or not. — Lauren Oliver

I think the movie business is in trouble. It's all movies that you've seen before. Everything's a remake; they want things that are familiar rather than things that surprise you. — Graydon Carter

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.
You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it. — Cesare Pavese

Mom says,'What are you going to do when it's time to go to college?' I choose not to think about that yet. That is years away. For now, I just watn things all safe and familiar. My life may not be perfect, but it is what I have known.
~pg 16; Hattie on change — Ann M. Martin

A wonderful place, the mind, but if it has any kind of disappointing failure, it's that it always attempts to put new things into the context of things which are already familiar to it. — Jim Butcher

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

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

In Holland, things were pretty stale for me. Even though there were a lot of good influences and a certain openness to music and art and literature, I just wanted to go somewhere less familiar - somewhere bigger. — Ari Marcopoulos

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

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

Running through things because you are familiar with them, breeds routine and this is the seed of boredom. — James Galway

I don't like to get involved in things that I am not familiar with. I'm kind of a hands-on type of person. — Dolly Parton

Are you familiar with the word inspiration? The meaning of it? Where it comes from?...In the Dark Ages no understood the things that made some people special. Every soul in that dark, difficult time faced the same limitations, every soul except a precious few who saw things differently, the poets, inventors, artists, stone masons. Regular folks didn't understand how a person could wake up one day and see the world differently. They thought it was a gift from God. Thus the word "inspiration." It means breathed upon...breathed upon by God himself. — John Hart

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

How Not to Spend Your Senior Year,
Rule #3:
No matter how dire things get,
do not panic.

It will only make a bad situation even worse. Besides, by the time you've reached the hit-the-panic-button stage, it's way too late. Nothing you do will make a difference anyhow.
This is a phenomenon known to the ancients as irony. You may be more familiar with the contemporary expression of this concept: Life sucks.
Particularly weekends. — Cameron Dokey

It's tempting to tether ourselves to the familiar comfort of the way things are, but fulfillment is often discovered in the unpredictable and unknown. We can serve ourselves and our universe, best, when we can take the journey that takes us from the limited desire of our ego, to the ever-expanding love and wisdom, of our divine nature. — Jaeda DeWalt

The music of a popular song now came from the radio as Hawksmoor gazed out of the window; and he saw a door closing, a boy dropping a coin in the street, a woman turning her head, a man calling. For a moment he wondered why such things were occurring now: could it be that the world sprang up around him only as he invented it second by second and that, like a dream, it faded into the darkness from which it had come as soon as he moved forward? But then he understood that these things were real: they would never cease to occur and they would always be the same, as familiar and as ever-renewed as the tears which he had just seen on the woman's face. — Peter Ackroyd

Transformations require that we let go of familiar ways of doing things, without yet knowing what we will do next. — Sheldon B. Kopp