Interchangeable Quotes & Sayings

Self-esteem is reliance on one's power to think. It cannot be replaced by one's power to deceive. The self-confidence of a scientist and the self-confidence of a con man are not interchangeable states, and do not come from the same psychological universe. The success of a man who deals with reality augments his self-confidence. The success of a con man augments his panic. — Ayn Rand

I can see, I can see that it is in this distorted vision of the world's proper proportions that lies the secret of our fears. We make the animals bigger with our fears. We make our creations and our loves smaller, we shrink by our vision, and enlarge and shrink according to the whims of our interchangeable vision, not according to an immutable law of growth. The size of each world we live in is individual and relative, and the objects and people vary in each EYE. — Anais Nin

Why not end up with her? floats into my line of vision. An answer: she has a better body than most other girls I know. Another one: everyone is interchangeable anyway. — Bret Easton Ellis

[She] had occasionally glimpsed a series of interchangeable well-groomed blondes accompanying him to work events, then Grace had rocked up with her funny-coloured hair and her funny-coloured tights, and Vaughn had been smitten. Well, as smitten as Vaughn could be. — Sarra Manning

Books are interchangeable: People want a story that excites them, relaxes them, entertains them. And if you don't give them that, someone else will - and you'll be history. — Joel Dicker

If women really are practically interchangeable with men, because there is hardly any difference, why would it be important to strive for equal representation in a presidential cabinet? The distinction becomes something equivalent to hair color. Would fairness demand an equal number of blondes and brunettes in government? — Sam A. Andreades

...If it wasn't for you, I'd think that angels were all totally interchangeable.'
'You mean because I'm beyond perfect?'
'No. Because you're so humble.'
'Humility's overrated.'
'So is clear self-assessment, apparently.'
'Real warriors don't stand for psychobabble.'
'Or for rational thinking.'
He glances at my naked legs. 'No, not that rational, I admit. — Susan Ee

It is also true that the separate brain units, by
virtue of where they are placed in a system, contribute different
components to the system's operation and are thus not interchangeable. — Antonio R. Damasio

In music, consonant chords are point of arrival. Rest. There's no tension. Most pop music hooks are consonant, which is why most people like them. They're catchy but interchangeable. Boring. Dissonant Intervals, however are full of tension, you can't predict which way they're going to go. It makes limited people uncomfortable
frustrated, because they don't understand the point, and people hate what they don't understand. But the ones who get it,"
he said, lifting a hand to my face,
"find it fascinating. Beautiful."
He traced the shape of my mouth with his thumb.
"Like you. — Michelle Hodkin

Socialism had somehow made time more flexible. There were often situations when 1 PM and 5 PM were interchangeable. — Colin Cotterill

The dead shook off their rust of living and seized up steel. Their lips quivered with the defiance of innocents, with manipulations of politicians and their interchangeable dreams, and with the insanity of thugs who don't even know for which parties they commit their atrocities. — Ben Okri

I think people are really starting to rebel against that. And I think there's going to be more and more gray areas. Hopefully that means we'll see more stories with characters that could be interchangeable with men. — Evan Rachel Wood

Give a great deal of attention to keeping his managers and his technical people as interchangeable as their talents allow. The barriers are sociological ... To overcome this problem some laboratories, such as Bell Labs, abolish all job titles. Each professional employee is a member of technical staff. — Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

If fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeable,I'm going to kill myself,because I won't know what else to do — Stephen King

The words are strung together, with their own special grammar-the laws of quantum theory-to form sentences, which are molecules. Soon we have books, entire libraries, made out of molecular "sentences." The universe is like a library in which the words are atoms. Just look at what has been written with these hundred words! Our own bodies are books in that library, specified by the organization of molecules-but the universe and literature are organizations of identical, interchangeable objects; they are information systems. — Heinz Pagels

Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet. — Charles Baudelaire

The terrorist threat is so cloudy, faceless, and vague, so manipulable by political purposes, so definitely present but indefinitely manifested, that it sometimes feels interchangeable with everyday dread itself. — Lee Siegel

Bandits and governments 'ave so much in common that they might be interchangeable anywhere in the world ... — Terry Pratchett

If men were like ants, there would be no interest in human freedom. If individual men, like ants, were uniform, inter changeable, devoid of specific personality traits of their own, then who would care whether they were free or not? Who, indeed, would care if they lived or died? The glory of the human race is the uniqueness of each individual, the fact that every person, though similar in many ways to others, possesses a completely individuated personality of his own. It is the fact of each person's uniqueness - the fact that no two people can be wholly interchangeable - that makes each and every man irreplaceable and that makes us care whether he lives or dies, whether he is happy or oppressed. And, finally, it is the fact that these unique personalities need freedom for their full development that constitutes one of the major arguments for a free society. — Murray N. Rothbard

The purpose of every industrial revolution is to make craft and skills obsolete, and thereby make people interchangeable and cheap. — Greg Palast

I think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they're all interchangeable and nobody thinks they have a better painting or a worse painting ... Besides even when the subject is different, people want the same painting. — Andy Warhol

Bill read in a biology book about how cells replace themselves over the years; how bodies died and were remade out of interchangeable pieces. It depressed him how foreign his younger self looked to him now, how his body had stolen the identity of this happy dead kid, and with his own life, had made a complete mess of it — Don Hertzfeldt

Of this be wary. Honor and fame are often regarded as interchangeable. Both involve an appraisal of the individual ... but I suggest this difference. Fame is morally neutral. — Edward R. Murrow

Every one of my novels could be entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being or The Joke or Laughable Loves; the titles are interchangeable, they reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me, and unfortunately, restrict me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or write. — Milan Kundera

Political elites look increasingly interchangeable: Blair, Brown, and Cameron have all tried to provide cover for the surrender of sovereignty to foreign investors with invocations of 'British' values, and, more opportunistically, anti-immigrant rhetoric. — Pankaj Mishra

One way was Taylorism. Frederick W. Taylor had been a steel company foreman who closely analyzed every job in the mill, and worked out a system of finely detailed division of labor, increased mechanization, and piecework wage systems, to increase production and profits. In 1911, he published a book on "scientific management" that became powerfully influential in the business world. Now management could control every detail of the worker's energy and time in the factory. As Harry Braverman said (Labor and Monopoly Capital), the purpose of Taylorism was to make workers interchangeable, able to do the simple tasks that the new division of labor required - like standard parts divested of individuality and humanity, bought and sold as commodities. — Howard Zinn

There are lots of women tennis players, for instance, but because not many of them seem to have much personality, they're interchangeable. You don't have a feeling about them. — Daley Thompson

In those days, the early 1980s, TV and film were interchangeable. — David Hare

I never made beats to make beats; I only made them when there was a record to make them for. That's one of the things that has changed in hip-hop that's made me like it less. It feels much more like it's a producer-driven medium, where there are all these tracks that are completely interchangeable. — Rick Rubin

Faith and power, he had come to believe, were interchangeable. Was the final truth even simpler? That no act of faith was possible until you were rudely pushed out into the screaming middle of things like a newborn child skydiving chutelessly out of his mother's womb? — Stephen King

Identity was a liquid state, ever interchangeable, and adaptable to its surroundings... It was better to not have favourites - a snake didn't mourn when it had to shed its skin. — Leonardo Donofrio

Blood and wine are interchangeable.
Love and hate are unrecognizable.
Sanity is no longer with me. — A.P. Sweet

In marketing terms, a commodity is an undifferentiated product that is just like its competitors. It isn't usually very innovative, and offers a similar set of features and price point compared to competitive products. In other words, its defining characteristic is its "sameness" compared to other similar products. When a product becomes a commodity, the price that it commands in the marketplace tends to erode. People aren't willing to pay extra for your product. They consider it and those of your competitors to be interchangeable, so no one company has an edge in sales. — Chuck Frey

Xxx it is not lack of wit or intellect that shallow men crave, it is lack of personality; they desire a woman who will exist only as a shadow to themselves, because this gives them the illusion that they have some importance, that they are more than cattle. Personality is what distinguishes us from each other, what makes each man and woman unique, and to submerge one's personality is to make one's self interchangeable, like a mass-produced commodity; xxx — Steven Brust

That is what is meant by the proposition omne ens est verum (everything that is, is true) - though we have almost ceased to understand it - and by the complementary proposition that being and truth are interchangeable concepts. (What does truth mean, where things are concerned, the truth of things? "A thing is true" means: it is known and knowable, known to the absolute spirit, knowable to the spirit that is not absolute. — Joseph Pieper

At least you had sense enough not to attempt to lead this particular away team." "Star Trek," I murmured, picking out one of Luc's ubiquitous movie and television references. "I have trained you well, Padawan." "You're mixing your Wars and Treks," Jeff pointed out. "They're interchangeable," Luc said, earning a horrified look from Jeff. — Chloe Neill

Burlesque had stock routines and it was no big deal if one comic had the same act as another. But no one expected interchangeable burlesque routines to find a home on a national broadcast. Other comedy teams like Wheeler & Woolsey and Howard & George had done versions of "Who's on First?" prior to Bud and Lou, but Abbott & Costello now got all the credit. — Kliph Nesteroff

Too many companies believe people are interchangeable. Truly gifted people never are. They have unique talents. Such people cannot be forced into roles they are not suited for, nor should they be. Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do. — Warren G. Bennis

Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group. — Steven Pinker

Many people confuse a Dom personality with a Dom's position of authority. The two are not exactly the same or interchangeable. A true Dom dominates. Plain and simple. And by dominate, we mean does what it takes to get a job done. Even if that means submit. — Lucian Bane

Madness and passion have always been interchangeable. Throughout the entire western literary tradition. Madness is an abundance of existence. Madness is a way of asking difficult questions. What did he mean, the powerless tyrant king? O Fool, I shall go mad.
Maybe madness is the excess of possibility, ... And writingis about reducing possibility to ne idea, one book, one sentence, one word. Madness is a form of self-expression. It is the opposite of creativity. You cannot make anything that can be separated from yourself if you are mad. And yet, look at Rimbaud
and your wonderful Christopher Smart. But don't harbour any romantic ideas about what it means to be mad. My language was my protection, my guarantee against madness and when there was no one to listen my language vanished along with my reader. — Patricia Duncker

I really think happiness is very closely aligned with success, and may almost be an interchangeable synonym. Happiness (like success) also comes from doing what we feel called to do in life; however, it's also obvious no one can experience one without the other. — Donna Fargo

They were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement. — Robert A. Caro

The 'person' is not an interchangeable part. The 'citizen' is ... The person is harking back to a pre-print model. It's what the hippies were. — Terence McKenna

See?" my mother would say, smiling at me and my sister, Carol, in turn. "We live in the greatest country on earth. See how lucky we are?"
And yet the ash continued swirling down, and the smells of death came through the windows, crept under the door, hung in our carpets and curtains, and screamed of her lie.
Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?
And if you lie to a liar, is the sin somehow negated or reversed?
These are the kinds of questions I ask myself now: in these dark, watery hours, when night and day are interchangeable. No. Not true. — Lauren Oliver

I am comfortable calling myself a writer of suspense, or a writer of thrillers; both terms are sort of interchangeable to me. I think that came from a sense of being at conflict with my true nature throughout my youth, and being afraid of discovery, and feeling as if I didn't belong. — Christopher Rice

A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable. — Elaine Dundy

The most pernicious message relayed by pornography is that women are natural sexual prey to men and love it; that sexuality and violence are congruent; and that for women sex is essentially masochistic, humiliation pleasurable, physical abuse erotic. But along with this message comes another, not always recognized: that enforced submission and the use of cruelty, if played out in heterosexual pairing, is sexually "normal," while sensuality between women, including erotic mutuality and respect, is "queer," "sick," and either pornographic in itself or not very exciting compared with the sexuality of whips and bondage. Pornography does not simply create a climate in which sex
and violence are interchangeable; it widens the range of behavior considered
acceptable from men in heterosexual intercourse-behavior which reiteratively
strips women of their autonomy, dignity, and sexual potential, including the potential of loving and being loved by women in mutuality and integrity. — Adrienne Rich

The various causes of ease or strain have interchangeable effects. When you are in a state of cognitive ease, you are probably in a good mood, like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your intuition, and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar. You are also likely to be relatively casual and superficial in your thinking. When you feel strained, you are more likely to be vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, and make fewer errors, but you also are less intuitive and less creative as usual. — Daniel Kahneman

But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective scientific method, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology. — Stephen Jay Gould

In many instances, the words "sell" and "influence" are completely interchangeable. — Chris Murray

Although technology often leads science in discovery, the philosophy of technology is usually drawn from the scientific philosophy of its time. In our time, the technology of machines has drawn its inspiration from mechanics, dealing with complexity by reducing the number of relevant parts. The technology of government, on the other hand, has drawn upon statistical mechanics, creating simplicity by dealing only with people in the structureless mass, as interchangeable units, and taking averages. — Gerald M. Weinberg

I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT KING TRITON. Specifically, King, why are you elderly but with the body of a teenage Beastmaster? How do you maintain those monster pecs? Do they have endocrinologists under the sea? Because I am scheduling you some bloodwork ...
... Question: How come, when they turn back into humans at the end of Beauty and the Beast, Chip is a four-year-old boy, but his mother, Mrs. Potts, is like 107? Perhaps you're thinking, "Lindy, you are remembering it wrong. That kindly, white-haired, snowman-shaped Mrs. Doubtfire situation must be Chip's grandmother." Not so, champ! She's his mom. Look it up. She gave birth to him four years ago ... As soon as you become a mother, apparently, you are instantly interchangeable with the oldest woman in the world, and / or sixteen ounces of boiling brown water with a hat on it. Take a sec and contrast Mrs. Pott's literally spherical body with the cut-diamond abs of King Triton, father of seven. — Lindy West

Marriage, by its very nature, requires complementarity. The mystical union of Christ and the church - each "part" belonging to the other but neither interchangeable - cannot be pictured in marital union without the differentiation of male and female. — Kevin DeYoung

Nonviolence and nonaggression are generally regarded as interchangeable concepts - King and Gandhi frequently used them that way - but nonviolence, as employed by Gandhi in India and by King in the American South, might reasonably be viewed as a highly disciplined form of aggression. If one defines aggression in the primary dictionary sense of "attack," nonviolent resistance proved to be the most powerful attack imaginable on the powers King and Gandhi were trying to overturn. The writings of both men are filled with references to love as a powerful force against oppression, and while the two leaders were not using the term" force" in the military sense, they certainly regarded nonviolence as a tactical weapon as well as an expression of high moral principle." Susan Jacoby (p. 196) — Helen Prejean

The years of us. Our farm and our people. The children, from this distance now almost all completely interchangeable faces and forms, smiling and running and growing so easily into this other thing. So unfettered by time. So shaped by our story, yet somehow so completely untouched by any of it. — Andrew Miller

I'm not a 'long writer' and have never wanted to write a novel or even a novella. Poetry, like flash fiction, provides a readily accessible canvas to play with. Whether to express an emotion or share a vignette, these forms are often interchangeable. — Marge Simon

Respect the colony as an organism rather than a mechanism with interchangeable parts. — Gunther Hauk

To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. — Maria Semple

I play basketball for love and money, and they come in interchangeable order, depending on how things are going when you ask the question. — Tom Heinsohn

I think the fallacy is to think that Women's Liberation meant that men and women would become interchangeable. That has not happened, and most men and women would not want it to happen. — Christina Hoff Sommers

As an actress, I always felt like the people you met on set were interchangeable with the people you met on other sets - the grips, the gaffers, the actors, the directors - everybody steps into their role. — Brooke Adams

(Never mind that the assistants were likely interchangeable, while Michelangelo was not.) — Susan Cain

I THINK ITS COOL THAT OTHER CROWDS LIKE WHAT I DO. HOWEVER IVE ALWAYS HAD A GOOD MIX OF PEOPLE AT MY SHOWS. I STARTED DOING THINGS ON RADIO ON ROCK MARKETS AND ALTERNATIVE MARKETS. IVE ALWAYS BEEN A COUNTRY TYPE ACT HOWEVER I STARTED WITH THE ROCK MARKET. IM VERY INTERCHANGEABLE. — Larry The Cable Guy

A famous philosopher (either Aristotle or Judith Krantz, I forget who) once said about being a woman in Los Angeles: If you're blonde and beautiful, you're interchangeable. If you're not, you're invisible. — Laura Levine

I never thought it would get this bad. I never thought the Reestablishment would take things so far. They're incinerating culture, the beauty of diversity. The new citizens of our world will be reduced to nothing but numbers, easily interchangeable, easily removable, easily destroyed for disobedience.
We have lost our humanity. — Tahereh Mafi

The rudeness of many Americans depressed him, a rudeness based on a solid ignorance of the whole concept of manners, and on the proposition that for social purposes, all people are more or less equal and interchangeable. — William S. Burroughs

Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them. — Fred Brooks

The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of Holiness in Jewish thought refers to energy and not an expression of personhood. Never in rabbinical commentaries is the Spirit considered as an entity separate from God, even though at times it is used as synonymous with God and interchangeable with Shekinah (majesty of God present among men and in nature: immanence). — Vince McLaughlin

The structural similarity of men, and their ability to be represented both as ideal, like Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, and as average. Man being the measure of all things, and therefore a sort of standard and interchangeable unit of length, breadth, intelligence, emotion. We could lay them end to end to measure the distance between the continents, the distance to the moon. We could use them to calculate the weight of weather, or to buy things at the grocery. With such an abundance of men, we could gauge anything we chose. — Alexandra Kleeman

A lot of these American actors have this - in my view - misplaced view that they have to look like Action Man. The trouble is, they all run the risk of being interchangeable. — Damian Lewis

Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass - anything and everything - the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that's how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don't understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such. — Maria Semple

There's no difference between lyrics and poetry. Words are words. The only difference is the people who are in academic positions and call themselves poets and have an academic stance. They've got something to lose if they say it's all poetry; if there's not music to it, and you have to wear a certain kind of checkered shirt or something like that. It's all the same. Lyrics are lyrics, poetry is poetry, lyrics are poetry, and poetry is lyrics. They are interchangeable to me. — Van Morrison

I've tried to prepare my daughter for the phenomenon I've experienced of beautiful young women being dismissed and devalued as interchangeable. I tell Rachel that if a relationship doesn't make you feel good about yourself as an individual, then it's not right. My grandmother told me once years ago that if you're ever with somebody who you find embarrasses you in public or private, you're with the wrong person. Walk away. — Kathleen Turner

Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being
not a constant state
that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden. — Vladimir Nabokov

Do not internalize the industrial model. You are not one of the myriad of interchangeable pieces, but a unique human being, and if you've got something to say, say it, and think well of yourself while you're learning to say it better. - David Mamet — Seth Godin

The actual legacy of Desert Storm was to plunge the United States more deeply into a sea of difficulties for which military power provided no antidote. Yet in post-Cold War Washington, where global leadership and global power projection had become all but interchangeable terms, senior military officers...were less interested in assessing what those difficulties might portend than in claiming a suitably large part of the action. In the buoyant atmosphere of that moment, confidence in the efficiency of American arms left little room for skepticism and doubt. As a result, senior military leaders left unasked questions of fundamental importance. What if the effect of projecting U.S. military power was not to solve problems, but to exacerbate them? What if expectations of doing more with less proved hollow? What consequences would then ensue? Who wear bear them? — Bacevich

The faces of the others looked like aggregates of interchangeable features, every face oozing to blend into the anonymity of resembling all, and all looking as if they were melting. Rearden's face, with the sharp planes, the pale blue eyes, the ash-blond hair, had the firmness of ice; the uncompromising clarity of its lines made it look, among the others, as if he were moving through a fog, hit by a ray of light. — Ayn Rand

This irrelevance of molecular arrangements for macroscopic results has given rise to the tendency to confine physics and chemistry to the study of homogeneous systems as well as homogeneous classes. In statistical mechanics a great deal of labor is in fact spent on showing that homogeneous systems and homogeneous classes are closely related and to a considerable extent interchangeable concepts of theoretical analysis (Gibbs theory). Naturally, this is not an accident. The methods of physics and chemistry are ideally suited for dealing with homogeneous classes with their interchangeable components. But experience shows that the objects of biology are radically inhomogeneous both as systems (structurally) and as classes (generically). Therefore, the method of biology and, consequently, its results will differ widely from the method and results of physical science. — Walter M. Elsasser

I have heard your orators speak on many questions. One among them the so-called vital question of money which is above all things the most coveted commodity but I, as a Jainist, in the name of my countrymen and of my country, would offer you as the medium of the most perfect exchange between us, henceforth and forever, the indestructible, the unchangeable, the universal currency of good will and peace, and this, my brothers and sisters, is a currency that is not interchangeable with silver and gold, it is a currency of the heart, of the good life, of the highest estate on the earth. — Virchand Gandhi

We all think we're snowflakes, but we're Tinker Toys, held together by our interchangeable parts. (39) — Lauren Fox

We are not interchangeable objects, LEGO pieces that click together just because the parts fit. — Jay Crownover

Archetypes are universal, and, in subtle or extravagant ways, interchangeable. — Tanith Lee

I slowly came to recognize individual monks within the crowds of interchangeable orange robes and shaved heads. There were flirtatious and daring monks who stood on each other's shoulders to peek over the temple at you and call out "Hello, Mrs. Lady!" as you walked by. There were novices who snuck cigarettes at night outside the temple walls, the embers of their smokes glowing as orange as their robes. I saw a buff teenage monk doing push-ups, and I spotted another one with an unexpectdely gangsterish tattoo of a knife emblazoned on one golden shoulder. One night I'd eavesdropped while a handful of monks sang Bob Marley songs to each other underneath a tree in a temple garden, long after they should have been asleep. I'd even seen a knot of barely adolescent novices kickboxing each other - a display of good-natured competition, that like boys' games all over the world, carried the threat of turning truly violent at a moment's notice. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Anything can be an instrument, Chugurh said. Small things. Things you wouldn't even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People don't pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It's just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. to separate the act from the the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it's just a coin. Yes. That's true. Is it? — Cormac McCarthy

Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role ... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences. — Nick Harkaway

It is soon to be spring
The Christmas toys barely played with
I have a glass soldier whose head can turn
The epaulettes interchangeable
Soon flowers will bloom
Lawrence from the garden shed will give us
each a cup of seeds

I am to wait
I said — George Saunders

Dance music is so interchangeable. There's not a lot of face to it. It's a bunch of Dutch DJs with the same haircut. — Diplo

You really want to go out to dinner?" Gabriel shot Rase a skeptical look out of the corner of his eye.
"As opposed to what?"
"Getting on your knees and begging me to beat you." There was no inflection in Gabriel's voice, no heat, and no emotion at all. He wasn't even looking at Rase.
... "I don't want one more than the other," he answered, fully aware that he was being challenged. "They're not interchangeable. I want them both."
Rase took a breath to calm the pounding in his chest and continued, even though Gabriel wouldn't look at him. "I want to go out to dinner with you, anywhere you want, on a date. And then I want to go back to your place or my place and I want you to beat me until I bleed. — Anah Crow

Try not to have idols: they are interchangeable and lead to a wantonness that is easily mistaken for love. — Hildegard Knef

I often felt the girls' speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon ... [p. 48] — Siri Hustvedt

I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management. — Jean Giraudoux

I felt like an animal in a cage being stared at by other animals, all of us anonymous, mindless, interchangeable. — Leah Raeder

We realise that natural aptitudes are not interchangeable, and each person must, of biological or spiritual necessity, practise the art for which he is fitted. — George William Russell

Understand, my own politics aren't necessarily interchangeable with what any of my characters believe. You could take each of the characters in On the Ropes, and I'd probably be in sympathy with a different one on any given day, depending on what's going on in the world. — James Vance

Economists copied their mathematics from the work of 19th-century physicists: they see individuals and businesses as interchangeable atoms, not as unique creators. — Peter Thiel

Photos should suggest a word(s) and vice versa. They should be equal and interchangeable. — John Baldessari

Often we take personally the slings and arrows of our 'abusers'. But frequently we are merely the interchangeable pawns of their own neurotic dramas. Anyone else in your position would have received the same treatment. There is nothing especially noxious or negatively noteworthy about you. — Brian L. Weiss

Our efforts and actions produce results. These results come unlabeled. WE label them as success or failure based on OUR expectations. Don't forget that these labels are interchangeable if we allow ourselves to be free from an unhealthy attachment to our expectations. — Steve Maraboli

You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are. — Italo Calvino