Recurrent Quotes & Sayings

Empire as located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. — J.M. Coetzee

Recurrent invasions racked the city of Theodora in the centuries of its history; no sooner was one enemy routed than another gained strength and threatened the survival of the inhabitants. When the sky was cleared of condors, they had to face the propagation of serpents; the spiders' extermination allowed the flies to multiply into a black swarm; the victory over the termites left the city at the mercy of the woodworms. One by one the species incompatible to the city had to succumb and were extinguished. By dint of ripping away scales and carapaces, tearing off elytra and feathers, the people gave Theodora the exclusive image of human city that still distinguishes it. — Italo Calvino

Next, the psychiatrist's report must demonstrate how the claimant relives the traumatic event in one of the four following ways: recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections of the event; — John D. Roche

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object. — Northrop Frye

Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert irrevocable tenure there. The opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando of Edith Piaf's Je ne regrette rien - the text is infantile, the tune stentorian, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive - tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song, and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me. — George Steiner

So I come back again to the condition that the Golden Rule, if one adopts it, is a difficult master to serve. The ship's captain will not throw the compass overboard because the wind blows fair and the day is funny. For he knows, from the experiences of the ocean's instability, that the danger days of storm are always "just ahead." So the compass must always be handy and obedience to it must always be loyal. And so with the Golden Rulle - the compass must be ever at hand through life's journey. It will see us through trying times. And perhaps the most trying of all times comes when success is riding high and we may be tempted to "throw the compass overboard." It is then we must remember that all good days in human life come from the mastery of the days of trouble that are forever recurrent. — James Cash Penney

Public service and respect for ideas is a recurrent theme in both the American and Australian sides of my family. — Bill Drayton

Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs. — Ambrose Bierce

Indeed, there are recurrent hints in the Bible that the Israelites had feelings of guilt about taking the Canaanites' land,147 a curious adumbration of Israeli twinges about homeless Palestinian Arabs in the late twentieth century. The Israelites, however, hid any remorse in the belief that the conquest was a pious act: it is 'because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is driving them out before you'. — Paul Johnson

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension ... — T. S. Eliot

The Puritans' sense of priorities in life was one of their greatest strengths. Putting God first and valuing everything else in relation to God was a recurrent Puritan theme. — Leland Ryken

A recurrent theme in Kissinger's early writing is the historical ignorance of the typical American decision-maker. Lawyers, he remarked in 1968, are the "single most important group in Government, but they do have this drawback - a deficiency in history." For Kissinger, history was doubly important: as a source of illuminating analogies and as the defining factor in national self-understanding. Americans might doubt history's importance, but, as Kissinger wrote, "Europeans, living on a continent covered with ruins testifying to the fallibility of human foresight, feel in their bones that history is more complicated than systems analysis."
-Foreign Affairs, The Meaning of Kissinger: A Realist Reconsidered, By Niall Ferguson — Niall Ferguson

I found a deep kinship between Mahler's recurrent attempts to confront all sides of life and to affirm himself in the face of his own finitude, and Aschenbach's dedication to persevere in the literary evocation of beauty. Exploring this kinship led me to reflect on many of Mahler's songs and symphonies - and particularly his great masterpiece, Das Lied von der Erde. The end result was a way of reading Mann that I hadn't originally anticipated at all. — Philip Kitcher

There was that in the atmosphere of San Salvatore which produced active-mindedness in all except the natives. They, as before, whatever the beauty around them, whatever the prodigal seasons did, remained immune from thoughts other than those they were accustomed to. All their lives they had seen, year by year, the amazing recurrent spectacle of April in the gardens, and custom had made it invisible to them. They were as blind to it, as unconscious of it, as Domenico's dog asleep in the sun. The visitors could not be blind to it - it was too arresting after London in a particularly wet and gloomy March. Suddenly to be transported to that place where the air was so still that it held its breath, where the light was so golden that the most ordinary things were transfigured - to be transported into that delicate warmth, — Elizabeth Von Arnim

You cannot end a theology class without hearing these recurrent words "maybe", "it seems to me", "perhaps", "the unique reason may be that", "my belief on this subject is that", "there are many interpretations to how", etc. All of which indicate a lack of certainty. It's not surprising in a class with the task to study the invisible god — Bangambiki Habyarimana

Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers. — Elizabeth Bishop

Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he's had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he'll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has 'got over it.' But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again. — C.S. Lewis

The recurrent drama of menstrual bleeding must have been unnerving to primitive peoples. In man, the shedding of blood is always associated with injury, disease, or death. Only the female half of humanity was seen to have the magical ability to bleed profusely and still rise phoenix-like each month from the gore. — Estelle Ramey

When uncultured minds, confined to a narrow range of personal experience, are under the pressure of continued misfortune, their inward life is apt to become a perpetually repeated round of sad and bitter thoughts: the same words, the same scenes are revolved over and over again, the same mood accompanies them - the end of the year finds them as much what they were at the beginning as if they were machines set to a recurrent series of movements. — George Eliot

As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing? — Isabel Allende

There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition. — F Scott Fitzgerald

But [in bureaucracies], too, decision making takes place in a world full of unceratinties. Any actual system of information processing, planning and control will never be optimal but merely practical, applying rote responses to recurrent problems and employing a variety of contingency tactics to deal with unforeseen events. — Manuel De Landa

Recurrent descent into insanity is not a wholly attractive feature of capitalism. — John Kenneth Galbraith

I was somewhat put out to find that recurrent projections in the mind of the images of either of them, Jean or Suzette, did not in the least exclude that of the other. That was when I began to suspect that being in love might be a complicated affair. — Anthony Powell

There's no beginning to the farmer's year, / Only recurrent patterns on a scroll / Unwinding ... — Vita Sackville-West

Purification and redemption are such recurrent themes in ritual because there is a clear and ubiquitous need for them: we all do regrettable things as a result of our own circumstances, and new rituals are frequently invented in response to new circumstances. — Susan Cain

The first, clearer, type suggests the musical pattern of theme and variations. The chosen theme persists through the six stages, in various aspects. The second type is more difficult to analyze. A recurrent leitmotiv is lacking here; instead six differerent stages whose connection is usually an inner one are joined together in mosaic fashion. But on both types, the so-called judgment is the tenor which is maintained through all the changes. — Hellmut Wilhelm

The prisoner's recurrent, sporadic dreams of escape were simply that - spurious vagaries dismissed almost as quickly as they blossomed in Schkirt's feverish mind. — Stanley Goldyn

In his 1923 review of James Joyce Ulysses, T. S. Eliot focused on one of his generation's recurrent anxieties
the idea that art might be impossible in the twentieth century. The reasons that art seemed impossible are many and complex, but they were all related to the collapse of ways of knowing that had served the Western mind at least since the Renaissance and that had received canonical formulation in the seventeenth century in the science of Newton and the philosophy of Descartes. In both science and philosophy, the crisis was essentially epistemological; that is, it was related to radical uncertainty about how we know what we know about the real world. This crisis, disorienting even to specialists, was at once a cause of despair and an incentive for innovation in the arts. — Jewel Spears Brooker

A style is the consequence of recurrent habits, restraints, or rules invented or inherited, written or overheard, intuitive or preconceived. — Paul Rand

When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men. — Pat Conroy

But the first glad moment in our first love is a vision which returns to us to the last, and brings with it a thrill of feeling intense and special as the recurrent sensation of a sweet odour breathed in a far off hour of happiness. It is a memory that gives a more exquisite touch to tenderness, that feeds the madness of jealousy, and adds the last keenness to the agony of despair. — George Eliot

Lyall felt he could not say which of two things was harder to put up with, the Abbot's conversational style, with its bland coherence and assumption of severely limited cogitative powers in the hearer, or his recurrent look of pleased surprise as each fresh piece of evidence of his wisdom or moral worth turned up, but between them they were likely to implant in certain minds a hardy seed of revolt. — Kingsley Amis

It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestrial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction. — Kingsley Amis

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

The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable — Aldous Huxley

But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination
with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced. Writers often delighted in leading readers into, but not out of, the haunted dusk of the borderland. — Howard Kerr

The spiritual discipline of simplicity is not a lost dream, but a recurrent version throughout history. It can be recaptured today. It must be. — Richard J. Foster

Two days prior to the Herrick operation I repaired a double cleft lip, resected a recurrent cancer of the mouth, corrected lop ears in a child, and closed a burn of the buttocks. — Joe Murray

When a country is largely owned by foreigners, there is a recurrent and almost irrepressible social demand for expropriation. — Anonymous

I was afraid the staff would laugh at me - and as frightened as I was, the thought of derision frightened me even more. In retrospect, it was a life-threatening deception, somewhat along the lines of hiding recurrent chest pains from one's cardiologist from embarrassment. Nearly — Elyn R. Saks

At physical death man loses his consciousness of the flesh and becomes conscious of his astral body in the astral world. Thus physical death is astral birth. Later, he passes from the consciousness of luminous astral birth to the consciousness of dark astral death and awakens in a new physical body. Thus astral death is physical birth. These recurrent cycles of physical and astral encasements are the ineluctable destiny of all unenlightened men. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Lillian's recurrent dream of a ship that could not reach the water, that sailed laboriously, pushed by her with great effort, through city streets, had determined her course toward the sea, as if she would give this ship, once and for all, its proper sea bed. — Anais Nin

He woke once more to external reality, looked round him, knew what he saw- knew
it, with a sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the recurrent delirium
of his days and nights, the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness. — Aldous Huxley

I realized that if I wanted to truly talk about vastness and the sublime and scale and the West - recurrent themes in my overall work - I needed to engage with the vast ocean that is Los Angeles. — Michael Light

So the mythological imagination moves as it were in circles, hovering either to find a place or to return to it. In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity in the idea of seeking for a place with a most dark and deep and mysterious levity about all the places found. — G.K. Chesterton

It turns out that all the "magic" of cognition depends, just as life itself does, on cycles within cycles of recurrent, "re-entrant," reflexive information-transformation processes — Daniel C. Dennett

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. — E.B. White

Television's contribution to family life has been an equivocal one. For while it has, indeed, kept the members of the family from dispersing, it has not served to bring them together. By its domination of the time families spend together, it destroys the special quality that distinguishes one family from another, a quality that depends to a great extent on what a family does, what special rituals, games, recurrent jokes, familiar songs, and shared activities it accumulates. — Marie Winn

Rachel was a girl who depended on small, recurrent rituals - that was one of the things he'd come to know about her, and his very ability to identify so specific a trait made him proud of his own capacity for tenderness. — Richard Yates

The idea of the Eternal Return can be fully grasped only by a man endowed with several chronic, hence recurrent infirmities, and who thus has the advantage of proceeding from relapse to relapse, with all that this implies as philosophic reflexion. — Emil Cioran

Comprehending at one bound the myth of Demeter and knowing that she was Demeter, that the fountain between her thighs was my own youth and I Persephone, who had come to her in spring and would come forever, for she was my youth, older than I and yet my youth, my ever-recurrent spring, and spring itself only a metaphor for the source, the waters, the hidden river, the tunnel of life between her thighs. — Kate Millett

That recurrent dream had the quality of not being remembered except within the dream itself — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Witch-hunting misogyny is fiercely recurrent in this nation, even if its forms vary with the ages. — Patricia J. Williams

In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of [Joyce's] characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring. — John Munro Woolsey

Temporal experience is neither completely recurrent (in which case it would be wholly knowable) nor completely variable (in which case it would be wholly inscrutable). In effect, it is more like a piece of complex music, a Bach fugue heard for the first time. In one sense, we are excited and surprised by the novel disposition of tones and rhythms and by the uncanny variety of the treatment. In another sense, we realize that recurring ideas and cycles are what give the work its native character, and that the variations, however stunning, have significance only in terms of their relationship to these underlying themes. Conversely, the recurrent themes are realizable in their fullest sense only through the variations upon them. The careful student of time is thus as sure that certain things will recur as he is sure that they will recur in dazzling new forms. — Robert Grudin

It would seem that Caesar's recurrent and deep-rooted fault was his concentration in pursuing the objective immediately in front of his eyes to the neglect of his wider object. Strategically he was an alternating Jekyll and Hyde. — B.H. Liddell Hart

Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval. — Vladimir Nabokov

RECURRENT CURRENTS
Like the ocean, life ebbs and flows with the occasional rip
Kamil Ali — Kamil Ali

I possess everyone who sleeps in the motor court, roam their memories, and embed recurrent nightmares that will destroy their sleep for weeks after I've departed them."
"I'd prefer a free continental breakfast. — Dean Koontz

Even if he was happier in Asia than he'd been in Latin America, the wanderlust still worked on my father's insides like a disease. One of the most recurrent memories of my childhood is of him sitting in his armchair in the evenings, poring over atlases the way other fathers read newspapers or books. — Scott Anderson

A search for justification and the impossibility of justification are recurrent motifs in the philosophy of Sartre. His philosophy is one of the incarnations of problematism and of the ambiguity of contemporary thought (for Man does seem, to the contemporary mind, to be ambiguous). — Jean-Paul Sartre

It is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique. He is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in the last analysis can be neither known nor compared with anything else. — C. G. Jung

What's distressed me, and I think is one of the major reasons we get recurrent intensifying crises, is we seem to have lost our capacity for outrage. And it's only people getting outraged that produces really positive social change. — William K. Black

I thought of how many women told me dispiritedly about how their husbands waited for them to ask - or to make a list - and how demoralizing that was for them. I could not help thinking that there was some element of passive aggression in this recurrent theme of nice men, good, playful dads, full of initiative and motivation at work, who "waited to be asked" to do the more tedious baby-related work at home, until the asking was finally scaled back or stopped. — Naomi Wolf

After the success of Buddenbrooks, he married and fathered six children. Yet the surviving diaries tell us of recurrent sexual problems - and of Katia Mann's extremely sympathetic response to them — Philip Kitcher

Literature provides a person with a conceptual framework for recognizing human beings recurrent challenges in life. Reading good literature deepens a person's understanding of the variable ways that somebody might respond to circumstances in their world, thereby adding to their own potential intellectual and spiritual depth and expands their understanding of the nuances of their own personal behavior. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Confronted with the twin disasters of climate change and an impending oil peak, it is hard to see how anyone could justify the assertion that the need to drive a car which can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles an hour in 4.5 seconds (the Audi S4 for example) overrides the Ethiopians' need to avoid recurrent famines, or the whole world's need to avoid the economic catastrophe we'll suffer if petroleum peaks too soon. — George Monbiot

crystals and low-grade inflammation can persist in the joint during this period.23 Once an initial acute gout attack has occurred, further attacks are likely to follow. Recurrent attacks of acute gout often lead to chronic tophaceous gout, in which monosodium urate deposits (tophi) form in the soft tissues, usually along the rim of the ear, over the elbow joint, and in the joints of the fingers and toes. Tophi reduce the growth and viability of bone cells (osteoblasts),24 and if left untreated, tophaceous gout can lead to significant joint erosion and loss of function.22 — Life Extension

For years it seemed to me that this period had become a recurrent nightmare that I had almost every night, because I would wake in the morning feeling the same terror I had felt in the room with the saint. During my adolescence, when I was a student at an icy boarding school in the Andes, I would wake up crying in the middle of the night. I needed old age without remorse to understand that the misfortune of my grandparents in the house in Catasa was that they were always mired in their nostalgic memories, and the more they insisted on conjuring them, the deper they sank. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) also has dissociative symptoms as an essential feature. PTSD has been classically seen as a biphasic disorder, with persons alternately experiencing phases of intrusion and numbing... [T]he intrusive phase is associated with recurrent and distressing recollections in thoughts or dreams and reliving the events in flashbacks. The avoidant/numbing phase is associated with efforts to avoid thoughts or feelings associated with the trauma, emotional constriction, and social withdrawal. This biphasic pattern is the result of dissociation; traumatic events are distanced and dissociated from usual conscious awareness in the numbing phase, only to return in the intrusive phase. — James A. Chu

In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing — G.K. Chesterton

From this haunting feeling of being not wanted, which remained a recurrent haunt through life, I found two ways of escape, both of which in changing form also persisted. One was the invention of gods, the other was personal efficiency in work. — Anna Louise Strong

The word crisis- is from the Greek, meaning a moment to decide.- The recurrent moments of crisis and decision when understood, are growth junctures, points of initiation which mark a release from one state of being and a growth into the next. — Jill Purce

Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist. — Mary McCarthy

Potable, n. Suitable for drinking. Water is said to be potable; indeed, some declare it our natural beverage, although even they find it palatable only when suffering from the recurrent disorder known as thirst, for which it is a medicine. — Ambrose Bierce

A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success; — Daniel Kahneman

This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea, and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal. — C.S. Lewis

We all have such fateful objects
it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another
carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break. — Vladimir Nabokov

There is clearly a feeling abroad that God smiled on our beginnings, and that we should return to them as we can. If we really did attempt to return to them, we would find Moses as well as Christ, Calvin, and his legions of intellectual heirs. And we would find a recurrent, passionate, insistence on bounty or liberality, mercy and liberality, on being kind and liberal, liberal and bountiful, and enjoying the great blessings God has promised to liberality to the poor. — Marilynne Robinson

In describing the ways that religious and other types of communities appropriate and understand their histories, among both fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists, the sociologist Anthony Giddens utilizes the term "reflexivity" and states that it is the characteristic of "all human action." Reflexivity takes place when individuals and/or communities utilize their perceptions of their histories as a way of guiding their present and future actions. For Giddens, tradition is a means of "handling time and space, which asserts any particular activity or experience with the community of past, present, and future, these in turn being structured by recurrent social practices." In light of this, tradition is a set of entities which religious communities and cultures continually reconstruct within certain parameters. Religions are not completely static in that almost every new generation reinvents the religious and cultural inheritance from the generations that preceded it. — Jon Armajani

Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don't in don't shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people
are right more than half the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths,the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. — E.B. White

What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hunger is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls. — Denis Diderot

One learns to accept the fact that no permanent return is possible to an old form of relationship; and, more deeply still, that there is no holding of a relationship to a single form. This is not tragedy but part of the ever-recurrent miracle of life and growth. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

If you find yourself plagued by a recurrent worry, train yourself to think of something else. Your conscious mind can concentrate on only one thought at a time, and driving the negativity away will free you up to move forward again. — Harvey MacKay

Mannerism, especially when it takes the form of recurrent word or phrase, is by no means easy to represent; there is but a hair's breadth between the point at which the reader delightfully recognizes is as a revealing habit of speech, and the point at which its iteration begin to weary him. — Mary Lascelles

She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer. — Vladimir Nabokov

For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts. — John Drinkwater

Except that the poor other man i was to run off with died, remember. Suddenly there is death. Life goes on but he's not here. There are certain recurrent shocks in life, which you can just steady yourself for
you can take a deep breath and it passes by and it doesn't hurt so much. But this is different. He was such a support for me in my head for so long. And now he's not here even to be there. I've managed, however. Actually I've been so heroic I wouldn't recognize myself. — Philip Roth

We used to call it recurrent airplay when someone had a hit. — Michael Bolton

In the world "out there," there are no verbs, no speech events, and no adjacency pairs. There are particles of matter moving around in certain recurrent and yet not fully predictable patterns. We interpret such experiences as and through symbolic means, including linguistic expressions. That's what it means to be human. — Duranti A Alessandro

Recurrent floods of sadness and anger gradually wash away the rubble of the defunct relationship, leaving only the bits of treasure: the remembered moments of real communion, a new understanding of your own mistakes, a clear picture of the dysfunctions you will never tolerate again. — Martha Beck

The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there? — Rose Macaulay

Recurrent memories of Henry Schoonmaker were the most exciting thing to happen in her conscious mind these days. — Anna Godbersen

So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. — Italo Calvino

There is a recurrent scene from those dinners that surfaces again and again, like an obsessive undercurrent in a dream. Julian, at the head of the long table, rises to his feet and lifts his wineglass. 'Live forever,' he says.

And the rest of us rise too, and clink our glasses across the table, like an army regiment crossing sabres: Henry and Bunny, Charles and Francis, Camilla and I. 'Live forever,' we chorus, throwing our glasses back in unison.

And always, always, that same toast. Live forever. — Donna Tartt

One gets recurrent thoughts about things he had insisted upon and about matters he formed opinions! — Dada Bhagwan

Plant diseases, drought, desolation, despair were recurrent catastrophes during the ages - and the ancient remedies: supplications to supernatural spirits or gods. — Norman Borlaug

A kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name. CHAPTER III. - The Suicide — G.K. Chesterton

When I first met him, he had a recurrent nightmare that Henry Kissinger was chasing him with a knife, and I said it was really his father, and he said it was really Henry Kissinger, and I said it was his father and he said it was Henry Kissinger, and this went on for months until he started going to the Central American shrinkette, who said Henry Kissinger was really his younger sister. — Nora Ephron