Accustomed Quotes - Page 14

• Staring at her face, she began to fancy her outer layer had begun to melt away while she wasn't paying attention, and something -- some new skeleton -- was emerging from beneath the softness of her accustomed self. With a deep, visceral ache, she wished her true form might prove to be a sleek and shining one, like a stiletto blade slicing free of an ungainly sheath. Like a bird of prey losing its hatchling fluff to hunt in cold, magnificent skies. That she might become something glittering, something startling, something dangerous.

  Laini Taylor

  Skeletons, Self, Sky

  Laini Taylor (2009). “Lips Touch: Three Times”, p.40, Scholastic Inc.

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• Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled— those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control.

  Alfie Kohn

  Running, Children, Thinking

  Alfie Kohn (1999). “Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes”, p.49, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Sometimes," Jem said, "our lives can change so fast that the change outpaces our minds and hearts. It's those times, I think, when our lives have altered but we still long for the time before everything was altered-- that is when we feel the greatest pain. I can tell you, though, from experience, you grow accustomed to it. You learn to live your new life, and you can't imagine, or even really remember, how things were before.

  Cassandra Clare

  Life, Change, Pain

  Cassandra Clare (2010). “Clockwork Angel”, p.308, Simon and Schuster

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• Experiment! Meet new people. That’s better than any college education . . . By adventuring; about, you become accustomed to the unexpected. The unexpected then becomes what it really is . . . the inevitable.

  Amelia Earhart

  College, People, Unexpected

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• … the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.

  Chaim Potok

  Long, World, Grows

  Chaim Potok (2009). “My Name Is Asher Lev”, p.255, Anchor

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• It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.

  Daniel Handler

  Happiness, Despair, Acquired Taste

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• Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which your are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. ... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal and that you are a paralytic.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Grandmother, Animal, May

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• When I was able to get home it first hit me that you had left and I couldn't do anything about it. Every day before that an evening with you was waiting for me after school, now no more, strange feeling. I had grown too accustomed to your warmth. That is also a danger. At home I looked at the notebooks that you had bought and I got the stupidest surge of hope that I'd find something of you, something especially for meant for me. I would so much like to have something of you that I could always keep by me, that nobody else would notice.

  Sophie Scholl

  Notebook, School, Home

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• Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality....I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.

  Anais Nin

  Life, Children, Pain

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• Daemon had written: "What do you do when she asks a question no man would give a child an answer to?" Saetan had replied: "Hope you're obliging enough to answer it for me. However, if you're backed into a corner, refer her to me. I've become accustomed to being shocked.

  Anne Bishop

  Children, Men, Giving

  Anne Bishop (1998). “Daughter of the Blood: The Black Jewels Trilogy”, p.282, Penguin

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• Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Atheist, Writing, Hands

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• This solitude opressed her; she was accustomed to have her thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted; it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.

  E. M. Forster

  Thinking, Solitude, Events

  E. M. Forster (2013). “Delphi Collected Works of E. M. Forster (Illustrated)”, p.386, Delphi Classics

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• I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Real, Style, Opponents

  Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Hitch 22: A Memoir”, p.270, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.

  Willa Cather

  Attitude, Men, Long

  Willa Cather (2002). “The Professor's House”, p.77, U of Nebraska Press

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• We are accustomed to live in hopes of good weather, a good harvest, a nice love-affair, hopes of becoming rich or getting the office of chief of police, but I've never noticed anyone hoping to get wiser. We say to ourselves: it'll be better under a new tsar, and in two hundred years it'll still be better, and nobody tries to make this good time come tomorrow. On the whole, life gets more and more complex every day and moves on its own sweet will, and people get more and more stupid, and get isolated from life in ever-increasing numbers.

  Anton Chekhov

  Sweet, Stupid, Nice

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• The wise man who has become accustomed to necessities knows better how to share with others than how to take from them, so great a treasure of self-sufficiency has he found.

  Epicurus

  Wise, Men, Self

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• optimism, n. The doctrine, or belief, that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. It is held with greatest tenacity by those most accustomed to the mischance of falling into adversity, and is most acceptably expounded with disproof - an intellectual disorder, yielding to no treatment but death. It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Beautiful, Fall, Adversity

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.175, University of Georgia Press

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• Let me tell you about customs, James," said Lillian. "I am not accustomed to being summoned to someone else's home. You're very fortunate that I came." "I am indeed blessed," Dad told her. "I am also, by the way, called Jon." Lillian looked faintly surprised. "Are you?" "Really?" Dad asked. "Really? I was the only Asian guy who went to our school. I kind of stood out. While you are an identical twin, and I still managed to know your name.

  Sarah Rees Brennan

  Dad, Blessed, Home

  Sarah Rees Brennan (2013). “Untold”, p.175, Simon and Schuster

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• Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armor themselves against wonder.

  Leonard Cohen

  Time, Eye, Animal

  Leonard Cohen (2003). “The Favorite Game: A Novel”, Vintage Books

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• Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?

  Marcel Proust

  Crush, Death, Breathing

  Marcel Proust (2010). “In Search Of Lost Time Vol 1: Swann's Way”, p.96, Random House

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• Men are so accustomed to maintaining external order by violence that they cannot conceive of life being possible without violence.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Peace, War, Men

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• We have become so accustomed to the religious lie that surrounds us that we do not notice the atrocity, stupidity and cruelty with which the teaching of the Christian church is permeated.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Christian, Religious, Lying

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• Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence.

  John Lahr

  Music, Science, Silence

  John Lahr (1970). “Up against the fourth wall: essays on modern theater”

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• Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more he loves it; for the instability; instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Love, Change, Moving

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• To my deafness I'm accustomed, To my dentures I'm resigned, I can manage my bifocals, But Oh how I miss my mind.

  Alec Douglas-Home

  Missing, Mind, Age

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