Familiar Quotes - Page 23

• Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

  Wallace Stevens

  Boys, Echoes, People

  Wallace Stevens, Holly Stevens (1966). “Letters of Wallace Stevens”, p.575, Univ of California Press

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• We can't solve modern problems by going back in time. Retreating to the safety of the familiar is an understandable response, but God has called us to a life of faith. And faith requires us to face the unknown while trusting Him completely.

  Charles R. Swindoll

  Trusting Him, Safety, Faces

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• Mrs. Obama has a hug - a sincere and friendly embrace - that has become familiar to countless supporters from coast to coast. And when she talks to you, she focuses all her calm attention on your face.

  Andre Leon Talley

  Hug, Friendly, Attention

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• I love Russian culture. I don't know the young Russia, I'm not at all familiar with young Russia, but the old school Russia is good enough for me for the moment.

  Andre Leon Talley

  School, Russia, Culture

  "Q&A: André Leon Talley". Interview with Luisa Zargani, wwd.com. February 28, 2013.

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• The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Writing, Two, Inspiration To Write

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• I don't think politicians should be allowed into power who are not familiar with their bodies, because that's where our bottom line is. And I know that they would make totally different decisions if they felt responsible simply for their own bodies.

  Twyla Tharp

  Thinking, Decision, Different

  "The High Priestess of Creative Movement". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 25, 1993.

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• Living with these teenage boys allowed me to see how much their psyches were like their girl counterparts. They were more familiar to me than I would have thought.

  Marlo Thomas

  Girl, Teenage, Psych

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• Are you familiar with 9/11? Building 7? You know what was in there? All the Enron stuff. I guess that building went down on its own.

  Jesse Ventura

  Stuff, Building, Enron

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• I do a lot of American plays. I've done a lot of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Neil Simon. I was in 'Sisters Rosensweig,' 'Six Degrees of Separation,' all of that stuff. So we're very familiar with America. I did 400 performances of 'Born Yesterday.' I did 700 performances of 'They're Playing Our Song.'

  Jacki Weaver

  Song, America, Play

  "Jacki Weaver Interview ANIMAL KINGDOM". Interview with Sheila Roberts, collider.com. August 12, 2010.

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• There are two sayings that are familiar in every news room across the country: 1) sex sells; 2) if it bleeds it leads.

  Armstrong Williams

  Country, Sex, Two

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• As we divest ourselves of once familiar physical objects - digitize and dematerialize - we approach a 'Star Trek' future in which everything can be accessed from the fourth dimension with a few clicks or terse audibles.

  James Wolcott

  Stars, Dimensions, Clicks

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• Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesn't have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesn't explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.

  James Wolcott

  Running, Team, Character

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• In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down.

  James Wolcott

  Reality, One Direction, Passivity Is

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• When you feel a connection, a gut connection, a heart connection, it's a very special thing. What's familiar to everyone is watching people falling in love; it doesn't happen on screen that often. People fall in lust, then they're suddenly together.

  Alfre Woodard

  Love, Fall, Heart

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• You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.

  Philip Larkin

  Crazy, Odd, Finnegans Wake

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• Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Mother, Art, Thinking

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• If I had grown up in that house I couldn't have loved it more, couldn't have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon . . . . The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood.

  Donna Tartt

  Swings, Blood, Color

  Donna Tartt (2011). “The Secret History”, p.96, Vintage

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• And so I learned that familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evenings may lead as well to prison as to innocent untroubled sleep.

  Albert Camus

  Summer, Sleep, May

  Albert Camus (1982). “The stranger”

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• 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

  Positive, Meaningful, Kitchen Table

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• Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar.

  Cornelia Funke

  Flower, Book, Smell

  Cornelia Funke (2011). “Inkspell”, p.65, Scholastic Inc.

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• If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face. My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness. I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.

  Alice Hoffman

  Daughter, Dream, Stars

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• 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

  Dream, Travel, Home

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• Some stories are so familiar its like going home.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Home, Stories, Going Home

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• Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office. The door opens, and the person holding the knob is asked to identify himself. The agent then says, "I'm going to ask you to come with me.

  David Sedaris

  Home, Doors, Office

  David Sedaris (2000). “Me talk pretty one day”

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• Wow, it really snowed last night! Isn't it wonderful? Everything familiar has disappeared! The world looks brand new! A new year ... a fresh, clean start! It's like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on! A day full of possibilities! It's a magical world, Hobbes, ol' buddy ... let's go exploring!

  Bill Watterson

  New Year, Night, Years

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