Familiar Quotes - Page 24

By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

Arundhati Roy

Men, Smell, Rose

Arundhati Roy (2002). “The God of Small Things”, p.6, Penguin Books India

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They do not love that do not show their love. The course of true love never did run smooth. Love is a familiar. Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love.

William Shakespeare

Love, Running, Angel

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Her beauty satisfied [his] artistic eye, her peculiarities piqued his curiosity, her vivacity lightened his ennui, and her character interested him by the unconscious hints it gave of power, pride and passion. So entirely natural and unconventional was she that he soon found himself on a familiar footing, asking all manner of unusual questions, and receiving rather piquant replies.

Louisa May Alcott

Character, Eye, Passion

Louisa May Alcott (1997). “A Long Fatal Love Chase”, Thorndike Pr

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It must happen to us all…We pack up what we’ve learned so far and leave the familiar behind. No fun, that shearing separation, but somewhere within, we must dimly know that saying goodbye to safety brings the only security we’ll ever know.

Richard Bach

Motivational, Change, Moving On

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So the Midwest nourishes us [...] and presents us with the spectacle of a land and a people completed and certain. And so we run to our bedrooms and read in a fever, and love the big hardwood trees outside the windows, and the terrible Midwest summers, and the terrible Midwest winters [...]. And so we leave it sorrowfully, having grown strong and restless by opposing with all our will and mind and muscle its simple, loving, single will for us: that we stay, that we stay and find a place among its familiar possibilities. Mother knew we would go; she encouraged us.

Annie Dillard

Summer, Mother, Running

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And now I understand something so frightening &wonderful- how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.

Mary Oliver

Rushing, Mind, Wonderful

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The search for God is a reversal of the normal, mundane worldly order. In search for God, you revert from what attracts you and swim toward that which is difficult. You abandon your comforting and familiar habits with the hope (the mere hope!) that something greater will be offered you in return for what you have given up.. if we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be.. a prudent insurance policy.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Destiny, Order, Swim

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I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.

Jack Kerouac

Dream, Wisdom, Song

Jack Kerouac (2007). “Road Novels 1957-1960”

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...now he saw the familiar wide river beside the path differently. He saw all of the light and color and history it contained and carried in its slow - moving water; and he knew that there was an Elsewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going

Lois Lowry

Moving, Light, Color

Lois Lowry (2014). “The Giver Quartet”, p.121, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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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

Reading, Knowledge, Self

Harold Bloom (2001). “How to Read and Why”, p.29, Simon and Schuster

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Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

Virginia Woolf

Fall, Toss, Poet

Virginia Woolf (2015). “The Waves”, p.51, Booklassic

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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

Life, Change, Dream

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I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

Margaret Atwood

School, People, Different

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God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called creation.

Francis Bacon

Book, Two, Environmental

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Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?

Wilkie Collins

Men, Ideas, Intellectual

Wilkie Collins (2013). “The Woman in White”, p.475, Courier Corporation

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Be civil to all; serviceable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none.

Benjamin Franklin

Life, Relationship, Friends

Benjamin Franklin (2012). “Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard's Almanack”, p.43, Courier Corporation

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Today I will go to wait for her again, because I cannot help it, because my whole being seems now to be bound up in the being of one so different from myself and yet so exquisitely familiar that I can scarely understand what has happened.

Elizabeth Kostova

Waiting, Different, Today

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Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied.

Octavio Paz

Ideas, Erotic, Desire

Octavio Paz (1998). “An Erotic Beyond: Sade”, Harcourt

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...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

Lying, Night, Breathing

Toni Morrison (1992). “Jazz”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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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

Memories, Finding Yourself, Path

Andrew Sean Greer (2007). “The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel”, p.65, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible.

Jeanette Winterson

Invisible, Objects

Jeanette Winterson (2013). “The Powerbook”, p.196, Random House

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Nothing will surprise us more than when we get to heaven and see the Father and realize how well we know Him and how familiar His face is to us.

Ezra Taft Benson

Father, Heaven, Faces

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After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?

Tad Williams

Profound, Bending, World

Tad Williams (2002). “Otherland 4: Sea of Silver Light”, p.584, Penguin

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Vice is a monster of so frightful mien As to be hated needs but to be seen; Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Alexander Pope

Vices, Monsters, Needs

'An Essay on Man' Epistle 2 (1733) l. 217

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It's hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Such communication has always been... one of the primary sources of progress.

John Stuart Mill

Communication, Progress, Action

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