Familiar Quotes - Page 25

• The woman was silent, her eyes on the floor. Shimamura had come to a point where he knew he was only parading his masculine shamelessness, and yet it seemed likely enough that the woman was familiar with the failing and need not be shocked by it. He looked at her. Perhaps it was the rich lashes of the downcast eyes that made her face seem warm and sensuous. She shook her head very slightly, and again a faint blush spread over her face.

  Yasunari Kawabata

  Eye, Needs, Faces

  Yasunari Kawabata (2013). “Snow Country”, p.21, Vintage

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• The ego relies on the familiar. It is reluctant to experience the unknown, which is they very essence of life.

  Deepak Chopra

  Spiritual, Essence, Ego

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• The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon.

  Kim Edwards

  Moon, Breaths

  Kim Edwards (2006). “The Memory Keeper's Daughter: A Novel”, p.248, Penguin

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• Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write

  George Sand

  Queens, Powerful, Writing

  George Sand “Les ëuvres Choisies de George Sand. The Selected Works of George Sand”, Library of Alexandria

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• I heard the bells on Christmas Day Their old, familiar carols play, And wild and sweet The words repeat Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Christmas, Sweet, Xmas

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, J. D. McClatchy (2000). “Poems and Other Writings”, p.475, Library of America

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• There was another reason [she] took her books whenever they went away. They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends -- daring and knowledgeable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored.

  Cornelia Funke

  Clever, Powerful, Book

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• Are you familiar with that play? In fact, we're almost living it!

  Michael Buckley

  Play, Facts

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• Maybe you once were excited about that person God supernaturally brought into your life as a marriage partner, but now all the excitement has worn off. Don’t’ allow that sense of a miracle to slip away. Don’t get so familiar with each other that you take one another for granted.

  Joel Osteen

  Miracle, Excitement, Excited

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• ...for reading, once begun, quickly becomes home and circle and court and family, and indeed, without narrative, I felt exiled from my own country. By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one's familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways, immobile and thus unfettered.

  Matthew Tobin Anderson

  Country, Book, Reading

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• All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms.

  J. G. Ballard

  Past, Egypt, Museums

  "The Atrocity Exhibition". Book by J. G. Ballard, 1970.

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• Now, bitterly, with one sweep of the front door, the compassion was spent. To the degree that Lawrence's face was familiar, it was killingly so - as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known. She'd been handed her diploma. There were no more surprises - or only this last surprise, that there were no more surprises. To torture herself, Irina kept looking, and looking, at Lawrence's face, like turning the key in an ignition several times before resigning herself that the battery was dead.

  Lionel Shriver

  Compassion, Keys, Doors

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• He looked into the crowd for approval, saw his mother and father. He waved and they waved back. Smiles and Indian teeth. They were both drunk. Everything familiar and welcome. Everything beautiful.

  Sherman Alexie

  Beautiful, Mother, Father

  Sherman Alexie (2013). “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”, p.107, Open Road Media

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• McKenna will always be a part of me, no matter where he goes. They say that people who've lost a limb sometimes feel as if they still have it. How many times I've felt that McKenna was still here, and the empty space beside me was alive with his presence." She closed her eyes and leaned forward until her forehead and the tip of her nose touched the cool glass. "I love him beyond reason," she whispered. "He's a stranger to me now, and yet he is still so familiar. I can't imagine a sweeter agony, having him so close.

  Lisa Kleypas

  Eye, I Love Him, Agony

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• The fields stretch out in long unbroken rows. We walk aware of what is far and close. Here distance is familiar as a friend. The feud we kept with space comes to an end.

  Theodore Roethke

  Distance, Space, Long

  Theodore Roethke (2011). “The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke”, p.31, Anchor

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• And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Summer, Sunshine, Tree

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more”, p.481, e-artnow

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• For now, I just want things all safe and familiar. My life may not be perfect, but it is what I have known.

  Ann M. Martin

  May Not Be Perfect, Safe, Want

  Ann M. Martin (2013). “A Corner of the Universe”, p.23, Scholastic Inc.

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• It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

  Carson McCullers

  Country, Home, Simple

  Carson McCullers (1975). “The mortgaged heart”, Penguin Books Ltd

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• The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?

  Stewart O'Nan

  Acceptance, Romance, Midwest

  Stewart O'Nan (2008). “Songs for the Missing: A Novel”, p.12, Penguin

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• A familiar name on its own, however, does not carry its bearer far unless the talent is there, and the will to work.

  Daphne du Maurier

  Names, Doe, Talent

  Daphne Du Maurier (1980). “The Rebecca notebook and other memories”, Book Sales

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• The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass.

  Tennessee Williams

  Glasses, Cities, Pieces

  Tennessee Williams (1945). “The Glass Menagerie”, p.97, New Directions Publishing

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• I didn't have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw it's fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.

  Haruki Murakami

  Book, Eye, Enough

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Sep 24, 2015

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• I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Country, Dream, New York

  Off the Page with Carole Burns, www.washingtonpost.com. May 9, 2006.

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• To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

  Michael Joseph Oakeshott

  Laughter, Perfect, Facts

  "On Being Conservative". Essay by Michael Joseph Oakeshott, 1956.

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• A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.

  Michel Foucault

  Thinking, Practice, Criticism

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• Hey there. Here's something familiar, a bat. Hope you like it.

  Koushun Takami

  Bats, Hey, You Like It

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