familiarity Quotes

“Many of us have made our world so familiar that we do not see it anymore. An interesting question to ask yourself at night is, What did I really see this day?”

“All of a sudden I knew that of all of the places in the world that I’d ever been in this was the one. That of all the people I’d ever met these were the ones. This was where I was supposed to be.”

“Go ahead and cry, Bud, you’re home.”

“But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.”

“Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way.”

“When we are sad - at least I am like this - it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don’t change.”

“There was something about him—about those eyes and that stare—something familiar. It was the kind of something that made everyone else in the room fade away into the dark recess of my mind until there was no one left but me and him. He was the picture. Everything else around him was just white noise.”

“It’s strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.”

“The price of lasting love is continuing to pay attention to a person, a place, or a work that has become familiar.”

“Proximity bred familiarity, and familiarity bred comfort.”

“There are familiar faces on these trains, people I see every week, going to and fro. I recognize them and they probably recognize me. I don’t know whether they see me, though, for what I really am.”

“The only thing all the intended disorientation had accomplished was to familiarize her with the building. Idiots.”

“With Cats, some say, one rule is true: Don’t speak till you are spoken to. Myself, I do not hold with that — I say, you should ad-dress a Cat. But always keep in mind that he Resents familiarity. I bow, and taking off my hat, Ad-dress him in this form: O Cat! But if he is the Cat next door, Whom I have often met before (He comes to see me in my flat) I greet him with an oopsa Cat! I think I’ve heard them call him James — But we’ve not got so far as names.”

“He would on no account have exchanged those coins, which had become his familiars, for other coins with unknown faces.”

“You’ll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar.”

“The simple joy he felt at being once more a part of such familiar things also contained an element of strangeness and unreality. With a sharp stab of wonder he reminded himself, as he had done a hundred times in the last few weeks, that he had really come home again —”

“Their beautiful mother’s mouth, Estha thought. Ammu’s mouth. That had kissed his hand through the barred train window. First class, on the Madras Mail to Madras. ‘Bye Estha, Godbless, Ammu’s mouth had said. Ammu’s trying-not-to-cry mouth. The last time he had seen her.”

“‘So, I’m not strange anymore?’ he asks. ‘What?’ ‘You’re riding in my car, which must mean I’m not a stranger anymore.’ ‘Actually, the more I’m around you, the stranger you get.’”

“Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions - we can alter the way we think-slice - by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions...It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort. Taking rapid cognition seriously - acknowledging the incredible power, for good and ill, that first impressions play in our lives - requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions.”

“The fact that she stayed home all day in her pajamas translating books by mostly dead people didn’t seem to help matters much.”

“Have we...met before, somewhere else?

“To say the truth women are, in general, too familiar with each other, which leads to that gross degree of familiarity that so frequently renders the marriage state unhappy.”

“Slightest feeling of relief that you are not there, and it is all over. Familiarity and overexposure will cause this reaction. Remain elusive, then. Intrigue your targets by alternating an exciting presence with a cool distance, exuberant moments followed by calculated absences.”

“Familiarity breeds indifference.”

“It was home; her roof, her garden, her green acres, her dear trees; it was shelter for the little family at Sunnybrook.”

“With every second that went past, with every sentence she spoke, she felt a little strength flowing back. And now that she was doing something difficult and familiar and never quite predictable, namely lying, she felt a sort of mastery again, the same sense of complexity and control that the alethiometer gave her.”

“It was like coming home after you’d been gone a long, long time. It held a million promises of summer and of what just might be.”

“The air tasted just the same, smelled just the same. The wind making my hair feel sticky, the salty sea breeze, all of it felt just right. Like it had been waiting for me to get there.”

“Now that he was safe, he wanted to reach out and grasp hold of everything that was familiar and trusted.”

“Do not seek familiarity, do not keep searching for your past in your future. Trust what comes.”

“The stories are old and fluid, as old as humankind. They’re somehow familiar, as if she were born knowing them.”

“She felt powerless and silly. But then she looked at the boards again, with the pieces set in the familiar pattern, and the unpleasant feelings lessened. She might be out of place in this public high school, but she was not out of place with those twelve chessboards.”

“Want is our companion from birth to death, familiar as the seasons or the earth.”

″‘I think you had better not go out in a boat, mademoiselle,’ Eugenio declared. Winterbourne wished to Heaven this pretty girl were not so familiar with her courier; but he said nothing. ‘I suppose you don’t think it’s proper!’ Daisy exclaimed. ‘Eugenio doesn’t think anything’s proper.‘”

Just as she is losing hope of ever finding a home, and forgetting all she once loved, Halinka sees something that reminds her that everyone needs some beauty in their lives, like they need air, or food . . . and maybe a friend.

“Katherine Tyler, though art here accused that not having the fear of God before thine eyes thou hast had familiarity with Satan the grand enemy of God and man, and that by his institution and help thou hast in a preternatural way afflicted and done harm to the bodies and estates of sundry of His Majesty’s subjects, in the third year of His Majesty’s reign, for which by the law of God and the low of the Colony thou deservest to die.”

“It made him feel better to think that there was one familiar thing, twinkling above him, amid so much that was new and strange.”

“My good woman (for the Fairy was very familiar, and no more minded a Queen than a washerwoman)- my good woman, these people who are following you will be the first to turn against you; and as for this little lady, the best thing I can wish her is a LITTLE MISFORTUNE.”

“Every single time I see the ocean, even if I’ve been there in the morning, it feels like a new miracle—its power, its blueness always just as overwhelming. Like falling in love.”

″‘It is difficult to see a situation for what it is when you are in the midst of it,’ Tsukiko says. ‘It is too familiar. Too comfortable.‘”

“Even at my age I saw what this did to Dad’s posture. He was an easygoing metro guy, but Mr. Nick’s casual familiarity with the property immediately pushed some macho rigidity into his spine.”

I heard Joe on the staircase. I knew it was Joe, by his clumsy manner of coming upstairs,—his state boots being always too big for him,—and by the time it took him to read the names on the other floors in the course of his ascent. When at last he stopped outside our door, I could hear his finger tracing over the painted letters of my name, and I afterwards distinctly heard him breathing in at the keyhole.

“whose familiarity seemed so much like unaffected good-nature”