Familiarity Quotes

“Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table ....”
― W.H. Auden, Collected Poems

“When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you've worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recogonize so well you could draw it by heart and for this very reason keep it with you on journeys at all times. And yet, when you least expect it, one day you open your eyes and there is an unfamiliar turnoff, a vantage point taht wasn't there before, and you have to stop and wonder if maybe this landmark isn't new at all, but rather something you have missed all along.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.

How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“His beard was all colors, a grove of trees in autumn, deep brown and fire-orange and wine-red, an untrimmed tangle across the lower half of his face. His cheeks were apple-red. He looked like a friend; like someone you had known all your life.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“The world needs someone they can admire from a distance; from a very far distance.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.”
― Don DeLillo

“There is something particularly fascinating about seeing places you know in a piece of art - be that in a film, or a photograph, or a painting.”
― Sara Sheridan

“When you’re in love with two people, always choose the second. The fact that you are constantly thinking of the second person makes it obvious that the first will never fulfill you, unless the second person did not fulfill you either. At this point, you have to choose the third person because God is getting a little tired of your inattention and indecisiveness, and is planning on sending a fourth person into your life just to slap you around with the bible for not entering the promised land.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“It's weird when you hear teachers call each other by their first names. It's like they're friends or something.”
― Brian Francis

“One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That's what you wanted to write about, about what you didn't know. So. What mysterious time and place don't we know?"

[Remember This: Write What You Don't Know (New York Times Book Review, December 31, 1989)]”
― Ken Kesey

“Even in the familiar there can be surprise and wonder.”
― Tierney Gearon

“The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur. ”
― Julian Barnes

“Just because something is familiar, doesn't mean it's safe. And just because something feels safe, doesn't mean it's good for you.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“Inside the person you know, there is a person you do not know.”
― Christy Lefteri, The Beekeeper of Aleppo

“Doesn't being over-familiar put you at a disadvantage? A more formal way of speaking doesn't just mean you're being polite, it's also a way of protecting yourself.”
― Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years

“What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to 'Know' - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as 'outside us'.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“If you listen, I’ll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we’re not enemies anymore.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Anne’s is a world very like this one, and you can move about in it with familiarity - but not freedom: it is a place of rigorous consequence, where the weak have to give way to the strong, where her governess heroine Agnes must walk as best she can in the cold shade of money and masculinity.”
― Jude Morgan, The Taste of Sorrow

“شاید ہم لوگوں سے کہیں زیادہ ان کے معمولات سے مانوس اور آشنا ہو جاتے ہیں۔ ہماری ذاتی اشیاء، اوقات کار اور عادات ہماری پہچان بن جاتے ہیں اور خود ہم اس پہچان میں کہیں کھو سے جاتے ہیں۔”
― Hashim Nadeem, Parizaad / پری زاد

“The ‘easy-road’ is nothing more than a permanent rest stop on something that we thought to be a road.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“. . . finding the familiarity of captivity more reassuring than the strange call of freedom.”
― Elif Şafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

“. . . almost EVERYTHING we look at triggers a tiny flash of affect . . . [social psychologist Robert] Zajonc was able to make people like any word or image just by showing it to them several times. The brain tags familiar things as good things. Zajonc called this the "mere exposure" affect and it is a basic principle of advertising.”
― Jonathan Haidt

“(Beware of Strangers)
As children, we are taught to beware of strangers, to refrain from approaching them.

As we grow older, we learn that no one is stranger than those we thought we’d known all our lives.

We learn that a stranger may carry more empathy, and understand us more deeply, and that affections from a stranger may be more sincere.

So, I ask: Can humanity and strangeness be synonymous? Could we say, 'I am a stranger; therefore I am'?

Can we truly feel alive without strange things, strange encounters, without strangers reminding us that our hearts and minds are still beating?

They teach us to avoid strangers, yet life teaches us that human awareness can only be born of the dagger of strangeness… that life is tasteless without mingling with strangers… that familiarity is opposed to life!

Thus, I loudly declare: A stranger I was born; a stranger I wish to remain! And I ask that you issue my death certificate the day I become familiar.

October 29, 2022”
― Louis Yako, سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]

“That was a to do, I thought, grateful that the moment was over. Yet I found myself returning to the memory throughout the day, as a person might absently touch a favored piece of jewelry.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands

“…freedom rarely arrives in the form we think it should. In fact, for most of us, freedom feels not only unfamiliar but distinctly unpleasant. That’s because we’re used to our chains. They might chafe, they might make us bleed, but at least they’re familiar. Familiarity is just a thought, however, or sometimes a feeling.”
― Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness

“Sometimes she won’t listen,” he said, “when she’s mad.”

We knew this. Not about Abi but about ourselves. Now that we thought about it, we probably didn’t know Abi at all.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds