Novelty Quotes

“Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.”
― Anthony Doerr

“We only know a tiny proportion about the complexity of the natural world. Wherever you look, there are still things we don’t know about and don’t understand. [...] There are always new things to find out if you go looking for them.”
― David Attenborough

“Intensity-seeking is an enslavement of our own perpetuation. When we step out of the delirium of always seeking someone new, and meet the same old sad and lonely child within, our healing journey begins. Exhausting ourselves with novelty is a defense against our deepest pain, one that we cannot outrun. But once we stop and feel our losses, we can begin our healing journey and be the authentic, joyous person we were born to be.”
― Alexandra Katehakis, Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence

“All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept that tradition or they fight against it, it inhabits them, it is their familiar and their succubus. Why write, if everything has, in a way, already been said? Gide observed sardonically that since nobody listened, everything has to be said again, yet a suspicion of guilt and superfluity leads the European intellectual to the most extreme refinements of his trade and tools, the only way to avoid paths too much traveled. Thus the enthusiasm that greets novelties, the uproar when a writer has succeeded in giving substance to a new slice of the invisible; merely recall symbolism, surrealism, the ‘nouveau roman’: finally something truly new that neither Ronsard, nor Stendahl , nor Proust imagined. For a moment we can put aside our guilt; even the epigones begin too believe they are doing something new. Afterwards, slowly, they begin to feel European again and each writer still has his albatross around his neck.”
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“But when fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to recover
the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and objectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, we
must try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural.
Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contempt. For in connection with things so great as are here considered, whatever our view of them,
contempt must be a mistake. Indeed contempt must be an illusion. We must invoke the most wild and soaring sort of
imagination; the imagination that can see what is there.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

“If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

“Emma was just like any other mistress; and the charm of novelty, falling down slowly like a dress, exposed only the eternal monotony of passion, always the same forms and the same language.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Grandmaster games are said to begin with novelty, which is the first move of the game that exits the book. It could be the fifth, it could be the thirty-fifth. We think about a chess game as beginning with move one and ending with checkmate. But this is not the case. The games begins when it gets out of book, and it end when it goes into book..And this is why Game 6 [between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue] didn't count...Tripping and falling into a well on your way to the field of battle is not the same thing as dying in it...Deep Blue is only itself out of book; prior to that it is nothing. Just the ghosts of the game itself.”
― Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

“In these days of faith-cures, and hypnotism, and telepathy, and subliminalities – why, the simple old world grows very confusing. But rarely, very rarely novel.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“Novelty and Security: the security of novelty, the novelty of security. Always the full thing, the whole subject, the true subject, stood just behind the one you found yourself contemplating. The trick, but it wasn't a trick, was to take up at once the thing you saw and the reason you saw it as well; to always bite off more than you could chew, and then chew it. If it were self-indulgence for him to cut and polish his semiprecious memories, and yet seem like danger, like a struggle he was unfit for, then self-indulgence was a potent force, he must examine it, he must reckon with it.”
― John Crowley, Novelty: Four Stories

“A new man is like a new toy. Fresh and interesting. Almost intriguing. It's like when you get a new car. Everything is different. The smell, the sound of the horn and seats, and it even ride good for a while. That's what a man is like to me.”
― Jeanette Michelle, Mycall

“Our nervous system likes familiarity. It like sensuality much because it’s scared of the unknown.”
― Lebo Grand

“Death is great for the appetites. How about those two girls and Gribble? They wanted to see what screwing a dead man felt like. Now for Something Completely New and Different. I don't know if Gribble got much out of it, but they sure as shit did. It's the same with anybody. It doesn't matter if they're eating or drinking or sitting on their cans. They like it better, they feel it and taste it better because they're watching dead men.”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“So much of songwriting hinges on finding new, defamiliarizing ways to express very familiar sentiments, in hopes of being able to reach ears that may be inoculated to true but tired clichés.”
― Robin Pecknold, Wading in Waist-High Water: The Lyrics of Fleet Foxes

“Nothing dazzles like the first time.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“Our nervous system likes familiarity. It hates sensuality because it’s scared of the unknown.”
― Lebo Grand

“Our nervous system likes familiarity. It doesn’t like sensuality much because it’s scared of the unknown.”
― Lebo Grand

“A “rich environment” is a combination platter of novelty, unpredictability, and complexity — three elements that catch and hold our attention much like risk. Novelty means both danger and opportunity. To our forbearers, a strange scent in the wind could be prey or predator, but either way it paid to pay attention. Unpredictability means we don’t know what happens next, thus we pay extra attention to what happens next. Complexity, when there’s lots of salient information coming at us at once, does more of the same.”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“I tried to come up with a smartass quote and ended up on someone's shoulder.”
― Andrei Paler

“A person whose name we know is way more likely, to get our attention, than a person whose name we do not know. The opposite is true, when it comes to things.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“...anything new will activate our stress-response systems. Our default response to novelty is "Uh-oh. What is this?" And until the new thing is proven safe and positive, it will be categorized as a potential threat.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“We all seek novelty whether we realize it or not.”
― Lebo Grand

“Watching the trees bloom in a riot of pink clouds in spring, the red-gold sunrise in the skin of an apple, the shadows mingling on the moss, the moments of novelty and beauty hidden in the repetition— this was the orchard that captured Delphine. She tried to catch its movement in sketches and coax its colors into painted landscapes. And she knew, intuited it from the quietest, deepest part of herself, that there was more of that novelty and beauty waiting to be discovered. Waiting for her.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“That's what only words can do--
Prod us toward something new
& in doing so, move us closer -> together.”
― Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry

“Novelty wears off when you are not totally devoted to the limitless expansion of your sensuality.”
― Lebo Grand

“Novelty is the standard price of sensual connection. However, this price keeps rising like inflation, for good reasons. So that you will keep seeking fuller expression of the sensual life you were meant to live.”
― Lebo Grand

“Novelty is playing in different dimensions of sensuality.”
― Lebo Grand

“Remember, that which makes you yearn for novelty is sensual Life seeking fuller expression.”
― Lebo Grand

“Put simply, when ideating, more is better. When ideating with the goal of reaching deep divergence, more is essential.”
― Kevin Molesworth, The Utility of Deep Divergence in Applied Creativity

“Come good times or bad, there is always a market for things nobody needs.”
― Kin Hubbard