11 Quotes Tagged: familiarity

I talked about places, about the ways that we often talk about love of place, by which we mean our love for places, but seldom of how the places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer a familiarity that allows some portion of our lives to remain connected and coherent... And distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren't so deeply entrenched and we can imagine other stories, other selves, or just drink up quiet and respite.

Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table ....

Familiarity with any great thing removes our awe of it.

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.

The world needs someone they can admire from a distance; from a very far distance.

... The armour of others is too wide, or too strait for us; it falls off us, or it weighs us down.

You can never be annoyed by anyone when you are just alone, insults comes from being too familiar even with the most respectful persons.

(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.

"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)]

Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.

When two persons are too close, they fall apart.