Quotes About Routine

Change of habit cannot alter Nature.

The man who buries his house in the sand and digs it up again, each evening, learns to put it together quickly and just as quickly to take it apart. My parents sleep like children in the dark. I am too far to hear them breathe

Every day she waits for night-time. She goes to bed at half past eight because that is the earliest time she can imagine going to bed and because that means that the day is officially over and she doesn't have to do anything more about it. About anything.

In general, I call her every night, and we talk for an hour, which is forty-five minutes of me, and fifteen minutes of her stirring her tea, which she steeps with the kind of Zen patience that would make Buddhists sit up in envy and then breathe through their envy and then move past their envy.

I peed, then washed my hands with shampoo. The soap was in the soap dish and looked, at that moment, the size of a piece of soap.

Dad lost his job. Then he got a new job. Then he got his old job back and went back to it. They were all in the same building.

good things have banal ingredients.

The Prestige of Laundry

É impossível continuar a fazer amor se a carpete for sempre a mesma.

Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.

My months in the Scrubs were a kind of desert in time: beyond their strict and ascetic routines they were featureless, and it is hard in retrospect to know what one did on any day or even in any month. I had had, of course, some experience of deserts, even a taste for them, and knew how to fall back, like a camel on its fat, on an inner reserve of fantasy and contemplation.

There's sex and death and human grime in monochrome for one thin dime, and at least all the trains run on time but they don't go anywhere.

It was as if life was one great big impersonal piece of machinery.

Eating was something to do to pass the time.

I studied him and realized that madness is the last defence of the mind when it can't hope to reconcile itself with events; I too was standing between routine and the unknowable.

I hear that 5 o'clock whistle in my mind like Fred Flintstone and I have to stop. I'm also not much of a morning writer. I have a sweet spot from about 11am to 4pm. But I really work during that time.

There's the man with his cart who sold me rolls sprinkled with thyme and sesame every morning and then saluted me like a soldier.

Another woman gave her boyfriend a ten-minute back rub every day he managed to arrive for dinner by 7:00.

When you wake up in the morning, you choose between lying in bed another ten minutes and getting to work on time.

Around this time, I decided to go back to the bathroom and, oh, I don't know, wash my hands, brush my hair, maybe pluck my eyebrows. Stuff.

It was so unlike her not to be able to sleep. No matter what was going on, she was usually out the second her head hit the pillow.

Just as variety was a boon to happiness, ritual was a great duller of pain,

I don't really know how to relate to a long-term day-in day-out kind of comfortable relationship.

On Sunday we didn't work at all. That was the Lord's Day. As soon as we heard the drum beating, we knew it was time for church. We met at the house of Captain Myles Standish, the military leader of the colony. Then we lined up by threes and marched to church. Everybody in town was expected to go (even if they weren't church members), and the service lasted all morning. Then after lunch (which they called dinner) we went back for three more hours!