Quotes About Routine

I love ritual and repetition. Without them, I would be a balloon with a slow leak.

A day out of season, stopping the monotonous count of summer days. Stopping, too, one's own summer routine, so that, looking out on the gray skies, one says not only, 'What time of year is it?' but, 'What time of life am I in? Where am I? What am I doing?

Would it always be like this? Endless days of needlework, painting, house chores and skills, teas, Papa and Dominic coming home? What did other people do? They married and raised children, ran houses. Of course the poor worked, and society went to parties, rode in the park or in coaches, and presumably had families as well?

I saw my real gods . . the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity.

What in hell was mortality? Shitting, pissing, eating, and then the same cycle all over again!

El caos era el vacío sin sentido de la vida cotidiana

Y vi mis dioses verdaderos... los dioses de la mayoría de los hombres: la comida, la bebida y la seguridad en el conformismo. Cenizas.

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.

When she went out to the kitchen, I knew she would be getting her Triscuits. That was what she had for her snack at the end of every workday: six Triscuits exactly, because six was the serving size listed on the box. She showed a slavish devotion to the concept of a recommended serving size....

She had tried her best to be a good mother---which to her meant a predictable mother. She had promised herself that her children would never have to worry what sort of mood she was in; they would never peek into her bedroom in the morning to see how their day was going to go. She was the only woman she knew whose prime objective was to be taken for granted.

when I get up in the morning I think, boy, only fourteen more hours and I can be back to sleep again. I

flossing his teeth. He couldn't go to bed without flossing his teeth. For some reason, Sarah had found this irritating. If Macon were condemned to death, she'd said once, and they told him he'd be executed by firing squad at dawn, he would no doubt still insist on flossing the night before. Macon, after thinking it over, had agreed.

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

She went to the kitchen for plates, and as she returned, one of the

I broke my days into separate moments," he said. "See, it's true I didn't have any more to look forward to. But on the other hand, there were these individual moments that I could still appreciate. Like drinking that first cup of coffee in the morning. Working on something fine in my workshop. Watching a baseball game on TV.

Everything was harried and nightmarish and yet the same small practical things were going on at the same time.

Does he ever stop to consider his life? The meaning of it, the point? Does it trouble him to think that he will probably spend his next thirty or forty years this way? Nobody knows. And it's almost certain nobody's ever asked him. On a Monday toward the end of October, he was still eating breakfast when his first call came in.

She had promised herself that her children would never have to worry what sort of mood she was in; they would never peek into her bedroom in the morning to see how their day was going to go. She was the only woman she knew whose prime objective was to be taken for granted.

He ate an apple and a little box of raisins from his bag, drank the milk, and went off to the lavatory to floss and brush his teeth.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.

Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading--that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur's life a good one, or Thomas Mann's?

Doing what you're supposed to do is always boring.

The stitches in my forehead itched, loud noises made me jump, and I'd been wearing the same socks for three days in a row. Everyone

That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.