Quotes About Routine

Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race "looking out for its best interests," as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.*

Mediocristan is where we must endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted; Extremistan is where we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen, and the unpredicted.

repeated serial exposure.

Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.

I wonder what life will be like a millennium from now, when the average age will be nearer to one thousand. Will we all be renaissance children, skilled at every art and science, because we've had time to master them? Or will boredom and slavish routine plague us even more than it does today, giving us less of a reason to live limitless lives? I dream of the former, but I suspect the latter.

Even though the whole world had slid of its axis. Breakfast was breakfast. How dare it be?

I'm sure that absolute correctness must seem a dull existence to you, but I know no other way to be

Probably chicken again. He's sick of chicken.

Breakfast was breakfast. How dare it be?

Citra ate, even though she didn't have an appetite. Even though the whole world had slid off its axis. Breakfast was breakfast. How dare it be?

She assumed she would go to college, get a degree in something pleasant, then settle into a comfortable job, meet a comfortable guy, and have a nice, unremarkable life. It's not that she longed for such an existence, but it was expected. Not just of her, but of everyone. With nothing to really aspire to, life had become about maintenance.

Munira Atrushi, like most people in the world, had a job that was perfect in that it was perfectly ordinary. And like most every- one in the world, she didn't hate her job, nor did she love it. Her feelings lingered somewhere near the center.

With nothing to really aspire to, life had become about maintenance. Eternal maintenance.

How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?

the courage it took to get out of bed each morning to face the same things over and over was enormous.

I wasn't going anywhere and neither was the rest of the world. We were all just hanging around waiting to die and meanwhile doing little things to fill the space. Some of use weren't even doing little things. We were vegetables.

Never get out of bed before noon.

Existence was not only absurd, it was plain hard work. Think of how many times you put on your underwear in a lifetime. It was appalling, it was disgusting, it was stupid.

soon I'll finish this 5th of Puerto Rican rum. in the morning I'll vomit and shower, drive back in, have a sandwich by 1 p.m., be back in my room by 2, stretched on the bed, waiting for the phone to ring, not answering, my holiday is an evasion, mt reasoning is not.

we are worn-down, hope stamped out. We reach for coffee cups like the robots about to replace us.

Sunday, the worst god-damned day of them all.

as the junkies junk as the alkies drink as the whores whore as the killers kill the albatross blinks its eyes the weather stays mostly the same.

This kind of life is like everybody else's kind of life: it's killing us.

At lunchtime (10:24 p.m.) I went out and bought the L.A. Times.