Quotes About Routine

running through its usual repertoire of encouraging noises.

Reveille came in the form of an electric buzzer, the kind associated with a cheap alarm clock. That was good news. No bugle--he hated bugles in the morning.

Shortly before seven, he made Katie her sourdough toast and coffee, and woke her up with breakfast in bed. The tire shop he managed was closed on Sunday, so this was the only day he could relieve his wife of what would otherwise be a seven-day-a-week job. Taking care of the kids so she could sleep in an hour was, she frequently assured him, so romantic, and so sexy—and on most Sunday nights after the kids went to bed, she showed him exactly how much she appreciated the gesture. But

Jack missed the normality of merely reading the paper.

He picked the milk off the porch, and then searched for a moment before finding the newspaper in the bushes near the door. The copy of the International Herald Tribune was wrapped in a plastic bag to protect it from the weather, indicating the paperboy had better sense than he had aim.

It is precisely to prevent us from thinking too much that society pressurizes us all to get out of bed.

Something had happened to him ove the past couple of years, something to do with being home with Aaron, sinking into the rhythm of a kid's day. The little tasks, the small pleasures. The repetition that goes beyond boredom and becomes a kind of peace. You do it long enough, and the adult world starts to drift away. You can't catch up with it, not even if you try.

Ritual he liked, but compulsory routine he hated. Thus, he resented every minute that he now had to surrender to showering, shampooing, shaving, and flossing and brushing his teeth. If mere men could devise self-defrosting refrigerators and self-cleaning ovens, why couldn't nature, in all its complex, inventive magnificence, have managed to come up with self-cleaning teeth? There's birth, he grumbled, there's death, and in between there's maintenance.

elated, perhaps, because, in a rational world where even disasters are familiar and damn near routine, something of almost fairytale flavor had occurred?

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?

Before the cook arrived when she stood in a space no wider than a bench is long, back behind and to the left of the milk cans. Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past.

I am determined to de-fang cheap racism, annihilate and discredit the routine, easy, available color fetish, which is reminiscent of slavery itself (The Origin of Others, 53).

Life was often simply the repetition of the same movements in a different order, depending on the day and the place.

No amount of security is worth the suffering of a life lived chained to a routine that has killed your dreams.       I

I hate clocks. They tick. Other things make noises in their time and need, but clocks mechanically beat the seconds to death.

shampoos. Whenever

The days passed, as they do, and life went on.

Habit is far more dependable than inspiration. Make progress by making habits. Don't focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout.

I'm not even supposed to be here today.

I was pacing through the house, brushing my hair, rubbing moisturizer on my face, clipping my toenails, all these little things to make myself presentable, and, each time, I'd look at myself again in the mirror and feel like not a single thing had changed.

In the night I brush my teeth with a razor

because my mother has never been out of bed before the

I have navigated so much of my life on autopilot, moving mechanically through the more routine parts of my day. Then, when the spiritual parts arrive—meetings, speaking, praying, writing, engagements—I ask that His Spirit fill, inhabit and lead me. That is certainly a good thing, but not His best thing. It was never God's intention for any of us to live our lives in the land of perpetually playing spiritual hokey-pokey.

is biological, but we don't always realize that the ability to sleep is a learned skill.