Quotes About Familiarity

Being continually in people?s sight, by the satiety which it creates, diminishes the reverence felt for great characters.

The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.

The familiarity of home always outweighed the danger. Deadly mistake, that.

The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.

Of course, I thought. Unavailable. Just Charlotte's type. Charlotte, in fact, had used that same expresion every time she mentioned the Dude. He's so my typo. What most people mean by type is a sense of attraction- a type of physical appearance or a type personality turns them on, But what underlies a person's type, in fact, is a sense o familiarity.

Familiarity, not survival, is the strongest drive in human beings.

Bob wasn't precisely a friend to me but... I was used to him. In a way he was family, the mouthy, annoying, irritable cousin who was always insulting you but who was definitely at Thanksgiving dinner. I had never considered the possibility that one day he might be something else.

Better the enemy you know than the enemy you don't.

The passengers weren't treated like refugees but rather long lost relatives.

When you leave New York you ain't going anywhere.

He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the cold conclusion.

In fact I did not need to look, nor could I avoid them by not looking: I knew them by heart.

Dear Joan, the letter begins, although the writer did not know me at all.

Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen.

Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look "right" to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the name of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.

I could picture him gray and gaunt, looking out from an armchair, braving the worst. I knew how he'd be; I knew him. He'd be glad to see me by then, more than glad. I could feel myself wishing it were that time now.

If you live in each other's pockets long enough, you're related.

It's like picking up an unfamiliar piece of sheet music & starting to stumble through it, only to realize it is a melody you'd once learned by heart, one you can play without even trying.

Identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through.

I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself.

Being bored at your own house is so much worse than being bored at somebody elses house.

In short, I was in a familiar place, the place of feeling unfamiliar, which I responded to in my usual fashion by arming myself with a gin and tonic, my first of the evening. I

Can you love someone you don't remember? Can you love someone you don't know?

The land where the stones know you is worth more than the land where the people know you.