Quotes About Repetition

compensating for utter vacuity with numerically staggering indulgence, hoping to make up in sheer repetition of experience what was missing in depth and meaning.

The difference between mad people and sane people," Brave Orchid explained to the children, "is that sane people have variety when they talk story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over." Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine — like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.

When I was young, I was attracted to sorrow. It seemed interesting. It seemed an energy that would take me somewhere. Now I am older . . . and I hate sorrow. I see that it has no energy of its own, but uses mine, furtively. I see that it is leaden, without breath, and repetitious, and unsolvable. And now I see that I am sorrowful about only a few things, but over and over.

The different and the novel are sweet, but regularity and repetition are also teachers.

The other way to train medics is to have them practice a skill so many times that it becomes automatic. So when the prefrontal cortex goes AWOL, when reasoning drops away, muscle memory, one hopes, will persist.

I grew very weary and irritable with the curate's perpetual ejaculations;

Writing about an idea frees me of it. Thinking about it is a circle of repetitions.

Promiscuity is like never reading past the first page. Monogamy is like reading the same book over and over.

People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they're reflecting too. You know, like the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other across a narrow passage. [...] Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes.

When I left class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of dream?

It is amazing how everything can fall into a routine

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." — Attributed to Aristotle

Greatness is very boring.

If I eat one more egg omelet I think Ill turn over easy and cluck.

suffering in the midst of the vast city from solitude so acute that not even the narcotic of late-night television talk shows could distract them from occasional nocturnal forays in search of signs of other life; even other furita, on their way back to their parents' houses, which, to make their meager ends meet, they still inhabited, who might share a tired cigarette and an unfunny joke before sleeping off the morning, then rising to do it all over again later that day.

When you hear the same story everywhere you look and listen, you assume it must be true.

When you hear the same story everywhere you look and listen, you assume it must be true. And the more people believe it's true, the more likely they are to repeat it, and thus the more likely you are to hear it. This is how inaccurate information can create a bandwagon effect, leading quickly to a broad, but mistaken, consensus.

The widespread notion that stories never should be changed but should be repeated without alteration every time is an innovation of modern written cultures.

A trick of vocabulary: we say to develop a photograph '; but what the chemical action develops is undevelopable, an essence (of a wound), what cannot be transformed but only repeated under the instances of in-sistence (of the insistent gaze). This brings the Photo-graph (certain photographs) dose to the Haiku. For the notation of a haiku, too, is undevelopable: everything is given, without provoking the desire for or even the pos-sibility of a rhetorical expansion.

How we make large circles in earth for ourselves… Around we go, back to the start and the start is there again: resumption, which was ever the curse of daylight. How long before we see daylight again?

I never read the paper myself. Why bother? It's the same old shit day in and day out, dictators beating the ching-chong out of people weaker than they are, men in uniforms beating the ching-chong out of soccer balls or footballs, politicians kissing babies and kissing ass.

The same meat, at the same time, from the same butcher. Who always says the same things, unless I say something different. I'll admit, buddy, that it's sometimes crossed my mind to walk up to him and say, 'How's it going there, Mr. Warren, you old bald bastard? Been fucking any warm chicken-holes lately?

George Orwell knew when he wrote 1984: if you say a thing often enough, it will be accepted as truth.