Quotes About Repetition

When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.

You'd have to stand twice in the same place to make a shadow.

They went to school, apparently, to learn to say over and over again, regardless of where they were, what had already been said too often. They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself.

Normal is just a cycle on the washing machine.

The man who drinks Zambezi waters must always return to drink again.

One after another, they were examined. One after another, they proved to have nothing to say--and said it (so far as the women were concerned) at great length...

One after another those words travelled over my memory, repeating themselves again and again with a wearisome, mechanical reiteration. I was roused from what felt like a trance of many hours--from what was really, no doubt, the pause of a few moments only--by a voice calling to me.

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present

da capo ad nauseam?

Grove Health Center, trilled the woman on the end of the line. She had the vocal automisation that comes to people whose job description might as well read: 'Ceaseless repetition'.

Because always,' he thinks, 'when anything gets to be a habit, it also manages to get a right good distance away from truth and fact.

Again. Sadder than was. Again. Saddest of all. Again.

Here's a wagon that's going a piece of the way. It will take you that far; backrolling now behind her a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes from day to dark and dark to day again, through which she advanced in identical and anonymous and deliberate wagons as though through a succession of creakwheeled and limpeared avatars, like something moving forever and without progress across an urn.

Wasn't it just one before?' the old porter said. 'Wasn't one enough then to tell us the same thing all them two thousand years ago:

Each generation was a rehearsal of the one before, so that that family gradually formed the repetitive pattern of a Greek fret, interrupted only once in two centuries by a nine-year-old boy who had taken a look at his prospects, tied a string around his neck with a brick to the other end, and jumped from a footbridge into two feet of water. Courage aside, he had that family's tenacity of purpose, and drowned, a break in the pattern quickly obliterated by the calcimine of silence.

Problem what happened he always woke up the same person went to bed the night before only way he knew it these God damned words going through his head, go to bed knew he'd wake up the same God damned person finally couldn't take it anymore, same God damned words waiting for him only thing to do get rid of the God damned container for the thing contained, God damned words come around next morning God damned container smashed on the sidewalk no place for them to . . .

There was that same sense of being surrounded by the sleeping inhabitants of a waking world he had no interest in visiting or knowing, of dull business temporarily suspended, of futility and repetition soon to wake again.

Some things need no study, no learning, no repetition in pursuit of memory. They burn themselves into the eye and can be examined ever after in minute detail. Moreover it is their nature - as we cannot even think, without leaving a mark somewhere on the cosmos - to bring with them their own inescapable interpretation.

History is only a tiresome repetition of one story.

There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.

Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations. On the other hand, the same thing recurring on different days, in different contexts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, related to other things and reviewed, gets well wrought into the mental structure.

Vessels knocked together for hour upon hour, like bones, like someone infinitely stupid and patient at the door of an empty house.

Focus on building habits. When you create habits, you get the new behavior "for free" (think of the stand-up meetings), and you're less likely to backslide.

People tend to overuse any idea or concept that delivers an emotional kick.