Unfamiliar Quotes - Page 6

I think that simply nudging yourself into unfamiliar settings - physical or emotional - can produce surprising results on the writing front.

Ralph Keyes

Writing, Emotional, Thinking

Source: writerunboxed.com

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Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.

Ian Mcewan

Sadness, Home, Thinking

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

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When I stay focused and honest about who I am and the image that I hope to portray, then I won't find myself stranded in unfamiliar territory chasing money or popularity. If the work that you do is quality, then you'll be rewarded. It's also good to stretch musically within the realm of your ability, but not if it compromises your integrity.

Oleta Adams

Integrity, Who I Am, Quality

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Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.

Harold Brodkey

Pain, Agony, Shock

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Each of the essays in this volume ranges widely across technical and philosophical domains. They examine both familiar automatons from throughout history and delight us with yet more that will likely be unfamiliar to most readers. But the real treat of the essays is how they will make Artificial Life researchers squirm as they recognize their own intellectual sleights of hand exposed for all to see. Those researchers and the Genesis Redux contributors are all ultimately interested in what it is that truly distinguishes us beings from other lumps of matter.

Rodney Brooks

Real, Philosophical, Hands

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All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.

June Jordan

History, African American, Soul

June Jordan (1981). “Civil Wars”, Beacon Pr

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Too often technology is perceived as the problem rather than the solution; as something to be avoided rather than embraced. This is about as logical as my daughter's observing, while our family was driving through an unfamiliar city, "Trying to read a map while driving causes all the traffic lights to turn green."

Norman Ralph Augustine

Family, Daughter, Technology

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A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man’s business; the eye of the federal inspector will be in every man’s counting house… The law will of necessity have Indus[tr]ial features, it will provide penalties, it will create complicated machinery. Under it, men will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the taxpayer. An army of federal inspectors, spies, and detectives will descend upon the state.

Richard E. Byrd

Home, Eye, Army

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I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.

John Cage

Trying, Sake, Habit

John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.6, Wesleyan University Press

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Five Truths
about
Fear Truth
1. The fear
will never
go away as
long as I continue
to grow. Truth 2. The only way to get rid of the fear of doing something is to go out and do it. Truth 3. The only way to feel better about myself is to go out… and do it. Truth 4. Not only am I going to experience fear whenever I’m on unfamiliar territory, but so is everyone else. Truth 5. Pushing through fear is less frightening than living with the underlying fear that comes from a feeling of helplessness.

Susan Jeffers

Feel Better, Pushing Through, Long

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Paralysis seems to happen on the steepest slope of the survival arc—where almost all hope is lost, when escape seems impossible, and when the situation is unfamiliar to the extreme.

Amanda Ripley

Survival, Impossible, Lost

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Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.

Franz Kafka

Book, Keys, Castles

Franz Kafka (2013). “Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors”, p.23, Schocken

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Christian apologists who argue that a story about an empty tomb is convincing evidence of a resurrected body are likely unfamiliar with Occam’s razor, which states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. They assume that the most likely explanation is miraculous resurrection through some unproven divine connection, but more likely scenarios include a stolen body, a mismarked grave, a planned removal, faulty reports, creative storytelling, edited scriptures, etc. No magic required.

David G. McAfee

Christian, Convincing Evidence, Creative

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Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.

Rebecca Solnit

Fall, Two, Getting Lost

Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.32, Canongate Books

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We shot that in Morocco, and got out of the country at the beginning of July - and two months later came the attack on Twin Towers. The movie was then released in December, so that kind of atmosphere is not something that was unfamiliar to me.

Eric Bana

Country, July, Two

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We shook hands. For a moment our eyes met - which I found surprisingly destabilizing. Then we pulled back and there was a mement of what seemed like mutual appraisal. For me, it was like being at a regatta, sizing up the competition on the dock before climbing into the shells. Could I take him? ... He could inflict serious damage. I sensed that. But he would be unfamiliar with rowers - men used to toiling backwards, blindly, trained, most of all, to endure.

Stefan Kieszling

Eye, Men, Climbing

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A muddy little stream, a village grown unfamiliar with time and trees. I turn around and retrace my way up Main Street and park and have a Coke in the confectionery store. It is run by a Greek, as it used to be, but whether the same Greek or another I would not know. He does not recognize me, nor I him. Only the smell of his place is familiar, syrupy with old delights, as if the ghost of my first banana split had come close to breathe on me.

Wallace Stegner

Running, Smell, Tree

Wallace Stegner (2000). “Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier”, p.29, Penguin

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May you eat an unfamiliar dessert in a strange land at least once every three years.

Rob Brezsny

Years, Land, Three

Rob Brezsny (2005). “Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings”, p.258, Frog Books

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(Home is) a place we carry inside ourselves, a place where we welcome the unfamiliar because we know that as time passes it will become the very bedrock of our being.

Verlyn Klinkenborg

Home, Welcome, Time Passes

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I spend several days at a time without enough sleep. At first, normal activities become annoying. When you are too tired to eat, you really need some sleep. A few days later, things become
strange. Loud noises become louder and more startling, familiar sounds become unfamiliar, and life reinvents itself as a surrealist dream.

Henry Rollins

Dream, Tired, Sleep

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I'm definitely working class, and I still believe in those values. I know that losing everything would not be an unfamiliar feeling. Meaning, if you don't have it anymore, you didn't have it to begin with.

John Travolta

Believe, Losing Everything, Class

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May you eat an unfamiliar dessert in a strange land at least once every three years. May you wake up... and start dancing while you're still half-asleep. May you spray-paint Rilke poems as graffiti on highway overpasses... My you learn to identify by name 20 flowers, 15 trees, 10 clouds, and one extrasolar planet... May you dream of taking a trip to the moon in a gondola powered by firecrackers and wild swans.

Rob Brezsny

Dream, Stars, Flower

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Nothing in music is hard, just unfamiliar.

Kenny Werner

Music Is, Hard

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By seeing the otherness in that which is most unfamiliar, we can learn to see it too in that which at first seemed merely ordinary. If wilderness can do this - if it can help us perceive and respect a nature we had forgotten to recognize as natural - then it will become part of the solution to our environmental dilemmas rather than part of the problem.

William Cronon

Environmental, Firsts, Ordinary

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Right-thinking people are not supposed to discuss any meteorological or geophysical event - a hurricane, a wildfire, a heat wave, a drought, a flood, a blizzard, a tornado, a lightning strike, an unfamiliar breeze, a strange tingling on the neck - without immediately invoking the climate crisis. It causes earthquakes, plagues and backyard gardening disappointments. Weird fungus on your tomato plants? Classic sign of global warming.

Joel Achenbach

Disappointment, Thinking, Earthquakes

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