Unfamiliar Quotes

1. "I was unprepared for Julia Campbell. I should have done my homework, should have looked before diving into unfamiliar waters. Ditching her proved to be problematic, my sexual needs greater than my common sense."
Author: Alessandra Torre

2. "Emily felt the sweet strains of paranoia drifting back. They told her to look over her shoulder, and when she did, they told her to check the lock on the door, and when she did that, they told her that her fears had meaning and depth, and that she was right to feel them. Each shadow meant something different and strange, an unfamiliar animal or a line of weapons. These visions were terrifying, but after they went away, she felt a strange kind of peace that those things existed in the world, that her world was powerful enough to conjure them. My world, she thought."
Author: Amelia Gray

3. "Death is with you all the time; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it's not unfamiliar to you. It's always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life."
Author: Bell Hooks

4. "The hard core of morality and even of religion seems to me to be just what makes good comedy possible...Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced provincialism in which we may laugh at the merely unfamiliar. Unless there is something about which the author is never ironical, there can be no true irony in the work."
Author: C.S. Lewis

5. "The Sisters vanished entirely then, and Aunt Harriet was standing over Tessa, her face flushed with fever as it had been during the terrible illness that had killed her. She looked at Tessa with great sadness. "I tried," she said. "I tried to love you. But it isn't easy to love a child that isn't human in the least....""Not human?" said an unfamiliar female voice. "Well, if she isn't human, Enoch, what is she?" The voice sharpened in impatience. "What do you mean, you don't know? Everyone's something. This girl can't be nothing at all...."
Author: Cassandra Clare

6. "She knew this music--knew it down to the very core of her being--but she had never heard it before. Unfamiliar, it had still always been there inside her, waiting to be woken. It grew from the core of mystery that gives a secret its special delight, religion its awe. It demanded to be accepted by simple faith, not dissected or questioned, and at the same time, it begged to be doubted and probed."
Author: Charles De Lint

7. "Leadership is particularly necessary to ensure ready acceptance of the unfamiliar and that which is contrary to tradition."
Author: Cyril Falls

8. "England is my home. London is my home. New York feels like, if I have to spend a year living in an unfamiliar city, this is a pretty lovely one to spend a year in, but I will be going home at the end of it, certainly."
Author: Daniel Radcliffe

9. "Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom."
Author: David Wojnarowicz

10. "I watched him playing with the long blades of grass, weaving them into patterns as he hummed an unfamiliar song, a waltz."What are you doing?" I asked him."I'm letting you get used to the idea of me," he said idly. "I'm pretending to be harmless. Is it working?""Until you smile," (...)"
Author: Delilah S. Dawson

11. "I'm trying to go over my lines. I woke up on the floor, somebody had me in their arms. I didn't quite know who, people looked so unfamiliar. That's about all I remember."
Author: Dick York

12. "If you want to love and understand yourself better, seek out unfamiliar people in unfamiliar places."
Author: Elaine Orabona Foster

13. "The journey through another world, beyond bad dreamsbeyond the memories of a murdered generation,cartographed in captivity by bare survivorsmakes sacristans of us all.The old ones go our bail, we oblate preachers of our tribes.Be careful, they say, don't hock the beads of kinship agonies; the moire-effect of unfamiliar hymnsupon our own, a change in pitch or shrillness of the voicetransforms the ways of song to words of poetry or proseand makes distinctionsno one recognizes.Surrounded and absorbed, we tread like Etruscanson the edge of useless law; we prayto the giver of prayer, we give the cane whistlein ceremony, we swing the heavy silver chainof incense burners. Migration makes new citizens of Rome."
Author: Elizabeth Cook Lynn

14. "And suddenly it seemed to Olive that every house she had ever gone into depressed her, except for her own, and the one they had built for Christopher. It was as though she had never outgrown that feeling she must have had as a child - that hypersensitivity to the foreign smell of someone else's home, the fear that coated the unfamiliar way a bathroom door closed, the creak in a staircase worn by footsteps not one's own."
Author: Elizabeth Strout

15. "I'm so unfamiliar with the gym, I call it James!"
Author: Ellen DeGeneres

16. "To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

17. "Don't call me Bistle, yeh sodding half-wit," said the gravely voice, which belonged to a particularly grizzly goblin in black shirt and trousers. "I'm Mr. Saffron when we're on the job. And blast yehr sixth sense. Yeh're just a great coward whenever yeh get in an unfamiliar place. The sooner we get on, the sooner it'll be over and we'll be back to the shack to celebrate."
Author: G. Norman Lippert

18. "A man is perfectly entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. The very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

19. "But when fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to recoverthe candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and objectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, wemust try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural.Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contempt. For in connection with things so great as are here considered, whatever our view of them,contempt must be a mistake. Indeed contempt must be an illusion. We must invoke the most wild and soaring sort ofimagination; the imagination that can see what is there."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

20. "One needs but to say that, in the case of an unfamiliar sequence of syllables, only about seven can be grasped in one act, but that with frequent repetition and gradually increasing familiarity with the series this capacity of consciousness may be increased."
Author: Hermann Ebbinghaus

21. "Giving the tortoise a little wave, I kind of felt stupid afterward for doing so. It just stuck its head back in its green and brown shell. "That's a very interesting pet.""And those are very interesting shorts." His gaze dropped. "What are they?" Leaning forward his eyes narrowed and I stiffened. "Pizza slices?"Heat swamped my cheeks. "They're ice cream cones.""Huh. I like them." Straightening, his gaze drifted up me slowly, leaving an unfamiliar wake of heat behind. "A lot."
Author: J. Lynn

22. "It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been- and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past... Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition."
Author: James P. Carse

23. "In that moment, as they stood smiling at one another, Charlotte was conscious of several contradictory sensations, of which the chief were these: annoyance with herself for being incapable of governing her own actions, satisfaction that Sidney had won this very minor victory over her, amusement, embarrassment - an odd something between perturbation and pleasure - and above all else, a flutter of joyful spirits which made her feel she had strayed somehow into a most unfamiliar world."
Author: Jane Austen

24. "He looked up as the party emerged and nickered a soft hello to his master, who was dressed in an unfamiliar green cloak and had dirt plastered on his face. Halt glanced at him, brow furrowed, and silently mouthed the words 'shut up'. Abelardshook his mane, which was as close as a horse could come to shruging, and turned away.'My horse recognized me,' Halt said accusingly out of the side of his mouth to Horace.Horace glanced at the small shagging horse, standing beside his own massive battlehorse.'Mine didn't,' he replied. 'So that's a fifty-fifty result.''I think I'd like odds better than that,' Halt replied.Horace suppressed a grin. 'Don't worry. He can probably smell you.''I can smell myself,' Halt replied acerbically. 'I smell of tea and soot.'Horace thought it was wiser not to reply to that."
Author: John Flanagan

25. "Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I have not been able to identify its presence."
Author: John Knowles

26. "For you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape."
Author: Joseph Conrad

27. "An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul's summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar; it was a mood. She did not sit there inwardly upbraiding her husband, lamenting at Fate, which had directed her footsteps to the path which they had taken. She was just having a good cry all to herself."
Author: Kate Chopin

28. "An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That's the time and place when you can suppose that all the people you meet are nice. It's dream time."
Author: Louis Ferdinand Céline

29. "It was the Law of Attraction that she was referring to, and it was something I had always understood on a certain, nebulous level but rarely had paid attention to until a situation got so extreme that I had no other choice but to listen because I was out of other options. Like attracts like. Positive attracts positive, negative attracts negative. Change your outlook, change your day-to-day experience, change your future, change your world. Now that I was more conscious of it, I was working to enact it more into my life by making better choices and opening myself to the change that appeared for me to reach out and experience. That was key, too--being open to the change and allowing it to happen. Not being too afraid to experience something efferent and unfamiliar. Allowing yourself to stretch and grow in new ways of being. Change was scary, but it was exciting, too. It all comes back to you and your outlook."
Author: Madelyn Alt

30. "Tourists, a lot of them, wearing unfamiliar faces. There is something subtly different about them, like they're a different species...They're related to us like Dove is related to the water horses."
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

31. "And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding my bicycle, I catch myself feeling, in a way that's as old as I am but suddenly seems unfamiliar, light. I have felt so heavy for so long. At first I felt odd- as if I shouldn't be feeling this lightness, that familiar little catch of pleasure in the heart which is inexplicable, though a lovely passage of notes or the splendidly turned petal of a tulip has triggered it. It's my buoyancy, part of what keeps me alive: happy, suddenly with the concomitant experience of a sonata and the motion of the shadows of leaves. I have the desire to be filled with sunlight, to soak my skin in as much of it as I can drink up, after the long interior darkness of this past season, the indoor vigil, in this harshest and darkest of winters, outside and in."
Author: Mark Doty

32. "[Alon Johnson] Later wrote that, "coming through a battered building near a well known and dangerous doorway. I heard something unfamiliar -- the sound of excited voices somewhere in the distance. The significance of this babble seemed to escape the tired company, but to me it suggested a sudden and radical change in the situation. Important enough to risk being shot at by showing myself in the doorway. Nothing happened, so I stepped into the street,..."
Author: Mark Zuehlke

33. "Judging from the unfamiliar number, I assumed the text came from Shannon. If not, I would see who came by my house at 4:30 and go with it. Maybe it would be Mr. Darcy coming to pick me up in an extravagant horse-drawn carriage, but I couldn't picture Mr. Darcy using a cell phone."
Author: Michelle Madow

34. "She was filled with a strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness, and knew that this was love. Twice in her life she had mistaken something else for it; it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him, but it is not only not the friend, but not even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can't imagine how you ever mistook that other person for him."
Author: Nancy Mitford

35. "I never completely understood the phrase, "I took my medicine religiously", unless of course it was a religion I was unfamiliar with!!"
Author: Neil Leckman

36. "...i have in all honesty believed that two people with similar names must have similar characters, that an unfamiliar word - be it Turkish or foreign - must be semantically similar to a word spelt like it, that the soul of a dimpled woman must carry something of the soul of another dimpled woman i knew before, that all fat people are the same, that all poor people belong to a fraternity about which i know nothing, that there must be a link between peas and Brazil - not just because Brazil is Breziliya in Turkish and the word for pea is bezelye but also because the Brazilian flag has, it seems, an enormous pea on it...."
Author: Orhan Pamuk

37. "Life Lesson 8: Change is always hard, but time softens the rough edges and eases the pull of the past. Eventually, we all climb out from under the bed, and even the most unfamiliar places begin to feel like home."
Author: Patti Davis

38. "The East is unfamiliar with those confessions, memoirs, and autobiographies so beloved in the West. There is a clear difference in tonality. One's gaze never lingers on the suffering humanity of Christ, but penetrates behind the kenotic veil. To the West's mysticism of the Cross and its veneration of the Sacred Heart corresponds the eastern mysticism of the sealed tomb, from which eternal life eternal wells up."
Author: Paul Evdokimov

39. "But your solitude will be a supportand a home for you,even in the midst of veryunfamiliar circumstances,and from it you will find all your paths."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

40. "Having grown up Protestant, I was unfamiliar with St. Francis. Then I watched the movie 'Brother Sun, Sister Moon'... I just became fascinated with the character of St. Francis. What I saw in that movie was a man who had fallen in love with God, someone for whom God was everything."
Author: Rich Mullins

41. "There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways."
Author: Richard Dawkins

42. "He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns."
Author: Robert Penn Warren

43. "Sorry,' I apologized, realizing she was the sort of girl who got upset when someone used an unfamiliar word, rather than learning what it meant."
Author: Robyn Schneider

44. "A thump thump thump noise that was so unfamiliar, and yet I couldn't quite place it. But I knew it. It was---"Mmm-hmmm," Monica murmured, just as Wes came view into the path. He was running, his pace quick and steady. He was in shorts, his shirt off, staring ahead as he passed. His back was tan and gleaming with sweat. God god!" she said finally, fanning her face with her hand, "I've seen it a million times but it just never gets old. Never."
Author: Sarah Dessen

45. "Appetite knows what it craves, without cerebral embellishment. It tends not to waste any time laying hold of its tools. That was the thing I had recognised here: appetite. I recognised it precisely because, in a context like this, it was so unfamiliar. It had forced me to rule out everything else. And there was a second reason for my recognition, which because unprecedented was not recognition at all, but astounding discovery: Martha's face told me. I saw appetite there..."
Author: Susan Choi

46. "You're just scared. You're afraid of what you're unfamiliar with. You're too worried about disappointing people. You stifle your own potential because of what you think others expect of you- because you still follow the rules you've been given."
Author: Tahereh Mafi

47. "We become so used to the familiar that we begin to doubt the unfamiliar, until our eyes are opened and we see."
Author: Ted Dekker

48. "Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd."
Author: Thomas Mann

49. "(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."
Author: Verlyn Klinkenborg

50. "Beatrice," she says. "Beatrice, we have to run." She pulls my arm across her shoulders and hauls me to my feet. She is dressed like my mother and she looks like my mother, but she is holding a gun, and the determined look in her eyes is unfamiliar to me."
Author: Veronica Roth

Unfamiliar Quotes Pictures