Familiar

Famous quotes containing the word familiar:

    “I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
    The time has been, my senses would have cooled
    To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair
    Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
    As life were in’t. I have supped full with horrors;
    Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
    Cannot once start me.”
    —William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    “It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
    —Carson McCullers (1917–1967)

    “The scholar is not apt to make his most familiar experience come gracefully to the aid of his expression.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)