I was a supporting character in other people's lives, which seemed right and familiar to me. I was also an outsider: English in the U.S., American in England, dogged yet comforted by that familiar feeling of alien-ness, which occupied that space where my sense of self should have been.

Allegra Huston

Only people who live outside cities realize the size of them. London turns out to be huge; there are great swaths, vast panoramas, a whole diaspora I'd never imagined. The place I live in tends to be manageably small, a few familiar journeys and destinations.

A. A. Gill

Great Age Whole

As an actor, we're unemployed a lot, so I'm familiar with the stress of trying to get a gig, and sometimes you take shows that you don't really want to do to keep the money coming in.

Aaron Douglas

Time Money You

My name is not unfamiliar to anybody in the dance community. I'm talking the upper echelon of dance studios.

Abby Lee Miller

Upper Up Unity

The first time I went to the Planning Commission was when it was under KC Pant, a long time ago. Since then I have been back there many, many times to the point where the many people who seem to spend their lives sitting outside the various offices and even the patches of grime in the hallways and stairwells began to look familiar.

Abhijit Banerjee

Time Who Where

I'm drawn to scenes in movies where you just see characters turning off lights in a room or putting the groceries away; it's like, 'I understand that.' We all have to get ready for bed, and we all do it in a different way, and yet it's all strangely familiar and strangely human.

Abigail Spencer

Movies You Where

I have a cousin who is a spiritual advisor for Native veterans in Canada, so I'm very familiar with the history of Natives in the military. And growing up as an American Indian myself, the story of Ira Hayes is one that is often told.

Adam Beach

History Yes Wit

I have a lot of family in Marquette. I'm way more familiar with the U.P. than I am with the lower peninsula. I've visited Michigan every couple of years since I was a kid.

Adam Conover

Family Years Year

The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity.

Adam Grant

Then T Sing

To generate creative ideas, it's important to start from an unusual place. But to explain those ideas, they have to be connected to something familiar.

Adam Grant

Art Usual Us

A holiday vacation can mean sampling all kinds of new cuisine - whether it's Uncle Joe's award-winning chili or the exotic flavors of Nepal. If your little ones are fussy, be sure to ease mealtime hassles by bringing along a supply of the familiar foods they're accustomed to rejecting at home.

Adam Mansbach

War Time Home

Saxon, if you are unfamiliar, is a British heavy-metal band that has been around since the mid-'70s and was in no small part the inspiration for Spinal Tap.

Adam Schlesinger

Art You UN

When you're coming into training camp, there's not a whole lot that is familiar. When you can grab something from it, it keeps you calm and helps you just play football.

Adam Thielen

You Whole Who

The art editor in charge of the covers at the 'New Yorker' is Francoise Mouly. She's very familiar with the eccentricities and personalities of cartoonists, so working with her is very easy.

Adrian Tomine

Work Car Art

I was thinking about what it was like for my parents to have a strange kid with a hobby or a pursuit that maybe they weren't that familiar with. It must have been a strange experience - nerve-wracking, in some ways.

Adrian Tomine

Experience Wit Were

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Aesop

T Reed Liar

If scientists could communicate more in their own voices - in a familiar tone, with a less specialized vocabulary - would a wide range of people understand them better? Would their work be better understood by the general public, policy-makers, funders, and, even in some cases, other scientists?

Alan Alda

Work Would Wit

I am a little suspicious of industry paradigms. I feel like so many movies and TV shows feel so familiar because of over-reliance on these paradigms.

Alan Ball

Movies Use Us

It's easy to look at the vampires as a metaphor for any feared or misunderstood group. It's also easy to look at them as a metaphor for a shadow organization that says one thing and has a completely different agenda on their mind, and anybody who gets in their way, they just get rid of them. Does that sound familiar?

Alan Ball

Fear Age Who

I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.

Alan Bradley

Love Years Year

It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.

Alan Cohen

Power Men Life

I was influenced by many, many different people in my student years, and I was always, I guess, immersed in a Navy environment, and so, obviously, that had a big impact when I decided what I wanted to do was go and be a Navy pilot. I was very familiar with the Navy community and felt very comfortable with it.

Alan G. Poindexter

I'm not intimidated by embracing a familiar form and what's familiar about it and making it my own. It is, I think, one of my gifts.

Alan Menken

I turn on the TV sometimes, start watching something and think: 'This seems quite good, a bit familiar.' Then I realise... It's one of my movies. It's a pretty odd feeling.

Alan Parker

This familiarity with a respected physician and my appreciation of his work, or the tragedy I experienced with the long, tormented agony and death of my mother might have influenced me in wanting to study medicine. It was not the case.

Albert Claude

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

Aldous Huxley

We, in Prince Edward Island, are fully familiar with this modern phenomenon.

Alex Campbell

It's funny, each time you come back to a tournament you start to feel more and more welcome. It gets familiar. That was one of the biggest things that's helped me.

Alex de Minaur

I like what I hear as a resulting combination of these two strands... something of a combination of familiarity and, for lack of a better word, strangeness.

Alex North

In case you're unfamiliar with TED, it is a series of short lectures on a variety of subjects that stream on the Internet for free.

Alex Pareene

I wasn't all that familiar with the 'Texas Chainsaw' franchise, and I knew who Leatherface was, but I had never seen any of the films, so I didn't know what the meaning behind it was.

Alexandra Daddario

I think, when you're doing a column and blogging every day, you get familiar with the sound of your own voice.

Alexandra Petri

When you feel a connection, a gut connection, a heart connection, it's a very special thing. What's familiar to everyone is watching people falling in love; it doesn't happen on screen that often. People fall in lust, then they're suddenly together.

Alfre Woodard

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Alfred North Whitehead

It's really difficult when you don't see much of a team and you're not familiar with how they play.

Ali Krieger

If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds.

Alice Meynell

One night, I lay awake for hours, just terrified. When the dawn finally came up - the comfortable blue sky, the familiar world returning - I could think of no other way to express my relief than through poetry. I made a decision there and then that it was what I wanted to do. Every time I pulled a wishbone, it was what I asked for.

Alice Oswald

My husband and I have known each other since kindergarten. I had a crush on him in school, but we never dated. Then we saw each other again after high school, and there was something instantly familiar about him. I'm a very shy person and was very closed off. But he allowed me to be myself. And there's a safety in that.

Alison Sweeney

Mothers suffer in the workplace. That fact is by now so painfully familiar it even has a name: the motherhood penalty.

Alissa Quart

I was a supporting character in other people's lives, which seemed right and familiar to me. I was also an outsider: English in the U.S., American in England, dogged yet comforted by that familiar feeling of alien-ness, which occupied that space where my sense of self should have been.

Allegra Huston

I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with 'The Idiot,' Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky's idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature.

Allen Ginsberg

Acquire the habit of speaking to God as if you were alone with Him, familiarly and with confidence and love, as to the dearest and most loving of friends.

Alphonsus Liguori

My daughter loves to be surprised. And she loves to surprise me. She loves to create games where either one or both of us are surprised, or go away, and then come back. And she loves to play them over and over, and over again. The combo is familiar. Go away. Come back. Surprise! She is only two. I better get used to this.

Alysia Reiner

Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head.

Ambrose Bierce

I have long held that many of the writers and artists working in the aftermath of 9/11 have presented a faux familiarity with the so-called terrorist mind.

Amitava Kumar

We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of ideological camps, but in the differences that thrive behind settled, more clear-cut divisions.

Amitava Kumar

I usually don't have to do a lot of research in my work, as I'm writing about something I'm already familiar with.

Amy Bloom

Pond's is a name that everyone is familiar with, and I know that I can trust them when it comes to skincare.

Amy Jackson

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

Anais Nin

I love Russian culture. I don't know the young Russia, I'm not at all familiar with young Russia, but the old school Russia is good enough for me for the moment.

Andre Leon Talley

Mrs. Obama has a hug - a sincere and friendly embrace - that has become familiar to countless supporters from coast to coast. And when she talks to you, she focuses all her calm attention on your face.

Andre Leon Talley