Richard Brookhiser Quotes

I feel like I could be likened to an old hound circling on a rug for the last five years.

But the grind has begun. The windows don’t open, and even the availability of near-constant jokes about Jews and Mormons fails to stem the tide of frustration, decay. We’ve reached the end of pure inspiration, and are now somewhere else, something implying routine, or doing something because people expect us to do it, going somewhere each day because we went there the day before, saying things because we have said them before, and this seems like the work of a different sort of animal, contrary to our plan, and this is very very bad.

Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy.

nothing in life is more corroding than habit.

Many people are in a rut and a rut is nothing but a grave - with both ends kicked out.

For me, habit is just a synonym for death.

I can't do the same thing every night, the same gestures... it's like putting on dirty panties every day.

So easy to fall into a rut, isn't it? Why should ruts be so comfortable and so unpopular?

When we get in a routine we can become zombie-like and shut down.

Habit is a great deadener.

Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement.

We walk ourselves into ruts so deep we cannot see over them.

When you do anything for eight or nine years, you start getting a little comfortable; you start taking things for granted.

I'm fed up of doing run-of-the-mill stuff.

I don't like to do the same songs every night for a week. I just... it's boring and tiring and frustrating basically.

Doing the same thing in the same way year after year is like eating a quail a day for thirty days. Along toward the middle of the month a fellow begins to long for a broiled crow or a slice of cold dog.

Always the same thing.

Nobody has ever thought himself to death. The chief danger confronting us is not age. It is laziness, sloth, routine, stupidity, - forcing their way in like wind through the shutters, seeping into the cellar like swamp water.

You don't want to get into doing the same thing, over and over again. I know I don't.

Nothing happened, and nothing kept happening.

Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma.

The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

Day in, day out. That same old voodoo follows me about.

Continuity in everything is unpleasant.

Was this normalcy-predictable patterns, the certainty of doing the same thing everyday? Because if so, normalcy was about to make me freak out and start screaming.