Routine Quotes

“It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.”
― Honore de Balzac

“Love has the power to create an inviting space in the lives of people. But if daily routine kills dreamy or passionate thoughts, the constraint of the room may become oppressive and the emptiness unbearable. The room loses then its original fullness and turns into a place of nothingness. ( " Another empty room" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“An island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.”
― Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

“The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.”
― Vilayat Inayat Khan

“If you follow the classical pattern, you are understanding the routine, the tradition, the shadow -- you are not understanding yourself.”
― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

“Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Round House

“I want to caution you against the idea that balance has to be a routine that looks the same week in and week out.”
― Kevin Thoman

“Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing — singing, laughing, learning. The responsibility, the awful responsibility of managing (profitably) 12 hours a day for 10 weeks is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, noone, to insert an exact routine into the large unfenced acres of time — which it is so easy to let drift by in soporific idling and luxurious relaxing. It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush, (or rather outrush,) of the rarified scheduled atmosphere — poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. That's what it feels like: getting shed of a routine. Even though one had rebelled terribly against it, even then, one feels uncomfortable when jounced out of the repetitive rut. And so with me. What to do? Where to turn? What ties, what roots? as I hang suspended in the strange thin air of back-home?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“People just don't seem to get me. Don't understand that I need my space. Always telling me what to do. They think rules and routines and clean hands and your p's and q's will make everything all right. They haven't got a clue.”
― Rachel Ward, Numbers

“I was also sick of my neighbors, as most Parisians are. I now knew every second of the morning routine of the family upstairs. At 7:00 am alarm goes off, boom, Madame gets out of bed, puts on her deep-sea divers’ boots, and stomps across my ceiling to megaphone the kids awake. The kids drop bags of cannonballs onto the floor, then, apparently dragging several sledgehammers each, stampede into the kitchen. They grab their chunks of baguette and go and sit in front of the TV, which is always showing a cartoon about people who do nothing but scream at each other and explode. Every minute, one of the kids cartwheels (while bouncing cannonballs) back into the kitchen for seconds, then returns (bringing with it a family of excitable kangaroos) to the TV. Meanwhile the toilet is flushed, on average, fifty times per drop of urine expelled. Finally, there is a ten-minute period of intensive yelling, and at 8:15 on the dot they all howl and crash their way out of the apartment to school.” (p.137)”
― Stephen Clarke, A Year in the Merde

“I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess that we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.”
― John D. MacDonald, The Deep Blue Good-By

“BE SPONTANEOUS,
NEVER BE AFRAID TO TRY NEW THINGS
OR FIND NEW WAYS.
DON'T LET OVERPLANNING AND ROUTINE POISON YOUR LIFE.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Be spontaneous!
Never be afraid to try new things
or find new ways!
Don't let routine ruin your life!”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“As individuals die every moment, how insensitive and fabricated a love it is to set aside a day from selfish routine in prideful, patriotic commemoration of tragedy. Just as God is provoked by those who tithe simply because they feel that they must tithe, I am provoked by those who commemorate simply because they feel that they must commemorate.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“When you're a kid, if you watch 'The Jeffersons' with your family at seven o'clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting. The universe is a strange, strange place when all of a sudden you can't use your glass with the Bionic Woman on it any more.”
― Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“Odd how the daily imperatives persist even in the face of collective disaster.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“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.”
― dave eggers

“Man was designed in a way in which he must eat in order to give him a solid reason to go to work everyday. This helps to keep him out of trouble. God is wise.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Die meisten Menschen leben in den Ruinen ihrer Gewohnheiten.”
― Jean Cocteau

“the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in the traffic jam...”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“If one knocks oneself out of one’s routine—and in so doing knocks others gently out of theirs—then one can now and again create these momentary opportunities to be better than one is.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“The spectacle takes us away from our routines. For at least a time, we feel part of something big, colorful, exciting. It is perhaps understandable that civilians are often more enthusiastic during wartime than soldiers who have experienced battle. The soldiers know that war is often boring and dirty as well as terrifying and colorful. Even so, after some years, an old soldier like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., could brush aside his earlier description of the pain, boredom, and death of war and declare that “its message was divine.” The stench disappears, but the spectacle remains in memory’s eye.”
― Nel Noddings, Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War

“But I say to myself, recovering my sanity, Mr Prentice at four; Mr Eyres at four thirty. The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“He didn't suffer from hunger - he suffered only from a breach in his routine. He was uneasy.”
― Graham Greene, The Human Factor

“It suddenly hits me that I'm allowing my life to fall back into exactly the same shape it was the first time round: gravitating toward familiarity and repetition, the way I always do. Encouraging the sameness, because even when it's awful, I still like it more than change. Slipping back into time as if it's an old pair of comfy slippers I refuse to throw away, even though they're not even that comfortable anymore and my toes are sticking out and getting cold.

And this wasn't the point of what it is I'm trying to do.

I'm supposed to be taking risks, making changes, and if I don't--if I simply wrap myself in the comfort of a timeline I already know--I'll just end up where I was at the beginning, and I'll have wasted my time.

Worse: I'll have wasted all of them.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“I return myself to the safety of my bedroom and throw myself into a loop of my own making: read a book I've already read, watch a TV show I've seen dozens of times, wear my Wednesday pajamas and eat my Wednesday dinner. I listen to a favorite song on repeat, dozens of times; bury myself in familiarity like a small, hurt animal in its den, turning in tiny circles until it can comfortably settle. I make the same small sounds to myself, over and over again. I curl up in a ball on my bed, rocking gently, losing myself in the comfort of a pattern.
I soothe myself with repetition until I feel calm.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“Prayer is like medicine. Pray three times per day: once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once in the evening.”
― Luckson T Mabade