Graham Greene Quotes

All objects lose by too familiar a view.

You might have a favorite book or film, but you can only watch or read it so many times before you have to let it sit and then go back and realize it's your favorite still. At some point everything gets a little stale and you have to step away from it.

The more often we see the things around us - even the beautiful and wonderful things - the more they become invisible to us. That is why we often take for granted the beauty of this world: the flowers, the trees, the birds, the clouds - even those we love. Because we see things so often, we see them less and less.

You do not notice changes in what is always before you.

Familiarity gives rise to contempt.

If you see somebody running down the street naked every single day, you stop looking up.

You know, there are times when you play a song over and over and over and you get a little tired of it and you let it sit for a while. It's like, you may love eating sushi, but if you eat it every single day, you're going to get a little tired of it.

Nothing is more uninteresting than completely knowing somebody, being totally at ease.

Oh, there's nothing like getting used to things.

When the new becomes commonplace, people become accustomed to it. That's a tribute to our sense of adventure.

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

I can't imagine anybody who showed up at Firestone for the first time who felt like they knew it better than I did. For me to travel to Akron the first time, 'Oh, my gosh, I can't wait, I know every hole on this golf course. I know the big water tower with the Firestone ball on top, I grew up with this. Here it is! It's real!'

When something is working well, it becomes too easy to let things run themselves.

I've been here for 19 years, so West Ham fans are bored with seeing me. It's like my wife, who changes the wallpaper every three years because she gets tired of it.

You know people probably don't realize this but I lived in Denver for 10 years as a kid. I was familiar with the city and what it had to offer. You know like any place it's changed a lot over the years. But that familiarity hit home for me.

I know Coney Island more than I know Queens and Brooklyn! And I understand everything about it - Coney Island is my home.

When you become a comedian a lot of stuff that made you laugh before just stops. You stop watching your old cartoons you used to watch. You stop reading the funnies. It's like working at a strip club. You don't come home and turn on the Playboy Channel.

I was in Rome this time for about three or four months, and I feel like, by the time I left, every single person in Rome had seen me at least 10 times riding my bicycle. When I first got there, it seemed like people were happy to see me and would say hello. And by the end, they were kind of bored of seeing me. And it was like, "Ugh, there he goes again".

Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible.

We take a natural interest in novelties, but it is against nature to take an interest in familiar things.

If a man is rich and strong anywhere, it must be on his native soil. Here I have been these forty years learning the language of these fields that I may the better express myself. If I should travel to the prairies, I should much less understand them, and my past life would serve me but ill to describe them. Many a weed here stands for more of life to me than the big trees of California would if I should go there. We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.

The mind becomes accustomed to things by the habitual sight of them, and neither wonders nor inquires about the reasons for things it sees all the time.

A man does not wonder at what he sees frequently, even though he be ignorant of the reason. If anything happens which he has not seen before, he calls it a prodigy.

Familiarity can blind too.

Once thoroughly our own, the knowledge ceases to give us pleasure.