Kenneth Koch Quotes

The moment I'm interested in, the moment I'm working toward in these stories, is when the familiar world seems strange.

France was always a little scary to me. I had the preconception that France was a bit hoity-toity.

Every orientation presupposes a disorientation.

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

They would hear 3000 and think it was the year 3000, I was hoping it would sort of disorient them and prepare them for the strange message they were about to receive.

I'm always struck when I go somewhere I've never been before, especially if it's in my home town, by just how different the atmosphere can be, and how disorienting it can be - especially if there's any kind of trouble.

India I have visited a great many times, though there is a lot about it I will never understand.

I feel like I'm losing my ability to understand reality; like when someone loses their hearing, they can still speak English, but their speech eventually becomes distorted because they can't hear themselves.

When I was a child, I felt at times that I had been born into an insane asylum, that much of human life appeared to be an insane asylum. It was bewildering.

I'm not usually where I think I am. It's kind of spooky.

Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time.

The thing that scares us the most is when familiar things operate in unfamiliar ways.

In England, you pass from A to B, and it goes to B, but in Barcelona, you have to go to D and then to F, and it really works your brain.

It's not an easy option. The essence of travel is letting go of habit and prejudice and relishing the unfamiliar. Food you've never eaten before, a language you've never spoken before, religion that mystifies, customs that confuse, politics that perplex, all question everyday assumptions about how you live your life.

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed.

Like a word on a page that you’ve printed and read a million times, that suddenly looks strange or wrong, foreign. And you feel scared for a second, like you’ve lost something, even if you’re not sure what it is.

At home we have lost the capacity to see what is before us. Travel shakes us out of our apathy, and we regain an attentiveness that heightens every experience. The exhilaration of travel has many sources, but surely one of them is that we recapture in some measure the unspoiled awareness of children.

I try to create a place of disorientation.

I've been out to LA a couple of times but, over there, the Grenouille in me always comes to the surface. I feel completely terrified, totally flummoxed, like I don't understand what the hell is going on. I've no desire at all to go back there.

Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they are all along, busy with living; they don't talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day is entirely different; I am foreign.

And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs.

If we come to see that this world does not have the final word, then we open our mind and therefore our entire lives to experience the possibility of infinite possibilities.

Living in Manchester was like living on the moon... wherever that might be

Getting lost in human perception is a very scary idea.

On Tuesday, when it hails and snows, The feeling on me grows and grows That hardly anybody knows If those are these or these are those.