34 Novelty Quotes

You ride in a limousine the first time, it's a big thrill but after that it's just a stupid car.

I've found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard new things: that is things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe there might be anything new.

Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.

'What I'm proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude - that you act as though you've never been there before. So that you're not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.'

The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new.

Don't keep forever on the public road. Leave the beaten track behind occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do you will be certain to find something you have never seen before.

I make the most money, I think, in Russia and Paris, for the people of those countries are so willing to be amused, so eager to see something new and out of the ordinary

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

Once a year, go someplace you've never been before.

The Modernist's command was Pound's 'Make it New.' The postmodern imperative is 'Get it Used.' The more used the better.

There are moments in many of his movies that are just poetic... In doing silent movies, no one had done this yet!

And in his eyes she read a love such as she had never known.

'Guess what? Wheels have been round for a really long time, and anybody who 'reinvents' the new wheel is generally considered a crackpot. It turns out that 'round' is simply a good form for a wheel to have. It may be boring, but it just tends to roll better than a square, and 'hipness' has nothing what-so-ever to do with it.'

In the pretext of the academic being detestable, the worst in the class was made a hero! He opens the door to the ethics of shit! Newness at whatever cost and art becomes just a latrine!

Those writers who lay on the watch for novelty, could have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.

This power...reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.

I bought one of those little glass ball things with the snow in it... Mine's a bit different, though. Mine has a little plow that comes out and does the roads.

A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new. [citation needed]

I took a chance on 'Nature Boy', though I think 'Lost April' is a much better song. The public liked 'Nature Boy' because it was something different.

Clearly this stranger was the most interesting thing that had happened to Keturah in her entire life

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.

I just want something different. I want to be surprised. I want something that doesn't feel formulaic or beaten to death. (2004)

I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.

Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of.

I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. 'What's new?' is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question 'What is best?,' a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and 'best' was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.