Selected repetition quotes

1. Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass.

2. I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

3. It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.

4. There's no harm in talking to yourself, but try to avoid telling yourself jokes you've heard before.

5. For the first lesson, I want you to play over every column of Modern Chess Openings, including the footnotes. And for the next lesson, I want you to do it again.

6. History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.

7. When one side only of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly.

8. Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

9. All my life's a circle; But I can't tell you why; Season's spinning round again; The years keep rollin' by.

10. The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.

11. And always Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne, over and over the same photo in glaring greens and reds, of a tram, huffy, blunderous, manoeuvring itself with pole akimbo round the tight corner where Bourke Street enters Spring.

12. To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.

13. Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote.

14. Life itself is a quotation.

15. If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.

16. When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them.

17. It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.

18. I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.

19. And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.

20. If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.

21. 'You all look like happy campers to me. Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been, and, as far as I am concerned, happy campers you will always be.'

22. When I said. 'A rose is a rose is a rose.' And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do? I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.

23. I made the mistake of watching 'A.I.' on cable the week they showed it about 792 times, and I ended up watching it every time it was on.

24. I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

25. I wish I had an answer to that, because I'm tired of answering that question.

26. The great masses of people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one. Especially if it is repeated again and again.

27. Isn't life just a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?

28. Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter-productivity.

29. They were regular in being gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, they learned many little things that are things in being gay, they were gay every day, they were regular, they were gay, they were gay the same length of time every day, they were gay, they were quite regularly gay.

30. There are many that I know and I know it. They are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them themselves and they repeat it and I hear it. Always I listen to it. Slowly I come to understand it. Many years I listened and did not know it. I heard it, I understood it some, I did not know I heard it. They repeat themselves now and I listen to it. Every way that they do it now I hear it. Now each time very slowly I come to understand it. Always it comes very slowly the completed understanding of it, the repeating each one does to tell it the whole history of the being in each one, always now I hear it. Always now slowly I understand it.

31. Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way of realizing everything and every one comes out of them in repeating. More and more then every one comes to be clear to some one.

32. The greatest natural genius cannot subsist on its own stock: he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated. When we know the subject designed by such men, it will never be difficult to guess what kind of work is to be produced.

33. Hamm: Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!

34. Nell: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness. Nagg: Oh? Nell: Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.

35. To go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I'll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.

36. A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle. [citation needed]

37. There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.

38. As a filmmaker, I'm not interested in 9/11 [...] it's too small, history overwhelms it. The history of the world is like: He kills me, I kill him, only with different cosmetics and different castings. So in 2001, some fanatics killed some Americans, and now some Americans are killing some Iraqis. And in my childhood, some Nazis killed Jews. And now, some Jewish people and some Palestinians are killing each other. Political questions, if you go back thousands of years, are ephemeral, not important. History is the same thing over and over again.

39. It's like deja vu all over again.

40. You must do over the same subject ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must appear accidental, even a movement.

41. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting...Read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

42. Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.

43. If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it

44. Does it not seem as if Mozart's works become fresher and fresher the oftener we hear them? ~ Robert Schumann