Sameness Quotes

“The car was on the FDR drive now and, turning her head, she glanced out at the bleak brown buildings of the projects that stretched for blocks along the drive. Something inside her sank at the sight of all that sameness, and she suddenly felt defeated.
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. In the past year, she'd started experiencing these moments of desperate emptiness, as if nothing really mattered, nothing was ever going to change, there was nothing new; and she could see her life stretching before her--one endless long day after the next, in which every day was essentially the same. Meanwhile, time was marching on, and all that was happening to her was that she was getting older and smaller, and one day she would be no bigger than a dot, and then she would simply disappear. Poof! Like a small leaf burned up under a magnifying glass in the sun. These feelings were shocking to her, because she'd never experienced world-weariness before. She'd never had time. All her life, she'd been striving and striving to become this thing that was herself--the entity that was Nico O'Neilly. And then, one morning, time had caught up with her and she had woken up and realized that she was there. She had arrived at her destination, and she had everything she'd worked so hard for: a stunning career, a loving (well, sort of) husband, whom she respected, and a beautiful eleven-year-old daughter whom she adored.
She should have been thrilled. But instead, she felt tired. Like all those things belonged to someone else.”
― Candace Bushnell, Lipstick Jungle

“We're not very different from one another, not different at all in fact. We're all just people with the same needs, the same desires, the same feelings. It's a lie about us being different.”
― Harry Bernstein, The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers

“It's strange being here with you. I hardly know you. But...sometimes it feels like we're the same person born into two different worlds.”
― Marie Lu, Legend

“Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is a child of God.”
― Phillips Brooks

“You think of outside your room, of the streets of the town, the lonely little squares over by the station, of those winter Saturdays all alike.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death

“Everything and nothing are the same in the Absolute.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun

“Oneness is not sameness.”
― Lois Farfel Stark, The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times

“Surely the extraordinary success of artificial intelligence is attributable to the fact that it frees us from real intelligence, that by hypertrophying thought as an operational process it frees us from thought's ambiguity and from the insoluble puzzle of its relationship to the world. Surely the success of all these technologies is a result of the way in which they make it impossible even to raise the timeless question of liberty. What a relief! Thanks to the machinery of the virtual, all your problems are over! You are no longer either subject or object, no longer either free or alienated - and no longer either one or the other: you are the same, and enraptured by the commutations of that sameness. We have left the hell of other people for the ecstasy of the same, the purgatory of otherness for the artificial paradises of identity. Some might call this an even worse servitude, but Telecomputer Man, having no will of his own, knows nothing of serfdom. Alienation of man by man is a thing of the past: now man is plunged into homeostasis by machines.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“We look at sunflowers, they all look the same; we look at people, they all look the same! Everyone became same because everyone is focused on the same things that society wants of them! Everyone is striving to fulfil the destiny that society has drawn for them!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“But she knew that she still had no plan in life, save always to go along the same streets, past the same people, to the same shops.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

“Wherever exchange is impossible, what we encounter is terror. Any radical otherness at all is thus the epicentre of a terror: the terror that such otherness holds, by virtue of its very existence, for the normal world. And the terror that this world exercises upon that otherness in order to annihilate it.
Over recent centuries all forms of violent otherness have been incorporated, willingly or under threat of force, into a discourse of difference which simultaneously implies inclusion and exclusion, recognition and discrimination.
Childhood, lunacy, death, primitive societies - all have been categorized, integrated and absorbed as parts of a universal harmony. Madness, once its exclusionary status had been revoked, was caught up in the far subtler toils of psychology. The dead, as soon as they were recognized in their identity as such, were banished to outlying cemeteries - kept at such a distance that the face of death itself was lost. As for Indians, their right to exist was no sooner accorded them than they were confined to reservations. These are the vicissitudes of a logic of difference.
Racism does not exist so long as the other remains Other, so long as the Stranger remains foreign. It comes into existence when the other becomes merely different - that is to say, dangerously similar. This is the moment when the inclination to keep the other at a distance comes into being.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“As sure as things will change, Is as sure
As things will stay the same. Stillness and flux
Are of the same fabric. And sameness, and change Are one.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic

“Later, as the sisters grew, Esther hyperfocused on their differences, but as a little kid she'd been far more hypnotised by their sameness. They both loved chewing lemon peels and watermelon rinds, loved pictures of goats but not actual goats, loved putting sand in their hair so they could scratch it out later, loved watching their parents slow-dance in the living room to Motown records. They loved the sound of the wind, the sound of breaking ice, the sound of coyotes calling on the mountain.

They disliked zippers, ham, the word 'milk', flute music, the gurgling sound of the refrigerator, Cecily's long weekends away, Abe's insistence on regular chess matches, and days with no clouds. They disliked the boxes of books that came to their door daily or were lugged home by their father, disliked their dusty lonesome smell and how they consumed Abe's attention. They disliked when their parents closed the bedroom door and fought in whispers. They hated the phrase 'half sister.' There had been no half about it.”
― Emma Törzs, Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“There is pain in staying the same and there is pain in changing. Pick the one that moves you forward.”
― Lee Rose & Kathleen McGhee-Anderson

“Relax, Brandy says, Whatever you're thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they're doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is cooperative effort.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Places of worship that have been built throughout history often represent monotony because they are mostly made of the same type! The distinctness is admirable; but monotony makes people bored! Sameness represents the poverty of the mind; distinctness on the other hand represents the wealth of the mind!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“This is the reappearance of the principle of Evil in a new guise. No morality or guilt is implied, however: the principle of Evil is simply synonymous with the principle of reversal, with the turns of fate. In systems undergoing total positivization - and hence desymbolization - evil is equivalent, in all its forms, to the fundamental rule of reversibility.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Those girls are not the opposite of me. We are perpendicular. We may be on different paths, yes. But there's a place where we touch, where we connect and are just the same.”
― Renée Watson, Piecing Me Together

“Accept that you can't control many of the things that happen to you. Stop wishing for things to stay the same, or to to be different. Above all, remember that your own struggles are part of the human struggle, shared by everyone you meet.
[p53. Chapter 1 summary]”
― Hugh Mackay, The Kindness Revolution: How we can restore hope, rebuild trust and inspire optimism

“In this hysterical phase, it was, so to speak, the femininity of man which projected itself on to woman and shaped her as an ideal figure in his image. In Romantic love, the aim was not now to conquer the woman, to seduce her, but to create her from the inside, to invent her, in some cases as achieved Utopian vision, as idealized woman , in others as femme fatale, as star - another hysterical, supernatural metaphor. The Romantic Eros can be credited with having invented this ideal of harmony, of loving fusion, this ideal of an almost incestuous form of twin beings — the woman as projective resurrection of the same, who assumes her supernatural form only as ideal of the same, an artefact doomed henceforth to l'amour or, in other words, to a pathos of the ideal resemblance of beings and sexes - a pathetic confusion which substitutes for the dual otherness of seduction. The whole mechanics of the erotic changes meaning, for the erotic attraction which previously arose out of otherness, out of the strangeness of the Other, now finds its stimulus in sameness - in similarity and resemblance. Auto-eroticism, incest? No . Rather a hypostasis of the Same. Of the same eyeing up the other, investing itself in the other, alienating itself in the other - but the other is only ever the ephemeral form of a difference which brings me closer to me. This indeed is why, with Romantic love and all its current spin-offs, sexuality becomes connected with death: it is because it becomes connected with incest and its destiny - even in banalized form (for we are no longer speaking of mythic, tragic incest here; with modern eroticism we are dealing with a secondary incestuous form - of the protection of the same in the image of the other - which amounts to a confusion and corruption of all images).
We have here then, in the end, the invention of a femininity which renders woman superfluous. The invention of a difference which is merely a roundabout copulation with its double. And which, at bottom, renders any encounter with otherness impossible (it would be interesting to know whether there was not any hysterical quid pro quo from the feminine in the construction of a virile, phallic mythology; feminism being one such example of the hystericization of the masculine in woman, of the hysterical projection of her masculinity in the exact image of the hysterical projection by man of his femininity into a mythical image of woman).”
― Jean Baudrillard, Screened Out

“We are people Of The Same House But we live in different rooms but still uses the same lighting, so don't let hatred make you forget that you and I aren't different is just 1% Dna difference, either you are a male or female we have the same home.”
― Christen Kuikoua

“Was it so bad to be different, when everyone around you screamed to be the same?”
― K. Weikel, Sameness

“Has this sameness created apathy in its purest form?”
― K. Weikel, Sameness

“But how can someone who was raised to be the same as everyone else be told they're different because of something out of their control?”
― K. Weikel, Sameness

“Being different isn't something small. It never has been. Even back then, before all this sameness.”
― K. Weikel, Sameness

“Wasn’t the point of making all these rules to keep us the same all the time, no matter what? Because I was feeling terribly different and like a sore thumb in a sea of toes.”
― K. Weikel, Sameness

“In order to have equality among a society’s people, there must always be someone, or a group of people, who are not equal to the bigger mass. They produce rules and enforce sameness upon the people who are below them. We must give the illusion of equality in order to satisfy those who beg for it, even if it’s something intangible.”
― K. Weikel, Sameness

“We've all been each other in our past lives. We've all been African, Caucasian, homosexual, rich, poor, religious, the saint, the killer. We've been each other for as long as the souls have existed. Reincarnation of the soul is real.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“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