Life & Wisdom Quote by Jonathan Carroll

A person who says, "I feel like a cliche" is catching themselves in the act of living a story they have seen too many times before. The moment of recognition is both comic and disheartening: comic because it sounds like a line from a movie, disheartening because it suggests your pain or joy is a hand-me-down, something mass-produced rather than singular. That double awareness is intensely modern. We are steeped in narratives about breakups, midlife crises, epiphanies, grief, and sudden love; when life lines up with those plots, self-consciousness floods in. Jonathan Carroll, whose novels slide between the real and the uncanny, often frames feeling as a dialogue with storytelling itself. His characters know stories, and they suspect that stories know them back. The sentence distills that suspicion: maybe my experience is not just mine, but a role being performed.

Calling yourself a cliche can be a shield. It preempts judgment with a wry shrug, a way to say, Yes, I see the stereotype, so you cannot use it against me. But it is also a confession of vulnerability. Behind the joke sits the ache of wanting to be unique and fearing that you are not. Carrolls sensibility turns that tension into an opportunity. Cliches persist because they capture patterns that recur; they are worn not only from overuse but also from truth. The task is not to flee the pattern but to inhabit it so fully that texture returns. Grief can be the usual story and still have the strange smell of your fathers sweater; love can be springtime predictable and still be the only face your eyes learn. The line is a sigh and a challenge. It recognizes how stories shape us while inviting us to reclaim authorship, to let the common plot carry the weight and then let the details save it from banality.