Habits and ruts and if you don’t stop it, you’ll go blind, deaf, and dumb

“Habit forms the style of the writer just as much as the character of the man, and the author who has more than once been content to attain, in the expression of his thoughts, to a certain kind of attractiveness, in so doing lays down unalterably the boundaries of his talent, just as, in succumbing too often to pleasure, to laziness, to the fear of being put to trouble, one traces for oneself, on a character which it will finally be impossible to retouch, the lineaments of one’s vices and the limits of one’s virtue.” – Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)