Stranger Quotes - Page 20

• The little girls were wearing black party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Girl, Nice, Party

  KURT VONNEGUT JR (1969). “SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE”

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• Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise. Become a stranger to need of pity. Or if compassion be freely given out, take only enough. Stop short of the urge to plead, then purge away the need. Wish for nothing larger than your own small heart or greater than a star. Tame wild disappointment with caress, unmoved and cold. Make of it a parka for your soul. Discover the reason why so tiny human midget exists at all, so scared and so unwise. But expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.

  Alice Walker

  Stars, Disappointment, Heart

  "Anything We Love Can Be Saved". Book by Alice Walker, June, 1997.

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• The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress." --Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Powerful, Dancing, Perfect

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• No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Life, Philosophy, Events

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• But a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidial and even stranger, eventually including what we must term ‘imaginary’ shapes (which some preferred to term invisible).

  Thomas Pynchon

  Exotic, Affliction, Shapes

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• Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Time, Opinion, Tomorrow

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.26, Graphic Arts Books

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• He didn't have a single clue what was going on with these two strangers, but every instinct told him Master George equaled good, Mistress Jane equaled bald- he blinked-uh, bad.

  James Dashner

  Two, Mistress, Clue

  James Dashner (2009). “The Journal of Curious Letters”, p.12, Simon and Schuster

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• Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily.

  Anne Lamott

  Grace, Stitches, Hem

  Anne Lamott (2008). “Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith”, p.48, Penguin

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• I'm alive inside. A bird is my heart. Mama and Daddy is not win. I'm winning. I'm drinking hot chocolate in the Village wif girls--all kind who love me. How that is so I don't know. How Mama and Daddy kknow me sixteen years and hate me, how a stranger meet me and love me. Must be what they already had in they pocket.

  Sapphire

  Love, Girl, Hate

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• She was startled. "But you're human, aren't you?" In some ways yes. But in other ways I'm a stranger to your kind. I have a friend who calls you plucked angels, and he claims you're a total waste of spirit. Do you ever think like that?" Of course, in honest moments. But I can be just as honest and think that we aren't a spiritual waste but a spiritual potential waiting to grow.

  Deepak Chopra

  Spiritual, Angel, Thinking

  Deepak Chopra (1996). “The Return of Merlin”, Wheeler Pub Incorporated

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• The people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping...something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene.

  Italo Calvino

  Running, Stars, Moving

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• I'm not...' Angharad began, but then she thought. Not what? Not a bad person? Perhaps. But had she never known anger? Never held unkind thoughts? The stranger's observation was valid. No one was innocent of darkness.

  Charles de Lint

  Darkness, Innocent, Observation

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• Once born into childlike faith, brimming with belief, typical people begin to lose their faith. Society mocks them. Their friends smirk. They come to change the world, but over time the world changes them. Soon they forget who they were; they forget the faith they once had. Then one day someone tells them the truth, but they don’t want to go back, because they’re comfortable in their new skin. Being a stranger in this world is never easy.

  Ted Dekker

  People, Skins, One Day

  Ted Dekker (2012). “The Paradise Trilogy”, p.649, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• That is the purpose for which you are called hither. Called, is say, though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the peril of the world.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Believe, Land, Purpose

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings”, p.176, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be — or to be indistinguishable from — self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.

  Neal Stephenson

  Self, Years, Games

  "Cryptonomicon". Book by Neal Stephenson, 1999.

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• Well, most women are full to the brim, that's all...We are, most of us, ready to explode, especially when our children are small and we are so weary with the demands for love and attention and the kind of service that makes you feel you should be wearing a uniform with "Mommy" embroidered over the left breast, over the heart...If a stranger had come up to me and said, "Do you want to talk about it? I have time to listen," I think I might have burst into tears at the relief of it.

  Elizabeth Berg

  Children, Heart, Thinking

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• Ignore any loss of nerve, ignore any loss of self-confidence, ignore any doubt or confusion. Move on believing in love, in peace, and harmony, and in great accomplishment. Remember joy isn't a stranger to you. You are winning and you are strong. Love. Love first, love always, love forever.

  Anne Rice

  Strong, Believe, Moving

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• Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution--these can lift at a colossal humbug,—push it a little— crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand. - "The Chronicle of Young Satan," Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts

  Mark Twain

  Laughter, Blow, Race

  The Mysterious Stranger ch. 10 (1916)

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• You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Night, Glasses, Our Generation

  Chuck Palahniuk (2005). “Fight Club: A Novel”, p.66, W. W. Norton & Company

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• We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes...

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Dream, Sweet, Home

  "The Rock That is Higher: Story as Truth". Book by Madeleine L'Engle, 1993.

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• The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.

  Edmund White

  Book, Important, Intimate

  Edmund White (1988). “The Beautiful Room is Empty”, Random House Incorporated

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• Make your choice, adventurous Stranger, Strike the bell and bide the danger, Or wonder, till it drives you mad, What would have followed if you had.

  C. S. Lewis

  Mad, Choices, Nephew

  C. S. Lewis, Aurand Harris (1985). “The Magician's Nephew”, p.16, Dramatic Publishing

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• Rules and Things Number 63: Never, Ever Say Something Bad About Someone You Don't Know--Especially When You're Around a Bunch of Strangers. You Never Can Tell Who Might Be Kin to That Person or Who Might Be a Lip-Flapping, Big-Mouth Spy.

  Christopher Paul Curtis

  Numbers, Spy, Mouths

  Christopher Paul Curtis, Holt Rinehart & Winston (2002). “Bud, not Buddy: with connections”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• We are fat and sick and dying because we have handed a basic, fundamental and intimate function of life over to corporations. We choose to value our nourishment so little that we entrust it to strangers. This is insanity. Feed yourselves. Feed your loved ones. And for God's sake feed your children.

  Alton Brown

  Children, Sick, Insanity

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• Now they were as strangers; nay worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.

  Jane Austen

  Unison, Estrangement

  Jane Austen (2005). “Jane Austen: 8 Books in 1”, p.509, Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax

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