Stranger Quotes - Page 21

• In the cherry blossom's shade there's no such thing as a stranger.

  Kobayashi Issa

  Flower, Japan, Shade

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• We're all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away--our stories. I guess that's what I love about books--they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be.

  Libba Bray

  Book, Humanity, Needs

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• When messengers are sent to minister to the inhabitants of this earth, they are not strangers, but from the ranks of our kindred, friends, and fellow beings. Our fathers and mothers, brothers, sisters and friends who have passed away from this earth...bringing messages of love, warning, reproof and instruction, to those whom they had learned to love in the flesh.

  Joseph Fielding Smith

  Love, Mother, Brother

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• Be generous in prosperity and thankful in adversity, Be fair in thy judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be a lamp unto those who walk in darkness, and a home to the stranger. Be eyes to the blind, and a guiding light unto the feet of the erring. Be a breath of life to the body of humankind, a dew to the soil of the human heart, and a fruit upon the tree of humility.

  Bahá'u'lláh

  Home, Heart, Adversity

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• We are not strangers to ourselves, we only try to be.

  Dean Koontz

  Trying

  Dean Koontz (2016). “The Complete Odd Thomas 8-Book Bundle: Odd Thomas, Forever Odd, Brother Odd, Odd Hours, Odd Apocalypse, Odd Interlude, Deeply Odd, Saint Odd”, p.272, Bantam

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• People hide their truest nature. I understood that; I even applauded it. What sort of world would it be if people bled all over the sidewalks, if they wept under trees, smacked whomever they despised, kissed strangers, revealed themselves?

  Alice Hoffman

  People, Tree, World

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• People with yuan fen are destined to like one another; Friendship develops even if a thousand miles apart. But should yuan fen be absent between two individuals, They will remain strangers despite sitting face-to-face

  Adeline Yen Mah

  Two, People, Sitting

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• There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Firsts, Chance, Moments

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2014). “The 10 Greatest Books of All Time”, p.10, Google Publishing

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• He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend.

  Ann Brashares

  Oldest Friends

  Ann Brashares (2008). “The Last Summer (of You and Me)”, p.12, Penguin

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• I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

  George Orwell

  Thinking, Doors, Cities

  George Orwell (1976). “The Penguin complete novels of George Orwell”

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• That's all I've ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn't matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

  Paul Auster

  Men, Hands, Soul

  Paul Auster (2008). “Collected Novels”

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• Instead, we just sat there, together but really apart, watching a show about a stranger and all her secrets, while keeping our own to ourselves, as always.

  Sarah Dessen

  Secret, Together, Sat

  "Just Listen". Book by Sarah Dessen, 2006.

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• I hadn't understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Only 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' still had any meaning for me.

  Albert Camus

  Names, Yesterday, Long

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Stranger”, p.80, Vintage

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• There was some women in a café the other week that I was sat in, and she came up and she sat down with her mate and she was talkin' loudly goin' on about "oh the baby's lovely." They said it's got, er, lovely big eyes, er, really big hands and feet. Now that doesn't sound like a nice baby to me. I felt like sayin' it sounds like a frog. But I thought I don't know her, there's only so much you can say to a stranger. I don't know what kept me from sayin' it.

  Karl Pilkington

  Baby, Nice, Eye

  "The Podfather Trilogy", Episode 1: Halloween, 2006.

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• When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Girl, Dog, Sadness

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.180, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Talk to strangers when the family fails and friends lead you astray when Buddha laughs and Jesus weeps and it turns out God is gay. 'Cause angels and messiahs love can come in many forms: in the hallways of your projects, or the fat girl in your dorm, and when you finally take the time to see what they’re about perhaps you find them lonely or their wisdom trips you out.

  Saul Williams

  Girl, Lonely, Jesus

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• I do desire we may be better strangers.

  William Shakespeare

  Inspirational, Desire, May

  'As You Like It' (1599) act 3, sc. 2, l. [276]

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• I was remembering the things we had done together, the times we had had. It would have been pleasant to preserve that comradeship in the days that came after. Pleasant, but alas, impossible. That which had brought us together had gone, and now our paths diverged, according to our natures and needs. We would meet again, from time to time, but always a little more as strangers; until perhaps at last, as old men with only memories left, we could sit together and try to share them.

  John Christopher

  Memories, Men, Trying

  John Christopher (2013). “The Pool of Fire”, p.134, Simon and Schuster

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• Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems; And e'en the dearest--that I love the best-- Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

  John Clare

  Dream, Sea, Joy

  John Clare (1965). “Selected poems”

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• I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore. You can look far and wide, but you'll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style. It's as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay.

  John Waters

  Moving, Cities, Style

  "Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste". Book by John Waters, 1981.

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• In my own life, as winters turn into spring, I find it not only hard to cope with mud but also hard to credit the small harbingers of larger life to come, hard to hope until the outcome is secure. Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility; for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger's act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again.

  Parker J. Palmer

  Kindness, Spring, Winter

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• It's funny how strangers can pass in front of you every day and all you see is a flat shadow, a vague outline, not noticing any of the details. They move in a gray crowd, always looking the same and acting the same, simple caricatures of who they really are, but once you get to know them, you notice the specific, tiniest things, you pay attention to the intricacies of their personalities, their habits and particular ways of walking and talking, the subtle changes in their appearance and dress.

  Gregory Galloway

  Moving, Simple, Talking

  Gregory Galloway (2015). “As Simple as Snow”, p.33, Penguin

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• Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable.

  Azar Nafisi

  Home, Imagination, Expectations

  Azar Nafisi (2003). “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”, p.94, Random House

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• Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.

  Nancy Mitford

  Dream, Dresses, Dinner

  Nancy Mitford (2013). “Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie”, p.192, Vintage

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• We had been friends. We could not become strangers. It left only one thing: we must be enemies.

  John Christopher

  Enemy, Left, One Thing

  John Christopher (2015). “The Prince in Waiting”, p.128, Simon and Schuster

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