Stranger Quotes - Page 39

• An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to strangers', like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Reality, Imagination, Faces

  1904 Larry Doyle to Tom Broadbent. John Bull's Other Island, Act 1.

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• When it [truth] emerges it often bears out the saying that 'truth is stranger than fiction.' A novelist has to appear plausible, and would hesitate to make use of such astounding contradictions as occur in history through some extraordinary accident or twist of psychology .

  Bill Vaughan

  Psychology, Twists, Novelists

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• Plasma on the wall/Write my name on your heart like I'm Lucille Ball/But love changes, a thug changes/And best friends become strangers

  Ras Kass

  Wall, Writing, Heart

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• I was staying in a hotel in San Francisco for a couple of nights, before flying back to the UK. My hotel was a desperate grey block made from paper and people’s screams. At night the sound of strangers having icy sex echoed off the building and poured through the broken air conditioning, like tiny daggers I couldn't see, reminding me of just the tip of what I was missing.

  Craig Stone

  Sex, Couple, Block

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• There was a weird intimacy, sitting in a car together. Couples sat in cars. Cops and their partners. Strangers became unstrange, sharing a windshield view of the world.

  Jerry Stahl

  Couple, Views, Car

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• However we may flatter ourselves to the contrary, our friends think no higher of us than the world do. They see us through the jaundiced or distrustful eyes of others. They may know better, but their feelings are governed by popular prejudice. Nay, they are more shy of us (when under a cloud) than even strangers; for we involve them in a common disgrace, or compel them to embroil themselves in continual quarrels and disputes in our defense.

  William Hazlitt

  Eye, Thinking, Clouds

  William Hazlitt (2008). “Liber Amoris and Related Writings”, Carcanet Press

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• What a position of transcendent horror must that be, where the perpetrator of a great crime, till then a stranger to positive guilt, finds himself suddenly cut off, and forever, from all human sympathy, isolated from hope, the tenant of a solitary cell, and with a wide, impassable gulf yawning between him and that great brotherhood of which he has ceased to be a part--no longer regarded as a man, but as a monster in the shape of one, from whom Mercy herself turns away, and for whom Pity even has no tears!

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Cutting, Men, Yawning

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• I spot a little stranger standing across the room, my brain takes a vacation just to give my heart more room.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Heart, Vacation, Expression

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• Change is a stranger you have yet to know.

  George Michael

  Expression, Knows

  Song: Older, Album: Older, 1996

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• A stranger is just a friend I haven't met yet.

  Will Rogers

  Just Friends, Mets, Havens

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• I always feel uncomfortable at parties, and I'm often nervous when talking to strangers. I don't think this makes me feel special. Maybe everybody feels this way.

  Jonathan Coulton

  Party, Thinking, Talking

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• I went home one afternoon to pick up a script without bothering to change, and a half an hour later the Beverly Hills Police were at my door because a neighbor had reported a suspicious stranger lurking around Ross Martin's house. I had to peel off my beard to prove who I was.

  Ross Martin

  Home, Doors, House

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• I'm more the sort of person who doesn't like hugging strangers because we don't know each other, so we shouldn't.

  Carey Mulligan

  Hug, Persons, Knows

  "Carey Mulligan: 'I haven't seen myself naked in the mirror for a decade'". Interview with Kira Cochrane, www.theguardian.com. January 15, 2012.

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• What made Obama unique was that he was the ultimate charismatic politician - the most unknown stranger ever to achieve the presidency in the United States. No one knew who he was, he came out of nowhere, he had this incredible persona that floated him above the fray, destroyed Hillary, took over the Democratic Party and became president. This is truly unprecedented: A young unknown with no history, no paper trail, no well-known associates, self-created.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Party, Unique, Self

  "'Obama Is Average'". Interview with Klaus Brinkbäumer and Gregor-Peter Schmitz, www.spiegel.de. October 26, 2009.

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• I don't date guys that I just meet randomly. I don't feel comfortable meeting strangers.

  Ali Landry

  Guy, Feels, Meetings

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• What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.

  George Saunders

  Powerful, Desire, Found

  George Saunders (2012). “The Brain-Dead Megaphone”, p.55, A&C Black

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• You are a stranger in a strange land. As an evolved person living in a relatively unevolved world, you are constantly subjected to a bombardment of seemingly endless negative vibrations emanating from those around you.

  Frederick Lenz

  Land, Negative, World

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• To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.

  John Cheever

  Dream, Pain, Writing

  "From the Sixties—I" by John Cheever, www.newyorker.com. January 21, 1991.

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• In response to the challenge of strangers, sport arose as a sublimated representation of a community's armed might as well as its pride of place and clan.

  John Thorn

  Sports, Pride, Community

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• People like ourselves may see nothing wondrous in writing, but our anthropologists know how strange and magical it appears to a purely oral people - a conversation with no one and yet with everyone. What could be stranger than the silence one encounters when addressing a question to a text? What could be more metaphysically puzzling than addressing an unseen audience, as every writer of books must do? And correcting oneself because one knows that an unknown reader will disapprove or misunderstand?

  Neil Postman

  Book, Writing, People

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.13, Penguin

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• For me, there are no my people and strangers, no bad people and good people. All people are equal for me.

  Viktor Yanukovych

  People, Equal, Good People

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• The thing that I'm most proud of in my life is that if a stranger came up to me and said, 'I can't stop drinking. I can't stop drinking. Can you help me?' I can say, 'Yes, I can help you.'

  Matthew Perry

  Drinking, Yes I Can, Proud

  "Matthew Perry Comes Clean", abcnews.go.com.

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• When I was small, my most serious handicap was a painful bashfulness in the presence of strangers.

  George McGovern

  Serious, Painful, Handicaps

  George Stanley McGovern (1977). “Grassroots: the autobiography of George McGovern”, Random House (NY)

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• But coming to terms with one’s sorrow is one thing; sharing it with strangers is quite another.

  Marie Brennan

  Sorrow, Term, One Thing

  Marie Brennan (2013). “A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent”, p.322, Macmillan

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• The past is an obdurate stranger that puts as many marks on us as we attempt to impose on it.

  Joanne Harris

  Past, Mark

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