Strangers Quotes
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Howard Altmann has found a way to make language transform itself. If the elusive moment between I and Thou could speak, it might be one of his quietly amazing lines-'you ask the silence to invert itself / like a gymnast in the dark . . . ' Without a trace of rhetoric, In This House reminds us of the power of poetry: to show us how to live in a world in which we are strangers. It's a thrill to come close to such an original and deeply realized art.
Dennis Nurkse
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We would never consider for a moment paying the team members equally. In the Olympics we usually have some of the world’s fastest runners yet have lost some of the relay races because we could not pass the baton without dropping it! We take it for granted that accountability must be individual; there must be someone to praise for victory and someone to blame for defeat, the individual where “the buck stops.” In fact, instead of admiring relationships, we value and admire individual competitiveness, winning out over each other, outdoing each other conversationally, pulling the clever con game, and selling stuff that the customer does not need. We believe in caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), and we justify exploitation with “There’s a sucker born every minute.” We breed mistrust of strangers, but we don’t have any formulas for how to test or build trust. We value our freedom without realizing that this breeds caution and mistrust of each other. When we are taken in by a Ponzi scheme and lose all our money, we don’t blame our culture or our own greed—we blame the regulators who should have caught it and kick ourselves for not getting in on it earlier.
Edgar Schein
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Strangers come up to me in bars and tell me about their sex lives. I'm thinking, 'You think I can make it better somehow?'
Chris Harrison
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Modern society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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Suddenly Shirley understood why her father had brought her 10,000 miles to live among strangers. Here, she did not have to wait for gray hairs to be considered wise. Here, she could speak up, question even the conduct of the President. Here, Shirley Temple Wong was somebody. She felt as if she had the power of ten tigers, as if she had grown as tall as the Statue of Liberty.
Bette Lord
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Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers for long.
Matthew Pearl
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Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.
George Whitman
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Strangers had met and created a true sporting masterpiece - a tapestry of daring and shot-making brilliance that they draped in Laver Arena.
Bud Collins
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I wasn't big on family gatherings. Too many intimate strangers. I smiled a lot, but really I never knew what to say.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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Youth should be kept strangers to all that is bad, and especially to things which suggest vice or hate. When the five years have passed away, during the two following years they must look on at the pursuits which they are hereafter to learn. There are two periods of life with reference to which education has to be divided, from seven to the age of puberty, and onwards to the age of one and twenty.
Aristotle
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They looked at each other. Like they knew everything about each other. Like that. But what exactly did they know, these strangers who were so familiar and intimate? You fought a war with someone, and you knew them. But you only knew the part that was in the war, the part that knew how to fight. The other part, the pedestrian part that lived in the endless calmness of days, you didn’t know that part.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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My home is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world - the ... affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other.
Charlotte Bronte
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Do we police because we fear we can be savages? Do our barricades from each other belie the blinds that keep us strangers to ourselves?
Angel Kyodo Williams
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Now they were as strangers; nay worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.
Jane Austen
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Love should start from people close to us, then be extended to other people, to strangers, and eventually to the world.
Confucius
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I've always had a real fascination with Alice in Wonderland and really related to it in some way. And since I was little, people always nicknamed me Alice, even total strangers. I do know I'm always in Wonderland. And I'm definitely just as curious. I don't mind being amongst the mad people, I enjoy it.
Evan Rachel Wood
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No one I know actually reads what I write, so thank heavens for you strangers.
Sarah Vowell
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The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.
George Eliot
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... stress hormones are meant to give us the strength and endurance to respond to extraordinary conditions. People who actively do something to deal with a disaster - rescuing loved ones or strangers, transporting people to a hospital, being a part of a medical team, pitching tents or cooking meals - utilize their stress hormones for their proper purpose and therefore are at much lower risk of becoming traumatized.
Bessel van der Kolk
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I live on in the sweetness of old days
with strangers who build new dwellings
on blue hills up to the edge of the sky,
I talk softly with the captured trees
and comfort them sometimes.
How slowly time consumes the core of things,
and soundlessly treads fate’s heavy heel.
Edith Södergran