Strangers Quotes
More Strangers Quotes
By foreign hands thy dying eyes were closed, By foreign hands thy decent limbs composed, By foreign hands thy humble grave adorned, By strangers honoured, and by strangers mourned.
Alexander Pope— 1717 Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, l.51-4.
Urban people, of course, are terribly scared nowadays. They may yearn for society, but it is risky to go around talking to strangers, for a lot of reasons, one being that people are so accustomed not to have many human contacts that they are afraid they may find out they really prefer life that way.
russell baker— "Small Kicks in Superland" (p.56)
Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though Nancy shared it with me; strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed... I could not use a telephone, I felt sick every time I travelled by train, and to see more than two new people in a single day prevented me from sleeping.
robert graves— Ch.26 On being at home in Harlech in 1919. During the First World War, the mental effects of war on the fighting men were called shell shock or neurasthenia — or dismissed altogether as cowardice. Graves describes very clearly symptoms of what would now be seen as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
paul of tarsus— Paul of Tarsus, Hebrews 13:2 (KJV)
I am born of the conquerors, you of the persecuted. Raped by rum and an alien law, progress and economics, are you and I and a once-loved land peopled by tribes and trees; doomed traders and stock-exchanges, bought by faceless strangers.
McKinney— 1990 A Human Pattern,'Two Dreamtimes', stanzas17-18.The poem is dedicated to KathWalker (now Oodgeroo Noonuccal).
Sundered by peaks unscalable, Tomorrow shall we strangers be.
— c.750 'Visiting an Old Friend', collected in A GoldenTreasury of Chinese Poetry (translated byJohnTurner,1967).
I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
— 1947 Blanche. A Streetcar Named Desire, sc.11.
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
paul of tarsus— Hebrews 13:2 (KJV)
By foreign hands thy dying eyes were closed,By foreign hands thy decent limbs composed,By foreign hands thy humble grave adorned,By strangers honored, and by strangers mourned.
Alexander Pope— Line 51.
But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,This which we live behind our unseen faces,Is neither dream, nor childhood, neitherMyth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,For we are incomplete and know no future,And we are howling or dancing out our soulsIn beating syllables before the curtain:We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.
delmore schwartz— "Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers"
May I never sit on a tribunal where my friends shall not find more favor from me than strangers.
themistocles— As quoted by Plutarch, in Lives as translated by J. Langhorne and W. Langhorne (1850), p.225
I have a terrible problem with procrastination... a friend told me, "Well, you should go to therapy." And I thought about it, but then I said, "Wait a minute. Why should I pay a stranger to listen to me talk when I can get strangers to pay to listen to me talk?" And that's when I got the idea of touring.
ellen degeneres— Here and Now
Shaking hands with the strangers of opposite sex is forbidden
mohammad hussein fadlallah— al-Nadwah, vol.6, p.723
It is easier with strangers, for they touch your life but for an instant. You will not disappoint them, for you owe them nothing; neither do they expect anything. Friends you can hurt, for they expect everything.
david gemmell— Ch. 2 (The King Beyond the Gate)
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— The Rock That is Higher: Story as Truth (1993)
The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivable encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no preciser name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold.
thomas mann— Herr und Hund (A Man and his Dog) (1918)
....But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay, Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows, And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way. Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write."
philip sidney— Sonnet 1,Concluding couplet from Loving in truth,and fain in verse my love to show
Compare: "Look, then, into thine heart and write", Henry W. Longfellow, Voices of the Night, Prelude.
The fact that men have a same origin and live in the same universe means that they are representatives of a same unity. Deep down, they are also related (or connected) among them; that they consider (or not) themselves as strangers, this just depends on the feeling (or sensation) that dictate their relationships. In their country, two fellow coutrymen whose paths berely cross (or see each only only briefly) with inferrence, would effusively rush themselves up (or throw themselves) into each other arms if they would happen to meet in a desert, among Cannibles.
african spir— p. 42 (Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937))
I do desire we may be better strangers.
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, As You Like It (c.1599-1600), Act III, scene 2, line 274.
We are strangers to Christian love, if we harbor malice or revenge in our hearts toward any of our fellow-creatures, whatever treatment we receive at their hands.
— Charles Backus, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 401.
The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more. Logical outcomes were the reduction of this licence to privilege by the men of the desert, and their hardness to strangers unprovided with introduction or guarantee, since the common security lay in the common responsibility of kinsmen.
— T. E. Lawrence, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), Ch. 11
Encounters between strangers in the desert, while rare, were occasions of mutual suspicion , and masked by initial preparations on both sides for an incident that might prove either cordial or warlike.
— Walter M. Miller, Jr., in A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Ch 1
Indeed, Miss Manners has come to believe that the basic political division in this country is not between liberals and conservatives but between those who believe that they should have a say in the love lives of strangers and those who do not.
— Miss Manners (Judith Martin), Miss Manners Rescues Civilization
I do desire we may be better strangers.
— Orlando, Sc. ii
I read once that women love mysterious strangers.
Nicholas Sparks— The Notebook (1996)
She couldn't possibly go back to the gentleman's flat; she had no right to cry in strangers' houses.
Beauchamp— 1922 The Garden Party and Other Stories,'The Life of Ma Parker'.
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— 1904 Larry Doyle toTom Broadbent. John Bull's Other Island, act1.
