Quotes about people
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“There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls

“It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

World, Light

“I'm a freaking princess when it comes to other people's feelings. Yo dogbreath, get your paws of the everglades. -Max”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: School's Out—Forever

Feeling, Princess

“I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

After the Goskino representative explains that he is trying to give the point of view of the audience.
Sculpting in Time (1989)

“I have come to realize that destiny can hurt a person as much as it can bless them, and I find myself wondering why--out of all the people in all the world I could ever have loved--I had to fall in love with someone who was taken away from me.”

Nicholas Sparks book Message in a Bottle

Source: Message in a Bottle

Love, World, Hurt, Personality

“i dunno," i said, "but i have an idea that people who don't think too much tend to look younger longer”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Idea, Thinking

“When you interrupt, you've stopped listening. People need to be heard.”

Jerry Seinfeld (1954) American comedian and actor

“All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.

[Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth,, March 9, 1998]”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

“Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Thinking, Change, Time, Madness

“Crowds of questions stream through me like lines of people exiting a soccer ground or a concert. They push and shove and trip. Some make their way around. Some remain in their seats, waiting for their opportunity.”

Markus Zusak (1975) Australian author

Source: I Am the Messenger

Way, Question, Waiting

“It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“… people with nothing to declare carry the most.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“See fantasy is what people want, but reality is what they need. And I just retired from the fantasy part.”

Lauryn Hill (1975) American singer, rapper, songwriter, record producer, actress

Reality, Parting

“In difficult times, in dark times, some people shine.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Time

“It's such a happiness when good people get together.”

Jane Austen book Emma

Variant: It is such a happiness when good people get together -- and they always do.
Source: Emma

Happiness, Wedding

“In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.”

Nicholas Carr (1959) American writer

Source: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

Books, Idea, Reading

“People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother's house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count of the Bookmobile.”

Adriana Trigiani (1970) American film director

Source: Big Stone Gap

Memory, Childhood, Housing

“To some people
Love is given,
To others
Only Heaven.”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

Source: The Collected Poems

Love

“Some people standby you in your darkest hour while others walk away; only a select few march towards you and become even closer friends.”

Jeffrey Archer book Only Time Will Tell

Source: Only Time Will Tell

“My films are therapy for my debilitating depression. In institutions people weave baskets. I make films.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

“Oh, no. We can’t have that. Where you going, Mr. Meanie-Pants? You don’t hurt people then run. That’s just rude. Can the Simi barbecue him, or is he on the ‘No Simi’ eat list?” – Simi”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

Hurt

“The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away. But when people left they always came back.”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

“The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Source: Diaries of Franz Kafka

Sister, Personality

“In a city this size, every year, hundreds of husbands walk away. Kids leave home. Wives escape. People disappear.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted

Home

“Because a sound tree doesn't have bad roots, Amara. No enterprise of greatness
begins with treachery, with lying to the people who trust and love you”

Jim Butcher Furies of Calderon

Source: Furies of Calderon

Love, Lying, Tree

“Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.”

Lin Yutang (1895–1976) Chinese writer

"The Epigrams of Lusin"
Variant: Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

Hope, Country, Hope

“The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Leigh-Cheri to Bernard, in Phase III, Ch. 46.
Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)
Context: I’m not quite twenty, but, thanks to you, I’ve learned something that many women these days never learn: Prince Charming really is a toad. And the Beautiful Princess has halitosis. The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn’t that be the way to make love stay?

Love, Making love, Way, Lovers

“Her eyes burned, her muscles ached, but in some strange and secret place, she was happy to finally be doing something that wasn't just protecting herself, but protecting other people, too.”

Rachel Caine book Glass Houses

Source: Glass Houses

Happiness, Secret

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies. To be in the window and watch people being sent to concentration camps or being attacked in the street and do nothing, that's being dead.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

US News & World Report (27 October 1986)

Love, Life, Death, Hate

“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

The Olive Tree (1936)

Forgetting

“You look like the type of people who would criticize a misspelling in a suicide note.”

Tucker Max book Assholes Finish First

Source: Assholes Finish First

Suicide

“There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

Love, Idea

“Aren't you afraid of dying?
Not really. I've watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Be kind. It's worthwhile to make an effort to learn about other people and figure out what you might have in common with them.”

Viggo Mortensen (1958) American actor

Effort, Learning

“It's easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.”

Laura Hillenbrand book Seabiscuit: An American Legend

Source: Seabiscuit: An American Legend

Way, Understanding, Change, Horse

“Our first computers were born not out of greed or ego, but in the revolutionary spirit of helping common people rise above the most powerful institutions.”

Steve Wozniak (1950) American inventor, computer engineer and programmer

Help

“But I wasn't a bad girl. I don't want to be forgotten. I want people to remember me.”

Christopher Pike (1954) American author Kevin Christopher McFadden

Source: Remember Me

Girl

“Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home who has found his people everywhere.”

Chaim Potok (1929–2002) American rabbi

World, Beauty, Way, Home

“So eager are our people to obliterate the present.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

“Some people ripen, some rot.”

Marlena de Blasi (1952)

A Thousand Days in Venice

“You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Survivor

Source: Survivor

Death, World, Law, Time

“Almost all people have this potential for evil, which would be unleashed only under certain dangerous social circumstances.”

Iris Chang book The Rape of Nanking

Source: The Rape of Nanking

Evil

“Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve.”

Frank Herbert book God Emperor of Dune

Source: God Emperor of Dune

Thinking

“The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

“The strongest, toughest men all have compassion. They're not heartless and cold. You have to be man enough to have compassion - to care about people and about your children" (217) - John Singleton "Oh Man, I've Become My Father”

Denzel Washington (1954) actor, screenwriter, director, producer

Source: A Hand to Guide Me

Men, Children

“That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.”

Tracy Kidder (1945) writer

Source: Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World

Feeling, Help

“the seed of doubt was there, and it stayed, and every now and then sent out a little root. It changed everything, to have that seed growing. It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

Change

“It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Source: An Autobiography

Love, Cute, Romantic, Valentine's Day

“It means she chose light over darkness. I want people to know that so they'll always remember.
I always will.
Bonnie McCullough”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: The Fury

Light

“You’re a dead man,” Kyle said. “Warren doesn’t take kindly to people who hurt me.”

Patricia Briggs book Frost Burned

Source: Frost Burned

Hurt, Dead

“If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.”

John Steinbeck book The Grapes of Wrath

Variant: If you're in trouble or hurt or need–go to poor people. They're the only ones that'll help–the only ones.
Source: The Grapes of Wrath

Help, Hurt, Hurtful

“And all people live, not by reason of any care they have for themselves, but by the love for them that is in other people.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Love

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Wide hats and narrow minds" https://books.google.com/books?id=-lWtVSZoqWkC&pg=PA776 New Scientist 8 March 1979, p. 777. Reprinted in The Panda's Thumb, p. 151 https://books.google.com/books?id=z0XY7Rg_lOwC&pg=PA151. <br class="br">Source: The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

“If your appearance is all people see, they have no respect for your mind.”

Trudi Canavan book The Magician's Apprentice

Source: The Magician's Apprentice

Appearance

“In order to love people usefully you need to be focused on them and not yourself.”

Richard Templar (1950–2006) selfhelp author

Love

“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

Foreword to The Dreaded Comparison: Animal Slavery and Human Slavery (1996) by Marjorie Spiegel, p. 14 http://books.google.com/books?ei=je4zTPjrBcmTnQfXmMCLBA&ct=result&id=8u_tAAAAMAAJ&dq=dreaded+comparison+%22exist+for+their+own%22&q=%22exist+for+their+own%22.

Women, Men, World, Animals

“Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look.”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper

Thinking, Positive

“… what makes you older is when your bones, muscles and blood wear out, when the heart sinks into oblivion and all the houses you ever lived in are gone and people are not really certain that your civilization ever existed.”

Richard Brautigan The Tokyo-Montana Express

Source: The Tokyo-Montana Express

Heart, Housing

“People who want to make a million borrow a million first”

Sophie Kinsella book Shopaholic Abroad

Source: Shopaholic Takes Manhattan

“If you're not reading - with your heart as well as your brain - you will be one stupid grown up. Even worst, you'll be missing out on one of the best experiences you can possibly have. Nowhere will you meet more interesting people than in books.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Christmas Wedding

Books, Stupidity, Reading, Heart

“After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?”

Russell Hoban (1925–2011) American British novelist, children's writer and illustrator

“My idea is to give hope, because where there is no hope, there is no vision, and where there is no vision, people will perish.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Source: The Uncommon Wisdom of Oprah Winfrey: A Portrait in Her Own Words

Hope, Idea

“As far as I’m concerned, high school sucked when I went, and probably sucks now. I tend to regard people who remember it as the best four years of their lives with caution and a degree of pity.”

Stephen King book Guns

Source: Guns

School

“We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Choke

Time

“Things happen to people by accident.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett A Little Princess

Source: A Little Princess

“Armageddon is not around the corner. This is only what the people of violence want us to believe. The complexity and diversity of the world is the hope for the future.”

Michael Palin (1943) British comedian, actor, writer and television presenter

"Letter from London" (18 September 2003) http://palinstravels.co.uk/static-51?topic=1752&forum=12 <br class="br">Context: Contrary to what the politicians and religious leaders would like us to believe, the world won’t be made safer by creating barriers between people. Cries of “They’re evil, let’s get ‘em” or “The infidels must die” sound frightening, but they’re desperately empty of argument and understanding. They’re the rallying cries of prejudice, the call to arms of those who find it easier to hate than admit they might be not be right about everything.<br>Armageddon is not around the corner. This is only what the people of violence want us to believe. The complexity and diversity of the world is the hope for the future.

World, Hope, Future