Quotes about people
page 57

“Those you love will not drown or burn. They will fly away.'…'Now we both have people we love who are like birds. They have flown far from anything in this world that can hurt them. They're flying away still.”

Alice Hoffman (1952) Novelist, young-adult writer, children's writer

Source: Incantation

Love, World, Bird, Hurt

“People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.”

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) British writer and philosopher

Fear, Thinking, Passion

“Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness.”

Karen Joy Fowler book Sarah Canary

Source: Sarah Canary

Madness

“Treat people as an end, and never as a means to an end”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

“Life was going on, and no one but a handful of people cared if I lived or died.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Pale Demon

Life

“Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Depressing

“Some people think they have discernment when actually they are just suspicious..

Suspicion comes out of the unrenewed mind; discernment comes out of the renewed spirit.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

Source: Battlefield of the Mind: Winning the Battle in Your Mind

Thinking

“Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?”

D.H. Lawrence book Women in Love

Source: Women in Love

World, Beauty, Grass

“Well, well, well," I said. "If it isn't the people responsible for unleashing Rose Hathaway on the world. You've got a lot to answer for.”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

World

“To other people, it sometimes seems like nothing at all. You are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames.”

Matt Haig book Reasons to Stay Alive

Source: Reasons to Stay Alive

“We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Love, Light, Heart, Christ

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable.”

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian

"Terror Over Tripoli" http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/Tripoli_ZR.html (1993), from The Zinn Reader (1997)

“It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.”

E.M. Forster book Maurice

Source: Maurice

“I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

As quoted in ‪If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren't There More Happy People? (2009) ‬by John Mitchinson, p. 87

“My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

“Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.”

Susan Sontag book In America

Source: In America

Silence, Waiting

“She often had to remind herself that she couldn't do everything alone. She wasn't always the best person for the job. Sometimes she got tunnel vision and forgot about what other people needed.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

Personality

“You can’t fool people into loving you.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Choke

Love, Fools

“Guilty feelings about clothes are totally unnecessary. A lot of people earn their living by making clothes, so you should never feel bad.”

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer

Feeling, Clothes

“If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

“I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

World, Thinking, Sense, Parting

“Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.”

Tana French book The Likeness

Source: The Likeness

“That was another lesson I had learned perhaps too well: people meant pain.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

Pain, Learning

“If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort.”

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

“There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Time

“Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Chapter Thirteen: Frankfurt, Door, Independent Operants

Bird, Sleep, Singing

“It's just me and the Bane. And I'm fighting him because he killed all of those innocent mice and people, and I have to stop him. Not because Sandwich says so but because I say so.”

Suzanne Collins book Gregor and the Code of Claw

Source: Gregor and the Code of Claw

Fight

“I’ve never heard that the sexual act requires any particular intelligence. From what I’ve observed, many stupid people are easily able to produce children.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Suddenly You

Children, Stupidity, Intelligence

“The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.”

Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) American writer and lecturer

Source: How to Win Friends & Influence People

World

“Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.”

Lorrie Moore (1957) American writer

Source: Self-Help

Life, World

“Hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement.”

Robert Musil book The Man Without Qualities

Source: The Man Without Qualities

Reading

“People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve. (Bernard Mickey Wrangle, p 99)”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

Beauty

“If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Time

“Do you know, one of the greatest problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas? Now, thoughts and ideas, that interests me.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Variant: Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas.
Source: Margaret Thatcher

Age, Feeling, Idea, Problem

“People who ask confidently get more than those who are hesitant and uncertain. When you've figured out what you want to ask for, do it with certainty, boldness and confidence.”

Jack Canfield (1944) American writer

Confidence

“[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22

Education, Question

“I knew even then how rare that kind of love is. Only the luckiest people get to experience it at all.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Best of Me

Variant: Because I knew even then how rare that kind of love is. Only the luckiest people get to experience it at all.
Source: The Best of Me

Love

“Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.”

Iris Murdoch book The Message to the Planet

The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 509.

Distant

“It's so easy to get caught up in what people expect of you. Sometimes, you can just lose yourself.”

Sarah Dessen book Dreamland

Source: Dreamland (2000)

“People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

“I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.”

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer

World, Understanding, Thinking, Change

“But grief makes a monster out of us sometimes… and sometimes you say and do things to the people you love that you can't forgive yourself for.”

Melina Marchetta book On the Jellicoe Road

Source: On the Jellicoe Road

Love, Forgiveness

“… and he smiled a lot. The smile did not mean that he was happy. It meant he was stronger than most people, and that he intended to take advantage of it.”

Michael Cadnum (1949) American writer

Source: Flash

Happiness, Smile

“The people say that the two seemed to be removed from human experience; that they had gone through pain and had come out on the other side.”

John Steinbeck book The Pearl

Source: The Pearl

Pain

“You know, sometimes you've got to trust the people you love. You've got to trust that if they're good people, they'll make good decisions.”

Janette Rallison (1966) American writer

Source: How to Take the Ex Out of Ex-Boyfriend

Love, Decision

“You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

“Everyone's life is a mess. We all make mistakes… and not just little slip-ups. Major mistakes that hurt us and other people.”

James Alan Gardner Trapped

Source: Trapped

Life, Hurt

“It's funny how different people are. If I'd been this kid and someone was snarling "Ordering a pizza?" at me, without even thinking, I would have snarled back "Yeah. You want pepperoni?"
-Maximum Ride”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: School's Out—Forever

Thinking

“Fate is the magnetic pull of our souls toward the people, places, and things we belong with.”

Tiffanie DeBartolo (1970) American writer

Source: How to Kill a Rock Star

Fate, Soul

“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

Death, Thinking, Betrayal

“The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return …”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1970s, Homage to Daniel Shays : Collected Essays (1972), Matters of Fact and Fiction : Essays 1973 - 1976 (1978), p. 280

Question

“People are dumb. I’ll never get over how dumb people are.”

Gillian Flynn (1971) American author and critic

Source: The Grownup

“You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel strong. You save people by letting them save you.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Choke

Feeling, Strong

“But sometimes you have to be brave. Sometimes you have to show people what's important in life.”

Sophie Kinsella book I've Got Your Number

Source: I've Got Your Number

Life

“[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.”

Jonathan Haidt (1963) American psychologist

Source: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

Thinking

“Angel says that rich people don't like to tolerate much. Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Diary

Source: Diary

Love, Life, Money, Angels

“When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living.”

Judith Lewis Herman (1942) American psychiatrist

Source: Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

Feeling, Dead

“Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Fate, Beauty, Way

“The universe is full of dead people who lived by assumption.”

Alan Dean Foster book Splinter of the Mind's Eye

Source: Splinter of the Mind's Eye

Universe, Dead

“Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins.”

Darren Shan (1972) Irish writer of English-language fiction under pen name, real name Darren O'Shaughnessy

Life, Happiness, Way, Evil

“A person's shadow stood for his legacy, his impact on the world. Some people cast hardly any shadow at all. Some cast long, deep shadows that endured for centuries.”

Rick Riordan book The Serpent's Shadow

Source: The Serpent's Shadow

World, Personality

“When two people were in love you had to leave them to it. Especially when you weren't in love and wished that you were. That could embarrass. That could hurt.”

Irvine Welsh book Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance

Source: Ecstasy

Love, Hurt

“Maybe you feel pressure to be positive because so many people rely on your good, fake-positive energy? If that's the case, screw everybody else. You're not a bottle of Valium.”

Augusten Burroughs (1965) American writer

Source: This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't

Feeling

“I have one problem, I don’t hate people. They disgust me and I want to get away from them. I do not have hatred. I have an escape mechanism.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Hate, Problem

“It is the encounters with people that make life worth living.”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

Variant: It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.

Life

“The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. Create your own.”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

Feeling, Strong

“Percy," Grover said, "the godsdon't appreciate people sitting in their thrones. I mean like turn-you-into-a-pile-of-ashes don't appreciate it.”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

“Internet porn makes everything more reasonable -- once you've realized there is a massive subculture of upwardly mobile people who think it's erotic to see an Asian woman giving a hand job to a javelina, nothing else in the world seems crazy.”

Chuck Klosterman (1972) Author, Columnist

World, Thinking

“I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

"Mr. Chesterton in Hysterics," in The Clarion, (14 November 1913), re-published in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17 (1982), p. 219.
Variant: I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Source: Young Rebecca: Writings, 1911-1917

“It's unfair how the kids who are starving for attention tended to be so annoying that people had no inclination to give it to them.”

Lauren Myracle book Shine

Source: Shine

“Hurt, he'll never be hurt--he's made to hurt other people.”

George Eliot book Silas Marner

Source: Silas Marner

Hurt

“Pity is the feeling of well-intentioned people who are unable to act.”

Pramoedya Ananta Toer book Bumi Manusia

Source: Bumi Manusia

Feeling

“People with mental illnesses aren't wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can't be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward.”

Matt Haig book Reasons to Stay Alive

Source: Reasons to Stay Alive

Feeling, Selfishness

“I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

God, Heart

“To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.”

Dean Koontz book The Darkest Evening of the Year

Source: The Darkest Evening of the Year

Life

“We know from daily life that we exist for other people first of all, for whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Life, Happiness, Smile, Dependency

“The most sophisticated people I know - inside they are all children.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

Children

“I can
almost understand
why
people
leap
from
bridges.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Understanding

“The only queer people are those who don't love anybody.”

Rita Mae Brown (1944) Novelist, poet, screenwriter, activist

Love

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 2

Personality

“If people don't like you, or they think you're strange, then that's their problem.”

Nicholas Sparks book A Walk to Remember

Source: A Walk to Remember

Problem, Thinking

“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Men, Law, Reading

“The future is just wasted on some people.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

Source: Invisible Monsters

Future

“It's music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you're being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you're carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead”

Nick Hornby (1957) English novelist

God, Music, Jerk, Rage

“How can you, of all people, say everything will be alright?"
He has a point. I consider my answer. "Well, it's better than saying 'Keep on crying, I'm sure things will just get worse,' right?”

Wendy Mass (1967) American children's writer

Source: Rapunzel: The One with All the Hair

Cry

“All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 12, p. 330

Time, Motivational, Leadership

“I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect.”

Mary Balogh (1944) Welsh-Canadian novelist

Source: Then Comes Seduction

Hurt, Hurtful

“I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

Time

“People are fond of using military terms to describe what they do.
We call it bombing when we go out painting, when of course it's more
like entertaining the troops in a neutral zone, during peacetime in a
country without an army.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

Source: Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall

Painting, Country

“So I buy it. The most perfect little cardigan in the world. People will call me the Girl in the Gray Cardigan. I’ll be able to live in it. Really, it’s an investment.”

Sophie Kinsella book The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic

Source: Confessions of a Shopaholic

World, Girl, Perfection

“Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

Source: The Simple Art of Murder

Fish

“Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

"Gzowski on FM".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

Courageous

“Most People have a desire to look for the exception instead of the desire to become exceptional.”

John C. Maxwell (1947) American author, speaker and pastor

“If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

Love, Mathematics

“People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

“I have no regrets. I wouldn't have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say.”

Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982) Film actress from Sweden

"An Uncommon Scold," by Abby Adams, 1989.

Life, Way

“A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Quoted in Fire and Ice: The Art and Thought of Robert Frost (1961) by Lawrence Thompson
1960s

Personality

“I know what they said even if they would not say it to my face. People love to talk. They love to slander you if you have any substance. They say I love nothing but money and the Presbyterian Church and that is why I never married.”

Charles Portis book True Grit

Source: True Grit (1968), Chapter 7, pp. 214-215 : thoughts of 'Mattie Ross'

Love, Money

“LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

Attributed to Leary by Terence McKenna in one of his talks ( "The World and Its Double" https://terencemckenna.wikispaces.com/The+World+And+Its+Double, 11 September 1993, Nature Friends Lodge, Sierra Madre, CA), though he also stated[citation needed] Leary denied ever having said it. <br class="br">Misattributed

Behavior

“Being vulnerable, letting people in, getting hurt… it's all part of being in love.”

Jenny Han book Always and Forever, Lara Jean

Source: Always and Forever, Lara Jean

Love, Parting, Hurt

Quotes about people page 57

Related topics

Quotes about people
page 57