Quotes about people

page 69

“In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.”

“People need not fear the unknown if they are capable of achieving what they need and want.”

“You simply cannot tell other people they are stupid, even if they really are stupid.”

“The less people think of you, the more they will reveal to you or in your presence.”

“No matter how people try to dispute it, perception is reality. Its what you choose to believe that makes you the person you are.”

“Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.”

“Babies, babies, babies. Why did God make so many babies? But no, God didn't make them. Stupid people made them.”

“Most people would say that she's beautiful.
-That's because she's been with most people.”

“Real people had real agendas, real demands, real expectations about how other people should behave.”

“Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?”

“I stopped watching for ridicule, the scorpion's tail hidden in his words. He said what he meant; he was puzzled if you did not. Some people might have mistaken this for simplicity. But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart?”

“And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.”

“When I look around today, the biggest anachronism I see is pregnancy. I just can't believe that people are still pregnant.”

“Wilem snorted."That doesn't sound suspicious at all," he said. "And you wonder why people talk about you."

"I don't wonder why they talk," I said "I wonder what they say.”

“Cherish the people who make up your home, and you'll notice the hearth fires burn brighter than ever before.”

“People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.”

“Once I was seated, I couldn't help people-watching. I'll admit it, I'm an addict from way back.”

“But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is. -Connor”

“If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.”

“You must be careful when you ask people whether they’re happy; it’s a question that can upset them a great deal.”

“Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie.”

“People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.”

“Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don't quite understand the joke that is themselves.”

“People were just too complex to reduce to simple personality traits.”

“Everybody breaks sooner or later, Bob. Anyone can drown. Sometimes you see it. Most often, you
don’t because the body protects and the skin hides, so drowning doesn’t look like drowning and some
people scar so nicely. Take it from an expert.”

“When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh.”

“When people have tried everything and have discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert to what they know best—which will often be the tribe, the totem, or the taboo.”

“Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.”

“Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.”

“One can't love humanity. One can only love people.”

“Agent Jones held Sinjin’s face in his hands. “I’m going to make balloon animals. People need balloon animals.”
“How right you are, strange delusional man,” Sinjin said.”

“We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?”

“I feel ashamed now that I tried to take my life. It is such a precious thing. I had no one to talk me out of my despair and that was a mistake. You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart.”

“He wanted to explain how people were never quite what you thought they were.”

“I'd always thought telling the truth to other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself. Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew.”

“Why is marijuana against the law? It grows naturally on our planet, serves a thousand different functions, all of them positive. To make marijuana against the law is like saying that God made a mistake. Like on the seventh day God looked down, "There it is. My Creation, perfect and holy in all ways. Now I can rest. [Gives shocked expression] Oh my Me! I left fuckin' pot everywhere. I should never have smoked that joint on the third day. Hehe, that was the day I created the possum. Still gives me a chuckle. But if I leave pot everywhere, that's gonna give people the impression they're supposed to … use it. Now I have to create Republicans."”

“Is she for real?” He paused and reconsidered. “Are you for real? Spells? Magic? I mean, don’t get me wrong. I drink blood and control people’s minds. But I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

“What use is? What good is watching for that matter? People are forever watching things. They should be. Ithe things I look at. I am a see-er.”

“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”

“Why couldn't Jesus command us to obsess over everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to try not to breathe at all, or to pay attention, stomp away to brood when people annoy us, and then eat a big bag of Hershey's Kisses in bed?”

“Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”

“Reading has always been the largest and most irreplaceable pleasure for Vincent; reading about other people's successes and failures, joys and sufferings seemed to bury his own failures.”

“People you knew when you were teenagers, the ones who saw your stupidest haircut and the most embarrassing things you've done in your life, and they still cared about you after all that: they're not replaceable, you know?”

“People who make no mistakes lack boldness and the spirit of adventure. They are the brakes on the wheels of progress.”

“People hide the truth because they're afraid.”

“There are two kinds of people I don't trust: people who don't drink and people who collect stickers.”

“You will find that hate can unify people more quickly and more fervently than devotion ever could.”

“How am I going to make friends with these people if all I can think of is how easy it would be to rob them?”

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”

“The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.”

“People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.”

“Someone told me much later that you always know the people who are going to make a difference in your life, from the very first time you set eyes on them, even if you do not like them at all. And I had noticed him, as he had me. God help us.”

“I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.”

“But then, he thought, most politicians are small and shabby, the sort of people who have been bullied at school.

That's why they become politicians.”

“I'm done with those; regrets are an excuse for people who have failed.”

“life is too short for fake butter or fake people.”

“Ever, if I’ve learned nothing else in my six hundred years of living, it’s that people hate change almost as much as they hate for their beliefs to be challenged.”

“The more you can increase fear of drugs, crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all of the people.”

“People got such a charge from seeing their names in print. Proof of existence. I could picture a squabble of ghosts ripping through piles of newspapers. Pointing at a name on the page. See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was.”

“What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.”

“I hate horses. I know people who think that they are noble, graceful animals, but regardless of what a horse looks like from a distance, never forget that it's as likely to step on your foot as look at you.”

“Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in.”

“Are some people destined for a great fate, or to do great things? Or is it only that they're born somehow with that great passion -- and if they find themselves in the right circumstances, then things happen? It's the sort of thing you wonder…”

“I'm always a bit shy around evil people…”

“Now, 75 years [after], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.

[Open Letter,, July 2006]”

“It is said that all people who are happy have God within them.”

“The actual stuff my family owned, those boxes under my stairs, I can't quite bear to look at. I like other people's things better. They come with other people's history.”

“You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean before they came here I could stand it… But now it has changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople." - J. R. Isidore”

“What I do know is sometimes we love the wrong people and sometimes we marry them.”

“Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.”

“You know when people say fine, it generally means ‘leave me the hell alone because I don’t want to talk about what’s really bothering me.' (Susan)”

“I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.”

“People with places to go and people with no place to go; people with a purpose and people with no purpose; people trying to hold time back and people trying to urge it forward”

“Don't be reckless with other people's hearts, And don't put up with people that are reckless with yours.”

“My house seems remarkably full of people," he observed. "Is it possible we were expected.”

“I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.”

“Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than what people do or say. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill.”

“I’ve known people that the world has thrown everything at to discourage them… to break their spirit. And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and don’t ask quarters.”

“I began to realize that I had tended to avoid some people because of my instant conclusions about who they were and what they would have to say. I discovered that everyone, speaking honestly and openly, had important things to tell me.”

“The saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary, because there's nothing to make it last.”

“Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.”

“If other people see you differently, you’ll end up seeing them differently, too.”

“You know, the thing about life and love is that they are both ever-changing while people seldom are. (Acheron)”

“There was a lot of apologizing going on, but I realized that was how it was with people you cared about. You forgave each other and moved on.”

“I do not find it easy to talk to people I don't know.”

“Other people do not see you at all, but guess at you by uncertain conjectures.”

“Emotions come and go and can't be controlled so there's no reason to worry about them. That in the end, people should be judged by their actions since in the end it was actions that defined everyone.”

“I think about how people use the devil as an alias for the things they fear. The cause and effect is backward. The devil doesn't make anyone do anything. People just do things and blame the devil after.”

“People make their own reality, goddess. We hate and we love for reasons that are known only to us.”

“The truth between two people always cuts two ways.”

“Someone has to ask you a question," George continues meaningly, "before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions. Most people aren't that much interested….”

“People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It’s exciting to have to deal with God as a rival.”

“It's like all those quiet people, when they do lose their tempers they lose them with a vengeance.”

“Each book is a mind alive, a life revealed, a world awaiting exploration, but living people are all those things, as well—and more, because their stories haven’t yet been completely told.”

“Maybe… because for the first time… there was a chance I could keep him,” I say.
“So now that you've got me, what are you going to do with me?”
“Put you somewhere you can't get hurt.”
And when he kisses me, people in the room actually sigh.”

“What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!”

“And when you'd finished running you'd be thousands of miles away from people who love you and your problem would still be there except you'd have nobody to help you.”

“I think many people love their problems. Gives them all sorts of excuses for not growing up and getting on with life.”

“‎People who talk less frequently notice more.”