Quotes about people

page 79

“You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don't like bigots, bullies, snobs or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate."

"Consciously, sir, consciously," Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. "I hate them consciously.”

“God doesn't give people burdens they can't handle.”

“Of course I loved books more than people.”

“You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.”

“All your life people will tell you things. And most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, what they'll tell you will be wrong.”

“Birds sing even when the world is filled with sadness. I don't know why people can't do the same thing.”

“Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.”

“That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.”

“The only really interesting thing is
what happens between two people in a room.”

“This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.”

“People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”

“Different people were good at different things, Lena mused. Lena was good at writing thank-you notes, for instance, and Effie was good at being happy.”

“It was bewildering and humbling to keep discovering how many brave things people can fail to talk themselves out of doing.”

“Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.”

“I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart.”

“Luna! Artemis! lovers' spats are icing on the cake! Your just showing off to us single people! -Minako”

“People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.”

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”

“Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.”

“I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.”

“There's a name for people with an interest in the moon," Alex said. "They're called lunatics.”

“Forgiveness works two ways, in most instances. People have to forgive themselves too. The powerful have to forgive themselves for their behavior. That should be a sacred process.”

“People die… so love them every day.
Beauty fades… so look before it's gone.
Love changes… but not the love you give.
And if you love, you'll never be alone.”

“At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.”

“Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it's their kryptonite”

“Remember in elementary school you were told that in case of fire you have to line up quietly in a single file from smallest to tallest? What is the logic in that? What, do tall people burn slower?”

“Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.”

“We meet the people we’re supposed to when the time is just right.”

“i believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try and make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. then you write for who you love whether they can read or write or not and whether they are alive or dead.”

“After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.”

“We're late," she said, "The show is supposed to start in ten minutes. If some people hadn't decided that 'semiformal' meant 'seminaked'-"

"Why are you calling me 'some people'?" Mark inquired. "I am only one person.”

“Ammu explained to Estha and Rahel that people always loved best what they Identified most with.”

“Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.”

“Impatience can cause wise people to do foolish things.”

“People are watching the way we act, more than they are listening to what we say.”

“For in the long run, either through a lie, or through truth, people were bound to give themselves away…”

“Mama says that satisfaction isn't what I should search for. Respect is. Respect?
I detest that word. Probably because in this world you have to respect the wrong people for the wrong reasons.”

“Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.”

“Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.”

“There's an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.”

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.”

“Not everyone is willing to embrace liberty; liberty requires not just effort, but risk. Some people choose to delude themselves and see their chains as protective armor.”

“People talk about nature as a mother, but to me she's always been Medea, ready and willing to slaughter her children.”

“But grieving people are selfish. They won’t let you comfort them and they say you don’t understand and they make you feel useless when all your life you’ve been functional to them.”

“Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.”

“The car was full of unhappy people heading west. It was the Great American Family Road Trip, all right. Whaaa-hoo!”

“People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.”

“There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need never be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings.”

“Usually the threat of death makes people a lot more aware of their lives.”

“I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.”

“When people die, our dreams of what they could be die with them. Even if ours is the hand that ends them.”

“(M)aybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect… you know… like being people.”

“There's the South Pole, said Christopher Robin, and I expect there's an East Pole and a West Pole, though people don't like talking about them.”

“people who try to control situations all the time are afraid that if they don't, nothing will work out the way they want.”

“When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.”

“Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.”

“As a recluse I couldn't bear traffic. It had nothing to do with jealousy, I simply disliked people, crowds, anywhere, except at my readings. People diminished me, they sucked me dry.”

“Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.”

“Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable.”

“Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know “why” I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way and some of the roads weren’t paved.”

“People leave managers, not companies”

“A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.”

“There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.”

“Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.”

“Sometimes it’s like people are a million times more beautiful to you in your mind. It’s like you see them through a special lens — but maybe if it’s how you see them, that’s how they really are. It’s like the whole tree falling in the forest thing.”

“I don't know. I imagine good teaching as a circle of earnest people sitting down to ask each other meaningful questions. I don't see it as a handing down of answers…”

“Glum. It meant having the blues in a way that annoyed other people. Having the blues aggressively.”

“Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.”

“I am getting better at smiling when people expect it.”

“A lot of people refuse to do things because they don't want to go naked, don't want to go without guarantee. But that's what's got to happen. You go naked until you die”

“I was not so sure, but Jem told me I was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that’s why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I could just go off and find some to play with.”

“The noble-minded are calm and steady. Little people are forever fussing and fretting.”

“Frankly, our ancestors don't seem much to brag about. I mean, look at the state they left us in, with the wars, the broken planet. Clearly, they didn't care about what would happen to the people who came after them.”

“Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will. Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as it was — which was ungodly and inhuman. Ben Franklin called it what it was when he became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.”

“And if we get caught, I will claim I made you go. At gunpoint. I am American. People will assume I'm armed.”

“Here's what I think: the five most
unattractive traits in people are cheapness, clinginess, neediness, unwillingness to change and
jealousy. Jealousy is the worst, and by far the hardest to conceal.”

“Once I opened my mind to the concept of a greater power, I never struggled with it. Everywhere I went, I felt and saw the existence of a creative intelligence in this universe, of a loving power larger than myself in nature, in people, everywhere.”

“I'm tired of people thinking they're doing me favours.”

“I know there are people who believe you should forgive and forget. For the record, I'd like to say I'm a big fan of forgiveness as long as I'm given the opportunity to get even first.”

“I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together”

“A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.”

“Let me tell you about gays in the military. I don't want any gay people hanging around me while I'm killing kids. I just don't want to see it.”

“The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.”

“When people are alive they love, when they die, they keep loving. If love ends when person dies, that is not real love”

“Even mocking people helped their face stats. In the reputation economy, the only real way to hurt anyone was to ignore them completely. And it was pretty hard to ignore someone who made your blood boil.”

“Vampires are people too!”

“… if you expect people to try to do things your way, you're going to have to give some hints as to what that way is.”

“Holding people away from you, and denying yourself love, that doesn't make you strong. if anything, it makes you weaker. Because you're doing it out of fear.”

“Jason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have -- forget sex -- because the optic nerve is technically an extension of the brain, and when two people look into each other's eyes, it's brain-to-brain.”

“music isn't just something that comforts or distracts us, it goes beyond that - it's an ideology. you can judge people by the kind of music they listen to.”

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”

“All new news is old news happening to new people”

“Wherever people feel safe (…) they will be indifferent.”

“Some people say that you shouldn't operate from a place of fear but if there is no fear, how is there a challenge?”

“As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.”

“It's a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done.”

“We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it.”

“Image is what people think we are; integrity is whar we really are.”

“People living in the vanity of their own mind not only destroy themselves, but far too often, they bring destruction to others around them.”