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.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22

Hate, Effort, Help

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

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

God

“Of course I loved books more than people.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Love, Books

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

Libba Bray book The Sweet Far Thing

Source: The Sweet Far Thing

Success

“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.”

Michael Crichton book The Lost World

Source: The Lost World

Life, Time

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

Michael Gilbert (1912–2006) Author

Source: Perfected Sinfulness

World, Sadness, Bird, Singing

“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.”

Sarah Vowell book Assassination Vacation

Source: Assassination Vacation (2005), p. 208

War, History, Idea, Nature

“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.”

Renata Adler (1938) American author, journalist and film critic

Source: Speedboat

Drink, Sleep

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

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

Hope

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Source: Bernice Bobs Her Hair

“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.”

Ann Brashares The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

Source: The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

Happiness

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

Rob Sheffield (1966) American music journalist

Source: Love Is a Mix Tape

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

Joyce Carol Oates book The Falls

Source: The Falls

“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.”

L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Source: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Thinking, Heart, Heartbreaking, Hurtful

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

Naoko Takeuchi (1967) Japanese manga artist

Source: Sailor Moon, #11

Lovers

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

Ha-Joon Chang book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Source: 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

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

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

Letter to W.T. Barry http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch18s35.html (4 August 1822), in The Writings of James Madison (1910) edited by Gaillard Hunt, Vol. 9, p. 103; these words, using the older spelling "Governours", are inscribed to the left of the main entrance, Library of Congress James Madison Memorial Building. <br class="br">1820s <br class="br">Context: A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

Knowledge

“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.”

Lev Grossman The Magicians

Source: The Magicians

World, Dead

“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.”

Henry James Roderick Hudson

Source: Roderick Hudson

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

Anthony Horowitz book Crocodile Tears

Source: Crocodile Tears

“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.”

Sidney Poitier book The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography

Source: The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography

Way, Behavior, Forgiveness

“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.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Witchlight

Love, Beauty, Change

“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.”

Charles Bukowski book Ham on Rye

Ham On Rye (1982)
Source: Ham on Rye
Context: The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned 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. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.

God, Age, Way, Baby

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

Gillian Flynn book Gone Girl

Source: Gone Girl

“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?”

Stephen King The Dark Tower

Source: The Dark Tower

School

“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.”

Roald Dahl (1916–1990) British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter

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

Alyson Nöel book Shadowland

Source: Shadowland

Time

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Love, Reading, Perfection, 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.”

Richard Russo Empire Falls

Source: Empire Falls

World, Time, Heart

“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.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

Personality

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

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

page 98
Source: The God of Small Things (1997)

Love

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

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

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

Janette Oke (1935) Canadian writer

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

Max Lucado (1955) American clergyman and writer

Way

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

Agatha Christie book After the Funeral

Source: After the Funeral (1953)
Context: There were to be no short cuts to the truth. Instead he would have to adopt a longer, but a reasonably sure method. There would have to be conversation. Much conversation. For in the long run, either through a lie, or through truth, people were bound to give themselves away...

Truth, Lie

“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.”

Melina Marchetta book Looking for Alibrandi

Source: Looking for Alibrandi

World, Search

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

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Jayber Crow

World

“Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.”

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

Painting

“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.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Choke

Time

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

Susan Sontag book On Photography

"Melancholy Objects", p. 57
On Photography (1977)

Reality

“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.”

Terry Goodkind Chainfire

Source: Chainfire

Effort

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

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Ill Wind

Children, Nature

“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.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: The Piper's Son

Life, Feeling, Understanding, Selfishness

“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.”

Dean Koontz Odd Thomas

Source: Odd Thomas

Beauty, Imagination, Thinking, Perfection

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

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Pale Demon

Family, Cars

“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.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

Thinking, Personality

“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.”

D.E. Stevenson (1892–1973) British writer

Source: Listening Valley

Books, Travel, Winter, Help

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

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

Death

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

Graham Greene (1904–1991) English writer, playwright and literary critic

God, Personality

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

Cassandra Clare book Lord of Shadows

Source: Lord of Shadows

Dreams

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

Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995) author, activist, professor

Source: Raymond's Run

Flowers, Business

“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.”

A.A. Milne book Winnie-the-Pooh

Source: Winnie-the-Pooh

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

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Way, Time

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

Clifton Fadiman (1904–1999) American editor

Travel, Country

“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.”

Paul Fussell (1924–2012) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

Source: Class: A Guide Through the American Status System

World, Universe

“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.”

Charles Bukowski book Women

Source: Women

Jealousy, Reading

“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.”

Marilynne Robinson Gilead

Source: Gilead

Water, Dance

“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.”

Nick Hornby book How to Be Good

Source: How to Be Good

Love, Money

“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.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

Way, Travel

“People leave managers, not companies”

Marcus Buckingham (1966) British writer

First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently

“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.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: Ideology: An Introduction

“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.”

Charlie Kaufman (1958) American screenwriter

Source: Synecdoche, New York: The Shooting Script

World

“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.”

Kim Addonizio (1954) Poet, novelist

Source: Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

Reading

“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.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: The Summer I Turned Pretty

Beauty, Tree, Time

“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…”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

Imagination, Question

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

Gillian Flynn book Dark Places

Source: Dark Places

Way

“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.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

As quoted in the United States of America Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 105th Congress Second Session, Government Printing Office, Vol. 144, Part 4, p. 5738 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nEI6WcjH8ykC&pg=PA5738 <br class="br">Post-war years (1945–1955)

Horse