Quotes about personality
page 27

“Frankie appreciated both the accolades and the rejections equally, because both meant she'd had an impact. She wasn't a person who needed to be liked so much as she was a person who liked to be notorious.”

E. Lockhart book The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

Source: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

“I wish I had more friends, but people are such jerks. If you can just get most people to leave you alone, you're doing good. If you can find even one person you really like, you're lucky. And if that person can also stand you, you're really lucky.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

People, Jerk

“We're all born with selfish desires, so we can all relate to those feelings in others. But kindness is something made individually by each person… so it's easy to misunderstand when others are trying to be kind to you.”

Natsuki Takaya (1973) Manga artist

Source: Fruits Basket Ultimate Edition, Vol. 3

Feeling, Selfishness

“I want to make sure that the first person you kiss loves you, okay?”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Love, Kiss

“When a man or woman is truly honest, it is virtually impossible to insult them personally.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

“You must understand that love never keeps a man from pursuing his Personal Legend. If he abandons that pursuit, it's because it wasn't a true love.. the love that speaks the language of the world.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Love, World, Understanding

“At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.”

May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist

Truth, Fear

“… lies can sound awfully pretty when a girl is in love with the person telling them.”

Gabrielle Zevin (1977) American writer

Source: All These Things I've Done

Love, Girl

“I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.”

Karen Joy Fowler book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Source: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“A parent is inexcusable who does not personally teach her child to think.”

Elizabeth Gilbert (1969) American writer

Source: The Signature of All Things

Thinking, Parent

“The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Love, Women, Sadness

“And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“Whoever tells a lie is not pure of heart, and such a person can not cook a clean soup.”

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770–1827) German Romantic composer

To Mme. Streicher, in 1817, or 1818, after having dismissed an otherwise good housekeeper because she had told a falsehood to spare his feelings. in Beethoven: the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words http://www.fullbooks.com/Beethoven-the-Man-and-the-Artist-as-Revealed2.html by Ludwig van Beethoven, edited by Friedrich Kerst <br class="br">Attributed <br class="br">Variant: Anyone who tells a lie has not a pure heart, and cannot make a good soup.

Lie, Heart, Cooking

“The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so.”

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) English poet, diarist and memoirist

Hope

“The horror of knowing someone and living with them and even thinking you're lucky and then wham and now you know that every person is really two people and how can you ever know what the other half is up to.”

Michelle Tea (1971) American writer

Source: The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America

People, Thinking

“Do you think there's such a thing as a ghost who masquerades as a person? Do you believe that there are people whose bodies are still alive here on earth but whose souls are already in hell?”

Ann-Marie MacDonald book Fall on Your Knees

Source: Fall on Your Knees

People, Soul, Hell, Thinking

“I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.”

Nick Hornby book Housekeeping vs. The Dirt

Source: Housekeeping vs. the Dirt

Reading

“Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the colour in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty, and your animal spirits, and you will pass for a fine man.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On The Conduct of Life" (1822)

Health, Beauty, Animals

“Life's one great lesson was: Do not care. Not caring was a person's real protection.”

Francine Pascal Fearless

Source: Fearless

Life

“Opportunities and choices. When a person makes a heart wish, that wish resonates through the currents and things will happen to give the person an opportunity to make the wish come true. Like a hand offered and accepted.”

Anne Bishop book Sebastian

Source: Sebastian

Heart

“Maybe if everyone walked around being in touch with each other's hidden pain it could work out and even be beautiful, but it doesn't feel safe to be the only compassionate person on the planet.”

Michelle Tea (1971) American writer

Source: Rose of No Man's Land

Pain, Beauty, Feeling

“People want to believe that every marriage is perfect balance but it isn't. One person always loves more deeply than the other”

Nicholas Sparks book The Best of Me

Source: The Best of Me

Love, Marriage, People, Perfection

“Sometimes something catastrophic can occur in a split second that changes a person's life forever; other times one minor incident can lead to another and then another and another, eventually setting off just as big a change in a body's life.”

Jeannette Walls book Half Broke Horses

Source: Half Broke Horses

Life, Change, Time

“it's just business nothing personal…”

Mario Puzo (1920–1999) American Novelist

Business

“Nothing is more essential to the establishment of manners in a State than that all persons employed in places of power and trust must be men of unexceptionable characters.”

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

Men

“Perhaps he d always known that the truth of a person lies in the heart.”

Jodi Picoult book Harvesting the Heart

Source: Harvesting the Heart

Truth, Heart

“Politics is not about justice. It's about the settling of personal vendettas under a thin veneer of civilization. All politics is personal.”

Cinda Williams Chima (1952) Novelist

Source: The Crimson Crown

Justice

“A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.”

Jessica Mitford book Hons and Rebels

Source: Hons and Rebels

Books, Age, Way, Imagination

“A wise man once said that we can't make anyone feel or do anything. We can throw things into the wind, but it's up to each person to decide how they want to react, where they want to stand when things fall.”

Jonathan Maberry book Dust & Decay

Source: Dust & Decay

Feeling

“And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.”

Libba Bray book The Sweet Far Thing

Source: The Sweet Far Thing

Change, Time

“A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

Jealousy, Confidence, Self-confidence

“But most dragons seem to have interesting personalities--besides probably having quite good reasons for what they do, if only one could understand them”

Diana Wynne Jones book Fire and Hemlock

Source: Fire and Hemlock

Understanding

“Zealots: Wild eyed persons afflicted with incurable certainty about the workings of the world, a certainty that can lead to violence when the world doesn't fit.”

Jonathan Stroud book The Ring of Solomon

Source: The Ring of Solomon

World, Affliction

“Being in Love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Source: As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

Love

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person…”

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

“Time passes slowly. Nobody says a word, everyone lost in quiet reading. One person sits at a desk jotting down notes, but the rest are sitting there silently, not moving, totally absorbed. Just like me.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Time, Reading

“The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts.”

Rhonda Byrne book The Secret

Source: The Secret

Money

“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

People

“A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“You're always the* person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding new ways to express it.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

My Life on The Road
Source: My Life on the Road

Way

“[I]f you believe in God omnipresent, then you must believe everything that comes into your life, person or event, must have something of God in it to be experienced and loved; not hated.”

Elizabeth Goudge book Green Dolphin Street

Source: Green Dolphin Street

Love, Life, God, Hate

“I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Learning

“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

People, Thinking

“I had to decide what I was going to do, and what I was going to be.
I was standing there, waiting for someone to do something, till I realised the person I was waiting for was myself.”

Markus Zusak (1975) Australian author

Source: Underdog

Waiting

“Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

Love, Women, Money, Appearance

“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, People

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

“When you have only two minutes to say good-bye to the person you love most in the world, and you don’t know when you’ll see each other again, you can become logjammed with the effort to say and do and settle everything at once.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Source: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Love, World, Effort

“What do you want from me?" he asks.
What I want from every person in my life, I want to tell him.
More.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Jellicoe Road

Life

“You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.”

Stewart O'Nan (1961) American writer

Source: The Odds: A Love Story

Love, Life, World, Parting

“It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.”

Amy Hempel (1951) Short story writer

Source: The Collected Stories

Imagination

“A soulmate is the person who makes your sould grow the most.”

Caroline Myss (1952) author from the United States

“As for the age of electronics, Selena, I really don't want to get personal with something that comes with a warning label and batteries. (Grace)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon Fantasy Lover

Source: Fantasy Lover

Age

“A prude is a person who thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

Law, Nature, Thinking

“The real worth of a person came from how he acted during the bad times. (John Fiske)”

David Baldacci book The Simple Truth

Source: The Simple Truth

Time

“Never tell all you know—not even to the person you know best.”

Agatha Christie The Secret Adversary

Source: The Secret Adversary

“A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o'clock runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Nelly Dean (Ch. VII).
Source: Wuthering Heights (1847)

Chance

“I carry thoughts of you like my own personal constellation. How far away you are, my dearest friend, but no farther than those fixed stars in my soul.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Love in the Afternoon

Soul, Star

“I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. It didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.”

Charles Bukowski book Women

Source: Women (1978)
Context: I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn't fit the other. I didn't care.

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

Lisa See book Peony in Love

Source: Peony in Love

Love, People

“I have so many different personalities in me and I still feel lonely.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

Feeling

“You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back”

Paul Theroux (1941) American travel writer and novelist

Variant: You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
Source: Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

Way, Time

“I wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who WANTS to know all your stories.”

Gabrielle Zevin book Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

Source: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

Love

“Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you know, it is a law of love that the so-called 'right' person always comes to soon or too late.”

Lawrence Durrell book Balthazar

Source: Balthazar

Love, Law, Way

“In medieval times, if someone displayed the symptoms we now identify as boredom, that person was thought to be committing something called, a 'dangerous form of spiritual alienation' -- a devaluing of the world and its creator.”

Richard Louv (1949) American journalist

World, Time

“To be a saint is the exception; to be a just person is the rule. Err, stumble, commit sin, but be one of the just.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

“Only a weak person needed someone else around all the time.”

Sarah Dessen Lock and Key

Source: Lock and Key

Time

“This wasn’t the first time I’d been pulled out of bed for a crucial mission. It was, however, the first time I’d been subjected to such a personal line of questioning.

“Are you a virgin?”

Richelle Mead book The Indigo Spell

Source: The Indigo Spell

Question, Time

“If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

“Even after all this time, I keep forgetting that heroes can be found in unlikely places and persons -- like mechanics who can turn into coyotes.”

Patricia Briggs book Blood Bound

Source: Blood Bound

Time, Forgetting

“To travel is the experience of ceasing to be the person you are trying to be, and becoming the person you really are.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Warrior of the Light

Travel

“Are you the new person drawn toward me?”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

“I don't think anyone ever remembers what they were really like as kids. Adults think they do, but they don't. Photos and videos don't capture the real you, or bring back to life the person you used to be. You have to return to the past to do that.”

Darren Shan book Sons of Destiny

Source: Sons of Destiny

Life, Photo, Thinking, Past

“Everyone performs bad actions… A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Life, Truth

“Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

People

“Lara Jean, I think you half-fall in love with every person you meet. It’s part of your charm. You’re in love with love.”

Jenny Han book P.S. I Still Love You

Source: P.S. I Still Love You

Love, Thinking, Parting

“Personally, I think knees should be kept for the eighth or ninth date, or the wedding day. As a nice surprise you know? 'oh, my darling, you have knees! I never would have thought”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Mortal Coil

Thinking, Wedding

“Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot."

[(, Vol. 33 No. 15, 28 July 2011)]”

Alan Bennett (1934) English actor, author

Shoe, Clothes

“I mean, really: what kind of person could possibly dislike me?”

Jeff Lindsay book Dearly Devoted Dexter

Source: Dearly Devoted Dexter

“I just don't see the point in beating myself up. I think it's more productive to concentrate on being a better person right now than punishing myself for who I was in the past.”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Source: Second Helpings

Thinking, Past

“Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

Feeling, Childhood

“Regrets and apologies are all very well, but there's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them. They're like brands.”

John Boyne (1971) Irish novelist, author of children's and youth fiction

Source: Mutiny on the Bounty

Life, Memory, Heart, Forgetting

“Arguments cannot be answered by personal abuse; there is no logic in slander, and falsehood, in the long run, defeats itself.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Source: Some Mistakes of Moses

“He's a better person when she's around, and isn't that what friends are for, to raise you up and keep you at your best?”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

“To his children, Will showed the same love he had always shown to her, fierce and unyielding. And the same protectiveness he had only ever showed to one other person: the person James had been named after. Will’s parabatai, Jem.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Whitechapel Fiend

Love, Children

“But how do you ever know that you know a person?”

Anita Shreve book The Pilot's Wife

Source: The Pilot's Wife

“I don't believe in guilt, I believe in living on impulse as long as you never intentionally hurt another person, and don't judge people in your life. I think you should live completely free”

Angelina Jolie (1975) American actress, film director, and screenwriter

Variant: I don't believe in guilt, I believe in living on impulse as long as you never intentionally hurt another person, and don't judge people in your life. I think you should live completely free...

Life, People, Thinking, Hurt

“I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.”

Cary Grant (1904–1986) British-American film and stage actor

As quoted in "Quotable Cary" at American Masters (25 May 2005) http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/cary-grant/quotable-cary/618/

“Infatuation's just another word for not seeing clearly. When you start to love a person- that's when they become real”

Jodi Picoult book Second Glance

Source: Second Glance

Love

“Because others have let us down, it is now our duty to face the hard truths and do the right thing--no matter the personal cost.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

Truth

“The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.”

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) American teacher and writer

LXXX. TEACHER
Orphic Sayings
Context: The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciples. A noble artist, he has visions of excellence and revelations of beauty, which he has neither impersonated in character, nor embodied in words. His life and teachings are but studies for yet nobler ideals.

Teachers, Teachers' Day

“Do you know what happened to the last person who took that tone with me? (Xypher)
Let me guess…Disembowelment. Probably painful. Definitely slow. (Simone)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Dream Chaser

Pain

“I chuckled to myself and kept walking. The Universe had proven Curran wrong: a person who aggravated him more than me did, in fact, exist.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Burns

Universe