Quotes about personality
page 28

“Why could nothing with Kate be simple? Why couldn’t Jim ever just come by to tell me that he had bowled a perfect game or benched a personal best.
Maybe finally asked that weird tiger girl out.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Kate's Origin

Girl, Game, Perfection

“To love someone was not what she had expected. It was like falling from somewhere high up and breaking in half, and only one person having the secret to the puzzle of putting her back together.”

Jodi Lynn Anderson American children's writer

Source: Tiger Lily

Love, Secret

“…Jo loved a few persons very dearly and dreaded to have their affection lost or lessened in any way.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

Love, Way

“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

John Stuart Mill book On Liberty

Source: On Liberty (1859), Ch. II: Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion

Silence

“Neither a person entirely broken
nor one entirely whole can speak.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.”

Jane Hirshfield (1953) Poet

Source: Given Sugar, Given Salt

Happiness

“We’re always alone. You can be in a crowded room and still feel the bite of loneliness. Personally, I find that it bites deepest whenever others are around.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: The Guardian

Feeling, Loneliness

“You can see a person's whole life in the cancer they get.”

Haruki Murakami book Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Source: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Life

“I think that the most necessary quality for any person to have is imagination. It makes people able to put themselves in other people's places. It makes them kind and sympathetic and understanding.”

Jean Webster book Daddy-Long-Legs

Source: Daddy-Long-Legs

People, Imagination, Understanding, Thinking

“your loved ones have been used to lure you into Kronos's traps. Your fatal flaw is personal loyalty Percy. You do not know when it is time to cut your losses. To save a friend you would sacrifice the world.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

Love, World, Loss, Time

“Aren't you something," Grandma said. "I never saw a midget up close."
"Little person," Briggs said. "And I never saw anyone as old as you up close, either.”

Janet Evanovich High Five

Source: High Five

Grandma

“If you wish to discover the guilty person, first find out to whom the crime might be useful.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Source: The Count of Monte Cristo

“Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved.”

Barbara Johnson (1947–2009) American literary critic

Love, Problem

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

Problem, Suffering

“If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron”

Spider Robinson (1948) Canadian author

God Is An Iron (1977)
Context: "God is an iron," I said. "Did you know that?"
I turned to look at her and she was staring. She laughed experimentally, stopped when I failed to join in. "And I'm a pair of pants with a hole scorched through the ass?"
"If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron. Or else He's the dumbest designer that ever lived."

God

“The most educated person in the world now has to admit-- I shall not say confess-- that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

World, Education

“I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.”

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

God, World, Imagination, Sense

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

“Suppose death had a heart to love and to release you, to whom would he turn this passion, would you chose a person from the crowd there. A person to suffer as you suffer.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Love, Death, Suffering, Passion

“So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.”

Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Variant: The fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.
Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Hurt, Hurtful

“Myrna could spend happy hours browsing bookcases. She felt if she could just get a good look at a person’s bookcase and their grocery cart, she’d pretty much know who they were.”

Louise Penny book Still Life

Source: Still Life

Happiness

“I prefer to spend time with you. You’re the most interesting person I know.”

Sylvia Day (1973) American writer

Source: Captivated by You

Time

“The most fundamental thing about a person is desire. It defines them. Tell me what a person wants, truly wants, and I'll tell you who they are, and how to persuade them.”

Max Barry (1973) Australian writer

Source: Lexicon

“Marriage is about compromise, it's about doing something for the other person, even when you don't want to.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Wedding

Jane Lewis, Chapter 8, p. 130
Source: 2000s, The Wedding (2003)

Marriage

“An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.”

Roald Dahl book Boy

Source: Boy: Tales of Childhood

Life, Books

“The person may have a scar, but it also means they have a story”

Jodi Picoult book The Storyteller

Source: The Storyteller

“Personally, I wish D. would come after me, I need a good dance partner. My Daimons have lame legs. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Night Pleasures

Source: Night Pleasures

Dance

“Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.”

Jane Austen book Emma

Emma (1815)
Works, Emma

Nature

“He has personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts.”

Douglas Adams book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Dreams, Problem

“I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.”

Nick Hornby book How to Be Good

Source: How to Be Good

“Pigmentation was a quick and convenient way of judging a person. One of us, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once proposed we instead judge people by the content of their character. He was shot.”

Jon Stewart book Earth (The Book)

Source: Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race

People, Way

“If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Thinking, Sense

“She deserved at least one person who saw her and knew how good she was.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

“emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.”

Iris Murdoch book The Sea, the Sea

Source: The Sea, the Sea

World

“What kind of person doesn't let you have gummi bears?”

Libba Bray (1964) American teen writer

Source: Beauty Queens

“This is personal, she'd said. Real. This moment was too, even if you couldn't see it at first glance. It was fake on the outside, but so true within. You only had to look, really look to tell.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

“I continue to dream and pray about a revival of holiness in our day that moves forth in mission and creates authentic community in which each person can be unleashed through the empowerment of the Spirit to fulfill God's creational intentions.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Source: How To Pray: The Best of John Wesley on Prayer

God, Dreams, Communication

“Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person.”

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) American folklorist, novelist, short story writer

God

“Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?”

Alan Lightman (1948) Physicist, science writer, essayist, novelist

Love, Nature

“The eyes mirror the heart of a person. An entire life can be seen through them. Love, sorrow, deceit, pain. If you look closely, it’s all there.”

Gail Tsukiyama (1957) American writer

Source: The Language of Threads

Love, Life, Pain, Heart

“Your personality - the real you inside - was the price of beauty.”

Scott Westerfeld book Uglies

Source: Uglies

Beauty

“Someday," Magnus said, looking at the crumpled royal person at his feet, "I must write my memoirs.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Runaway Queen

“The sad thing is, people don't want to believe that the person they're in love with is out of his mind, drinking and using, so if you give them even half an excuse, they're going to want to believe it.”

Anthony Kiedis book Scar Tissue

Source: Scar Tissue

Love, People, Sadness, Drink

“If someone's different from you and it scares you or makes you mad, that's God telling you to take a closer look. If you're scared or mad, that's about you, not about the person who scares you or angers you.”

Chris Crutcher book Deadline

Source: Deadline

God, Madness, Anger

“There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person's heart.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

World, Heart

“No one so dislikes being punished unjustly as the person who might have been punished justly on scores of previous occasions, if he had only been found out.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Source: Tales of St. Austin's

“The one I wore to kill Jabba (my favorite moment in my own personal film history), which I highly recommend your doing: find an equivalent of killing a giant space slug in your head and celebrate that.”

Carrie Fisher book The Princess Diarist

Source: The Princess Diarist

History

“I'm a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that's me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I'd die; I don't know what of, I just knew I'd die.”

John Marsden (1950) author

Source: A Killing Frost

Mountain

“Do you love him?"
There were only a few people in the world who could ask me such insanely personal questions without getting punched. Dimitri was one of them.”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

Love, People, World, Question

“I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I do not tell lie.”

Mark Haddon (1962) English writer and illustrator

Lie

“Many persons lead lives of crushing boredom.”

Elizabeth Peters The Serpent on the Crown

Source: The Serpent on the Crown

“Strange, what being forced to slow down could do to a person.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Last Song

Source: The Last Song

“Somehow it seems wrong to photograph a blind person. It’s like stealing something valuable they don’t even know they own.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

Source: Phoenix

“I say “Out” to every negative thought that comes to my mind. No person, place, or thing has any power over me, for I am the only thinker in my mind. I create my own reality and everyone in it.”

Louise L. Hay (1926–2017) American writer

Reality

“The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.”

Lynne Truss (1955) British writer

Source: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Stupidity

“So this is how a person can come to despise himself-knowing he's doing the wrong thing and not being able to stop.”

Daniel Keyes book Flowers for Algernon

Source: Flowers for Algernon

“You know, you're kind of squeamish for such a lethal person”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

“There is more in every person's soul than we think.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Soul, Thinking

“Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.”

Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

World, Beauty

“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love (2006)
Context: People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.
A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.
A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master…

Life, People, Soul, Thinking

“Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Source: Letters of Thomas Jefferson

Peaceful

“Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.”

William Goldman book Adventures in the Screen Trade

Source: Adventures in the Screen Trade

Education, Time

“dealing with any man means dealing with multiple personalities.”

Rick Riordan book The Serpent's Shadow

Source: The Serpent's Shadow

“The person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control.”

John Lanchester book Capital

Source: Capital

Love

“Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Variant: I don't ask you to love me always like this but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight.
Source: Tender Is the Night

Love, Thinking, Night

“One person's weed is another person's wildflower.”

Susan Wittig Albert (1940) writer

Source: An Unthymely Death and Other Garden Mysteries

“If a person is confident enough in the way they feel, whether it's an art form or whether it's just in life, it comes off---you don't have anything to prove; you can just be who you are.”

Clint Eastwood (1930) actor and director from the United States

Life, Art, Way, Feeling

“You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.”

Thomas Bernhard book Gargoyles

Source: Gargoyles

Love, Question, Dead

“Before and after… I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can't make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.”

Curtis Sittenfeld book Prep

Source: Prep

Happiness, Boy, Time

“When you're soulmates, it hits you like lightning, and you know that's the one person in the world you were meant to be with. You don't think you're soulmates; you just know it's your destiny whether you like it or not.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Night World, No. 1

World, Thinking

“My idea of an interesting person is someone who is quite proud of their seemingly abnormal life and turns their disadvantage into a career.”

John Waters (1946) American filmmaker, actor, comedian and writer

Source: Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste

Life, Idea

“A person’s never too old for stories. Man and boy, girl and woman, we live for them. - Roland Deschain”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: The Wind Through the Keyhole

Girl, Boy

“To treat a person like a carpet, it is necessary that one do the walking, and one allow himself to be walked on.
--Shin'a'in saying”

Mercedes Lackey book Owlflight

Source: Owlflight

“Nobody admires anyone else without qualification. If they do they’re after an image, not a person.”

Scott Lynch book The Republic of Thieves

Interlude “Striking Sparks” section 6 (p. 247)
Source: The Republic of Thieves (2013)

“Being the best was as equal to being in the middle, which was equal to being the worst. All were merely a state of being. It was how a person felt in that state and why they were in that state that was the important thing.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: The Gift

“He laughs. And in his laugh I hear bliss. I hear feet dancing, the rush of skirts twirling. The sound of children.
Is that the first sign of love?
You hear in the person you're destined to love the sound of those yet to be born.”

Alyson Richman (1972) American writer

Source: The Lost Wife

Love, Children, Dance

“Die human, DIE!! Die nasty polluting person!!!!' yelled Grover. I turned him so he faced me. He kept on clicking his plastic gun towards me as if I was part of the game.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Game, Parting

“The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: The Fortunes of Indigo Skye

Feeling, Loneliness

“Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

Silence

“A person's true nature is revealed at times of the greatest adversity.”

Daisaku Ikeda (1928) Japanese writer

Nature, Time

“Love is a joint experience between two persons -- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.”

Carson McCullers (1917–1967) American writer

Source: The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

Love, People, Wedding

“That someone can want something out of another person who gives absolutely nothing in return astounds me.”

Melina Marchetta book On the Jellicoe Road

Source: On the Jellicoe Road

“God sometimes removes a person from your life for your protection. Don't run after them.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Life, God

“Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Lectures on Philosophy

Feeling, Understanding

“In real life, love has to be possible. Even if it is not returned right away, love can only survive when the hope exists that you will be able to win over the person you desire.”

Paulo Coelho book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Love, Life, Hope

“My heart applauds inside my ears, first like a roaring crowd, then slows and slows until it's a solitary person, clapping with unbridled sarcasm.
Clap. Clap.
Clap.”

Markus Zusak (1975) Australian author

Source: I Am the Messenger

Heart

“An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definite proposition… A contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says."

No, it's not…”

Graham Chapman (1941–1989) English comedian, writer and actor

“But to admire a strong person
and to live under that strong person’s thumb are
two different things.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Strong

“The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.”

Caroline Knapp (1959–2002) American writer

Source: Appetites: Why Women Want

Life, World, Learning, Waiting

“A person who already displays … cruelty to animals is also no less hardened towards men. We can already know the human heart, even in regard to animals.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Part II, p. 212
Lectures on Ethics (1924)

Men, Heart, Animals

“Who are you, anyway?
-Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Marriage Plot

Source: The Marriage Plot

Love, Thinking

“One person sees the beautiful view and the other sees the dirty window”

Andrew Matthews (1948) British writer

Source: Being Happy!

Beauty

“acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Context: Acquaintance, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. A degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous