Quotes about stranger (669 quotes, page 4)

“How different too would the real character be from that which is assumed; how little often do the most intimate know of each other. But the difference that the stranger might discover is nothing to that which we trace in ourselves.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

No.16. Ivanhoe — ROWENA.
Literary Remains

“But I have seen the unknown dead, those little men of the Republic. It was they who woke me up. If a stranger, an enemy, becomes a thing like that when he dies, if one stops short and is afraid to walk over him, it means that even beaten our enemy is someone, that after having shed his blood, one must placate it, give this blood a voice, justify the man who shed it. Looking at certain dead is humiliating. One has the impression that the same fate that threw these bodies to the ground holds us nailed to the spot to see them, to fill our eyes with the sight. It's not fear, not our usual cowardice. One feels humiliated because one understands–touching it with one's eyes–that we might be in their place ourselves: there would be no difference, and if we live we owe it to this dirtied corpse. That is why every war is a civil war; every fallen man resembles one who remains and calls him to account.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 23, p. 176

Men , Fate , War , Fear

“I simply nod, for I have already noticed the short distance between his right and left eyes. It is my secret way of detecting fags. I know he will speak. And the first thing the idiot says is, “Are you by any chance Samoan?” All my life strangers have been interested in my ancestry. There is something about my bearing that cries out for history. I’ve been mistaken for American Indian, Spanish, Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan and Arabian. No one has ever asked me if I’m a spic or a greaser. Am I Samoan? “Aren’t we all?””

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

I groan.
Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 68.

Life , Secret , Way , History

“If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposite to fixation at such a point, the sociological form of the "stranger" presents the unity, as it were, of these two characteristics.”

Georg Simmel book The Stranger

Source: The Stranger (1908), p. 402; Opening line.

“Nor would he recognize hope if it came to him. Too much a stranger, too long a ghost.”

Steven Erikson book Gardens of the Moon

Source: Gardens of the Moon (1999), Chapter 13 (p. 399)

Hope

“Whoever lives continually in a state of dissipation and distraction, becomes a stranger in his own heart.”

Adolph Freiherr Knigge book Über den Umgang mit Menschen

Wer immer in Zerstreuungen lebt, wird fremd im eigenen Herzen.
Über den Umgang mit Menschen (1788)

Heart

“You can be an ugly baby and everyone goes awww innit nice? There was some women in a cafe the other week that I was sat in, and she came up and she sat down with her mate and she was talkin' loudly goin' on about oh the baby's lovely. They said it's got, er, lovely big eyes, er, really big hands and feet. Now that doesn't sound like a nice baby to me. I felt like sayin' it sounds like a frog. But I thought I dont know her, there's only so much you can say to a stranger. I dont know what kept me from sayin' it.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

The Podfather Trilogy, Episode 1 Halloween
On Life

Love , Women , Baby

“Crewmates, by now we are hardly strangers to evil and hardship.
We've suffered worse. God will grant us an end to these sufferings also. …
Take heart once again and dispel your fears and depression.
Maybe the day'll come when even this will be joy to remember.”

Frederick Ahl (1941) Professor of classics and comparative literature

Translation of Virgil's Aeneid (2007), Book I, lines 198–199 and 202–203

God , Fear , Suffering , Evil

“For many years he has not breathed the air,
The wholesome open air; the sun, the moon,
The stars, the clouds, the fair blue heaven, the spring,
The flowers, the trees, and the sweet face of man,
Song, or words yet more musical than song,
Affections, feelings, social intercourse
(Unless remembered in his fairy dreams)
Have all been strangers to his solitude! —
A curse is set on him, like poverty,
Or leprosy, or the red plague, but worse, —
The heart has sent its fire up to the brain,
And he is mad.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(5th April 1823) Poetical Catalogue of Pictures. A Maniac visited by his Family in confinement : by Davis.
5th April 1823) April see The Vow of the Peacock (1835
The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Dreams , Music , Feeling , Star

“Excess of interest in both her own and in the stranger’s personality merge in feminine surrender, the urge to lose herself completely in a human being; but in so doing, she does justice neither to self nor to the humanity of another, and, at the same time, becomes unfit for exercising other duties.
Also connected to the false pursuit of prestige is a perverted desire for totality and inclusiveness, a mania to know everything and thereby to skim the surface of everything and to plunge deeply into nothing. However, such superficiality can never be true humanity.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), The Significance of Woman's Intrinsic Value in National Life (1928)

Justice , Exercises , Time , Personality

“This incident impressed upon me the Bedu’s indifference to human life. The man was sick and if God ordered it he would die. He was a stranger who came from a tribe unrelated to theirs. None of them felt an interest because he was a human being like themselves. His death would in no way affect them. Yet their code demanded that, however unwanted he might be, they should fight in his defence if he were attacked whilst with them.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 177.

Life , Death , God , Way

“The episode in Sodom is undoubtedly the earliest account in human history of the entrapment of homosexuals, a strategy widely practiced by the law enforcement agencies of modern Western countries, especially those of the United States. In effect, the men of Sodom were entrapped by two strangers, who in truth were not travelers but angels, that is to say, God’s plain-clothesmen. These agents of the Biblical vice-squad wasted no time punishing the offenders.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 162.

Men , God , Truth , Law

“The lifetime we've left behind with strangers
Promises and lies both have their dangers.
I just can't be wrong enough and I can't hide for long enough
So far away, but I still feel your pain.”

Ben Harper (1969) singer-songwriter and musician

Fool for a Lonesome Train
Song lyrics, Lifeline (2007)

Pain , Feeling

“Back! back! Away from me, or you must go with me — whither you know not — into the Land of Three Dimensions!""Fool! Madman! Irregular!" I exclaimed; "never will I release thee; thou shalt pay the penalty of thine impostures.""Ha! Is it come to this?" thundered the Stranger: "then meet your fate: out of your Plane you go. Once, twice, thrice! 'Tis done!"”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 17. How the Sphere, Having in Vain Tried Words, Resorted to Deeds

Fate , Penalty , Fools

“As he sat alone at his corner table drinking a gin and Dubonnet, Ewing watched the stranger sitting on the barstool and examined his appearance for a while because there was no one else interesting or attractive to watch in Wayne's bar that evening.”

Robin Maugham (1916–1981) British novelist, playwright and travel writer

Incipit
The Wrong People (1971)

Drink , Appearance

“Our liberty is neither Greek nor Roman; but essentially English. It has a character of its own,—a character which has taken a tinge from the sentiments of the chivalrous ages, and which accords with the peculiarities of our manners and of our insular situation. It has a language, too, of its own, and a language singularly idiomatic, full of meaning to ourselves, scarcely intelligible to strangers.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

' History https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55901/55901-h/55901-h.htm', Edinburgh Review (May 1828)

Age , Intelligence

“You know what I want. If I may become a clergyman, if I fulfill that position so that my work is equal to that of our Father [who was a clergy-man], then I shall thank God. I have good hope that I shall succeed, it was once said to me by someone who was further on in life than I, and who was no stranger in Jerusalem:… I believe that you are a Christian, you see, it was so good for me to hear those words… It is good to believe that there is a God who knows what we need, better than we know it ourselves, and who helps us when we need help. It is also good to believe that, just as in the olden days, now, too, an angel is not far from those who feel godly sorrow… I've carefully read the story of Elijah so often, and so often has it given me strength up to now:”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Vincent then quotes 1 Kings 19:3-15, leaving out all but the beginning of verses 14 and 15
quote from his letter to Theo, from Amsterdam, 31 May 1877 letter 118 http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let118/letter.html
1870s

Life , God , Hope , Angels

“It is my belief that everyone is a stranger as an individual and since everyone is a stranger, that is precisely the reason we cannot question someone else’s strangeness or otherness. It is that simple. We ourselves are strangers. Often even to ourselves… And while people have some kind of desperate desire to belong somewhere, as I see it, many people also have a perpetual desire to be outsiders.”

András Petőcz (1959) Hungarian writer

"It is good to be a stranger" http://www.hungarianpresence.ca/Culture/Literature/varnai-interview-e.cfm.
Interview

People , Question

“Caesar was a reserved, disbelieving, obdurate man, and Cleopatra had conquered him by loving him for what others found repellent. ‘In you, Caesar,’ she told him, ‘I have something that, being not sweet, will not corrupt—but, like a sour metal, will only tarnish.’ And in Cleopatra Caesar had something of another world, something hellish it might be, a stranger—but, because a stranger, one with whom he could yield to weariness of himself and yet feel that in his own world he had lost none of its secrets.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

Lives of Wives (London: Cassell, 1939)

Love , Secret , World , Feeling

“'If you're very tall it's not just rude boys who feel entitled to pass remarks. Perfect strangers in pubs are always coming up and saying, "Me and my friends are just having a bet. Just how tall are you?" Women to whom one has just been introduced think that it breaks the ice if they scream, "Goodness, you're tall!' How would they like it if I broke the ice first, by screaming, "Goodness, what thick ankles!"”

Tyrone Guthrie (1900–1971) English actor and director

or "Goodness what a bust!
Various Directions (1965)

Women , Feeling , Boy , Thinking

“His last thought, as sleep overtook him, was that it was true what Cosimo had said: the universe was far stranger than anyone imagined, or could imagine.”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Source: The Bone House (2011), p. 56

Imagination , Sleep , Universe

“The stranger is simply a friend I haven't met yet.”

Catherine Doherty (1896–1985) Religious order founder; Servant of God

Source: Poustinia (1975), Ch. 15

“I've been down a long road;
I'd become a stranger to myself.
Digging in my heels and hoping time might be kinder if I wait it out.But nothing came from wanting.
And I became so small and insecure.
Didn't know the cost of all I'd lost till I found it fresh and new again.”

Sarah McLachlan (1968) Canadian musician, singer, and songwriter

Loving You Is Easy
Song lyrics, Laws of Illusion (2010)

Hope , Time , Waiting

“How strange to have failed as a social creature — even criminals do not fail that way — they are the law's "Loyal Opposition," so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Letter to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald (December 1940)
Quoted, Letters

Law , Way , Reading

“Prior to the rebellion the great mass of the people were satisfied to remain near the scenes of their birth. In fact an immense majority of the whole people did not feel secure against coming to want should they move among entire strangers. So much was the country divided into small communities that localized idioms had grown up, so that you could almost tell what section a person was from by hearing him speak… This is all changed now. The war begot a spirit of independence and enterprise. The feeling now is, that a youth must cut loose from his old surroundings to enable him to get up in the world. There is now such a commingling of the people that particular idioms and pronunciation are no longer localized to any great extent; the country has filled up "from the centre all around to the sea"; railroads connect the two oceans and all parts of the interior; maps, nearly perfect, of every part of the country are now furnished the student of geography.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)

War , People , Youth , World

“In no particular order, I could not or would not exist without air, food, water, gravity, tides, the moon, the sun, night, civilization, the laws of physics, the laws of thermodynamics, the law of the land, ancestors having sex, DNA, viruses, bacteria, plants, animals, oceans, ice caps, the kindness of strangers, the Big Bang, familial bonds, smart people, brave people, memory, medicine, the periodic table of elements, tribal instincts, magnetic fields, weather, Earth's molten core, a rotating Earth, a tilted Earth, tectonic plates, sleep, death, heat, consciousness, evolution, teachers and the miraculous, self-regulating chemical factory that is my body. Other than that, I like to think of myself as a self-made man.”

Chuck Lorre (1952) American screenwriter

Chuck Lorre Productions, Vanity Card #469 (1st Aired: 6 Nov 2014) http://www.chucklorre.com/index-mom.php?p=469

Death , People , Family , Law

“The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, The Other Wind (2001), Chapter 2 “Palaces” (p. 72)

World , Thinking

“Programming with libxml2 is like the thrilling embrace of an exotic stranger.”

Mark Pilgrim (1972) American computer programmer

Dive Into Mark http://web.archive.org/web/20110902041836/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/18/libxml2, Wednesday, February 18, 2004.

“Encounters between strangers in the desert, while rare, were occasions of mutual suspicion, and masked by initial preparations on both sides for an incident that might prove either cordial or warlike.”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 1
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Homo

“A Spring o'erhung with many a flow'r,
The grey sand dancing in its bed,
Embank'd beneath a Hawthorn bower,
Sent forth its waters near my head:
A rosy Lass approach'd my view;
I caught her blue eye's modest beam:
The stranger nodded 'How d'ye do!”

Robert Bloomfield (1766–1823) British writer

And leap'd across the infant stream.
Rosy Hannah, stanza 1, from Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs (1802)

Spring , Water , Dance

“There's a slow train rumbling east of a place called Eden
Feeling wind-blown and proud as the trees upon the plain
And a stranger's voice talked to me of liberty and freedom
Yeah, it seems like he done gone wrong again
And he wears that hat like shame
Well he tasted the fruit of another
And when his Margie, when she discovered
Said she's gonna love him ten times more
Ain't nobody's business if she do”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

"East of Eden"
Lyrics and poetry

Love , Feeling , Business , Tree

“I believe it has been a received opinion, that I was so very fond of the emoluments of the Quarter master's office, that nothing but absolute necessity would induce me to quit it, I will not deny but that the profits are flattering to my fortune, but not less humbling to my military pride; and he who has entertained such sentiments is a stranger to my feelings. While I had a prospect of pleasing your Excellency, the army, and the Congress, the service was agreeable; but if a combination of circumstances changes these prospects, nothing shall induce me to continue in the business, even if the profits were made five times as large as they are.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (24 April 1779)

Feeling , Business , Change , Time

“Among other men Reason awakes in another form—as the impulse towards Personal Freedom, which, although it never opposes the mild rule of the inward Instinct which it loves, yet rises in rebellion against the pressure of a stranger Instinct which has usurped its rights; and in this awakening it breaks the chains,—not of Reason as Instinct itself, but of the Instinct of foreign natures clothed in the garb of external power.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 8

Love , Men , Nature , Freedom

“We are not, or at least I am not, seeking either to become natives (a compromised word in any case) or to mimic them. Only romantics or spies would seem to find point in that. We are seeking, in the widened sense of the term in which it encompasses very much more than talk, to converse with them, a matter a great deal more difficult, and not only with strangers, than is commonly recognized. "If speaking for someone else seems to be a mysterious process," Stanley Cavell has remarked, "that may be because speaking to someone does not seem mysterious enough." Looked at in this way, the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of humman discourse."”

Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) American anthropologist

Clifford Geertz. "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Culture. (1973) pp. 3-4.

Way , Sense , Universe

“Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)

Way , Memory , Heart , Night

“The revolution comes when two strangers smile at each other, when a father refuses to send his child to school because schools destroy children, when a commune is started and people begin to trust each other, when a young man refuses to go to war and when a girl pushes aside all that her mother has 'taught' her and accepts her boyfriends (sic) love.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

"The Revolution Is Life Versus Death" https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2157415-sanders-revolution.html, in Vermont Freeman (1969), as quoted in "The origins of Sanders' ideology, in his own words" http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/29/politics/bernie-sanders-own-words/ by Brianna Keilar, CNN (29 February 2016)
1970s

Love , War , Children , People

“Listen stranger, passerby,
And those I never knew.
There's not one day that you are living
Has been promised to you.”

Ben Harper (1969) singer-songwriter and musician

God Fearing Man.
Song lyrics, Fight for Your Mind (1995)

“The untented Kosmos my abode,
I pass, a wilful stranger:
My mistress still the open road
And the bright eyes of danger.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Songs of Travel and Other Verses

No. II, Youth and Love - I, st. 3.
Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896)

“Something you see in me I wis not:
Another heart in you I guess:
A stranger's lips — but thine I kiss not,
Erring in all my tenderness.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

By Still Waters (1906)

Kiss , Heart

“Strangers are endearing because you don’t know them yet.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

“Benefactors,” p. 110
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “Is It Possible to Write a Poem”

“a perpetual stranger
am I to the world
I don't understand its language
my silence it can't comprehend”

Bei Dao (1949) contemporary Chinese (PRC) avant garde poet

"A perpetual stranger...", p. 110
Variant translation:
In the world I am
Always a stranger
I do not understand its language
It does not understand my silence
The August Sleepwalker (1990)

World , Understanding , Silence

“What do I share?
What do I keep from all the strangers
Who sleep where I sleep?”

St. Vincent (musician) (1982) American singer-songwriter

"The Strangers"
Actor (2009)

Sleep

“Urban people, of course, are terribly scared nowadays. They may yearn for society, but it is risky to go around talking to strangers, for a lot of reasons, one being that people are so accustomed not to have many human contacts that they are afraid they may find out they really prefer life that way.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"Small Kicks in Superland" (p.56)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

Life , People , Way

“We ought to esteem him alone an agreeable and good-natured man, who, in his daily intercourse with others, behaves in such a manner as friends usually behave to each other. For as a person of that rustic character appears, wherever he comes, like a mere stranger: so, on the contrary, a polite man, wherever he goes, seems as easy as if he were amongst his intimate friends and acquaintance.”

Giovanni della Casa (1503–1556) Roman Catholic archbishop

Source: Galateo: Or, A Treatise on Politeness and Delicacy of Manners, p. 43

Nature , Appearance , Personality

“Novelists, playwrights, painters and others may hold in their heads the expectation of fame, but not poets. Having chosen that road, all one can dream of is the jealousy of one's rivals. Celebrity is unexpected and almost unseemly--it forces one to wear a constant look of chagrin, if that is possible. Unless you are Byron, who was the first poet to become a star. At its worst, fame means being known by strangers--enough to bring on waves of paranoia.”

Billy Collins (1941) American poet

Interview with Kritya: In the Name of Poetry

Jealousy , Dreams , Star

“Ooh, the more I get of you,
Stranger it feels, yeah.
And now that your rose is in bloom,
A light hits the gloom on the grave.”

Seal (musician) (1963) British singer-songwriter

"Kiss from a Rose"
Seal (1994)

Feeling , Light

“Being a stranger is hard, but being a stranger when you're so impossibly close is unbearable.”

Herta Müller book The Hunger Angel

Source: The Hunger Angel (2012), p. 261

“An interested stranger asked me
How do I see the scenery from here?
I reply
It's how you think it would be.
It's useless to explain
Everybody GO! Everybody JUMP!”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Humming 7/4
Lyrics, My Story

Thinking

“This was the beginning of something, yet I had ventured back into a world from which I had come and found it an alien world of which I was no longer a part. In a sense I had always been alien. My Druidic training had taken me deep into a past that held more than the present, and along with it had been my father’s accounts, returning home after voyages, of a world beyond our shores. I had mingled with the men of his crews, almost half of which had come from other lands, other cultures, until I had become a stranger in my own land.”

Louis L'Amour book The Walking Drum

Source: The Walking Drum (1984), Ch. 31

Men , World , Home , Sense

“In a war the normal codes of civilized behavior are suspended. It would be unthinkable in so-called normal life to go into someone's home where a family is grieving over the death of a loved one and spend long moments photographing them. It simply wouldn't be done. Those picture could not have been made unless I was accepted by the people I'm photographing. It's simply impossible to photograph moments such as those…without the complicity of the people I'm photographing…without the fact that the welcomed me, that they accepted me, that they wanted me to be there. They understand that a stranger who's come there with a camera to show the rest of the world what is happening to them…gives them a voice in the outside world that they otherwise wouldn't have. I try my best to approach people with respect. I want them to see that I have respect for them and the situation they're in. I want to be very open in my approach…feel open in my own heart towards them. I want them to be aware of that. People do sense it…with very few words…sometimes with no words at all.”

James Nachtwey (1948) American photographer

War Photographer, documentary, 2001

Love , Life , Death , War

“I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.”

Gertrude Stein book The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans (1925)

Way

“"You don't understand," he said, "who I am or what I am. I'll show you. By Heaven! I'll show you." Then he put his open palm over his face and withdrew it. The centre of his face became a black cavity. "Here," he said. He stepped forward and handed Mrs. Hall something which she, staring at his metamorphosed face, accepted automatically. Then, when she saw what it was, she screamed loudly, dropped it, and staggered back. The nose—it was the stranger's nose! pink and shining—rolled on the floor.Then he removed his spectacles, and everyone in the bar gasped. He took off his hat, and with a violent gesture tore at his whiskers and bandages. For a moment they resisted him. A flash of horrible anticipation passed through the bar. "Oh, my Gard!" said some one. Then off they came.It was worse than anything. Mrs. Hall, standing open-mouthed and horror-struck, shrieked at what she saw, and made for the door of the house. Everyone began to move. They were prepared for scars, disfigurements, tangible horrors, but nothing! The bandages and false hair flew across the passage into the bar, making a hobbledehoy jump to avoid them. Everyone tumbled on everyone else down the steps. For the man who stood there shouting some incoherent explanation, was a solid gesticulating figure up to the coat-collar of him, and then—nothingness, no visible thing at all!”

H. G. Wells book The Invisible Man

Source: The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter 7: The Unveiling of the Stranger

Understanding , Housing , Falseness

“One of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realization that they are going to be read, and read by strangers. I had never fully realized this before, although I had of course in my imagination dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote. It had simply never occurred to me that these the millions and millions of people might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters I was downright scared to open; of the three-hundred-odd letters that I received that summer I can count only thirteen that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends. Even my mother scolded me: "Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker," she wrote sternly; "it does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?"”

Shirley Jackson (1916–1965) novelist, short story writer

Lecture (1960); printed in her collection, Come Along with Me (1968)

People , Books , Imagination , Thinking

“A "seducer" who boasts of initiating women into the mystery of love is like a stranger who arrives at a railroad station and offers to show the sights to a tourist guide.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

Love , Women

“I don't give my phone number to strangers. It's Plaza 5048.”

Irene Dunne (1898–1990) American actress

to her future husband when he asked for her phone number after their first dance.[citation needed]

“How do you get away with it? Above all, how do you persuade people to risk their lives in order to kill total strangers whom they know almost literally nothing about? Why, the answer’s simple. You lie to them!”

John Brunner book The Stone That Never Came Down

Source: The Stone That Never Came Down (1973), Chapter 17 (p. 135)

People , Lie

“Not egoists but strangers, sometimes benevolent, make for citizens of the deontological republic; justice finds its occasion because we cannot know each other, or our ends, well enough to govern by the common good alone. This condition is not likely to fade altogether, and so long as it does not, justice will be necessary. But neither is it guaranteed always to predominate, and in so far as it does not, community will be possible, and an unsettling presence for justice.”

Michael J. Sandel book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice

Conclusion: Liberalism and the Limits of Justice
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1998

Justice , Communication

“Anacharsis coming to Athens, knocked at Solon's door, and told him that he, being a stranger, was come to be his guest, and contract a friendship with him; and Solon replying, "It is better to make friends at home," Anacharsis replied, "Then you that are at home make friendship with me."”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Life of Solon
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Friendship , Home

“The man who is satisfied, because he thinks he is safe, who feels that he has religion enough, because he thinks he has enough to save him from hell, is as ignorant of the power as he is a stranger to the consolation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Gardiner Spring (1785–1873) American clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 106.

Religion , Feeling , Hell , Thinking

“A stranger here
Strange things doth meet, strange glories see;
Strange treasures lodg'd in this fair world appear,
Strange all and new to me;
But that they mine should be who nothing was,
That strangest is of all; yet brought to pass.”

Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) English poet

"The Salutation", stanza 7; The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne, B.D. (London: Bertram Dobell, 1903) p. 3.

World , Appearance

“Yesterday is safe,
Tomorrow's full of danger,
Yesterday's a face I know,
Tomorrow is a stranger.”

Henry Summers (1911–2005) British civil servant

"A Spell for Midnight"

“'What do you mean by "a man like me"?' he [Philip Trent] demanded with a sort of fierceness. 'Do you take me for a man without any normal instincts? I don't say you impress people as a simple, transparent sort of character — what Mr Calvin Bunner calls a case of openwork; I don't say a stranger might not think you capable of wickedness, if there was good evidence for it: but I say that a man who, after seeing you and being in your atmosphere, could associate you with the kind of abomination I imagined is a fool — the kind of fool who is afraid to trust his senses.'”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley book Trent's Last Case

Source: Trent's Last Case (1912), Chapter XIII: "Eruption"

People , Fools , Imagination , Thinking

“The British were no strangers to the use of chemical weapons.”

Giles Milton (1966) British writer and historian

Winston Churchill's shocking use of chemical weapons https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/sep/01/winston-churchill-shocking-use-chemical-weapons (1 September 2013), The Guardian.

“[Cubitt hurling insults at Pinky after he refuses to lend him money] The picture Cubitt drew had got nothing to do with him: it was like the pictures men drew of Christ, the image of their own sentimentality. …He was like a professor describing to a stranger some place he had only read in books:…when all the time it was a country the stranger knew…”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

Men , Money , Books , Time

“Let us be honest. Suppose a man came into this city and should meet a funeral procession, and say, “Who is dead?” and they should reply, “The son of a widow; her only support.” Suppose he should say to the procession, “Halt!” and to the undertaker, “Take out that coffin, unscrew that lid. Young man, I say unto thee, arise!” and the dead should step from the coffin and in a moment afterward hold his mother in his arms. Suppose this stranger should go to your cemetery and find some woman holding a little child in each hand, while the tears fell upon a new-made grave, and he should say to her, “Who lies buried here?” and she should reply, “My husband;” and he should cry, “I say unto thee, oh grave, give up thy dead!” and the husband should rise, and in a moment after have his lips upon his wife’s, and the little children with their arms around his neck; do you think that the people of this city would kill him? Do you think any one would wish to crucify him? Do you not rather believe that every one who had a loved one out in that cemetery would go to him, even upon their knees, and beg him to give back their dead? Do you believe that any man was ever crucified who was the master of death?”

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

Orthodoxy (1884)

Love , Death , Children , People

“We're looking
For the strangers
With sunlight in their eyes
Who lived on Earth
When Man was new
When Time was
Just a coloured dew
That grew inside their mind…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Children of the Sun (1969)

Time

“For it is said, "You shall strengthen the stranger and the dweller in your midst and live with him," that is to say, strengthen him until he needs no longer fall upon the mercy of the community or be in need.”

Maimónides book Mishneh Torah

Book 7 (Sefer Zera'im "Seeds"), Treatise 2 (Mattenot Aniyiim "Laws of obligatory gifts to the poor"), Chapter (Perek) 10, Halacha 7 (Translated by Jonathan J. Baker.)
Mishneh Torah (c. 1180)
Variant: Concerning this [Leviticus 25:35] states: "You shall support him, the stranger, the resident, and he shall live among you." Implied is that you should support him before he falls and becomes needy. (Translated by Eliyahu Touger.)

Communication

“[Medea] looked toward the gates and found him still even as he went; and alas! as he departed still comelier seemed the stranger to the lovelorn girl: such shoulders, such frame doth he leave to her remembrance.”
Respexit que fores et adhuc invenit euntem, visus et heu miserae tunc pulchrior hospes amanti discedens; tales umeros, ea terga relinquit.

Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica, Book VII, Lines 106–108

Girl

“We cannot just give [our country] to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves.”

Peter Hitchens (1951) author, journalist

2015-09-06
PETER HITCHENS: We won't save refugees by destroying our own country
Mail on Sunday
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3223828/PETER-HITCHENS-won-t-save-refugees-destroying-country.html

Feeling , Country

“The world continues to dissolve
It’s sad how we just keep devolving
And the smaller it all goes
All the stranger it’s becoming”

Dhani Harrison (1978) English musician

Choose what you’re watching
Lyrics, You Are Here (2008)

World , Sadness

“Let all thy joys be as the month of May
And all thy days be as a marriage day:
Let sorrow, sickness, and a troubled mind
Be stranger to thee.”

Francis Quarles (1592–1644) English poet

To a Bride.

Marriage , Joy

“Ah! why do women condescend to receive a degree of attention and respect from strangers different from that reciprocation of civility which the dictates of humanity and the politeness of civilization authorize between man and man? And why do they not discover, when, "in the noon of beauty's power", that they are treated like queens only to be deluded by hollow respect. Confined, then, in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch.”

Mary Wollstonecraft book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Source: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Ch. 4

Women , Beauty

“I know the reason why you keep your silence up,
No you don't fool me.
The hurt doesn't show
But the pain still grows
It's no stranger to you and me.”

Phil Collins (1951) English musician, songwriter and actor

"In the Air Tonight"
Face Value (1981)

Pain , Fools , Silence , Hurt

“She was forcing it with her scorn, the kiss she gave me, the hard curl of her lips, the mockery of her eyes, until I was like a man made of wood and there was no feeling within me except terror and a fear of her, a sense that her beauty was too much, that she was so much more beautiful than I, deeper rooted than I. She made me a stranger unto myself, she was all of those calm nights and tall eucalyptus trees, the desert stars, that land and sky, that fog outside, and I had come there with no purpose save to be a mere writer, to get money, to make a name for myself and all that piffle.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Money , Fear , Beauty , Feeling

“I can’t quite define my aversion to asking questions of strangers. From snatches of family battles which I have heard drifting up from railway stations and street corners, I gather that there are a great many men who share my dislike for it, as well as an equal number of women who … believe it to be the solution to most of this world’s problems.”

Robert Benchley (1889–1945) American comedian

"Ask That Man" in Pluck and Luck (1925)

Women , Men , World , Family

“Tant pis and tant mieux, being two of the great hinges in French conversation, a stranger would do well to set himself right in the use of them before he gets to Paris.”

Laurence Sterne book A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

Montreuil.
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

“On the whole, I do not like the French as well as the Germans; the French are extremely reserved toward strangers… Everybody works for himself without concern for others. All want to instruct, and nobody wants to learn. The most absolute egotism reigns everywhere. The only thing the French look for in strangers is the practical; no one can think except himself, he is the only one who can produce anything theoretical. This is the way he thinks and so you can understand it is really difficult to be noticed, particularly for a beginner.”

Niels Henrik Abel (1802–1829) Norwegian mathematician

Letter to Bernt Michael Holmboe (ca. 1826) as quoted by Øystein Ore, Niels Henrik Abel: Mathematician Extraordinary (1957)

Way , Understanding , Thinking , Learning

“It took one tweet on Monday evening as I left the office to light the virtual touchpaper. At five past nine I tapped: "Now Guardian prevented from reporting parliament for unreportable reasons. Did John Wilkes live in vain?"… By the time I got home, after stopping off for a meal with friends, the Twittersphere had gone into meltdown. Twitterers had sleuthed down Farrelly's question, published the relevant links and were now seriously on the case. By midday on Tuesday "Trafigura" was one of the most searched terms in Europe, helped along by re-tweets by Stephen Fry and his 830,000-odd followers.
… One or two legal experts uncovered the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840, wondering if that would help? Common #hashtags were quickly developed, making the material easily discoverable. By lunchtime – an hour before we were due in court – Trafigura threw in the towel. The textbook stuff – elaborate carrot, expensive stick – had been blown away by a newspaper together with the mass collaboration of total strangers on the web. Trafigura thought it was buying silence. A combination of old media – the Guardian – and new – Twitter – turned attempted obscurity into mass notoriety.”

Alan Rusbridger (1953) British newspaper editor

Alan Rusbridger " The Trafigura fiasco tears up the textbook http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/14/trafigura-fiasco-tears-up-textbook" The Guardian, Wednesday 14 October 2009; As cited in Paul Bradshaw, ‎Liisa Rohumaa (2013) The Online Journalism Handbook: Skills to survive and thrive in the Digital Age. p. 176.
2000s

Home , Search , Question , Light

“Tomorrow's some kind of Stranger I'm not supposed to see.”

St. Vincent (musician) (1982) American singer-songwriter

"The Neighbors"
Actor (2009)

“p>Helen: What happened in my heart, to make me leave my home
And my own land, to follow where a stranger led?
Rail at the goddess; be more resolute than Zeus,
Who holds power over all other divinities
But is himself the slave of love. Show Aphrodite
Your indignation; me, pardon and sympathy.Hecabe: No; Paris was an extremely handsome man – one look,
And your appetite became your Aphrodite. Why,
Men's lawless lusts are all called love – it's a confusion
Easily made.”

Euripidés The Trojan Women

Troades (c. 415 BC), lines 946–950 and 987–990 (tr. Philip Vellacott)

Love , Men , Home , Heart

“Text: Psalm 119:19. I am a stranger on the earth, hide not Thy command ments from me.
Are we what we dreamt we should be? No, but still the sorrows of life..., so much more numerous than we expected, the tossing to and fro in the world, they have covered it over, but it is not dead, it sleepeth.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote from van Gogh's first sermon, 29 October, 1876; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, p. 18
1870s

Life , World , Dead

“In the New Testament sense, to be a Christian is, in an upward sense, as different from being a man as, in a downward sense, to be a man is different from being a beast. A Christian in the sense of the New Testament, although he stands suffering in the midst of life’s reality, has yet become completely a stranger to this life; in the words of the Scripture and also of the Collects (which still are read-O bloody satire!-by the sort of priests we now have, and in the ears of the sort of Christians that now live) he is a stranger and a pilgrim-just think, for example of the late Bishop Mynster intoning, “We are strangers and pilgrims in this world”! A Christian in the New Testament sense is literally a stranger and a pilgrim, he feels himself a stranger, and everyone involuntarily feels that this man is a stranger to him.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Attack Upon Christianity, The Instant, No. 7, Søren Kierkegaard, 1854-1855, Walter Lowrie 1944, 1968
1850s, Attack upon Christendom (1855)

Life , World , Feeling , Thinking

“I developed The Great Teacher theory late in my freshman year. It was a cornerstone of the theory that great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft; knowing what to steal and from whom. Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is that they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing that they had taught me their larcenous skills well.”

Pat Conroy The Lords of Discipline

Source: The Lords of Discipline (1980), p. 271

Art , Teachers , Personality , Training

“Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.”

David Hume book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Demea to Philo, Part X
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

Life , Pleasure , World , Disease

“I left my home, and I was left
A stranger in his land, bereft
Of even hope; there was not one
Familiar face to look upon.—
Their speech was strange.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Improvisatrice (1824)

Hope , Home

“To go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.”

Samuel Beckett book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)

Thinking , Distant , Time

“Whoever heard me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book The World as Will and Representation

Quoted by Jorge Luis Borges in his essay "A History of Eternity"
The World as Will and Representation (1819; 1844; 1859)

Imagination , Cats , Thinking , Madness

“There is an aphorism about a farmer who before sunrise on a cold and misty morning, saw a huge beast on a distant hill. He seized his rifle and walked cautiously toward the ogre to head off an attack on his family. When he got nearer, he was relieved to find that the beast was only a small bear. He approached more confidently and when he was within a few hundred yards the distorting haze had lifted sufficiently so that he could recognize the figure as only that of a man. Lowering his rifle, he walked toward the stranger and discovered he was his brother.”

Louis Nizer book My Life in Court

My Life in Court (1961), p. 443.

Family , Confidence , Distant

“This midget, whose name was Domenico, once introduced me to a good-looking man who was something like his butler. One year later, the poor little man was found on a dumpheap outside of Rome. The young man had killed him, just a block away from this bar we're sitting in right now! Truth sometimes is stranger than fiction…”

Donald O'Brien (actor) (1930–2003) Italian film and TV actor

Euro Trash Cinema magazine interview (March 1996)

Truth

“In this city I must visit the abodes of sorrow: but as yet no way has opened: no person offered to go along with me, which has made me determine to do nothing but what connot be avoided of a public nature. O that my little labour of love were finished, and comfortably completed to the joy of such who might hail me a welcome stranger on Zion's happy Coast, where my mansion of bliss awaits me, after all the storms of life are past.”

Dorothy Ripley (1767–1832) missionary

Letter to Abigail Eames (14 October 1805), p. 204
The Bank of Faith and Works United (1819)

Love , Life , Way , Nature

“No man is more of a stranger to you than you are to him. Receive him with trust.”

Neamat Imam book The Black Coat

The Black Coat (2013)

“There was the chance that someday he would surprise her, that she would turn to face her husband and find a stranger in his place, a stranger who didn't approve of her and didn't want her in his life anymore.”

Orson Scott Card book Lost Boys

Lost Boys (1992)

Life , Chance

“All these relics gave… Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine to memory. I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these retreats in the day; but I by no means coveted a night's repose on one of those wide and heavy beds: shut in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded, others, with wrought old-English hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings, — all which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight.”

Charlotte Brontë book Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 11)
Jane Eyre (1847)

Home , Flowers , Bird , Memory

“Stranger to love and the benevolent
hand of age……
History has recorded on our papery hearts
By the reed
And each partition of the reed
Complains of the Masnavi of our groans: ………..??
The lines in your hands
(these winding roads)
Is familiar to my eye.
Believe me
The lines in your hand
Are more familiar to me than my own lines…
Ah
O friend…
They buried us together in the grave
A thousand years ago”

Farrokh Tamimi (1934–2003) Iranian poet and translator

Poet, Fare welling Hands

Love , Age , History , Heart

“Now everything is clear.
I admit my defeat. The tongue
of my ravings in my ear
is the tongue of a stranger.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Requiem; 1935-1940 (1963; 1987)

“I seem to have gathered a reputation for being a jerk in real life, because frankly fans make me uncomfortable. Complete strangers come up and talk to me like they've known me their whole lives, and for that reason I can seem a bit stand-offish… No, the whole "fan" thing confuses me.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/interviews/6457-An-Exclusive-Interview-With-Yahtzee.3
Other Articles

Life , Jerk

“When I left your Excellency at Haverstraw, you desired me to go forward and reconnoitre the country, and fix upon some proper position to draw the troops together at, I was a stranger to all this part of the country, and could form no judgment of a proper place, until I had thoroughly examined the ground.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (July 1778)

Parting , Drawing , Country

“I can feel it in my blood
that I belong
to this strange and stony rock I stand upon
yet I cannot put a name upon it
I cannot place the time
nor see the land as it once was
nor tell which house was mine
no I cannot put a name upon it
which was where and when
yet here I am
a perfect stranger
home again.”

Mike Scott (1958) songwriter, musician

"I've Lived Here Before" (co-written with Liam Ó Maonlaí)
Universal Hall (2003)

Feeling , Home , Time , Housing

“One starts by seeing the person who poses, but little by little all the possible sculptures of him intervene… The more real a real vision of him disappears, the stranger his head becomes.”

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Swiss sculptor and painter (1901-1966)

As cited in: Kay Larson, " The thin man https://books.google.nl/books?id=ZckBAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA70," New York Magazine, 7 October 1985, p. 70
Giacometti, 1985

Personality

“"We treat each other well" In strong families, positive strokes outnumber negative broadsides by a wide margin. Members regularly express appreciation: "Thanks for fixing the drainpipe." "you look so nice in that dress." "The dinner was great" Criticism is offered gently. After all, strong families figure, if we can be kind to strangers, why not to one another.”

Joyce Brothers (1927–2013) Joyce Brothers

10 Keys to a Strong Family (2002)

Family , Strong

Quotes about stranger page 4

Quotes about stranger
page 4