Quotes About Stranger

Don't look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger's world.

We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can't.

What is required of us is restraint and humility. We can put up barriers on bridges to make it more difficult for that momentary impulse to become permanent. We can instruct young people that the kind of reckless drinking that takes place at a fraternity party makes the task of reading others all but impossible. There are clues to making sense of a stranger.

The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. In front that falls a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand the stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers's with caution and humility.

There is something about the idea of coupling—of the notion that a stranger's behavior is tightly connected to place and context—that eludes us. It leads us to misunderstand some of our greatest poets, to be indifferent to the suicidal, and to send police officers on senseless errands.

We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy.

And that means when you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you're confronting the stranger - because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.

There are clues to making sense of a stranger. But attending to them requires care and attention.

When we confront a stranger, we need to substitute an idea, a stereotype, for direct experience. And that stereotype is wrong all too often.

to assess the character of a stranger. And the criminal justice system assumes, as Chamberlain did, that those kinds of difficult decisions are better made when the judge and the judged meet each other first.

There is something about the idea of coupling—of the notion that a stranger's behavior is tightly connected to place and context—that eludes us (p. 311).

Een vreemde die geen vreemde meer is, begint de geliefde meteen te benauwen. - Amos Oz

Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity. We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.

Remember, they've never seen you before in their life.

He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend.

Or was he the romantic fiction of a girl who'd been desperate for a handsome stranger to come along?

You are exaggerating, Sunny. You don't know a thing about him. He is still a stranger. You may never see him again. Get over it.

By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

instead, we just sat there, together but really apart, watching a show about a stranger and all her secrets, while keeping our own to ourselves, as always.

Like I, of all people, didn't know better than to lead a total stranger to the point where they could hurt me most, knowing how easily they'd be able to find their way back to it.

Odd how it was so easy for a stranger to assume such familiarity. Especially when those who were supposed to know you best often didn't, not at all.

Odd how it was so easy for a stranger to assume such familiarity. Especially when those who were supposed to know you best often didn't, not at all.

I felt a surge of shame; I'd been so stupid to bring him here. Like I, of all people, didn't know better than to lead a total stranger directly to the point where they could hurt me most, knowing how easily they'd be able to find their way back to it.

Unfortunately, most people believe that analogies are one of the best ways to persuade. That fact goes far in explaining why it seems that every debate on the Internet ends with a Hitler analogy. The phenomenon is so common it has its own name: Godwin's law. But I doubt many people have changed an opinion just because a stranger on the Internet compared them to Hitler. A direct attack usually just hardens people into their current opinions.