Quotes About Strangers

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.

Oh don't torture my heart! I'll die of sadness in one week there. Living among strangers! How can you transplant an old tree?

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

Because this is the beauty of strangers: we're all just doing our best to help each other out, motivated not by karma but by a natural instinct to help the greater whole.

There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.

I argued against the view that the only obligation we have to strangers is to avoid harming them; but even if we were to take that view, the facts of climate change would demonstrate clearly that we are harming hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of the world's poor.

What we are doing to strangers in other communities right now is, therefore, far more serious and far more widespread than the harm we would do if we were in the habit of occasionally sending out a group of warriors to rape and pillage a village or two. Yet causing imperceptible harm at a distance by the release of waste gases is a completely new form of harm, and so we lack any kind of instinctive inhibitions or emotional response against causing it. We have trouble seeing it as harm at all.

Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family—that's impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don't empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.

Cultural traits, however, are a more general category than memes, because they also include quantitative (smoothly-varying) characteristics that cannot be easily represented as discrete alternatives: for example, the inclination to trust strangers. (More on that below.)

You never see the ones who really love you and help you; you're always involved with strangers.

Il m'arrivait aussi, à l'occasion, d'être accosté dans les rues de New York par des inconnus qui se lançaient dans une rencontre orageuse avec moi à cause de quelque chose dans mes romans qui les séduisait ou qui les exaspérait, ou qui les séduisait parce que cela les exaspérait, ou qui les exaspérait parce que cela les séduisait.

I am a stranger. You do not need to lie to me or pretend. Only with friends do you need masks - Surely it is only with friends that one can be at peace. - It is easier with strangers, for they touch your life but for an instant. You will not disappoint them, for you owe them nothing; neither do they expect anything. Friends you can hurt, for they expect everything.

Names are for friends, young lordling, not to be bandied about among strangers." "Strangers can become friends. In fact, all friends were at some time strangers.

Most people, I've noticed, are instinctively harsh to strangers. They expect every approach to be an attack, every question to be an interruption.

The swim of things. I go on an airplane. I walk under the Empire State Building. I take the bus, and the subway, and am surrounded by strangers the whole time. I certainly have room in my life for caution, but I have no room in my life for paralyzing fear. There's always a risk. There always has been. But I'd rather live my life than die of negations.

I want to have faith in strangers. I want to have faith in what we're all going to do next. But I'm worried. I see things shifting from United We Stand to God Bless America. I don't believe in God Bless America. I don't believe a higher power is standing beside us and guiding us. I don't believe we're being singled out. I believe much more in United We Stand. I have my doubts, but I want it to be true.

Why is it so much easier to talk to a stranger? Why do we feel we need that disconnect in order to connect?

I scoffed at such old fashioned notions as duty, patriotism, the military virtues. And here I was, aged fifty, standing on guard at the very edge of the known world. To protect what? A hundred or so mud and wattle huts, three hundred savage strangers who do not even speak my tongue. And, of course, my own skin.

I might reinvent myself to strangers, but to this day, as far as my family is concerned, I'm still the one most likely to set your house on fire.

Why go to a store when you could go to a museum?" she might ask. "Um, because the museum doesn't sell shit?" My sisters and I refuse to feel bad about shopping. And why should we? Obviously we have some hole we're trying to fill, but doesn't everyone? And isn't filling it with berets the size of toilet-seat covers, if not more practical, then at least healthier than filling it with frosting or heroin or unsafe sex with strangers?

even if I were informed, what's the likelihood of changing anyone's opinion, especially a couple of strangers'? If my own little mind is nailed shut, why wouldn't theirs be?

Women are odd," he said, to extricate himself. "Two or three of them have told me they're sure I modeled one of my characters on them. And they were complete strangers, women I'd had nothing to do with. What kind of delusion could that be?" "Lots of women are unhappy, so they console themselves with delusions.

Yes, sometimes it's the strangers that sustain you.

Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves - except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineering of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark. Azide Smith, How to be Both