Quotes About People

Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren't enough characters to go round. Unless, of course, one wrote about people who were themselves writing novels. And what would the novels that these fictional characters were writing be about? Well, they would be novels about people writing novels.

It was easy to make a difference to other people's lives, so easy to change the little room in which people lived their life.

How remarkable it was, she thought, that we managed to anchor ourselves at all in this world, and that we did so by giving ourselves names and linking those names with places and other people.

His life was unrecorded; who is there to write down the lives of ordinary people?

They're always helpful, those people. Which people? asked Ulf. Librarians. They know everything.

Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across.

the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.

That was the trouble with people in general: they were surprisingly unrealistic in their expectations.

That was the way the world was; it was composed of a few almost perfect people (ourselves); then there were a good many people who generally did their best but were not all that perfect (our friends and colleagues); and finally, there were a few rather nasty ones (our enemies and opponents).

There was the Queen, and then there was Seretse Khama and our own people. That is called history, you see." "But who asked them here?" The aunt shook her head. "There are some guests who do not knock." "That is very rude." "Yes," said the aunt.

Look at every territorial dispute you care to mention. Northern Ireland, for instance." "Religion in that case," Jamie ventured. "Not just. Religion was the badge of identity, but it wasn't really about whether you went to Mass or to a tub-thumping Protestant chapel. It was a result of the movement of people. The Protestant planters—many of them Scots—replaced the native Irish, remember? Movement of people again.

Most theories and ideologies claimed to explain the world, or some aspect of it, but did not in any real sense influence the world. Underneath everything, beneath the layers of explanation that we created, beneath all our elaborate protocols, people still did exactly as they wanted to do. In other words, you did not change human nature by inventing a theory of human nature.

Do you think your dog might have been drunk when he bit these people, Mr Lordie?

we don't see our parents as people. Your daddy was also a man—a very good man too—but he was a man.

So one might cry for everything that was wrong with the world, for all the injustice and crudity and cruelty, for all the things that are stolen from people.

It was Lennie Marchbanks at the door. She had met him once or twice before and rather liked him; mechanics struck her as being such easy, agreeable people. And, she noticed, as a psychotherapist, one never had a mechanic for a patient. Why was that? Were they invariably balanced people, free of the neuroses that afflicted non-mechanically-minded others?

it,' he said. 'People change their

Another Huber, you see, Herr Uber-Huber. Bavaria's teeming with people of your name.' 'Hubers, yes,' said Herr Uber-Huber. 'But not so many Uber-Hubers, I think.' 'An important distinction, that,' said the Rector. 'Tell me, Herr Uber-Huber–are there any Unter-Hubers, as far as you know?' Herr Uber-Huber shook his head. 'I would say that Huber is the equivalent of Unter-Huber.

Not as far as I know," said Ulf. "I asked Blomquist, who said that he thought a dwarf didn't have normal bodily proportions. Midgets—I mean, small people—do. They have small bodies, but otherwise they look normal." Anna frowned. "I'm not sure that you can say normal, you know. Perhaps say average. Nobody gets offended if you say that they're not average.

your mind like that, then you kept it in good order for a longer period of time, and you put off the day when you would be sitting in the sun, like some of the very old people, not exactly sure which day of the week it was and wondering why the world no longer made the sense that it once did. Yet such people were often happy, he reminded himself, possibly because it did not really matter what day of the week it was anyway.

the human world, he reflected, was divided into little clusters of people—tiny tribes, small groups of friends, families—and if you belonged to only a few of these, then your life was circumscribed.

You know what they're like. Mma Ramotswe nodded. She did. They were not all bad, of course. But many of them were awful, which somehow eclipsed the better qualities of some of the nice ones. It was very sad.

chairs are public, and one only needs to seek permission to sit in another's chair if the owner of the room is present; once you were by yourself, any chair was fair game. Except the chairs of really important people—one should not sit on a throne when left unattended in a monarch's throne room; that really was going too far. And yet who would miss such an opportunity? There could surely be little doubt but that visitors

photographs on a wall were there for people to see and to examine if interested; an album is a different thing…