Quotes About People

Who can know anybody?' said the bookshop owner. 'Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One's lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that's wanted, let alone know it.

Do you know what emperors do, Tilla?' That was easy. 'Send soldiers to steal the land and make us pay taxes.' 'They spend half their waking hours listening to people who want things. As, it seems, do gods. Maybe it wasn't as much of a transition as everyone thought.

She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.

I believe that in the deepest places in their hearts, people are violent and take pleasure in hurting each other.

The abbot thought jazz-playing monks might garner media attention and attract more young people to the temple. They called the band Thelonious.

The Public Library is a shrine of dreams, and people fall in love here all the time. Maybe you don't believe this, but it's true. Books are works of love after all.

The weather was gray, the streets filled with that Sunday morning silence that makes you feel like everybody else is home with people that they love.

I love all these people; they have so much passion. They're a little bit crazy, but they use their craziness for their business. They live right.

She was also completely candid about wanting to work with people she could learn from. My first boss, Rosalie Wright, had been much the same. Rosalie is the toughest person I've ever met: She bucked enormous pressure to run major investigative articles in New West.

From a logical point of view, anyone who sets out to create a Great Civilization ought to begin with people, with training cadres of experts in order to form a native intelligentsia. But it was precisely that kind of thinking that was unacceptable. Open new universities and polytechnics, every one a hornets' nest, every student a rebel, a good-for-nothing, a freethinker?

The land is sacred. The land gives people life, and that which gives life is sacred.

Much is said in our age about irony and humor, especially by people who have never been capable of engaging in the practice of these arts, but who nevertheless know how to explain everything.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.

Music, love, death. Certainly a triangle of sorts; maybe even an eternal one. The only people who can see the whole picture, he murmured, are the ones who step out of the frame. (The ground beneath her feet.)

They drove past buses that dripped people the way a sponge drips water, and arrived at a thick forest of human beings, a crowd of people sprouting in all directions like leaves on jungle trees.

Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real. This was the paradox of the whispered stories: they were no more than make-believe but they created the truth, and brought into being a city and an army with all the rich diversity of nonfictional people with deep roots in the actually existing world.

There are people who need to impose a shape upon the shapelessness of life. For such people the quest narrative is always attractive. It prevents them from suffering the agony of feeling what's the word. Incoherent.

Little rich boy, that's all just wind. All that importance-of-the-individual. All that possibility-of-humanity. Today, what people are is just another kind of thing.

History is the consequence not only of people's actions, but also of their forgetfulness.

The world is not ideas, rich boy; the world is no place for dreamers or their dreams; the world, little Snotnose, is things. Things and their makers rule the world; look at Birla, and Tata, and all the powerful: they make things. For things, the country is run. Not for people.

Now the only person you think is lying to you is the expert who actually knows something. He's the one not to believe because he's the elite and the elites are against the people

That's the least of it. The most of it is, he was always careless with people's hearts. He never took any responsibility for what he broke.

This is how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked.