Callers Quotes & Sayings

Nothing but rules. Rule the first: no callers at the front door. Rule the second: no callers at the back door. Rule the third: no going out after dark. The six dusters had to be washed each evening and accounted for. — Edna O'Brien

I do remember vividly sometime after puberty when I'd answer the phone at home and the callers began to say, 'Hi, Bill!' That's when I knew Dad and I had the same voice. — Willie Geist

Give a cold shoulder to cold callers. Never invest in anything based on a phone call from someone you don't know or whose office is a post office box. — Nancy Dunnan

None of the Aldens knew that they were the first real callers Miss Gray had had for many years. — Gertrude Chandler Warner

The president and the vice president wanted the FBI to execute searches in secret, avoiding the strictures of the legal and constitutional standards set by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The answer was Stellar Wind. The NSA would eavesdrop freely against Americans and aliens in the United States without probable cause or search warrants. It would mine and assay the electronic records of millions of telephone conversations - both callers and receivers - and the subject lines of e-mails, including names and Internet addresses. Then it would send the refined intelligence to the Bureau for action. Stellar — Tim Weiner

In a gradually unsubtlizing progression, within a couple more sales-quarters most consumers were now using masks so undeniably better-looking on videophones than their real faces were in person, transmitting to one another such horrendously skewed and enhanced masked images of themselves, that enormous psychosocial stress began to result, large numbers of phone-users suddenly reluctant to leave home and interface personally with people who, they feared, were now habituated to seeing their far-better-looking masked selves on the phone and would on seeing them in person suffer (so went the callers' phobia) the same illusion-shattering aesthetic disappointment that, e.g., certain women who always wear makeup give people the first time they ever see them without makeup. — David Foster Wallace

I tell cold callers I'm very interested but a bit deaf, my hearing aid is not working properly and can they speak up. The idea is to deliberately miss-hear what they say, ask them to repeat, only louder, and see how loud I can get them to shout. After a while I say "I'm not really deaf" and was just wasting their time, as they were doing with me. — Sean O'Grady

I have no desire to spend every night of the next few months at balls and soirees or drowning in tea with morning callers. — Sarah M. Eden

This was my attempt to deter cold callers: "There's no past, there's no future, just one pulsating present ... Please leave your message after the tone." — Bill Bailey

I've had two callers ask, 'Did you ever work for someone who is poorer than you are?' Their idea is it takes a rich person to give you a job because jobs are something that are given to you, an inferior, from on high. — John Hall

The cell phone has transformed public places into giant phone-a-thons in which callers exist within narcissistic cocoons of private conversations. Like faxes, computer modems and other modern gadgets that have clogged out lives with phony urgency, cell phones represent the 20th Century's escalation of imaginary need. We didn't need cell phones until we had them. Clearly, cell phones cause not only a breakdown of courtesy, but the atrophy of basic skills. — Mary Schmich

Breakfast delivered on a tray every morning is joy, and so is a meal at noon if she doesn't go out. To dine every evening in an alcove of the inn set aside specially for the Morleys is a fore-taste of heaven. The alcove is large enough to entertain guests; they have use of a secluded parlor as well. Lydia could serve on committees, receive callers, go shopping, order a carriage whenever she felt like it, visit her children's houses and spoil her grandchildren without having them all congregate at the house and make chaos. — Ellen Cooney

Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers ... shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips. — Salman Rushdie

The bigger the government, the more the corruption. It's almost never mentioned, and it might be the biggest of the ten principles that I am speaking of ... Do you know who has created the greatest evils of history? Big governments. Big SECULAR governments. Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, all big States. Why would anybody trust the big state? It's amazing how many callers have imbued the college message that more people have been killed by religion than anything else in history. NO. More people have been killed by governments than anything else in history ... ... .and just in the 20th century alone, and none of them were religious. You don't learn THAT in college. — Dennis Prager

I feel called to minister to telephone marketers. You know, the kind who call at inconvenient hours and deliver their spiel before you can say a word." Immediately I flashed back to the times I have responded rudely or simply hung up. "All day long these sales callers hear people curse at them and slam the phone down," she continued. "I listen attentively to their pitch, then I try to respond kindly, though I almost never buy what they're selling. Instead, I ask about their personal life and whether they have any concerns I can pray for. Often they ask me to pray with them over the phone, and sometimes they are in tears. They're people, after all, probably underpaid, and they're surprised when someone treats them with common courtesy. — Philip Yancey

Public opinion should not be confused with popular sentiment. Popular sentiment is what people say to one another around their dinner tables. Popular opinion is what they say to callers from polling organizations. — Richard Brookhiser

Who ever he is, I agree with your mother," said Dad as he entered the kitchen. "Stay away from him. Stay away from them all until you're of marrying age. Once you reach a nice, mature fifty-four, gentlemen callers will be welcomed here. — Sarah Rees Brennan

One cannot see callers, answer the telephone, go to luncheons or dinners, visit the dentist or shoemaker, address charitable organizations in or from a bed; therefore a bed, in my experience, is simply bristling with ideas. — Kate Douglas Wiggin

Bedsprings creaking, headboard banging, heavy breathing in triplicate (the bedroom sounds like a convention of asthmatic dirty phone callers have gathered there) — Gillibran Brown

Older Americans are perfect telemarketing customers, analysts say, because they are often at home, rely on delivery services, and are lonely for the companionship that telephone callers provide. — Charles Duhigg

His magic ring he kept a great secret, for he chiefly used it when unpleasant callers came. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Try to sell cold callers something and be very insistent. Works well. Also good for door-to-door sales people, especially if they're wearing poor shoes. — Sean O'Grady

In the last month of the presidential campaign, I tuned in to conservative talk radio and listened as callers considered the unthinkable. One after another, they all threatened the same thing: "If McCain doesn't win, I'm leaving the country." "Oh, right," I'd say. "You're going to leave and go where? Right-wing Europe?" In the Netherlands now, I imagine it's legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church. The doctor might be a woman who became a man and then became a woman again, all on taxpayers' dollars, but as long as she saves the stem cells, she'll have the nation's blessing. — David Sedaris

You have a minute and a half left."
"Fine," she snapped. "Then I'll reduce this conversation to one single fact. Today I had six callers. Six! Can you recall the last time I had six callers?"
Anthony just stared at her blankly.
"I can't," Daphne continued, in fine form now. "Because it has never happened. Six men marched up our steps, knocked on our door, and gave Humboldt their cards. Six men brought me flowers, engaged me in conversation, and one even recited poetry."
Simon winced.
"And do you know why?" she demanded, her voice rising dangerously. "Do you?"
Anthony, in his somewhat belatedly arrived wisdom, held his tongue.
"It is all because he" - she jabbed her forefinger toward Simon - "was kind enough to feign interest in me last night at Lady Danbury's ball. — Julia Quinn

A streak of Puritanism runs deep within American society. Permissive and pioneering as we may be on the one hand, we are strict and conservative on the other. As much as we may be a country of mavericks and entrepreneurs, we are also a country of finger waggers and name-callers. As much as we may be a country of compassion for the underdog, we are also a country that believes in self-reliance. — Edward M. Hallowell

...she doesn't want to become the kind of person who thinks that good news can only come from calls one was already expecting and callers one already knows — Gabrielle Zevin

Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril-explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress. — David Foster Wallace

Nevertheless, hateful as saying 'No' always is to an imaginative person, and certain as the offence may be that it will cause to individuals whose own work does not require isolated effort, the writer who is engaged on a book must learn to say it. He must say it consistently to all interrupters; to the numerous callers and correspondents who want him to speak, open bazaars, see them for 'only' ten minutes, attend literary parties, put people up, or read, correct and find publishers for semi-literate manuscripts by his personal friends. — Vera Brittain

Calgary wins for my coldest New Year's Eve gig. That's when I learned Fahrenheit and Celsius cross at 40 below. I could see callers' breath coming out of my phone. — Elayne Boosler

If I had been armed with a feminist understanding that no girl deserves to be called a slut, perhaps I would have fought back by reporting the harassment to my school's headmistress or another school authority, or at least I might have had the strength to tell of the name-callers on my own. But at the time, all I knew was that if I avoided eye contact, it was a hell of a lot easier to get through my days. — Leora Tanenbaum

The fact is, both callers and work thicken - the former sadly interfering with the latter. — George Eliot

Being a 911 operator means balancing seemingly contradictory skills. On one hand, operators have to be fanatically precise and well-organized. On the other, they must be able to establish rapport with panicky callers. — Gary Wolf

What is there in the world NOT to love? Other than enemies, drugs, diseases, traffic, morning alarms, people snoring, dishes, folding fitted sheet, YouTube ads, group texts you don't want to be a part of, taxes, unknown callers ... — Me

When the day inevitably comes that a Pac-12 team beats out an SEC team for the last playoff spot, you can be sure of two things: 1) Callers to The Paul Finebaum Show the next day will utter things never before heard on radio and 2) the SEC will go to nine conference games, stat. — Stewart Mandel

As a longtime fan of talk radio, I'm very worried about the low opinion that conservative hosts and callers have of the American artist. Art is portrayed as a scam, a rip-off and snow job pushed by snobbish elites. — Camille Paglia

The telephone is there for your convenience, not for the convenience of your callers. Yet, as soon as we hear the phone ring, we act as if we are firefighters rushing to a five-alarm fire. We run to pick it up as if our lives depended on the call being answered at once. I have seen people interrupt quiet family dinners, dedicated reading times and meditation periods to answer — Robin S. Sharma

We had a few calls saying election precincts had closed early. But it turned out that the callers were in the wrong places. Some people went to the old locations of a church, rather than the new one. We called the polling locations as well as the church pastor and they verified they were still open. — Jane Anderson

Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on these occasions that I realize how absolutely alone each individual is, and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the vast and impassable distance that separates one's own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the next chair. — Elizabeth Von Arnim