Now We Are Strangers Quotes & Sayings

She looked at the people around her and felt not just that she was surrounded by strangers, but that she herself was strange, somehow, that something kept her from ever fully bridging the gap between who she was and who all these other people, making their way through the very same day, were. — Daphne Kalotay

The widespread assumption that ethical behavior takes the fun out of life is false. In actuality, living ethically ensures that relationships in our lives, including encounters with strangers, nurture our spiritual growth. — Bell Hooks

It was a Different Time. People were Friendly. We trusted each other. Hell, you could afford to get mixed up with wild strangers in those days
without fearing for your life, or your eyes, or your organs, or all of your money, or even getting locked up in prison forever. There was a sense of possibility. People were not so afraid, as they are now. You could run around naked without getting shot. You could check into a roadside motel on the outskirts of Ely or Winnemucca or Elko where you were lost in a midnight rainstorm
and nobody called the police on you, just to check out your credit and your employment history and your medical records and how many parking tickets you owed in California. — Hunter S. Thompson

Do not assume that people are seeing you. The more you can clarify, optimize, and engage your fans and strangers with branded marketing and merchandise, the better chance you have of being seen and then heard. — Loren Weisman

We are not strangers. It's a lack of trust that keeps us separated. — Michael R. French

What set us apart from most or all of the other hominid species was our ultrasociality, our ability to be highly cooperative, even with strangers, people who are not at all related to us. — Jonathan Haidt

Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends. — Nancy Gibbs

In a media culture, we not only judge strangers by how they look but by the images of how they look. So we want attractive pictures of our heroes and repulsive images of our enemies. — Virginia Postrel

Aside from their companionship, I'd brought Sage and Sky as ambassadors, hoping they would attract attention and open the door to conversations with strangers. In a moment, they fulfilled their diplomatic function. — Philip Caputo

This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that "feeling special" was a private experience, and no one else's projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life. — Lionel Shriver

Music is where I feel loved. Past, present. Music is where I give love. Why do I continue to enter rooms of strangers who are suffering, dying, cursing, diminished, unwashed? Because of love. I don't see hollow faces, blank stares, decaying bodies. I see the faces of God in these human beings. Precious people with stories, contributions, presence. Music pays tribute to their lives, often coaxes out their life stories, gives them worth, but most of all loves them when they are lost, weak, vulnerable. — Robin Russell Gaiser

Strangers had small interest in hurting you. That was always done best by your own family and friends. — Robin Hobb

One of the men attached to the prison was the occasion of great amusement on the part of the prisoners, as well as the spectators, by taking a large lump of ice to show these strangers from the tropics. — Lewis Tappan

Why is it so important to have fun? Because if you love your work (or your activism or your family time), then you'll want to do more of it. You'll think about it before you go to sleep and as soon as you wake up; your mind is always in gear. When you're that engaged, you'll run circles around other people even if they are more naturally talented. From what we've seen personally, the best predictor of success among young economists and journalists is whether they absolutely love what they do. If they approach their job like - well, a job - they aren't likely to thrive. But if they've somehow convinced themselves that running regressions or interviewing strangers is the funnest thing in the world, you know they have a shot. — Steven D. Levitt

That's usually how I get to know strangers - get inappropriately touchy. Once they've experienced the awkwardness of you being way too close for comfort, after that, it all gets easy. — Natasha Lyonne

Rules and Things Number 63: Never, Ever Say Something Bad About Someone You Don't Know
Especially When You're Around a Bunch of Strangers. You Never Can Tell Who Might Be Kin to That Person or Who Might Be a Lip-Flapping, Big-Mouth Spy. — Christopher Paul Curtis

Sisters, when about their work, should not put on clothing which would make them look like images to frighten the crows from the corn. It is more gratifying to their husbands and children to see them in a becoming, well-fitting, attire, than it can be to merely visitors or strangers. — Ellen G. White

In London, there is a section in a newspaper, the Metro, where people write in and thank strangers for their lovely or kind actions throughout the week. It brings me such happiness reading it and makes me know that, ultimately, human beings are amazing. — Rosie Fellner

Ours was a relationship of small talk. We'd never stayed awake long into the night hoping to find in that nocturnal physical conversation a connection of minds. We hadn't stared into each others eyes because if eyes are the window to the soul it would be a little rude and embarrassing to look in. We'd created a ring-road relationship, circumventing raw emotions and complex feelings, so that our central selves were strangers. — Rosamund Lupton

I was so shy. I used to cross the street so I wouldn't even have to talk to my relatives, much less strangers. That's not shy, that's wise. But I found that that when you had a journalist's notebook in your hand it wasn't really you, you see. — Geraldine Brooks

I'm ill qualified to recommend myself to strangers. Mr. Darcy — Jane Austen

It's different when you're an actor and playing a part, but when it's just you, you feel immensely vulnerable have strangers prodding and prying. — Helena Bonham Carter

There's no feeling as a musician better than being on stage, sharing music with strangers. People you have never met, singing along, and making that connection with somebody is so awesome. — Mike Fontenot

Why do you help these strangers?" she asked Tiffany now. "They are not of your clan. You owe them nothing."

"Well," said Tiffany, "although they are strangers, I simply think of them as people. All of them. And you help other people--that's how we do it."

"Does every person do it?" said Nightshade.

"No," said Tiffany. "Sadly, that is true. But many people will help other people, just because, well, because they are other people. That's how it goes. — Terry Pratchett

That is what has happened to the United States in the international economic scene. We have deteriorated into a debtor status so that we are now dependent upon the kindness of strangers. That is not where the world's leading power should find itself. — Paul Sarbanes

It seems the older we get, the tighter our inner circle becomes. When life has you down, some of those you thought had your back run, others ... sometimes strangers surprise you and fill that empty space up. Oh, but life has a great balancing act and when that axle turns and you are right side up again ... you will definitely not be looking for any long, lost "friends" because your inner circle is battle-tested to win! — Sanjo Jendayi

How will the performer-audience interaction change,
now that we are so used to participating in the lives of strangers? — Natasha Tsakos

Often, when we have a crush, when we lust for a person, we see only a small percentage of who they really are. The rest we make up for ourselves. Rather than listen, or learn, we smother them in who we imagine them to be, what we desire for ourselves, we create little fantasies of people and let them grow in our hearts. And this is where the relationship fails. In time, the fiction we scribble onto a person falls away, the lies we tell ourselves unravel and soon the person standing in front of you is almost unrecognisable, you are now complete strangers in your own love. And what a terrible shame it is. My advice: pay attention to the small details of people, you will learn that the universe is far more spectacular an author than we could ever hope to be. — Beau Taplin

I think now we are simply strangers with some memories. — Tan Redding

I lost Susy thirteen years ago; I lost her mother
her incomparable mother!
five and a half years ago; Clara has gone away to live in Europe and now I have lost Jean. How poor I am, who was once so rich! ... Jean lies yonder, I sit here; we are strangers under our own roof; we kissed hands good-by at this door last night
and it was forever, we never suspecting it. She lies there, and I sit here
writing, busying myself, to keep my heart from breaking. How dazzling the sunshine is flooding the hills around! It is like a mockery. Seventy-four years ago twenty-four days. Seventy-four years old yesterday. Who can estimate my age today? — Mark Twain

I have a feeling that we've seen the dismantling of civilisation, brick by brick, and now we're looking into the void. We thought that we were liberating people from oppressive cultural circumstances, but we were, in fact, taking something away from them. We were killing off civility and concern. We were undermining all those little ties of loyalty and consideration and affection that are necessary for human flourishing. We thought that tradition was bad, that it created hidebound societies, that it held people down. But, in fact, what tradition was doing all along was affirming community and the sense that we are members of one another. Do we really love and respect one another more in the absence of tradition and manners and all the rest? Or have we merely converted one another into moral strangers - making our countries nothing more than hotels for the convenience of guests who are required only to avoid stepping on the toes of other guests? — Alexander McCall Smith

In Jump Time's developing hybrid world, capacities once nurtured in separate societies are available to the entire family of humankind. This is a stupendous happening, as important as the discovery of new continents during the time of the great sea journeys. For the first time in human history the genius of the human race is available for all to harvest. These rediscovered capacities may be evolutionary accelerators, now being gathered from many places, times, and cultures to awaken our species to who we are and what we yet may be and do. Often, however, it is not comfortable. We can for a time find ourselves strangers in a very strange land, wishing we could return to the comforts of a more insular and familiar worldview. Yet when we get beyond the shutterings of our local cultural trance, we gain the courage to nurture the emerging forms of the possible human and the possible society. — Jean Houston

Many of us are returning from a long journey during which we were forced to search for things that were of no interest to us. Now we realize that they were false. But this return cannot be made without pain, because we have been away for a long time and feel that we are strangers in out own land. It will take some time to find the friends who also left, and the places where our roots and treasures lie. But this will happen. — Paulo Coelho

Our world is moving so fast and we are apt to miss so much of what is happening "right now." If we can put down our smart phones for one moment and be present to what is around us, I believe these incidental meetings and strangers who come into our lives can give us unexpected fortitude, perspective and even wisdom just when we need them the most - if we are just awake, aware and open to these new insights. — Kristin S. Kaufman

My flesh is stone. My blood rages hot as molten iron. I have a thousand eyes. A thousand swords. And one mind.
I have heard the death-cry. Was she kin? She said as much, when first she touched me. We were upon the ground. Far from each other, and yet of a kind.
I heard her die.
And so I came to mourn her, I came to find her body, her silent tomb.
But she dies still. I do not understand. She dies still - and there are strangers. Cruel strangers. I knew them once. I know them now. I know, too, that they will not yield.
Who am I?
What am I?
But I know the answers to these questions. I believe, at last, that I do.
Strangers, you bring pain. You bring suffering. You bring to so many dreams the dust of death.
But, strangers, I am Icarium.
And I bring far worse. — Steven Erikson

But it's too late, I'm sorry. Now I have no idea how things begin, nor how to know that they are safe, nor how to show strangers we are safe too. — Sara Baume

That is the purpose for which you are called hither. Called, is say, though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the peril of the world. — J.R.R. Tolkien

We are exiles in Time's abyss, strangers now in the Promised Land. — D.B. Nielsen

Things used to be, now they not
anything but us is who we are
disguising ourselves as secret lovers
we've become public enemies
we walk away like strangers in the street
gone for eternity
we erased one another
so far from where we came
with so much of everything, how do we leave with nothing
lack of visual empathy equates the meaning of L-O-V-E
hatred and attitude tear us entirely — Chloe Mitchell

When the Irish nun said to me, "Speak your name loud and clear so that all the boys and girls can hear you," she was asking me to use language publicly, with strangers. That's the appropriate instruction for a teacher to give. If she were to say to me, "We are going to speak now in Spanish, just like you do at home. You can whisper anything you want to me, and I am going to call you by a nickname, just like your mother does," that would be inappropriate. Intimacy is not what classrooms are about. — Richard Rodriguez

People need to spread love towards strangers. We all bleed the same blood and we are all part of a global community now. — Aloe Blacc

I had the worst feeling, when I hung up, that I had missed the purpose of our conversation, that we both had. We had been apart for so long and no longer knew how to speak, other than as strangers. How are you feeling? we said, but what we meant was, Where are you? who are you now? Are you still in there? — Jennifer Gilmore

Comedy is the only profession where love from a stranger is better than love from a family member. You need to perform for strangers to see if you're really funny. If they laugh and cheer, it's the greatest thing in the world. — Jay Leno

Oftentimes lies are found in those closest to you and truth in perfect strangers — Katrina Sisowath

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children. — Iris Murdoch

The house seemed so different at night. Everything was in its correct place, of course, but somehow the furniture seemed more angular and the pictures on the wall more one-dimensional. She remembered somebody saying that at night we are all strangers, even to ourselves, and this struck her as being true. — Alexander McCall Smith

They're good, these stories," Mace continued, his cheeks stained with light color. "They teach the pain of others." "Empathy. Carlin always said it was the great value of fiction, to put us inside the minds of strangers. — Erika Johansen

Thompson's message was straightforward: if God through divine revelation so clearly sanctioned slavery, and even the trade in "strangers," how could genuine Christians attack modern slavery, or even the slave trade, as an evil? — Mark A. Noll

But the remarkable thing about the beetles was their sensitivity to all the grammar and directives and slogans and even unstated desires of the ant world, which they learned to manipulate. They first memorized the proper antenna-vibration and foreleg-tap which the ants themselves used to request food. The poor workers, busy going here and there and back again all day and never getting a chance to think, automatically assumed that these fearsome strangers had been authorized by the Central Committee since they knew the password, and so they regurgitated a drop or two of fruit juice on cue, much the same as when one is traveling across Europe or Asia on the train and a person in uniform requests one's passport, one's ticket, takes them away, and comes back, or else does not come back, having sold them; a badge and a superior manner can obtain anything in this world. — William T. Vollmann

A city like London is sociable in a sense that there are people gathering in bars and restaurants, concerts and lectures. Yet you can partake of all these experiences and never say hello to anyone new. And one of the things that all religions do is take groups of strangers into a space and say it is OK to talk to each other. — Alain De Botton

Oh, I thought that I was giving him so much!
And he to me - and the giving and the taking
Seemed so right: not in terms of calculation
Of what was good for the persons we had been
But for the new person, us. If I could feel
As I did then, even now it would seem right.
And then I found we were only strangers
And that there had been neither giving nor taking
But that we had merely made use of each other
Each for his purpose. That's horrible. Can we only love
Something created by our own imagination?
Are we all in fact unloving and unlovable?
The one is alone, and if one is alone
Then lover and beloved are equally unreal
And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams. — T. S. Eliot

There was something intrinsically sad about Shinjuku. A vacuum-packed hollowness that no quantity of neon could hide. Roppongi was the same, only there the sadness was older and more Western. All that movement to so little purpose. A million strangers searching for a cure to the darkness behind their eyes in the void between someone else's legs. — Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Better to sink with tempests raging o'er
Masts all dismantled and hull gaping wide
Than rest and rot on some unclouded shore
The idle plaything of the listless tide.

Better the grime of battle on the brow,
With grim defeat to crush thy dying hand
Than through long years of peace to tyrant bow
Or dwell captive in a strangers land.

Better the castle with beleaguered gate,
By battle's lightning shivered in a day
Than peaceful walls in pomp of sullen state,
Through centuries sinking to a dull decay.

Better resolve to win thy heart's desire,
And striving bravely, die in the endeavor
Than have the embers of some smothered fire
Lie smouldering in thy saddened soul forever. — Sam Davis

There can be no relation more strange, more critical, than that between two beings who know each other only with their eyes, who meet daily, yes, even hourly, eye each other with a fixed regard, and yet by some whim or freak of convention feel constrained to act like strangers. Uneasiness rules between them, unslaked curiosity, a hysterical desire to give rein to their suppressed impulse to recognize and address each other; even, actually, a sort of strained but mutual regard. For one human being instinctively feels respect and love for another human being so long as he does not know him well enough to judge him; and that he does not, the craving he feels is evidence. — Thomas Mann

I really love to be with people. It's nice, that. To have achieved sudden intimacy with strangers is perhaps the most human thing you can do. We all love our friends and families, as much as we hate them. When you can achieve intimacy with strangers, it's very exciting and heartening. — Russell Brand

I hide myself in my words. There's a cipher, and one half is in my writing and the other half is in me, and if you have them both then you'll understand everything. Strangers think it's just a story, but you'll know what's real. You'll know who I really am. — Leah Raeder

He turned to her and said, "About time," when the train finally creaked in, with the familiarity strangers adopt with each other after sharing in the disappointment of a public service. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: These are complex and hard-earned capacities. You don't need a history of trauma to feel self-conscious and even panicked at a party with strangers - but trauma can turn the whole world into a gathering of aliens. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

All the episodes from my stories and novels are not about food only, but about meals. You can eat food by yourself. A meal, according to my understanding anyhow, is a communal event, bringing together family members, neighbors, even strangers. At its most ordinary, it involves hospitality, giving, receiving, and gratitude. — Wendell Berry

Think of strangers as friends you not met yet. — Abraham Lincoln

I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger. — August Wilson

Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don't. — Seth Godin

Most people don't need the help of strangers to screw up their lives; most of them are quite capable of doing it themselves! — Lisa Gardner

Tiki ran hard, ignoring the startled looks of strangers. It felt good to run, to run away from her sadness and fear. — Kiki Hamilton

Trying to make strangers laugh is crazy and more than a little narcissistic. — Chris Hardwick

if a man wants friends be must go among strangers. It's — Arthur Conan Doyle

My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia. — Dame Edna Everage

We met with more closed doors than open ones
and the people who answered our knocks were invariably older. Young people didn't aswner the door to strangers, who would undoubtedly be trying to sell something, any more than they would answer the telephone to telemarketers once Caller ID came along. The only people we encountered going door-to-door were the ones old enough to remember when that's the way the world worked. — J. Mark Bertrand

Justice is impartiality. Only strangers are impartial. — George Bernard Shaw

Ours is the fellowship of strangers who know a secret that we cannot express. — Claire North