People Vanishing Quotes & Sayings

What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and yet ... I thought when I began, and still think, that there was another angle in all those years when she was growing old and older and very old, and Grandfather was matching her year for year, a separate line that did not intersect with hers. They were vertical people, they lived by pride, and it is only by the ocular illusion of perspective that they can be said to have met. But he had not been dead two months when she lay down and died too, and that may indicate that at that absolute vanishing point they did intersect. They had intersected for years, for more than he especially would ever admit. — Wallace Stegner

The adoption of new technology finally occurs when ease of use, economic savings, and trust all come together to work toward change. EVERYTHING — Alec J. Ross

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours. — James Baldwin

Time has no meaning, space and place have no meaning, on this journey. All times can be inhabited, all places visited. In a single day the mind can make a millpond of the oceans. Some people who have never crossed the land they were born on have travelled all over the world. The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calender, the wrinkles and lines of the body. The self is not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once. — Jeanette Winterson

And if we dare to look into those eyes, then we shall feel their suffering in our hearts. More and more people have seen that appeal and felt it in their hearts. All around the world there is an awakening of understanding and compassion, and understanding that reaches out to help the suffering animals in their vanishing homelands. That embraces hungry, sick, and desperate human beings, people who are starving while the fortunate among us have so much more than we need. And if, one by one, we help them, the hurting animals, the desperate humans, then together we shall alleviate so much of the hunger, fear, and pain in the world. Together we can bring change to the world, gradually replacing fear and hatred with compassion and love. Love for all living beings. — Jane Goodall

Alaska Dispatch said the disappearance never made it into the Newspapers at the time, and adds, "His vanishing is like all the others, who over the years have turned to ghosts; their disappearances leaving no trace of them at all behind... — Stephen Young

Instead, we talked about the reasons to support political leaders who support us, never mind party labels. It was the kind of campaigning only a movement could do. — Gloria Steinem

Let all the learned say what they can, 'tis ready money makes the man. — William Somervile

When you let people into the inner sanctum of your life, you risk having them see the heart of you. (from Vanishing Acts) — Jodi Picoult

It's like escaping a hot, bright room
for the serenity of a city at night, covered in snow.
People eliminated. A carpet of silence
for taxis to whisper across. The world becoming
a pleasant dream of itself. The itch
of want smoldering to life on skin. Memory sends
a chill vanishing between vertebrae.
It's New Year's Eve. Hail the Calendar! As if
clocks will pause for a moment
before reloading their long rifles. Years are tiny
freckles on the face of a century.
Where is the constellation we gazed at each night
Through a bill rolled so tight
the first President lost his breath, as our eyeballs
literally unraveled? I am alone
in the rectangular borough in the observatory,
where even fire trucks can't rescue
the arsonist stretching his calves in my brain. — Jeffrey McDaniel

I trust the time is nigh when, with the universal assent of civilized people, all international differences shall be determined without resort to arms by the benignant processes of civilization. — Chester A. Arthur

After school the very next day, El Rey's mobile home was gone. I laid in bed and wondered what happens to people when they go, if they become like shadows, if they fade away when they disappear from your life. The only thing I could see was the broken picket fence. The only sound I could hear was the cry of birds being killed in the night. — Joe Meno

I was 8 when we landed on the moon. I was so into the space program as a kid. Eventually, I realized it was very unlikely that a Mexican kid in the early '70s was going to be an astronaut. — Alfonso Cuaron

Paolo Uccello's wife told people that Paolo used to stay up all night in his study trying to work out the vanishing points of his perspective. When she called him to come to bed, he would say "Oh what a lovely thing this perspective is!" — Giorgio Vasari

Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,
Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin ... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to Lawyers,
nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,
her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,
that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever,
not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,
rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common. — Thomas Pynchon

Sandwiches can be both delicious and quite satisfying if made correctly. — Jennifer Lassalle Edwards

I want my images to achieve two things in this regard - to be an elegy to a world that is tragically vanishing, to make people see what beauty is disappearing. Also, to try and show that animals are sentient creatures equally as worthy of life as humans. — Nick Brandt

The laws of physics are not about to change. Set your agenda by what's happening in the atmosphere, not by what is happening in the artificial world of Kyoto. — Ross McKitrick

The Quakers have a saying: "An enemy is one whose story we have not heard." To communicate to post-Christians, I must first listen to their stories for clues to how they view the world and how they view people like me. Those conversations are what led to the title of this book. Although God's grace is as amazing as ever, in my divided country it seems in vanishing supply. — Philip Yancey

What is madness?" she asked, sitting with one leg up against her chest, vaporous skirt flickering around her calves and vanishing into mist. "It's when men don't think right," Kaladin said, glad for the conversation to distract him. "Men never seem to think right." "Madness is worse than normal," Kaladin said with a smile. "It really just depends on the people around you. How different are you from them? The person that stands out is mad, I guess. — Brandon Sanderson

Note even Jonathan Swift would dare to write a satire in which politicians argued that - in a world where species are vanishing and more than a billion people are barely able to afford to eat - it would somehow be good for the planet to clear rain-forests to grow palm oil, or give up food-crop land to grow biofuels, solely so that people could burn fuel derived from carbohydrate rather than hydrocarbons in their cars, thus driving up the price of food for the poor. Ludicrous is too weak a word for this heinous crime. — Matt Ridley

People get old, get sick and die. Or they die suddenly. Or their deaths drag on forever. My friend Tory is dying a slow, excruciatingly painful death of bone cancer. Eight friends have died of breast cancer. Polar bears are dying. Honeybees are vanishing. The oceans are drying up. There is a part of me that wants my money back. That wants to say, 'I didn't sign up for this. I don't like the way this whole thing is set up and I won't participate in it. — Geneen Roth

The morning news hour ends with Evelyna Salsdottir, the champion poet of New Asgard, reciting her award-winning song "Sunfall in Mesa Verde." It's about vanishing people, and the memories they leave behind, like the longest shadows cast as the sun sets. — Tessa Gratton

He still wondered what it would be like to be so intriguing that people would actually care if he disappeared. — Adam Langer

Friendship exists outside our modern economy of scarcity ... It's not about apportioning vanishing resources of time and energy. Friendship is a blessed relic of the ancient economy of the gift, and the time freely given to people dear to you actually creates magical abundance. — Victor Hugo

Doormen are kind of invisible, people don't know their names. They just say, Thank you, or Good morning. I'd never thought about doormen before. They're a vanishing breed. More electronic doors are being introduced. — Bob Newhart

Communities need to hear the liberating power of the gospel — Brad Bird

Time will solve all the problems Chinese school graduates face. In our bilingual society, there are no more Chinese school graduates, only English school graduates who can speak Mandarin. These English school graduates probably can also read and write Chinese, but they did not go to a Chinese school, and they act and think differently from us. Drawing a line between us, they would never say they graduated from a Chinese school, because former Chinese school graduates, that is, the vanishing group of people that includes us, are second-class citizens. They, on the other hand, belong to the first class, the Chinese elite, English school graduates who are fluent in Chinese. — Yeng Pway Ngon

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your f**kin' retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. — George Carlin

Last year in the U.S. alone more than nine hundred thousand people were reported missing and not found ...
That's out of three hundred million, total population. That breaks down to about one person in three hundred and twenty-five vanishing. Every year ...
Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's almost the same loss ratio experienced by herd animals on the African savannah to large predators. — Jim Butcher

Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary. And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied.
Some people call the sunset a creation of extraordinary beauty, and proof of God's existence. But what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel? Do not be fooled by the pretty colour, and do not submit to its beckoning. — Lawrence Hill

My friend Emma, who likes things to add up neatly, claims that this is because my parents died when I was too young to take it in: they were there one day and gone the next, crashing through that fence so hard and fast they left it splintered for good. When I was Lexie Madison for eight months she turned into a real person to me, a sister I lost or left behind on the way; a shadow somewhere inside me, like the shadows of vanishing twins that show up on people's X-rays once in a blue moon. Even before she came back to find me I knew I owed her something, for being the one who lived. — Tana French