Strange Man Quotes & Sayings

Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t'gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her - one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab's face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. — Herman Melville

Next time we will look at this from a much more basic point of view and one antedating all zoology, which, glimpsed only a little after my twentieth year, made write in those days that what is most valuable in man is his eternal and almost divine discontent, a discontent which is a kind of love without a beloved, and like an ache which we feel in members of our body that we do not have. Man is the only being that misses he has never had. And the whole of what we miss, without ever having had it, is never what we call happiness. From this one could start a meditation on happiness, an analysis of that strange condition which makes man the only being who is unhappy for the very reason that he needs to be happy. That is, because he needs to be what he is not. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity, - the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heavens artillery, - but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggots life, nothing more. Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of all things strives for utterance. And the fear od death, of God, of the universe, comes over him, - the hope of the Resurrection and the life, the yearning for immortality, the vain striving of the imprisoned essence, - it is then, if ever, man walks alone with God.
- The White Silence — Jack London

a small few actually able to do those things of which men whisper - these few could call demons and the dead, could kill with a curse or heal with strange potions. One of these men had been a creature the gunslinger believed to be a demon himself, a creature that pretended to be a man and called itself Flagg. He had seen him only briefly, and that had been near the end, as chaos and the final crash approached his land. Hot on his heels had come two young men who looked desperate and yet grim, men named Dennis and Thomas. These three had crossed only a tiny part of what had been a confused and confusing time in the gunslinger's life, but he would never forget seeing Flagg change a man who had irritated him into a howling dog. He remembered that well enough. — Stephen King

I believe no satirist could breathe this air. If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us tomorrow, he would be hunted down. If you have any knowledge of our literature, and can give me the name of any man, American born and bred, who has anatomised our follies as a people, and not as this or that party; and who has escaped the foulest and most brutal slander, the most inveterate hatred and intolerant pursuit; it will be a strange name in my ears, believe me. — Charles Dickens

We have won battles that are strange and strong for a carnal man to win. — Jaachynma N.E. Agu

Really, what a strange man he is, thought klara, with that aching feeling of loneliness which always overcomes us when someone dear to us surrenders to a daydream in which we have no place. — Vladimir Nabokov

A man looks down at the red paint on his hands and wonders for a moment if he's killed his wife and this is her blood or maybe he's just painted the garden bench red, that's all. He thinks it is a strange thought and carries on digging the hole he's digging in the back garden. He whistles. He writes this all down in his moleskin diary, later that evening. His wife should be back from work by now but she isn't. — Pleasefindthis

Walking up to the screened porch, however, I felt as strange and disconnected as I had ever been in my entire life. It was as if I were two people: a man who was a capable detective, a loving husband, and a devoted father who was heading toward a quiet little house in the South, and an unsure and fearful boy of eight trudging toward a home that might be filled with music, love, and joy or, just as easily, screaming, turmoil, and madness. — James Patterson

The whole set of stylizations that are known as "camp" (a word that I was hearing then for the first time) was, in 1926, self-explanatory. Women moved and gesticulated in this way. Homosexuals wished for obvious reasons to copy them. The strange thing about "camp" is that it has been fossilized. The mannerisms have never changed. If I were now to see a woman sitting with her knees clamped together, one hand on her hip and the other lightly touching her back hair, I should think, "Either she scored her last social triumph in 1926 or it is a man in drag. — Quentin Crisp

Business was successfully concluded. But - strange is man: he was deeply mortified at being in disfavour with the very people whom he did not respect, and whose vanity and love of dress he derided. — Nikolai Gogol

It is difficult to describe how it feels to gaze at living human beings whom you've seen perform in hard-core porn. To shake the hand of a man whose precise erectile size, angle, and vasculature are known to you. That strange I-think-we've-met-before sensation one feels upon seeing any celebrity in the flesh is here both intensified and twisted. It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a sundered valentine with the tagline HEART BREAKER on her right buttock and a tiny hairless mole just left of her anus. To watch Peter North try to get a cigar lit and to have that sight backlit by memories of his artilleryesque ejaculations.13 To have seen these strangers' faces in orgasm - that most unguarded and purely neural of expressions, the one so vulnerable that for centuries you basically had to marry a person to get to see it. — David Foster Wallace

It is the Bohemian fad to expatriate himself, to seek strange and bizarre environments. As soon as a place begins to attract civilization he flees it for some new hiding place. When he chooses a Chinese dinner he must have a restaurant where no white man has ever before trod, if he can find one. . . . As soon as others begin to frequent it also, again he flies.27 — Andrew Coe

It was a strange four-sided triangle, with Charlotte (in some sense) the 'other woman' in two different relationships with the same man. — Howard D. Beebe

Daniel walked as tall and strong as Ian or Mac, even Hart. "They grow up so fast," Angelo said when he reacheed Cam.
Cameron glanced at him, thinking the man joking, but Angelo's dark eyes were serious.
"Chilhood is gone in the wink of an eye, and then they have to be men. You Anglos are strange, sending your sons out into the world as soon as they get tall enough. My family has been together forever."
"I notice you don't live with them, Angelo, so don't become sentimental. Besides my family is together. Just a bit spread out."
"Rich Anglos need too much space."
"That is true, but it keeps us from killing each other. — Jennifer Ashley

Colin decided then and there that the female mind was a strange and incomprehensible organ - one which no man should even attempt to understand. There wasn't a woman alive who could go from point A to B without stopping at C, D, X, and 12 along the way. — Julia Quinn

Give me all of you, and I'll give you back yourself when we have finished.
And in the high country she had screamed aloud in some combination of fear and pleasure. And she had done that once more in a bed in Iowa, then turned the scream into a dwindling, involuntary cry for all the things she had once felt and now felt again with another strange man who lived in his own far places. — Robert James Waller

Yes" Bazarov began, "man's a strange being. When you look at a quiet, dull life, like my good parents' life here, cursorily or from a distance, you think - what could be better? Eat, drink and know you're acting in the most correct, sensible way. But that's not how it is. Boredom descends. You want to engage with people, even if just to shout at them, but still engage with them. — Ivan Turgenev

Sansa sat with her hands folded in her lap, watching with a strange fascination. She had never seen a man die before. She ought to be crying too, she thought, but the tears would not come. Perhaps she had used up all her tears for Lady and Bran. It would be different if it had been Jory or Ser Rodrik or Father, she told herself. The young man in the blue cloak was nothing to her, some stranger from the Vale of Arryn whose name she had forgotten as soon as she heard it. And now the world would forget his name too, Sansa realized; there would be no songs sung for him. That was sad. — George R R Martin

It seems strange that bears, so fond of all sorts of flesh, running the risks of guns and fires and poison, should never attack men except in defense of their young. How easily and safely a bear could pick us up as we lie asleep! Only wolves and tigers seem to have learned to hunt man for food, and perhaps sharks and crocodiles. — John Muir

All this convinced him that he had come to one of those revolting havens where pathetic depravity makes its abode, born of tawdry education and the terrible populousness of the capital. One of those havens where man blasphemously crushes and derides all the pure and holy that adorns life, where woman, the beauty of the world, the crown of creation, turns into some strange, ambiguous being, where, along with purity of soul, she loses everything feminine and repulsively adopts all the mannerisms and insolence of a man, and ceases to be that weak, that beautiful being so different from us. — Nikolai Gogol

How strange a checker-work of Providence is the life of man! — Daniel Defoe

Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can't TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don't even know. I'm aware, in an intellectual way. That I felt all those things about him, but this emotions are far away now.
What's so strange to me is that I can't even force my heart back to that place where I felt that all consuming passion. That makes me feel distant from myself. Who WAS I then? Will I ever be able to get back to that place? Reading the letters again made me wonder: Which is the real me? The one who saw the world in that emotionally saturated way, or the me who sees it the way I do now? — Bill Shapiro

I'd been unable to stop questioning if I knew what I was doing, even just kissing, and I'd sort of sheepishly apologized for my inexperience. Lucius had drawn back, a strange look in his eyes and a half smile on his lips as he'd said, 'I don't think I could allow another man who'd touched you to continue walking this earth. The only reason Zinn survives is the debt that I owe him.' He'd smiled a little more broadly, joking, 'Your inexperience saves lives, Antanasia. — Beth Fantaskey

For, I think, when I woke up today, with a dream of yesterday still in my eyes,I felt tired in life. And thinking of the little blond girl of Mays & Junes long gone by,I felt strange looking on a field of wheat, and I thought, in a moment I was God and so was she, and this field was us too. So long gone, she goes. But I am still her, whether she comes and goes like all of life, or she stays awhile.
Once, a man of physics told me, matter cannot be created or destroyed. And on
another occasion he said everything came from one point, in the beginning.
So we are all flowers and rivers and trees. That was all of us together. Every one of the past, present, and future. — Derek Keck

Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled. — Charles Mackay

Yes, the reaction is already upon me. I shall be as limp as a rag for a week."
"Strange," said I, "how terms of what in another man I should call laziness alternate with your fits of splendid energy and vigor. — Arthur Conan Doyle

A wound gives strange dignity to him who bears it. Well men shy from his new and terrible majesty. It is as if the wounded man's hand is upon the curtain which hangs before the revelations of all existence - the meaning of ants, potentates, wars, cities, sunshine, snow, a feather dropped from a bird's wing; and the power of it sheds radiance upon a bloody form, and makes the other men understand sometimes that they are little. His comrades look at him with large eyes thoughtfully. Moreover, they fear vaguely that the weight of a finger upon him might send him headlong, precipitate the tragedy, hurl him at once into the dim, gray unknown.
("An Episode Of War") — Stephen Crane

Even the humblest men have a strange reason behind greed. Every man thinks money solves problems - and every man thinks not just of himself, but his next three generations - there is a probability he will live to see those generations - and he wants to care for them in times of strife. — Siddharth Katragadda

But strange though it may seem, the more he judged, and the more he realized that men feared and acknowledged his right to judge, the more his innermost soul questioned man's right to judgment of any kind. — Lev Shestov

There are plenty of characters I'd love to write. Swamp Thing, Etrigan the Demon, Man-Thing, Howard the Duck, Dr. Strange, Dr. Druid, Ghost Rider, the Micronauts, the Shogun Warriors ... the list goes on and on. — Cullen Bunn

'Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel. — William Makepeace Thackeray

You may think this a strange story, but it is not. There are people whose lives are every bit as unusual as Bobby Box's
I can promise you that. Not all of them end as well, of course. For many people, the world is a place of sadness and sorrow, which is a great pity, as we have only one chance at life, and it is very bad luck if things do not go well.
But even if you think they are not going well, you can still wish, as Bobby Box did. And sometimes those wishes will come true, as his did, and the world will seem filled with light and happiness. That can happen, you know. So never give up hope; never think things are so bad that they can never get better. They can get better, and they do. And if you have the chance to make things easier for another person, never miss it. Stretch out your hand to help them, to cheer them up, to wipe away their tears. Stretch out your hand as that man and that woman did to Bobby Box. Stretch out your hand and see what happens. — Alexander McCall Smith

A present," he said, then winced. The presents he'd bought for Portia usually included ropes of pearls or gemstones the size of robin's eggs. A man of his wealth ought to provide something much nicer than a sack of strange-looking pods. Sophie peeked inside the bag, her face screwing up in confusion. "What are they?" she asked, lifting the odd vegetable from the bag. It was a ruddy orange shade, larger than her hand, and looked like an oblong pumpkin. There were four of them in the bag. "You once said the cocoa powder in this village was bad, and you wanted to make your own. These are cocoa pods, shipped directly from Brazil. If you split it open, you will find fresh cocoa beans inside. Then you can begin your culinary adventure of making chocolate from scratch." "You remembered!" she exclaimed. Her eyes widened in delight as she held the pod to her nose for a sniff and then ran her fingers along its waxy skin. "It's fabulous. Thank you! — Elizabeth Camden

I understood that you would take the Human Race in the concrete, have exploded the absurd notion of Pope's Essay on Man, [Erasmus] Darwin, and all the countless Believers-even (strange to say) among Xtians-of Man's having progressed from an Ouran Outang state-so contrary to all History, to all Religion, nay, to all Possibility-to have affirmed a Fall in some sense. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness — Sophocles

There shall be poets! When woman's unmeasured bondage shall be broken, when she shall live for and through herself, man
hitherto detestable
having let her go, she, too, will be poet! Woman will find the unknown! Will her ideational worlds be different from ours? She will come upon strange, unfathomable, repellent, delightful things; we shall take them, we shall comprehend them. — Arthur Rimbaud

How strange a thing is the heart of man! — Murasaki Shikibu

How strange it was, I thought, that when the tiny though thousandfold beauties of the Earth disappeared and the immeasurable beauty of outer space rose in the distant quiet splendor of light, man and the greatest number of other creatures were supposed to be asleep! Was it because we were only permitted to catch a fleeting glimpse of those great bodies and then only in the mysterious time of a dream world, those great bodies about which man had only the slightest knowledge but perhaps one day would be permitted to examine more closely? Or was it permitted for the great majority of people to gaze at the starry firmament only in brief, sleepless moments so that the splendor wouldn't become mundane, so that the greatness wouldn't be diminished? — Adalbert Stifter

The long-shot bet, in some strange way, was a young man's game. Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai no longer felt, or acted, quite so young. — Michael Lewis

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings. — Graham Greene

THEIR BELIEF. IT is a strange revelation to find that the natives believe in a common Creator, and that their race sprang from one man and woman. There is no mistake that this it; their belief. Their Creator's name is GNURKER. They allow that he has a wife, who gave birth to the first couple sent to populate the earth. When their God saw that this earth was fit for man, and that all animal life and fishes were plentiful, He caused an immense whirlwind, which reached from Heaven to earth, and sent down him son and daughter with full instructions in all manner of ceremonies. They were to name their children by four tribal names--Banaka, Boorung, Paljarri, Kymera--and thus observe the marriage laws. They were to strictly follow out His commands, and when they died, their and their children's spirits would be received into heaven. They were given control over the fishes of the waters, the birds of the air, all animals, insects, and every living thing--that — John G. Withnell

Indeed, Urcheon of Erlenwald made a strange request of King Roegner, a strange reward to demand when the king offered him his wish. But let us not pretend we've never heard of such requests, of the Law of Surprise, as old as humanity itself. Of the price a man who saves another can demand, of the granting of a seemingly impossible wish. 'You will give me the first thing that comes to greet you. — Andrzej Sapkowski

I am a man of very many anxieties but doing strange things with the camera is not one of them. — Lars Von Trier

It is strange how you shall hate a man, and yet pity him from the depths. — Richard Llewellyn

Oftentimes I felt ridiculous giving my seal of approval to what was in reality such a natural thing to do, sort of like reinventing the wheel and extolling its virtues. Had parents' intuition sunk so low that some strange man had to tell modern women that it was okay to sleep with their babies? — William Sears

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land. — Katherine Dunn

The more i live, the more i realize what strange creatures human beings are. some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. the human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-man seem actually non-existent. one doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself. — D.H. Lawrence

There was once a strange, small man. He decided three important details about his life:
1. He would part his hair from the opposite side to everyone else.
2. He would make himself a small, strange mustache.
3. He would one day rule the world.
... Yes, the Fuhrer decided that he would rule the world with words. — Markus Zusak

Strange that one man's actions could touch so many other people, like a single, thoughtless breath of wind coming in an open window and blowing the playing cards every which way. — Karleen Koen

I have observed that there always exists some strange relationship between the appearance of a man and his soul, as if with the loss of a limb, the soul lost one of its senses. — Mikhail Lermontov

I will sell thee my soul,' he answered: 'I pray thee buy it off me, for I am weary of it. Of what use is my soul to me? I cannot see it. I may not touch it. I do not know it.'
But the merchants mocked at him, and said, 'Of what use is a man's soul to us? It is not worth a clipped piece of silver. Sell us thy body for a slave, and we will clothe thee in sea-purple, and put a ring upon thy finger, and make thee the minion of the great Queen. But talk not of the soul, for to us it is nought, nor has it any value for our service.'
And the young Fisherman said to himself: 'How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.' And he passed out of the market-place, and went down to the shore of the sea, and began to ponder on what he should do. — Oscar Wilde

He wore the unmistakable look of a man about to be present at a row between women, and only a wet cat in a strange back yard bears itself with less jauntiness than a man faced by such a prospect. — P.G. Wodehouse

My father identified as a black man. No one asked him because he was clearly black. But people always ask me. If we were together, people would look at us in a really strange way. It sucked. As a little girl I had blond hair and they'd look at me, look at him, and be disgusted. — Mariah Carey

When my sons arrived in the family, their legal status was not ambiguous at all. They were our kids. But their wants and affections were still atrophied by a year in the orphanage. They didn't know that flies on their faces were bad. They didn't know that a strange man feeding them their first scary gulps of solid food wasn't a torturer. Life in the cribs alone must have seemed to them like freedom. That's what I was missing about the biblical doctrine of adoption. Sure it's glorious in the long run. But it sure seems like hell in the short run ... — Russell D. Moore

Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is - which was the only way he could get there - thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely his was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be a true philosopher, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have 'broken his digester. — Herman Melville

Do you not enslave people now?" asks the man. "Chains are forged of many strange metals. Poverty is one. Fear, another. Ritual and custom are yet more. All actions are forms of slavery, methods of forcing people to do what they deeply wish not to do. — Robert Jackson Bennett

Agent Jones held Sinjin's face in his hands. "I'm going to make balloon animals. People need balloon animals."
"How right you are, strange delusional man," Sinjin said. — Libba Bray

It was a strange thing: one never appeared to take a step forward int he heart or mind of this man. Those who wished, so to speak, to force their way into intimacy with him found the path blocked. — Alexandre Dumas

My stomach somersaults
he wants me ... in a weird way, true, but this beautiful, strange, kinky man wants me. — E.L. James

Nonc's pretty okay with the man's death, but the notion that he'll never get dressed again, that he's to die in a gown, seems strange and impossible. — Adam Johnson

Iverson: Man look, I hear you ... it's funny to me too, I mean it's strange ... it's strange to me too, but we're talking about practice man, we're not even talking about the game ... the actual game, when it matters ... We're talking about practice ... — Allen Iverson

You always notice a facelift on a woman. It's a tightness around the ears, and the scar is usually inside the ears. If I suspect it's been done, I usually move around until I can see it. But with a man, it actually pulls your beard and your sideburns back, and that's what's so strange. — Tom Ford

I don't go to mythical places with strange men. — Douglas Adams

COSMIC DANCER"

"I was dancing when I was twelve
I was dancing when I was aaah
I danced myself right out the womb
Is it strange to dance so soon
I danced myself right out the womb

I was dancing when I was eight
Is it strange to dance so late
I danced myself into the tomb
Is it strange to dance so soon
I danced myself into the tomb

Is it wrong to understand
The fear that dwells inside a man
What's it like to be a loon
I liken it to a balloon

I danced myself out of the womb
Is it strange to dance to soon
I danced myself into the tomb
But then again once more
I danced myself out of the womb
Is it strange to dance so soon
I danced myself out of the womb. — Marc Bolan

What I read told me that the Mankindman was a strange creature which stand on to legs. It seems to be a man from both sides; maybe all sides are man! — Ahmad Amani

When she saw a strange man whom she didn't trust, she did an immediate breakdown in her mind. It was quicker - honoring the pragmatics of fear - than pretending she shouldn't think this way. — Alice Sebold

But you begin now to realise," said the Invisible Man, "the full disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter - no covering - to get clothing was to forego all my advantage, to make myself a strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again. — H.G.Wells

And indeed man has invented God. And the strange thing, the wonderful thing, is not that God really does exist, but that an idea like that - the idea of God's necessity - could find its way into the head of a savage and vicious animal such as man, so sacred is it, that idea, so touching, so exceedingly wise and so greatly to his honour. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man's door, and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it. — Henry David Thoreau

The ghostly presence of virtual particles defies rational common sense and is nonintuitive for those unacquainted with physics. Religious belief in God, and Christian belief that God became Man around two thousand years ago, may seem strange to common-sense thinking. But when the most elementary physical things behave in this way, we should be prepared to accept that the deepest aspects of our existence go beyond our common-sense intuitions. — Antony Hewish

I've worked in television for 10 years straight. If I were a man, it wouldn't be considered strange [to have confidence] at all. — Mindy Kaling

In a city where public executions,duels, fights, magical feuds, and strange events regularly punctuated the daily round, the inhabitants had brought the profession of interested bystander to a peak of perfection. They were, to a man, highly skilled gawpers. — Terry Pratchett

He never understood why she chose him. She loved abstract things like music and books and strange words. Ove was a man filled entirely with tangible things. He liked screwdrivers and oil filters. He went through life with his hands firmly shoved in his pockets. She danced. — Fredrik Backman

To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Darks drifts covered the horizon. A strange shadow approaching nearer and nearer, was spreading little by little over men, over things, over ideas; a shadow which came from indignations and from systems. All that had been hurriedly stifled was stirring and fermenting. Sometimes the conscious of the honest man caught its breath, there was so much confusion in that air in which sophisms were mingled with truths. Minds trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of the storm. The electric tension was so great that at certain moments any chance-comer, thought unknown, flashed out. Then the twilight darkness fell again. At intervals, deep and sullen mutterings enabled men to judge of the amount of lightning in the cloud. — Victor Hugo

What is man? ... What a strange union of matter and mind! A machine for converting material into spiritual force. — Benjamin Peirce

God wisheth none should wreck on a strange shelf: To him man's dearer than to himself. — Ben Jonson

It sounds strange, somewhat on the line between irony and absurdity, to think that people would rather label and judge something as significant as each other but completely bypass a peanut ... World peace is only a dream because people won't allow themselves and others around them to simply be peanuts. We won't allow the color of a man's heart to be the color of his skin, the premise of his beliefs, and his self-worth. We won't allow him to be a peanut, therefore we won't allow ourselves to come to live in harmony. (Diary 18) — Erin Gruwell

As Julia scanned the crowd, one face stood out. A young-looking, fair-haired man with strange gray eyes stared unblinkingly in her direction, his expression one of intense curiosity. — Sylvain Reynard

What a strange creature is a laughing fool,
As if a man were created to no use
But only to show his teeth. — John Webster

War creates many strange juxtapositions, perhaps none stranger than this: men who are doing their utmost to kill other men can transform in a split second into lifesavers. Soldiers who encounter a wounded man (often an enemy) become tender, caring angels of mercy. The urge to kill and the urge to save sometimes run together simultaneously. — Stephen Ambrose

Have recovered somewhat from massive, delicious, inundating influx of life memories. Man, it is soooooooooo goooooooooood to be ME again. — Rob Reger

Man's sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things are marks of a strange disorder. — Blaise Pascal

Hatred ... When it comes to men and sex, David, nothing surprises me any more. Maybe, for men, hating the woman makes sex more exciting. You are a man, you ought to know. When you have sex with someone strange - when you trap her, hold her down, get her under you, put all your weight on her - isn't it a killing? Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards, leaving the body behind covered in blood - doesn't it feel like murder, like getting away with murder? — J.M. Coetzee

Life was becoming shorter and the thought that he would never stop smoking filled him with a strange satisfaction. Ignoring the warning on the cigarette packet might not be the most flamboyant act of rebellion a man could allow himself, but at least it was one he could afford. — Jo Nesbo

The novelist Thomas Wolfe, recalling a lifelong struggle with illness, wrote in his last letter, "I've made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I've seen the dark man very close." I had not made the journey myself, and I had only seen the darkness reflected in the eyes of others. But surely, it was the most sublime moment of my clinical life to have watched that voyage in reverse, to encounter men and women returning from the strange country - to see them so very close, clambering back. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Few, as I have said, are the humorists who can induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to give us the joy of being worn down and tired out with laughter, is a success to be won by no man save in virtue of a rare staying-power. Laughter becomes extreme only if it be consecutive. There must be no pauses for recovery. Touch-and-go humour, however happy, is not enough. The jester must be able to grapple his theme and hang on to it, twisting it this way and that, and making it yield magically all manner of strange and precious things. — Max Beerbohm

I would be ashamed to admit to the Indians that, where I come from, the women do not feel themselves capable of raising children until they read the instructions written in a book by a strange man. — Jean Liedloff

It is you who are unpoetical," replied the poet Syme. "If what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say! — G.K. Chesterton

Sarah drew a deep breath and released it slowly, waiting for her voice to steady before she spoke. "It's a ve ry good story. Are those the things you want for yourself? "
He nodded and began folding the advertisement. "But I can't have them," he said matter-of-factly.
"Why not?"
He shrugged as if it was obvious and she remembered that earlier he had declared, "I'm not normal." She had to admit it was hard to picture this strange man living a normal family life in an average community. His differences were stamped all over his body as well as hidden deep inside him. — Bonnie Dee

Garion started shaving. "Try to keep away from your nose," said Hettar wryly. "A man looks quite strange without a nose. — David Eddings

Do I need any more proof? Strange. Little. Man. Officially proven." "You got one word right. I'm definitely a man. I'm all man, baby. — James Dashner

If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing. But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable. It is this achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in these pages. — G.K. Chesterton

A strong hand suddenly grasped my arm above the elbow. My eyes flew open in surprise. It was that hateful, arrogant man from earlier, standing a few steps below me. He looked at me with a strange expression on his face. It almost looked like ... concern. What did he want? I tried to ask him, but the walls were falling in on me again. I closed my eyes tightly. "I think you're about to faint," a low voice said. Whose voice was it? It was too nice to belong to that man. I shook my head and said weakly, "I don't faint." And then darkness rushed up while I swooped down. We met in the middle and it swallowed me whole. — Julianne Donaldson

Neo-Darwinian theory has trouble accounting for the strange, sudden, and belated appearance of man, the conscious self which speaks, lies, deceives itself, and also tells the truth. — Walker Percy

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life. — Bertrand Russell

The irrevocable Hand That opes the year's fair gate, doth ope and shut The portals of our earthly destinies ; We walk through blindfold, and the noiseless doors Close after us, for ever. Pause, my soul , On these strange words for ever whose large sound Breaks flood-like, drowning all the petty noise Our human moans make on the shores of Time . O Thou that openest, and no man shuts; That shut'st, and no man opens Thee we wait! — Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

IT IS SO EASY TO GIVE IN
I have been thinking about the man who gives in.
Have you heard about him? In this story
A twenty-eight-foot pine meets a small wind
And the pine bends all the way over to the ground.
I was persuaded," the pine says. "It was convincing."
A mouse visits a cat, and the cat agrees
To drown all her children. "What could I do?"
The cat said. "The mouse needed that."
It's strange. I've heard that some people conspire
In their own ruin. A fool says, "You don't
Deserve to live." The man says, "I'll string this rope
Over that branch, maybe you can find a box."
The Great One with her necklace of skulls says,
I need twenty thousand corpses." "Tell you what,"
The General says, "we have an extra battalion
Over there on the hill. We don't need all these men. — Robert Bly

The maids in my village talked of falling in love with a man at first sight. That has always seemed naught but foolishness to me. Until I enter Sister Serafina's workshop. It is unlike anything I have ever seen, full of strange sights and smells, and I tumble headlong into love. — R.L. LaFevers