Strangely Quotes & Sayings

We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world. — Carl Lotus Becker

Strangely enough, I really think that shoes are a communication tool between people. — Christian Louboutin

wrestling with a curiosity about country living that seemed strangely akin to a homophobic person "struggling with same-sex attraction." As much as I wanted to be a creature of the city, as much as I'd organized my entire life around the overpriced, undersized vagaries of Manhattan living, I sometimes found myself wanting desperately to live on a farm, or at least near one. — Meghan Daum

I get strangely obsessed about the cleanliness of my house. — Utada Hikaru

More than being absurdly blond and absurdly messy, the Young Electrician had one of those extraordinarily sweet, extraordinarily vital, strangely mysterious, utterly unexplainable masculine faces that fill your senses with an odd, impersonal disquietude, an itching unrest, like the hazy, teasing reminder of some previous existence in a prehistoric cave, or, more tormenting still, with the tingling, psychic prophecy of some amazing emotional experience yet to come. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Please tell me you did something good."

"No," Romeo said bleakly. "I did something terrible."

Wait, Paris said silently. You can't tell him about that.

Don't we have to? said Romeo.

We don't know anything about him! How do we know he won't sell us out to the City Guard?

He leads a gang, said Romeo. He's probably not on speaking terms with the Guard. And do we have a choice?

"Does it have anything to do with the marks you have on your hands, which look strangely similar to the marks worn by the Juliet and her Guardian, and the way you stare at each other silently like you're talking mind to mind?" Vai asked innocently. — Rosamund Hodge

Like all mothers, mother nature is delighted to keep in touch with you when you're appearing in hit tv shows like BJ and the bear and My Two Dads but when you suddenly find yourself hosting When Insects Attack, oh she becomes strangely distant. — Greg Evigan

The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock - cliffs of rock; plateaus of rock; terraces of rock; crags of rock - ten thousand strangely carved forms. — John Wesley Powell

Watching the videotape seemed to induce a strangely stiff erection with no connection to the rest of me. — Jim Provenzano

She stepped inside, into warmth and white marble veined with gray, into the strangely spicy scent of whatever the masses of bold flowers cast off from their silver urn on the central table. — J.D. Robb

I'm strangely comforted when I hear from scientists that human beings are the most complex creatures we know of in the universe, still, by far. Black holes are in their way explicable; the simplest living being is not. I lean a bit more confidently into the experience that life is so endlessly perplexing. I love that word. Spiritual life is a way of dwelling with perplexity - taking it seriously, searching for its purpose as well as its perils, its beauty as well as its ravages. — Krista Tippett

Strangely fruitful intercourse this, between one body and another mind — Thomas Mann

I think of modern marriage as a car strangely fashioned out of an old abandoned horse carriage, built upon the framework of a mule cart. All the original engineering is still there, underneath it all. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Outside the window of the balcony room, three
metal guys were building a new patio for the
defunct pool. The pool was slowly filling with
red dust carried across the highway by intermittent
breezes. At some point I stood up from the table
and pulled back the curtain a bit and watched the
half naked bodies of the guys climbing in and out
of their trucks for tools or to turn up the volume
of the music. I felt like a detective with only the window
glass and the curtains camouflaging my desire. For a
moment I was afraid the intensity of my sexual fantasies
would become strangely audible; the energy of
the thought images would become so loud that
all three guys would turn simultaneously like
witnesses to a nearby car crash. — David Wojnarowicz

He has impressed upon our natures or states - must be an imitation of God incarnate: our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything we can attribute to the Divine life in itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the Divine life operating under human conditions. — C.S. Lewis

Frankly, out in America, you get the feeling that America is dying. And along its highways and byways, the country seems less ready to leap into the future than it is already clinging to a sepia-toned past when America stood as the unencumbered Big Boy in a Manichean world of good and evil, capitalists and Commies. Even the neon oasis-pods of the interstate - the perpetual clusters of Wendy's, McDonald's, Denny's, and Burger King - are crowded with people strangely reclaiming bygone days, connecting themselves to some prior eating experience, reveling in the familiar. We gas — Michael Paterniti

Don't be playful when I'm feeling emotional," I ordered.
To this, he strangely replied, "You get I'm a badass."
"Hard to miss, Deacon," I returned.
"Then don't tell me when to be playful. Badasses don't like that shit. — Kristen Ashley

Strangely enough, when the Sugababes' 'Freak Like Me' went to number 1, which was built around my 'Are 'Friends' Electric' song, I had another song called 'Rip' go to number 1 in the Kerrang TV chart, so I was pulling new people in from very different areas of musical interest. That was quite an amazing week. — Gary Numan

I don't think I could ever live with either a man or a woman for a long time. Male and female are attractive to my mind, but when it comes to the sexual act I am afraid. In every situation I need a lot of stimulation before I am conquered by the forces of passion and lust. But confusion, before and after, is the dominant factor.
I dreamed many times about a mature man with experience who would have the vigour of a boy but an adult's polished methods. Strangely enough, I also dreamed about women of my mother's age who were ideal lovers. These dreams came superimposed on one another. Sometimes the masculine element was dominant, sometimes the feminine one. At other times I wasn't sure. I saw a female body with male organs or a male body with female ones. These pictures, blended together in my mind, occasionally brought pleasure but more often pain. — Adam Thirlwell

The tree screamed Jingle Bells and the snow whispered Silent Night, but for the first time in her life she felt strangely Grinch-like. — Nicki Edwards

If you ask people to remember a painting and a photograph, their description of the photograph is far more accurate than that of the painting. Strangely enough, there is a physical element intertwined with the painting. It shakes loose an emotional element within the viewer. — Luc Tuymans

Strangely enough, it wasn't Gabe who was haunting my thoughts, though. That job belonged to a pair of sinfully black eyes that had lost their edge when they studied me, turning as soft and sultry as silk. — Becca Fitzpatrick

Since then her life had been peaceful and happy. She had allowed herself to be worshipped by that strangely captivating lover of hers, whose passionately willful temperament, tempered by that persistent, sunny gaiety, she had up to now only half understood. — Emmuska Orczy

The unfolding of the unexpected becomes the energy that drives you. You discover how thirsty you are for exploration without analysis. You become strangely at home in a place you can't define. You are truly creating. — Michele Cassou

... he remained restrained and strangely composed. It was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that lies beyond rage. — Arundhati Roy

Strangely enough, the first time I tried to read [The Lord of the Rings] I was on holiday in Florida. I dropped it in the pool my first day there. If that's not a Pippin thing to do, I don't know what is. — Billy Boyd

Yet the place was strangely old-fashioned. The strongest feeling I got from New York at first was nostalgia. A 1930s vision of the future. — Michael Moorcock

Our present condition, is, Legislation without law; wisdom without a plan; constitution without a name; and, what is strangely astonishing, perfect Independance contending for dependance. — Thomas Paine

I heard Joby Talbot's Hovercraft piece for orchestra and felt its immediate physical impact - visceral, unsettling, hungry and direct. These short five minutes became our keystone to unlocking a strangely seductive score that tensions the aggressive force of the White Stripes with the enigmatic beauty of Talbot's own compositions. — Wayne McGregor

Time changes its nature in prisons and hospitals. In this cosmogony it both races and drags itself. For anyone who hasn't been a long-term patient or prisoner - or both, like Sharmila - there is no way to imagine what evenings are like when you are locked in - the indeterminate hour when the sun has gone down but night hasn't fully set in. It haunts you. In a hospital, especially one where air-conditioning and double-glass windows don't shield you from the real world, there are mixed sounds that rise up from every floor; murmurs, shallow breaths, the sounds of pain and healing. Once the final inspections are done and the trays and bowls carried away, a shroud of silence falls over everything. It can be strangely tranquil, or eerily desolate. — Anubha Bhonsle

Strangely, the greater the debilitating toll poverty takes on the lives of America's schoolchildren, the more taboo discussions of poverty have become. — Linsey McGoey

Nature is more subtle, more deeply intertwined and more strangely integrated than any of our pictures of her than any of our errors. It is not merely that our pictures are not full enough; each of our pictures in the end turns out to be so basically mistaken that the marvel is that it worked at all. — Jacob Bronowski

I feel strangely normal. — Charles Bukowski

I stuff animals I find; I do roadkill. They're strangely fun to have. They're like easy-to-control pets. — Padgett Powell

You had every right to be. He raised his eyes to look at her and she was suddenly and strangely reminded of being four years old at the beach, crying when the wind came up and blew away the castle she had made. Her mother had told her she could make another one if she liked, but it hadn't stopped her crying because what she had thought was permanent was not permanent after all, but only made out of sand that vanished at the touch of wind and water. — Cassandra Clare

Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise. — Frank Moore Colby

The mistake I had made, obviously, was in overestimating human intelligence. By and large, one can not deny certain of mankind's achievements, such as the invention of lamb chops and central heating, but many people are strangely unreceptive to nuance. The hint, the diplomatic nudge, the oblique statements
these very often pass straight over their heads, and man and dog find themselves looking at each other through a fog of incomprehension. Thus it was with the management and myself. Delightful and welcoming, they certainly were, but not, it seemed, too quick on the uptake. — Peter Mayle

Ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.
Tyrion smiled. Lord Varys, I am growing strangely fond of you. I may kill you yet, but I think I'd feel sad about it.
I will take that as high praise. — George R R Martin

People usually will remember people most, for the stupid things they did, than the impressionable ones. This somehow strangely, makes them feel better. — Anthony Liccione

He let her go almost immediately, but he'd packed so much into that one fierce hug: want, need, worry, reassurance...He'd protect her with his life. Strangely, it made her indignant. Nobody should have to be in the position of having another person give up their life for them. She didn't want the weight of Declan's death. — Ilona Andrews

I can only guess that it made the world he went back to ... strangely without meaning. Though he lived in it, though he even enjoyed it, it remained utterly remote. I think it had lost sense for him. In his heart was the reflection of a lovely dream that he could never quite recall. — W. Somerset Maugham

4. The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life- preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live - that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The good news is that I believe every woman who wants to can find a great partner. You're just going to need to get rid of the idea that marriage will make you happy. It won't. Once the initial high wears off, you'll just be you, except with twice as much laundry.
Because ultimately, marriage is not about getting something
it's about giving it. Strangely, men understand this more than we do. Probably because for them marriage involves sacrificing their most treasured possession
a free-agent penis
and for us, it's the culmination of a princess fantasy so universal, it built Disneyland. — Tracy McMillan

As the grace grows nearer my theology is growing strangely simple, and it begins and ends with Christ as the only Savior of the lost. — Henry Benjamin Whipple

Irritably, Piatt replied that "in ninety days the land would be whitened by tents." But Lincoln would not take the bait. He merely replied: "Well, we won't jump that ditch until we come to it," pausing before he added: "I must run the machine as I find it." Piatt left dinner wondering why the "strange and strangely gifted" Lincoln remained "so blind. — Harold Holzer

Even though it felt completely natural - strangely enough - recording an album, I was very shy about making it public. — Sylvie Simmons

There was something strangely compelling about a Japanese guy with lamb-chop sideburns and a voice so shrill you could be forgiven for thinking his testicles were wired to the national grid. — Jamie Holoran

She needed to stand, but her body felt strangely heavy, as if invisible weights were tugging on her limbs. Gravity here felt different, harsher - or was she injured? Glass placed her hand on her shin and gasped. Her legs were wet. — Kass Morgan

Having everything to lose feels strangely the same as the reverse. — Emma Trevayne

And every breath I ever took, every tear I ever wept, every star I wished upon seemed nothing until now. Every prayer I ever said seemed strangely answered now. Could it be I'm in love? Could it be I'm in love? — Jann Arden

Strangely, although they may seem worlds apart, boxing and tennis have a certain kinship. Two individuals head-to-head, probing for weakness and attacking it. Footwork, timing and stamina are essential. Just you and your opponent until one of you is beaten. There's no brain damage in tennis - although sometimes I wonder. — Bud Collins

At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them - four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again - those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers. THE — Truman Capote

We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favours, we're completely beside ourselves. — Karen Joy Fowler

Ah, hissed Neeve, plump but strangely elegant as she sat beside Blue on the wall. Blue was struck again, as she had been struck the first time she'd met Neeve, by her oddly lovely hands. Chubby wrists led to soft, child-like palms and slender fingers with oval nails. — Maggie Stiefvater

Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. — Donna Tartt

It is strangely wonderful to feel the lack of something instead of believing that it was never there in the first place. — Kevin Wilson

As man is, so is his God. And thus is God oft strangely odd. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Cosmopolitanism gives us one country, and it is good; nationalism gives us a hundred countries, and every one of them is the best. Cosmopolitanism offers a positive, patriotism a chorus of superlatives. Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant, and thus it insures what is, perhaps, the most essential of all earthly considerations, that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation. Wherever there is a strangely-shaped mountain upon some lonely island, wherever there is a nameless kind of fruit growing in some obscure forest, patriotism insures that this shall not go into darkness without being remembered in a song. — G.K. Chesterton

Flip! Are you all right!" "Paul! Are you all right!" They spoke simultaneously and then they both laughed and Paul came over to the bed and kissed Flip and then stood looking down at her. Flip smiled at him and strangely her eyes filled with tears." "I thought he'd killed you," Paul said. "No, I'm fine, Paul. Are you all right? — Madeleine L'Engle

When she did walk, to the bathroom between the chairs and the customers leaning back in them, oblivious to her manoeuvres, the sight felt strangely moving and profound, like a baby, or a veteran getting out of a wheelchair, or a deer in snow. That is perhaps overdoing it. Maybe I didn't quite know that at the time, but it was striking. If you have not seen a deer in snow, I mean: moving with precision, but as if she might leap away in a completely different direction at any moment. — Olivia Sudjic

But the more time I spend with you . . . the more like you I become." He pulls back and I'm left with that heavy, yet strangely flattering, confession. I'm not sure what I should say. So I awkwardly mumble, "Well, be prepared to become totally awesome. — Karina Halle

A 5'5", 182-pound, 43-year-old man wearing khaki shorts and a UCLA sweatshirt runs to Nicolas Cage in a manner he will spend the rest of the night describing to his slightly bored but equally boring date as "ambushing." No one else is on the street and Nicolas Cage is unable to avoid the man, who wants a picture with his "brand new Droid." As the man, who actually seems to be vibrating and hovering in an almost hummingbird-like way, adjusts his stance for the third attempt at a picture his crotch lightly brushes Nicolas Cage's upper thigh, causing his face to shift from "bemused resignation" to, strangely, "serene bliss," for what will become the man's inaugural Facebook profile picture. — Megan Boyle

At any rate', said I, 'we can now state the problem accurately. People usually think the problem is how to reconcile what we now know about the size of the universe with our traditional ideas of religion. That turns out not to be the problem at all. The real problem is this. The enormous size of the universe and the insignificance of the earth were known for centuries, and no one ever dreamed that they had any bearing on the religious question. Then, less than a hundred years ago, they are suddenly trotted out as an argument against Christianity. And the people who trot them out carefully hush up the fact that they were known long ago. Don't you think that all you atheists are strangely unsuspicious people? — C.S. Lewis

I'm drawn in some strangely natural way to immersing myself in a milieu whose rules I don't understand, where there are things you can't access simply by being intelligent or doing well in school. — Rachel Kushner

I feel like I'm at a place in my life where I'm really strangely happy, and in awe of how great the world can be, and I think that's because I have gone through periods of looking at the world through a really melancholy lenses. It's all just flip sides of the same coin. — Laurel Nakadate

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself - one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. — Jack London

Sometimes when I observe contemporary U.S. culture, with its hard fronts and nasty culture wars, I have a strange sense that I've seen something like it before - in the Communist and semitotalitarian state in which I grew up. The issues and positions are very different, but the spirit is strangely familiar. In all public discussion, there was a party line that people had to toe; if you diverged, you were deemed disloyal and suspected of betraying the cause. I sense a similar spirit today among both progressives and conservatives in the United States when it comes to many hot-button issues, including Islam. — Miroslav Volf

And you're okay with this? ... " I studied his calm expression, my own features anything but calm.
"Noooo ... " Aeron drew the word out lazily with a slow, deliberate shake of his head. His face remained strangely composed.
"Then can I please have some of whatever sedative you took ... because this," I waved my hand, motioning from his head to his feet, "is way too cool under pressure. — M.A. George

Strangely, the subsequent AIDS works that have become iconic in our culture rarely mention the movement, or the engaged community of lovers, but both formations were inseparable from the crisis itself. Now, looking back, I fear that the story of the isolated helpless homosexual was one far more palatable to the corporations who control the reward system in the arts.The more truthful story of the American mass - abandoning families, criminal governments, indifferent neighbors - is too uncomfortable and inconvenient to recall. The story of how gay people who were despised, had no rights, and carried the burden of a terrible disease came together to force the country to change against its will, is apparently too implicating to tell. Fake tales of individual heterosexuals heroically overcoming their prejudices to rescue helpless dying men with AIDS was a lot more appealing to the powers that be, but not at all true. — Sarah Schulman

False notions of liberty are strangely common. People talk of it as if it meant the liberty of doing whatever one likes - whereas the only liberty that a man, worthy of the name of man, ought to ask for, is, to have all restrictions, inward and outward, removed that prevent his doing what he ought. — Frederick William Robertson

It's interesting that instead of having to get tighter and more restricted for a collaboration, strangely enough, from the beginning, we've actually been more confident that we could handle this. — Robert Asprin

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right. — Neal Stephenson

I'm just like this. I have no talent for choosing my battles. Life seems, strangely, like a battle to me. The whole thing. — Louise Penny

For very strangely his officers looked upon Jack Aubrey as a moral figure, in spite of all proofs of the contrary ... — Patrick O'Brian

It will be thought that I am acting strangely in concerning myself at this day with what appears at first sight and simply a well-known method of fortune-telling. — A. E. Waite

Vast flocks of fieldfares netted the sky, turning it to something strangely like a sixteenth-century sleeve sewn with pearls. — Helen Macdonald

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely. — Lee Siegel

And each time he finished a sentence, there was a tiny but meaningful lump of silence left behind. This lump floated there, enclosed in the car's restricted space like an imaginary miniature cloud, giving Aomame a strangely unsettled feeling. — Haruki Murakami

Scientists used to do an experiment whereby a dog's repeated reward for performing a task was unaccountably replaced by punishment. The dog, knowing it would be penalized for doing well or doing badly, would become melancholic and inactive. This and other unforeseeable results were funded by taxing up to sixty percent of people's earnings. People became strangely melancholic and inactive
— Steve Aylett

Wealth has more and more increased, and at the same time gathered itself more and more into masses, strangely altering the old relations, and increasing the distance between the rich and the poor. — Thomas Carlyle

I'm equally guilty of using technology - I Twitter, I text people, I chat. But I think there's something strangely insidious about it that it makes us think we're closer when in fact we're not seeing each other, we're not connecting. — Jason Reitman

It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately. — Thomas Jefferson

Somewhere in [China's] soul lurks the cunning of an old dog, and it is a cunning that is strangely impressive. What a strange old soul! What a great old soul! — Lin Yutang

The starlight, which seemed strangely bright tonight, wasn't starlight at all. Instead, Lucifer's demons had gathered high in the firmament above. It was their eyes that shone like stars through the wildfire smoke. — Lauren Kate

Economists who speak the English tongue are strangely intimidated by mathematical symbols. — Al Nichol

That sounds strangely little like "justice," Tisipohone jibed gently.

"On the contrary." Alicia jacked a discarding sabot round into the M-97's chamber and settled her left hand briefly on the forestock to activate its computer systems. "I won't do a thing to them unless they intend to do something to me."

Indeed?

"Indeed. But if they do have something planned, I intend to do unto them first."

So there are times you see things my way after all.

"Never said there weren't. — David Weber

I say, asshole!" she snapped. To this, Tack strangely responded, "Fifty thousand." Naomi's body went still and, incidentally, so did mine. "For each," Tack finished. What? — Kristen Ashley

For strangely graven
Is the orb of life, that one and another
In gold and power may outpass his brother.
And men in their millions float and flow
And seethe with a million hopes as leaven;
And they win their Will, or they miss their Will,
And the hopes are dead or are pined for still;
But whoe'er can know,
As the long days go,
That To Live is happy, hath found his Heaven! — Euripides

Strangely, the thing I listen to 75% of the time, when I'm exercising with my headphones on is English Tudor/Elizabethan music, so music from about 1450 to the early 1600's. — Tod Machover

It is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all. Strangely — Viktor E. Frankl

Because I am an officer and a gentleman they have given me my notebooks, pen, ink and paper. So I write and wait. I am committed to no cause, I love no living person. The fact that I have no future except what you can count in hours doesn't seem to disturb me unduly. After all, the future whether here or there is equally unknown. So for the waiting days I have only the past to play about with. I can juggle with a series of possibly inaccurate memories, my own interpretation, for what is worth, of events. There is no place for speculation or hope, or even dreams. Strangely enough I think I like it like that. — Jennifer Johnston

To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations, our ingenious schemes for separating the judicial from the executive functions, while we, I say, are finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilised societies are superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated. — Sri Aurobindo

There were about thirty of them, I think - all women; all seated at tables, bearing drinks and books and papers. You might have passed any one of them upon the street, and thought nothing; but the effect of their appearance all combined was rather queer. They were dressed, not strangely, but somehow distinctly. They wore skirts - but the kind of skirts a tailor might design if he were set, for a dare, to sew a bustle for a gent. Many seemed clad in walking-suits or riding-habits. Many wore pince-nez, or carried monocles on ribbons. There were one or two rather startling coiffures; and there were more neckties than I had ever seen brought together at any exclusively female ensemble. — Sarah Waters

Royal blue frock coat covered in gold braid and, even more ridiculously, a top hat. Howell had such an imposing presence that rather than losing dignity in this flunky's outfit he actually made it seem strangely distinguished. Howell — Kate Atkinson

Newaygo County, Michigan, is a strangely beautiful, yet almost fearful land. Its muscular forests flex around sodden lowlands. — John H. Timmerman

Strangely enough, for many many years I didn't talk about my childhood and then when I did I got a ton of mail - literally within a year I got a couple of thousand letters from people who'd had a worse childhood, a similar childhood, a less-bad childhood, and the question that was most often posed to me in those letters was: how did you get past the trauma of being raised by a violent alcoholic? — Dean Koontz

And the way it felt?" I whisper, as if that might soften the blow of embarrassment I'm about to deal. "Is that how you were feeling - how you feel - about me?"
A breeze comes off the ocean, and my skin feels strangely empty and open as he gives an almost imperceptible nod. — Elizabeth Norris

Also in the boom of the big bell there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them make me afraid, - deliciously afraid. never do I hear that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost, - a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and births. I hope to remain within hearing of that bell ... and, considering the possibility of being doomed to the state of a jiki-ketsu-geki, I want to have my chance of being reborn in some bamboo flower-cup, or mizutame, whence I might issue softly, singing my thin and pungent song, to bite some people that I know. — Lafcadio Hearn

It has been said that the great things in life are exactly what they seem to be. Such simplicity can be difficult to understand. I have had many visions that I could not interpret, visions meant to be passed to a greater soul. I am but a thread in the fabric. Nevertheless, I do know this: even the finest and most self-sacrificing actions must be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them so fine. — Susan Cartwright

I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn't work for me, the answer would be a simple no ... and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated ... — Kay Redfield Jamison