When They Become Strangers Quotes & Sayings

As for human contact, I'd lost all appetite for it. Mankind has, as you may have noticed, become very inventive about devising new ways for people to avoid talking to each other and I'd been taking full advantage of the most recent ones. I would always send a text message rather than speak to someone on the phone. Rather than meeting with any of my friends, I would post cheerful, ironically worded status updates on Facebook, to show them all what a busy life I was leading. And presumably people had been enjoying them, because I'd got more than seventy friends on Facebook now, most of them complete strangers. But actual, face-to-face, let's-meet-for-a-coffee-and-catch-up sort of contact? I seemed to have forgotten what that was all about. — Jonathan Coe

But uhh, a thug changes, and love changes
and best friends become strangers, word up — Nas

These stories, I realized, were lost. Nobody was going to know that part of the city but as a place where a bomb went off. The bomb was going to become the story of this city. That's how we lose the city - that's how our knowledge of what the world is is taken away from us - when what we know is blasted into rubble and what is created in its place bears no resemblance to what there was and we are left strangers in a place we knew, in a place we ought to have known. — Bilal Tanweer

My world has changed so much. Everything around me has perceptibly shifted in a direction I hadn't seen coming. The people around me, the ones I once thought I knew so well have transformed into strangers. Worst of all, I can't recognize the person I have become. — Cacey Hopper

It's great when two strangers become best friends but not when best friends become two strangers. — Drake

What started as a whisper
Slowly turned into a scream
Searching for an answer
Where the question is unseen
I don't know where you came from
And I don't know where you've gone
Old friends become old strangers
Between the darkness and the dawn — Ben Harper

It's one thing when you lose a friend or when your friends become enemies, but it's the worst when friends become strangers, — Hayley Williams

Here though, there are no oppressors. No one's forcing you to do this. You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You're at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you're staring at a screen! Searching for strangers in ... Dubai! — Dave Eggers

Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff - tell them of his difficulties in high school and put a pinch of soil in their pockets - in order to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone. — Walker Percy

Maybe, if you can't get someone out of your head they were never meant to leave. Perhaps, they were meant to help change you into the person you have been waiting to become. — Shannon L. Alder

If your not brave enough to talk to a stranger how do you think they will become anything more then a stranger. — Eden Griffith

Going about one's native land one is inclined to take many things for granted, roads and buildings, roofs, windows and doorways, the walls that shelter strangers, the house one has never entered, trees which are like other trees, pavements which are no more than cobblestones. But when we are distant from them we find that those things have become dear to us, a street, trees and roofs, blank walls, doors and windows; we have entered those houses without knowing it, we have left something of our heart in the very stonework. Those places we no longer see, perhaps will never see again but still remember, have acquired and aching charm; they return to us with the melancholy of ghosts, a hallowed vision and as it were the true face of France. We love and evoke them such as they were; and such as to us they still are, we cling to them and will not have them altered, for the face of our country is our mother's face. — Victor Hugo

Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away ... and forgiveness descends. — Julian Barnes

We are relatives at the village and yet we become strangers in the city — Thabo Katlholo

Bestfriends become strangers. That's how it is. — Wiz Khalifa

Although many, we might even say most, strangers in this world become easily the victim of a fearful hostility, it is possible for men and women and obligatory for Christians to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings. — Henri Nouwen

It's sad when friends become enemies. But what's even worse is when they become strangers. — Hayley Williams

But Bear said I shouldn't talk to strangers because they would be scared of me. I always thought I was supposed to be afraid of them, but Bear said I would just end up talking them to death and that any nefarious purpose they might have had would become moot.
When Bear McKenna accuses you of talking too much, you know you have a problem — T.J. Klune

When people who have been close don't see each other for a time, they become strangers. But when two people live together, no matter how bad things may get between them, they somehow manage to stay close. I suppose human beings are made that way. — Soseki Natsume

Strangers take a long time to become acquainted, particularly when they are from the same family. — M.E. Kerr

Sports (and the often barely withheld violence around them) have become one of the few modern ways to connect with strangers. They give an amazing number of geeks things to talk about. In the old days we settled for, Hello, how are you? — Perry Brass

The life of this alien city was lived under the cathedral dome of the sky. People ate where the birds could share their food and gambled where any cutpurse could steal their winnings, they kissed in full view of strangers and even fucked in the shadows if they wanted to. What did it mean to be a man so completely among men, and women too? When solitude was banished, did one become more oneself, or less? Did the crowd enhance one's selfhood or erase it? — Salman Rushdie

We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room." Here she describes a form of society that doesn't enforce identity but liberates it, the society of strangers, the republic of the streets, the experience of being anonymous and free that big cities invented. — Rebecca Solnit

The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes. The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation. We must turn away from the cacaphony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice. When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood. We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves. — James Hollis

You slip your hands inside my pockets.
Tell me nothing else would do. Without me, you can't live. And, you slip your heart into my chest. They both become one of the strongest pairs when strangers come. — Tegan Quin

How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny sefishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they are not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers. — G.K. Chesterton

If you want to have sex with strangers, you have to do it the old fashion way and become a prostitute. — Chelsea Handler

I will never be seen through your eyes again. When the world begins to depopulate of the people who love us, we become, little by little and following the rhythm of death, strangers. My place in the world was in your gaze and it was so unquestionable and perpetual that I never bothered to find out what was there. — Milena Busquets

At the first Holocaust memorial commemoration in the Capitol Rotunda, both President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Mondale referred to the 'eleven million victims.' Carter also used Wiesenthal's figures of 'six million Jews and five million others' in his Executive Order establishing the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. I have attended Holocaust memorial commemorations in places as diverse as synagogues and army forts where eleven candles were lit. More significant is that strangers have repeatedly taken me and other colleagues to task for ignoring the five million non-Jews. When I explain that this is an invented concept, they become convinced of my ethnocentrism. — Deborah E. Lipstadt

People change. Feelings fade. Lovers drift. Friends leave. Friends become enemies. Lovers become strangers.
You'll be judged. but still Life Goes On. — Lovely Goyal

But it has been my experience that the risks are faroutweighed by the rewards, chief of which is when you speak to strangers as though they are friends, more often than not, if only for as long as the encounter lasts, they become friends, and if in the process they also think of you as a little peculiar, who cares? — Frederick Buechner

When daughters grow up, they become good friends to mothers but when young boys grow up, they become strangers. — Sudha Murty

They had no conversation together, no intercourse but what the commonest civility required. Once so much to each other! Now nothing! There had been a time, when of all the large party now filling the drawing-room at Uppercross, they would have found it most difficult to cease to speak to one another. With the exception, perhaps, of Admiral and Mrs. Croft, who seemed particularly attached and happy, (Anne could allow no other exception even among the married couples) there could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so simliar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become aquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement. — Jane Austen

... food is capable of feeding far more than a rumbling stomach. Food is life; our well-being demands it. Food is art and magic; it evokes emotion and colors memory, and in skilled hands, meals become greater than the sum of their ingredients. Food is self-evident; plucked right from the ground or vine or sea, its power to delight is immediate. Food is discovery; finding an untried spice or cuisine is for me like uncovering a new element. Food is evolution; how we interpret it remains ever fluid. Food is humanitarian: sharing it bridges cultures, making friends of strangers pleasantly surprised to learn how much common ground they ultimately share. — Anthony Beal

Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to. — William Blum

I learned that love can end in one night, that great friends can become great strangers, that strangers can become best friends, that we never finish to know and understand someone completely, that the "never ever again" will happen again and that "forever" always ends, that the one that wants it can, will achieve it and get it, that the one that risks it never looses anything, that physique, figure and beauty attracts but personality makes one fall in love. — Tommy Tran

Talk to strangers politely. You don't how many of them will become your close companions. — Israelmore Ayivor

The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow," [Woolf] writes. "We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friens know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room." Here she describes a form of society that doesn't enforce identity but liberates it, the society of strangers, the republic of the streets, the experience of being anonymous and free that big cities invented. (Woolf's Darkness) — Rebecca Solnit

The starting point of enlightenment, a goal that every person should strive for, is inner leadership. Leadership is far more than something businesspeople do at work. Leadership is all about personal responsibility, self-discovery, and creating value in the world by the people we become. Too many people spend their time blaming others for all that isn't working in their lives. We blame our spouses for our unhappy home lives; we blame our bosses for our distress at work; we blame strangers on the freeway for making us angry; we blame our parents for keeping us small. Blame, blame, blame, blame. But blaming others is nothing more than excusing yourself. Blaming others for the current quality of your life is a sad way to live. In doing so, all you're doing is playing the victim. — Robin S. Sharma

I take no joy in mead nor meat, and song and laughter have become suspicious strangers to me. I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once. — George R R Martin

A couple you do not recognize - visitors, strangers - come to the door. How are you to view these people and what is your responsibility towards them? ... To assume that these visitors are really like you, that there are no real difference between you and them, and that the highest goal possible is that you and the other members of your congregation will become intimate friends with them and invite them into the private spaces of your life. — Thomas G. Long

Independent travel does that, bringing temporarily together these wandering ships that would otherwise pass in the night. Relationships were mostly brief and sometimes downright fleeting. The barriers and masks of settled existence melted away, allowing strangers to become fast friends, if only for a day. We travellers needed that, having deliberately stepped away from the social safety net of family, school, work and community. — John Haines

Here is an old phrase I like: "The only way to the universal good is that we all become strangers to ourselves." You imagine looking at yourself with a foreign gaze, through foreign eyes. I think this is something that could be the greatest thing in humanity. You are never really limited just to your own perspective. I don't like the false identity politics of multiculturalism which says that "you are enclosed in your culture." No, we have all this amazing capacity to be surprised, not by others, but by ourselves seeing how what we are doing is strange. — Slavoj Zizek

Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives. — Marilyn Ferguson

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

He could forget all these people, just like that, become fond again of strangers and leave them too. — John Gardner

She answered that she loved to read novels. The Rebbe responded that as novels are fiction, what you read in them is not necessarily what happens in real life. It's not as if two people meet and there is a sudden, blinding storm of passion. That's not what love or life is, or should be, about. Rather, he said, two people meet and there might be a glimmer of understanding, like a tiny flame. And then, as these people decide to build a home together, and raise a family, and go through the everyday activities and daily tribulations of life, this little flame grows even brighter and develops into a much bigger flame until these two people, who started out as virtual strangers, become intertwined to such a point that neither of them can think of life without the other. This is what true love is about, the Rebbe told Sharfstein. "It's the small acts that you do on a daily basis that turn two people from a 'you and I' into an 'us. — Joseph Telushkin

Eventually,we would mean nothing to each other and become strangers again. What I want you to do, either become someone to me or stay nothing at all because when we go strangers to each other, I don't wanna see another me by your side waiting to be nothing.. — Himmilicious

If the observation were made to you that "Strangers become intimate, and as intimacy grows they lower their guards and less mind their manners until errors are made, which decreases intimacy until estrangement exceeds that which existed before the strangers ever met," would you be inclined to agree? — Padgett Powell

Now they were as strangers; nay worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. — Jane Austen

Dissmell is the affect that monitors our drive for hunger. It was primarily developed as a survival mechanism. As we've become more complex, its use has extended interpersonally. Prejudice and rage against strangers (the ones who are not like us) have terrible consequences. Dissmell is a major sexuality factor. Disgust follows the same pattern as dissmell. Originally a hunger drive auxiliary, it has been extended to interpersonal relations. Divorces are often dominated by disgust. Victims of abuse carry various degrees of anger and disgust. Rapists who kill operate on disgust, anger and sex fused together. — John Bradshaw

Why had no one told me that my body would become a battlefield, a sacrifice, a test? Why did I not know that birth is the pinnacle where women discover the courage to become mothers? But of course there is no way to tell this or to hear it. Until you are the woman on the bricks, you have no idea how death stands in the corner, ready to play his part. Until you are the woman on the bricks, you do not know the power that rises from other women-even strangers speaking an unknown tongue, invoking the names of unfamiliar goddesses. — Anita Diamant

strangers were just people he hadn't become friends with yet. — Eric Walters

That's how it goes these days, huh? Moving forward at the sounds of horns on highways, at the cue of traffic signals, turnstiles, tollbooths, ushered and rushed to the next stop on the itinerary, and there are days on the commuter train in the winter when it's got dark early and you can't see out because of the reflection and you might put down your paper or put aside your book and really look at yourself, because amid the noise and the smoke and the strangers and what's become of your life: there you are. — Wilton Barnhardt