Phantom Stranger Quotes

I am but a stranger ... as we all are. Lonely inside our separate skins, we cannot know each others pain and must bear our own in solitude. For my part, I have found that walking soothes it; and that, given luck, sometimes we find one to walk besides us ... at least for a little way. ~ Alan Moore

In the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10: 25-37), Jesus taught us that every stranger in need is our neighbor. Refugees as well as immigrants command the Church's care. ~ Francis George

I don't take gifts from perfect strangers - but then, nobody is perfect. ~ Zsa Zsa Gabor

Only the family, society's smallest unit, can change and yet maintain enough continuity to rear children who will not be "strangers in a strange land," who will be rooted firmly enough to grow and adapt. ~ Salvador Minuchin

So much must I live for others, that almost I am a stranger to myself. ~ Pope Innocent III

I am scarred Mr. Courtemain not blind drop the gun and join me. ~ The Phantom

Home. One place is just like another, really. Maybe not. But truth is it's all just rock and dirt and people are roughly the same. I was born up there but I'm no stranger here. Have always felt at home everywhere, even in Virginia, where they hate me. Everywhere you go there's nothing but the same rock and dirt and houses and people and deer and birds. They give it all names, but I'm at home everywhere. Odd thing: unpatriotic. I was at home in England. I would be at home in the desert. In Afghanistan or far Typee. All mine, it all belongs to me. My world. ~ Michael Shaara

What did he want? What did he mean he was in the right place? ~ Yawatta Hosby

Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

You think it's okay to deliver dead flowers?" She turns and laughs. "I've had stranger requests." I flinch. Like what? I find the card and remove it from the tiny envelope. HE SAYS HE NEEDS YOU. HE DOESN'T. YOU THINK YOU KNOW HIM. YOU DON'T. I DO. LEAVE HIM. ~ Jodi Ellen Malpas

I used to tweet, but it's an act of futility. You're not really making any impact, and if you find yourself in a mood when you wanna be a bit controversial and you post something, you suddenly realise, 'Oh my God!' because you've opened yourself up to a bunch of criticism from strangers. ~ Sylvester Stallone

We cannot accept this sort of money from a stranger.'
'Maybe it's not a stranger,' Susan said.
'Then that's even worse!' Elizabeth retorted. 'My God, can you imagine? Some horrid person treating us like puppets, pulling our strings, thinking he can control our destiny? ~ Julia Quinn

Black would trust her with his secrets. He would protect hers. But did she trust him with her heart? Could she?
She thought of Wendell, and no longer felt any remorse for her feelings. She did not love him. Her heart had been taken two years ago, by a stranger she thought she had conjured up in the atmosphere of her imagination.
He had asked her to trust him - and there was only one way she knew how. She reached into the wardrobe and pulled out the crimson gown.
No regrets. No seduction. No scandal. Only love. ~ Charlotte Featherstone

Reality is stranger than fiction. ~ Parag Pandit

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

Fear not, but be bold:
A decent boldness ever meets with friends,
succeeds, and e'en a stranger recommends.
Odyssey vii. 50. ~ Homer

We came here for a small, informal meeting. We find you've turned it into a circus. Well, if you're going to have a circus, you've got to have elephants. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

I don't approve the informality in the world today, Mr. James. It's made strangers of us all. ~ Dorothy Salisbury Davis

I find myself thinking, and not for the first time, just how useful wilderness must be when it comes to burying a troublesome relative, or a complete stranger. ~ Pete McCarthy

For us, eating and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love. We love only the person we can eat. The person we hate we 'can't swallow.' That one makes us vomit. Even our friends are inedible. If we were asked to dig into our friend's flesh we would be disgusted. The person we love we dream only of eating. That is, we slide down that razor's edge of ambivalence.
The story of torment itself is a very beautiful one. Because loving is wanting and being able to eat up and yet to stop at the boundary. And there, at the tiniest beat between springing and stopping, in rushes fear. The spring is already in mid-air. The heart stops. The heart takes off again. Everything in love is oriented towards this absorption.

At the same time real love is a don't-touch, yet still an almost-touching. Tact itself: a phantom touching.

Eat me up, my love, or else I'm going to eat you up.

Fear of eating, fear of the edible, fear on the part of the one of them who feels loved, desired, who wants to be loved, desired, who desires to be desired, who knows there is no greater proof of love than the other's appetite, who is dying to be eaten up, who says or doesn't say, but who signifies: I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow. And yet manage it so as to keep me alive. But I often turn about or compromise, because I know that you won't eat me up, in the end, and I urge you: bite me.

Sign my death with your teeth ~ Helene Cixous

He's no longer a stranger. He's my moon. ~ Kyra Davis

And sadly, fairytale kingdoms work poorly. It's not just that they're fairytales and thus not terribly real; we've seen stranger and more mythical attempts at leadership in our time. The problem is that Fairytales attract Good Faeries, and thus Bad Faeries; Evil Queens; Huntsmen, and, of course, The Grand Vizier. And all of those tend to lead to ruination. ~ Jeff Mach

The greatest love stories are unexpected, unexplained... choreographed chaos played out in God's timing. It feels like a chance encounter with a familiar stranger... Like a rekindling of an eternal flame. ~ Steve Maraboli

In city of the dead are multifarious and innumerous millions who turned up their toes to the daisies sans of sanity and sagacity of their phantom of the mind realization. ~ Anyaele Sam Chiyson

Dear dad,
in consequence of a trivial altercation with a Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge, whom I happened to step upon in the corridor of a train, I had a pistol duel this morning in the woods near Kalugano and am now no more. Though the manner of my end can be regarded as a kind of easy suicide, the encounter and the ineffable Captain are in no way connected with the Sorrows of Young Veen. In 1884, during my first summer in Ardis, I seduced your daughter, who was then twelve. Our torrid affair lasted till my return to Riverlane; it was resumed last June, four years later. That happiness has been the greatest event in my life, and I have no regrets. Yesterday, though, I discovered she had been unfaithful to me, so we parted. Tapper, I think, may be the chap who was thrown out of one of your gaming clubs for attempting oral intercourse with the washroom attendant, a toothless old cripple, veteran of the first Crimean War. Lots of flowers, please!
Your loving son, Van

He carefully reread his letter – and carefully tore it up. The note he finally placed in his coat pocket was much briefer.

Dad,
I had a trivial quarrel with a stranger whose face I slapped and who killed me in a duel near Kalugano. Sorry!
Van ~ Vladimir Nabokov

It grew harder and harder. Even within these four walls there was too much misery, too much seemingly pointless suffering. Every day something else failed to make sense, something else grew too heavy. Will You carry this too, Lord Jesus? But as the rest of the world grew stranger, one thing became increasingly clear. And that was the reason the two of us were here. Why others should suffer we were not shown. As for us, from morning until lights-out, whenever we were not in ranks for roll call, our Bible was the center of an ever-widening circle of help and hope. Like waifs clustered around a blazing fire, we gathered about it, holding out our hearts to its warmth and light. The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God. "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. ~ Corrie Ten Boom

The fear of climatic catastrophes is an ancient one and not unlike our fear of strangers. In the past, people believed that the climate almost always changes for the worse, and only rarely for the better - God's punishment for sinful behavior. ~ Hans Von Storch

Moving forward fourteen hundred years, to sixteenth-century Europe, we hear a similar lament from the sister of the Holy Roman Emperor: "It is hard enough to marry a man . . . whom you do not know or love, and worse still to be required to leave home and kindred, and follow a stranger to the ends of the earth, without even being able to speak his language."4 ~ Stephanie Coontz

Eugen Bleuler (who in 1911 coined the word 'schizophrenia') once said that in the end his patients were stranger to him than the birds in his garden. But if they're strangers to us, what are we to them? (26) ~ Michael Greenberg

Strangers have crossed the sound, but not the sound of the dark oarsmen Or the golden-haired sons of kings, Strangers whose thought is not formed to the cadence of waves, Rhythm of the sickle, oar and milking pail ~ Kathleen Raine

WESLEY AYERS is the stranger in the halls of the Coronado. He is the Keeper in the garden who shares my secret. He is the boy who reads me books. He is the one who teaches me how to touch. ~ Victoria Schwab

There is something in the eyes of a bonobo that you don't see in those of a tiger or a shark. They are human eyes, but not the cautious glimpse of a stranger you pass on a city street, or the pretended interest of a shrink you're paying $300 an hour. Or someone you think you recognize but don't. The eyes of a bonobo are the eyes of your best friend or a lover or a priest. They see into you. They see nothing else. They invite confession. ~ Vanessa Woods

Christians believe themselves to be the aristocracy of heaven upon earth, they are admitted to the spiritual court, while millions of men in foreign lands have never been presented. They bow their knees and say they are 'miserable sinners,' and their hearts rankle with abominable pride. Poor infatuated fools! Their servility is real and their insolence is real but their king is a phantom and their palace is a dream. ~ William Winwood Reade

I was no stranger to bar fights. You'd think they'd be rare in a place like the University, but liquor is the great leveler. After six or seven solid drinks, there is very little difference between a miller on the outs with his wife and a young alchemist who's done poorly on his exams. They're both equally eager to skin their knuckles on someone else's teeth. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The ... promptitude with which many painters, on arriving at an entirely new and unfamiliar place, settle down to work at once, never fails to astonish me: it seems indecent, like button-holing a complete stranger. ~ Augustus John

I count on the kindness of strangers. ~ Bill Murray

In the end, without skill or talent, I've given myself over entirely to poetry. Po Chu-i labored at it until he nearly burst. Tu Fu starved rather than abandon it. Neither my intelligence nor my writing is comparable to such men. Nevertheless, in the end, we ALL live in phantom huts. ~ Matsuo Basho

I'm no stranger to murder. ~ Alexander Engel-Hodgkinson

Though solitude, endured too long,
Bids youthful joys too soon decay,
Makes mirth a stranger to my tongue,
And overclouds my noon of day;
When kindly thoughts that would have way,
Flow back discouraged to my breast;
I know there is, though far away,
A home where heart and soul may rest.
Warm hands are there, that, clasped in mine,
The warmer heart will not belie;
While mirth, and truth, and friendship shine
In smiling lip and earnest eye.
The ice that gathers round my heart
May there be thawed; and sweetly, then,
The joys of youth, that now depart,
Will come to cheer my soul again. ~ Anne Bronte

He recalled that when the sun had risen that morning, he was on another continent, still a shepherd with sixty sheep, and looking forward to meeting with a girl. That morning he had known everything that was going to happen to him as he walked through the familiar fields. But now, as the sun began to set, he was in a different country, a stranger in a strange land, where he couldn't even speak the language. He was no longer a shepherd, and he had nothing, not even the money to return and start everything over. ~ Paulo Coelho

It is the practice of the multitude to bark at eminent men, as little dogs do at strangers. ~ Seneca The Younger