When Strangers Meet Quotes

I can very well understand your frustration, but you must stick to your dreams. Try Harder! ~ K. Hari Kumar

I do not mind if you break my heart into two or a million pieces, I will bring another heart for you to play with! My body will keep on making hearts for you!If it fails to do so, I will kill myself and be born again to do so. ~ K. Hari Kumar When Strangers Meet

When strangers meet, great allowances should be made for differences in custom and training. ~ Frank Herbert

You will come across people who always affirm by everything you say, but at the hour of need, they simply disappear! Stay away from such people or simply don't fall for their promises. ~ K. Hari Kumar

I have a terrible problem with procrastination ... a friend told me, "Well, you should go to therapy." And I thought about it, but then I said, "Wait a minute. Why should I pay a stranger to listen to me talk when I can get strangers to pay to listen to me talk?" And that's when I got the idea of touring. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

When we involve others in spontaneous acts of kindness, we go from being strangers to becoming a united team connected at the heart level. ~ Molly Friedenfeld

The stranger's first feeling, when suddenly confronted by that towering and awful apparition wrapped in its shroud of snow, is breath-taking astonishment. It is as if heaven's gates had swung open and exposed the throne. (Twain on seeing the Jungfrau.) ~ Mark Twain

When man loves as a biological hypostasis, he inevitably excludes others: the family has priority in love over "strangers," the husband lays exclusive claim to the love of his wife - facts altogether understandable and "natural" for the biological hypostasis. For a man to love someone who is not a member of his family more than his own relations constitutes a transcendence of the exclusiveness which is present in the biological hypostasis. Thus a characteristic of the ecclesial hypostasis is the capacity of the person to love without exclusiveness, and to do this not out of conformity with a moral commandment ("Love thy neighbor," etc.), but out of his "hypostatic constitution," out of the fact that his new birth from the womb of the Church has made him part of a network of relationships which transcends every exclusiveness. ~ John D. Zizioulas

A flourishing life requires a capacity to recognize the times when the news no longer has anything original or important to teach us; periods when we should refuse imaginative connection with strangers, when we must leave the business of governing, triumphing, failing, creating or killing to others, in the knowledge that we have our own objectives to honour in the brief time still allotted to us. ~ Alain De Botton

In front of the mound: a mile of naked strangers. In groups of twenty, like smokes, they are directed to the other side by a man with a truncheon and a whip. It will not help to ink in his face. Several men with barrows collect clothes. There are young women still with attractive breasts. There are family groups, many small children crying quietly, tears oozing from their eyes like sweat. In whispers people comfort one another. Soon, they say. Soon. No one wails and no one begs. Arms mingle with other arms like fallen limbs, lie like shawls across bony shoulders. A loose gray calm descends. It will be soon . . . soon. A grandmother coos at the infant she cuddles, her gray hair hiding all but the feet. The baby giggles when it's chucked. A father speaks earnestly to his son and points at the heavens where surely there is an explanation; it is doubtless their true destination. The color of the sky cannot be colored in. So the son is lied to right up to the last. Father does not cup his boy's wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened of at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone; not simply the butterflies you fancied, or the bodies you yearned to see uncovered - look, ~ William H. Gass

You think we have a connection because of all the things you've sucked out of my mind by screening, but that isn't real. Trust comes when you've worked with someone for years; it doesn't speed up just because you can think fast, and it doesn't materialize when you stick a cable in someone's head. What you get from screening me isn't friendship, it's data. We're strangers. ~ Raphael Carter

When they got back into the carriage they felt greater strangers than before. ~ Emile Zola

They placed their lives on hold for a group of strangers and asked for nothing in return. They affirmed the basic goodness of man at a time when it was easy to doubt such humanity still existed. If the terrorists had hoped their attacks would reveal the weaknesses in western society, the events in Gander proved its strength. ~ Jim DeFede

She went to the church to sit in the cave of stone, filled with the voices of strangers. Murmurs coming through the air, bowling in the ceiling and sifting down with the speckled greens and blues, the deep dark red of the stained glass at the end of the nave. She sat in the hard wooden pew and waited for the hymns. And when the singing started, she could weep. She went to the church to open her mouth and feel her heart again, constricted, struggling, banging against her throat, the tears there in the place of words, her voice struggling out in the vast air, stopped by grief. ~ Sarah Blake

Somebody described it to me the best as when you go in to write a song with two people that you've never met, you're pretty much going in and taking off your pants in front of strangers, so it's a really weird feeling. ~ Scotty McCreery

Meanwhile, Blakeborough placed himself behind them like a guard. The investigator in Dom went to work analyzing the man's attire--expensive but not ostentatious, studied but not affected--and Blakeborough's wary stance, closed manner, and stiff expression. Was that just his usual response to strangers or a sign that he was bracing for trouble about his brother? Which could mean he was well aware of Barlow's scheme.
But the man in Dom noticed none of that. It just wanted to march over and punch bloody Blakeborough in his perfect, unscarred face for being too rich, too eligible, and too thoroughly engaged to Jane. The man in him wanted to throttle the earl for standing guard over Jane when she should be Dom's responsibility. Dom's to protect. Dom's to marry.
The man in him had to shut up, unfortunately. Or this investigation wouldn't progress very far. ~ Sabrina Jeffries

There's something excruciating about this part. Strangers, or, even worse, friends, crouch at the children's knees, touching them, hugging them, stressed faces one after another pressing into theirs, faces like caricatures. There is the awkwardness of people feeling the need to say something when there is nothing to say. Nothing. ~ A.M. Homes

Warriors, in the ancient world, put their souls away for safe keeping during times of danger. I'd put mine away and didn't want strangers to search for it. I might lose it. I'd watched those who'd thrown their souls in front of strangers and their bemusement when it was handed back to them, marked and scratched. Sometimes they didn't even get it back. Well, they'd been careless. Some of them wept, of course. But it was too late. It's murderously difficult to get your soul back, in any condition, once you've let it slip away from you. There's no search party willing to go out in all weathers to find your lost soul. ~ Josephine Hart

It's also selfish because it makes you feel good when you help others. I've been helped by acts of kindness from strangers. That's why we're here, after all, to help others. ~ Carol Burnett

What is this Charity, this clinking of money between strangers, and when did Charity cease to be a comforting and secret thing between one friend and another? Does Love make her voice heard through a committee, does Love employ an almoner to convey her message to her neighbor? ... The real Love knows her neighbor face to face, and laughs with him and weeps with him, and eats and drinks with him, so that at last, when his black day dawns, she may share with him, not what she can spare, but all that she has. ~ Stella Benson

The Hutterites (who came out of the same tradition as the Amish and the Mennonites) have a strict policy that every time a colony approaches 150, they split it in two and start a new one. "Keeping things under 150 just seems to be the best and most efficient way to manage a group of people," Spokane told me. "When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another." The Hutterites, obviously, didn't get this idea from contemporary evolutionary psychology. They've been following the 150 rule for centuries. But their rationale fits perfectly with Dunbar's theories. At 150, the Hutterites believe, something happens-something indefinable but very real-that somehow changes the nature of community overnight. "In smaller groups people are a lot closer. They're knit together, which is very important if you want to be be effective and successful at community life," Gross said. "If you get too large, you don't have enough work in common. You don't have enough things in common, and then you start to become strangers and that close-knit fellowship starts to get lost." Gross spoke from experience. He had been in Hutterite colonies that had come near to that magic number and seen firsthand how things had changed. "What happens when you get that big is that the group starts, just on its own, to form a sort of clan." He made a gesture with his hands, as if to demonstrate division. "You get two or three groups within the larger group. That is something you really try to preve ~ Malcolm Gladwell

IT SEEMS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE, but there was once a time when human beings did not feel the need to share their every waking moment with hundreds of millions, even billions, of complete and utter strangers. If one went to a shopping mall to purchase an article of clothing, one did not post minute-by-minute details on a social networking site; and if one made a fool of oneself at a party, one did not leave a photographic record of the sorry episode in a digital scrapbook that would survive for all eternity. But now, in the era of lost inhibition, it seemed no detail of life was too mundane or humiliating to share. In the online age, it was more important to live out loud than to live with dignity. Internet followers were more treasured than flesh-and-blood friends, for they held the illusive promise of celebrity, even immortality. Were Descartes alive today, he might have written: I tweet, therefore I am. ~ Daniel Silva

When Dawn looked at Vic, she saw Vic exactly as he wanted to be seen. Whereas Vic's parents couldn't help seeing who he used to be, and so many friends and strangers couldn't help seeing who he didn't want to be anymore, Dawn only saw him. Call it a blur if you want, but Dawn didn't see a blur. She saw a very distinct, very clear person. ~ David Levithan

Women can go mad with insomnia.
The sleep-deprived roam houses that have lost their familiarity. With tea mugs in hand, we wander rooms, looking on shelves for something we will recognize: a book title, a photograph, the teak-carved bird
a souvenir from what place? A memory almost rises when our eyes rest on a painting's grey sweep of cloud, or the curve of a wooden leg in a corner. Fingertips faintly recall the raised pattern on a chair cushion, but we wonder how these things have come to be here, in this stranger's home.
Lost women drift in places where time has collapsed. We look into our thoughts and hearts for what has been forgotten, for what has gone missing. What did we once care about? Whom did we love? We are emptied. We are remote. Like night lilies, we open in the dark, breathe in the shadowy world. Our soliloquies are heard by no one. ~ Cathy Ostlere

When the Irish nun said to me, "Speak your name loud and clear so that all the boys and girls can hear you," she was asking me to use language publicly, with strangers. That's the appropriate instruction for a teacher to give. If she were to say to me, "We are going to speak now in Spanish, just like you do at home. You can whisper anything you want to me, and I am going to call you by a nickname, just like your mother does," that would be inappropriate. Intimacy is not what classrooms are about. ~ Richard Rodriguez

Through the various branches of your tree, you are connected to the entirety of human history. When we talk about the ancient Egyptians building the pyramids, we're not talking about a bunch of exotic strangers, we're talking about our great-great-many-times-great grandparents! ~ Laurence Overmire

My family trained me to be polite to people I had just met, and that included strangers. You speak when you're spoken to. You look people in the eye when they address you and when you address them back. ~ Samuel R. Delany

The true reader must be an extension of the author. He is the higher court that receives the case already prepared by the lower court. The feeling by means of which the author has separated out the materials of his work, during reading separates out again the unformed and the formed aspects of the book - and if the reader were to work through the book according to his own idea, a second reader would refine it still more, with the result that, since the mass that had been worked through would constantly be poured into fresh vessels, the mass would finally become an essential component - a part of the active spirit.

Through impartial rereading of his book the author can refine his book himself. With strangers the particular character is usually lost, because the talent of fully entering into another person's idea is so rare. Often even in the author himself. It is not a sign of superior education and greater powers to justifiably find fault with a book. When receiving new impressions, greater sharpness of mind is quite natural. ~ Novalis

I'd love to have a program like 'Dr. Laura.' I studied psychology at the University of Miami, and when I rode the bus home from school, perfect strangers would strike up conversations with me and end up telling me their life stories. I think they could sense that I was studying to help people. That, or I have a face like a priest. ~ Gloria Estefan

The Accounting of Love and Hospitality -
Sermon on the Account


Do enough for others that it's impossible
For them to keep accounts
Of what they owe you
Or what you've done.

Lose the account yourself,
Expect nothing in return.

Make a habit of giving things away.
Pay for other people's meal,
Friends and strangers.
Keep no accounts on that either.

Take what is offered to you,
But expect or demand nothing.



Tell the people in your life
That you appreciate them
As often as you can.
There may be a day when you can't.

Tell your kids and spouse that you love them,
Often and every night.
Remind yourself
What it is you love about them.

Look for ways to be kind and helpful,
There are plenty to find.

Do things without telling others
You've done them.
Don't even remind yourself.
Do acts of kindness, then let them go.

Live a life without clinging to expectations
About who you should be.


Your friends and family will change,
Everything does, you will.
Life has a lot of additions and subtraction;
Change is inevitable.

Spend time mindfully changing yourself
Towards kindness and patience.

At the end of your life,
Which could be any moment,
Let the ones that knew you
Have lived a better life because you wer ~ Eric Overby

Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game. ~ Bernard Malamud

Dear friend, you are being faithful to God when you care for the traveling teachers who pass through, even though they are strangers to you. - 3 John 1:5 ~ Gary Chapman

Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true - anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other - beneath the face of the beloved, however ancient, ruined, and scarred, is the face of the baby your love once was, and will always be, for you. Love serves, then, if memory doesn't, and passion, apart from its tense relation to agony, labors beneath the shadow of death. Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you're out there in the craft of your mortality, alone. ~ James Baldwin

Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on 'what happened then' than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell. What we recall has as much to do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn. But when does one decide to stop looking to the past and instead conceive of a new order? When is it time to dream of another country or to embrace other strangers as allies or to make an opening, an overture, where there is none? When is it clear that the old life is over, a new one has begun, and there is no looking back? From the holding cell was it possible to see beyond the end of the world and to imagine living and breathing again? ~ Saidiya V. Hartman

How can you grow to love a handful of strangers so fiercely just because you have to sleep on the same couple of wooden planks with them, when half the time you were there you wanted to strangle them, and all you ever talked about is death and imaginary strawberries? ~ Elizabeth Wein

English, although the official language of Nigeria, was a formal language with which strangers and non-relatives addressed you. It had the potency of digging craters between you and your friends or relatives if one of you switched to using it. So, our parents hardly spoke English, except in moments like this, when the words were intended to pull the ground from beneath our feet. ~ Chigozie Obioma

I get hugs all the time from strangers. I do believe that people can feel your persona when you perform live, but it is one of the nicest things if you can translate that on your records. ~ Natalie Cole

Variant selves haunt
the corridors of my brain, people
my novels, crowd in like ghosts
drawn to blood when friends
or strangers tell me secrets,
hand me their troubles,
sweaters knit of hair and wire. ~ Marge Piercy

Then when I'd thought nothing else could possibly startle or surprise me, the Lord Master had taken one look at Barrons - and walked away.
That worried me. A lot. If the Lord Master walked away from Barrons, how much danger was I in on a daily basis? I'd been feeling invincible up until those last few moments in the cave. Until one man in the room with me had stripped away my will with mere words, and the other man in the room with me had apparently intimidated that one into leaving. Bad and badder.
I glanced across the front seat at badder. I opened my mouth. He looked at me. I closed it.
I don't know how he continued driving, because we stared at each other for a long time. The night whizzed by, the air inside the speeding car pregnant with all the things we weren't saying. We didn't even have one of our wordless conversations this time; neither of us was willing to betray a single thought or feeling.
We looked at each other like two too-intimate strangers who've woken after the lovemaking and don't know quite what to say to each other, so they say nothing at all and go their separate ways, promising, of course, that they'll call, but each time they look at the phone over the next few days, the discomfort and mild embarrassment of having taken off their clothing in front of someone they didn't really even know rises up, and the phone call never gets made.
Barrons and I had taken our skins off around each other tonight. Shared too many secrets, and n ~ Karen Marie Moning

When friends speak overmuch of times gone by, often it's because they sense their present time is turning them from friends to strangers. Long before the moment came to say goodbye, I think, we said goodbye in other words and ways and silences. Then when the moment came for it at last, we didn't say it as should be said by friends. So now at last, dear Mouse, with many, many years between: goodbye. ~ Frederick Buechner

Never mind that she's been hearing this soliloquy from strangers since she was born, in the Year of the Fire Horse, twin sixes after the nineteen. Never mind the order of questions invariably changes even if the questions themselves do not: 'How long have y'all lived here? Do you even speak English? Oh, well. Your English is so good. Bless your heart, you must miss your people. You stick out like a raisin in a big bowl of oatmeal. Is it true that you worship cows? . . . Have you even heard of the Bible? Don't get all uppity on me, don't turn away. I know you think you don't have to listen. But this is my country. You do. When are y'all heading back? Y'all best be getting back to where you came from, you hear? No need to overstay your welcome. ~ Devi S. Laskar

That's right, I am the unenthusiastic girl people avoid making eye contact with when they buy their spank mags and twelve-inch rubber cocks. I'm the one in full HAZMAT gear cleaning up the "accidental" shot spots they leave behind in one of our twenty-five cent porn booths. For what it's worth, there's a reason I don't fill in the glory holes, they all think they're so sneaky, getting their dick sucked by some anonymous stranger on the other side. I see it as less clean up, let the cock sucking stranger slurp up their spunk. It saves me running a disinfectant wipe along the wall, hoping that none of it touches any part of me. So keep up the good work anonymous strangers, keep gobbling cock and making my life easier. If you want, leave your address at the store and I'll add you to my fucking Christmas card list. ~ Jaden Wilkes

Of course, when strangers see me, they're star-struck because of who I am, but my friends take me as a friend because I'm their friend - not because I'm a movie star. ~ Quvenzhane Wallis

We fell in love with that little peep-show projection on the inside of an iris, pictures that amount to nothing more than the thirsty moon over a spot of bloody ground. Those weren't the nothings we restless sleepwalkers knew, no place no home no song. So we heard her and we followed until she went where we couldn't follow.

She went down beyond the mountains and disappeared between the crease of sky and land, like a great eyelid folding shut. No one knows what happened out in the Black Hills, but I imagine she lies buried in a rusty coffin under the stars. And on nights when the desert crickets sing her tune, they say one day she will rise again. On that day, there is no telling the kind of vengeance she'll demand of us. Fair is fair.

They say when she fell from Heaven she wore a crown of jagged stars that slit the skies throat. They say she loved them all, in the secret corners of their shallow sleep. Strangers, at the last. They say a lot of things. They're all lies. Everything is already written. ~ James Curcio

I really love to be with people. It's nice, that. To have achieved sudden intimacy with strangers is perhaps the most human thing you can do. We all love our friends and families, as much as we hate them. When you can achieve intimacy with strangers, it's very exciting and heartening. ~ Russell Brand

I guess it is what you do if you grow up with warnings of damnation ringing from every church door and radio station and family reunion, in a place where total strangers will walk up to you at the Piggly Wiggly and ask if you are Saved. Even if you deny that faith, rebuke it, you still carry it around with you like some half-forgotten Indian head penny you keep in your pocket for luck. I wonder sometimes if I will be the same, if when I see my life coming to an end I will drop to my knees and search my soul for old sins and my memory for forgotten prayers. I reckon so. ~ Rick Bragg

The king lifted a hand to her cheek and kissed her. It was not a kiss between strangers, not even a kiss between a bride and groom. It was a kiss between a man and his wife, and when it was over, the king closed his eyes and rested his forehead in the hollow of the queen's shoulder, like a man seeking respite, like a man reaching home at the end of the day. ~ Megan Whalen Turner

In deference to such spectacular carnage it is perhaps perverse to dwell upon one person's death, but we are creatures so constituted that the passing of one friend or one acquaintance has a profounder effect that that of 100,000 strangers. If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with them. ~ Louis De Bernieres

when i left them, i painted myself burgundy and grey
i stopped saying the words "please" and "i'm sorry"
i walked into grocery stores and bought too many
clementines, ordered too much Chinese, spent my
last four dollars on over the counter sleeping pills
that made my stomach bleed but my soul forget
every time i wanted to tell you "i'm sorry", i wrote
you a poem instead, i said things like "i hope your
mother calls you beautiful" to strangers and when
boys with dry hands and broken eyes asked me on
dates i didn't hesitate no, didn't even stop them
when their hands grazed my breasts and when
they moaned my name against my thighs i cried
i opened the mail and didn't tell anyone for a week
that i got accepted into law school, i stopped watering
the plants and filled the bathtub with roses and milk,
when i got invited to parties, i wore blue jeans with
white shirts, sat alone in some kitchen drinking hard
liquor until some boys mouth made me feel like home
i stopped answering the phone for a month, i didn't
like how my name tasted in his mouth but he was
older and didn't say things like "it doesn't matter"
and i think i went insane, my heart boiled blisters, i
couldn't understand why my bones felt like cages,
i walked around art museums until closing, watched
them lock up the gates and then open them up
again the very same morning, i thought ~ Irynka

I never used to see August the way other people saw him. I knew he didn't look exactly normal, but I really didn't understand why strangers seemed so shocked when they saw him. Horrified. Sickened. Scared. There are so many words I can use to describe the looks on people's faces. And for a long time I didn't get it. I'd just get mad. Mad when they stared. Mad when they looked away. "What the heck are you looking at?" I'd say to people - even grown-ups. Then, when I was about eleven, I went to stay with Grans in Montauk for four weeks while August was having ~ R.J. Palacio

She hardly ever began conversations with strangers just to talk. It was not a matter of shyness. For her, a conversation had a straightforward function. How do I get to the pharmacy? or How much does the hotel room cost? Conversation also had a professional function. [ ... ] When she worked as a researcher [ ... ], she had never minded having a long conversation if it was to ferret out facts. On the other hand, she disliked personal discussions, which always led to snooping around in areas she considered private. ~ Stieg Larsson