Some People Quotes (page 84)
The way I saw it, people are like leaves that have fallen into a swift-moving stream. As the leaves get carried downstream, some are caught in rocks and never get any farther. Some are swept to shore. Others - the lucky ones - keep going, missing the stones, staying clear of the shore, staying afloat until they reach the river delta and break free into open water.
Tony Curtis
There are... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky...
E. T. A. Hoffmann
I'd like to add some beauty to life," said Anne dreamily. "I don't exactly want to make people KNOW more... though I know that IS the noblest ambition... but I'd love to make them have a pleasanter time because of me... to have some little joy or happy thought that would never have existed if I hadn't been born.
L. M. Montgomery
You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. . . . Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely...
Gilbert K. Chesterton
No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says 'bloody,' unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is -----. No doubt in time -----, like 'bloody,' will find its way into the drawing room and replaced by some other word.
George Orwell
Why, man alive, Laura! Just look about you a little. What do you see? A world full of common people! All of 'em born and all of em' going to die! Which of them has one-tenth of your good points! Or mine! Or anyone else's, as far as that goes - gosh! Everybody excels in some one thing. Some in many!
Tennessee Williams
Sometimes one feels rage and despair that one should know so little the people one loves. one is heartbroken at the impossibility of understanding them, of getting right down into their hearts . sometimes, accidentally or under the influence of some emotion, one gets a glimpse of some emotion , one gets a glimpse of those inner selves , and one despairs how ignorant one is of that inner self and how far away one is from it.
W. Somerset Maugham
I was anti-everything and everyone. I didn't want people around me. This aversion was not some big crippling anxiety; merely a mature recognition of my own psychological vulnerability and my lack of suitability as a companion. Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as i struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life.
Irvine Welsh