Strangers Quotes

“. . .sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?"
“Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Marius and Cosette were in the dark in regard to each other. They did not speak, they did not bow, they were not acquainted; they saw each other; and, like the stars in the sky separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing upon each other.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Smile at strangers and you just might change a life.”
― Steve Maraboli

“There's an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Now, as we stand three feet apart and stare at each other, I feel the full distance that comes with spending so much time apart, a moment filled with the electricity of a first meeting and the uncertainty of strangers.”
― Marie Lu, Champion

“That's the thing about flying: You could talk to someone for hours and never even know his name, share your deepest secrets and then never see them again.”
― Jennifer E. Smith, The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

“Do you not know that God entrusted you with that money (all above what buys necessities for your families) to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to help the stranger, the widow, the fatherless; and, indeed, as far as it will go, to relieve the wants of all mankind? How can you, how dare you, defraud the Lord, by applying it to any other purpose?”
― John Wesley

“I'm not a stranger," I said, and pointed to his book. "I'm someone who reads the same authors you do.”
― Lemony Snicket, When Did You See Her Last?

“Nothing is stranger or more ticklish than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who meet and observe each other daily - no hourly - and are nevertheless compelled to keep up the pose of an indifferent stranger, neither greeting nor addressing each other, whether out of etiquette or their own whim.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I´m a stranger in a strange land.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”
― Anonymous, The Holy Bible: King James Version

“Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, The Story of a Marriage

“The power that each of us has over complete strangers to make them feel terrible and and frightened and weak is amazing.”
― Hank Green, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

“I am a free soul, singing my heart out by myself no matter where I go and I call strangers my friends because I learn things and find ways to fit them into my own world. I hear what people say, rearrange it, take away and tear apart until it finds value in my reality and there I make it work. I find spaces in between the cracks and cuts where it feels empty
and there I make it work.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“In this world of memories, there's no need for strangers.
-Kenshin to Kaoru”
― Watsuki Nobuhiro

“There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that's too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life!”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I fell in love with you a little bit, in that stupid way where you completely make up a fictional version of the person you’re looking at and fall in love with that person.”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

“The city's full of people who you just see around.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

“For a split second they stared at each other. A fleeting, lasting moment. One person noticing another person out of a whole crowd of strangers.”
― Alexandra Potter, Calling Romeo

“Something was comforting about strangers—it seemed like they would exist forever as the same, unknowable mass.”
― Megan Boyle

“The old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy ... a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, dangerous work of 'solving Amy'. When I'd hold up the bloody stumps, she'd sigh and turn to her secret mental notebooks on which she tallied all my deficiencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“You pass people on the street, some are for you, some are not.”
― Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

“In my experience - and this is a very awkward way to put it, since I don't really know what the word experience means - the strangest people in one's life are the people one has known and loved, still know and will always love. Here, both I and the vocabulary are both in trouble, for strangest does not imply stranger. A stranger is a stranger is a stranger, simply, and you watch the stranger to anticipate his next move. But the people who elicit from you a depth of attention and wonder which we helplessly call love are perpetually making moves which cannot possibly be anticipated. Eventually, you realize that it never occurred to you to anticipate their next move, not only because you couldn't but because you didn't have to: it was not a question of moving on the next move, but simply, of being present. Danger, true, you try to anticipate and you prepare yourself, without knowing it, to stand in the way of death. For the strangest people in the world are those people recognized, beneath one's senses, by one's soul - the people utterly indispensable for one's journey.”
― James Baldwin, Just Above My Head

“The house seemed so different at night. Everything was in its correct place, of course, but somehow the furniture seemed more angular and the pictures on the wall more one-dimensional. She remembered somebody saying that at night we are all strangers, even to ourselves, and this struck her as being true.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

“And now, for something completely the same:

Wasted time and wasted breath,
's what I'll make, until my death.
Helping people 'd be as good,
but I wouldn't, if I could.

For the few that help deserve,
have no need, or not the nerve,
help from strangers to accept,
plus from mine a few have wept.

Wept from joy, or from despair,
or just from my vengeful stare.
Ways I have, to look at stupid,
make them see I am not Cupid.

Make them see they are in error,
for of truth I am a bearer.
Most decide I'm just a bear,
mauling at them, - like I care.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“Spiritual love is when you see new faces as the oldest.”
― michael bassey johnson

“I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains