Strange Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.

Cormac McCarthy

It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane.

Terry Pratchett

Don't talk for five minutes, there's a good chap! I've a strange feeling come over me—almost as if I were going to think!

Aleister Crowley

The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east. Strange!

It is strange that all great men should have some little grain of madness mingled with whatever genius they possess.

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. You can see that when you think how the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays.

What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country.... Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.

John Hector St. John

The most sensational surprise was the sudden discovery, one day, that my pictures, for the first time in history, had become walls. By means of what strange process had I arrived at such precise images? And why did they make me, their first viewer, quake with emotion?

There is a strange and mighty race of people called the Americans who are rapidly becoming the coldest in the world because of this cruel, man-eating idol, lucre.

Edward Dahlberg

I wanted to know more about the young... strange that though they laughed so loud, they so seldom smiled. Perhaps laughter was involuntary whereas smiling was part of an attitude to life.

By the hollow mauntain-side
Questions strange I shout for ever,
While echoes far and wide
Seem to mock my vain endeavour;
Still I shout, for though they never
Cast my borrowed voice aside,
Words from empty words they sever—
Words of Truth from words of Pride.

James Clerk Maxwell

One of the strange things about friendship is that time together isn't cancelled out by time apart. One doesn't erase the other or balance it on some invisible scale. You can spend a few hours with someone and they will change your life, or you can spend a lifetime with a person and remain unchanged.

Michael Robotham

Metaphor relies on what has been experienced before; it transforms the strange into the familiar.

Some years back, all the best people came to bipartisan agreement that the most shameful thing a person could do with power was not to use it.
Since then everybody who wants to get ahead in Washington has made a great show of being a fierce fellow when left alone in the room with a little power. There seems to be a fear that if there is somebody around so low that it is all right to dump the garbage on him, and you hesitate, everybody will call you a sissy, and you will never be invited to lunch with Professor Kissinger.
Strange values result. Great killers are esteemed for good citizenship. "Not afraid to use power," people say of them.

Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos — novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes — you are beyond doubt the strangest?

It is strange to think that we might have crossed paths, and still not have known what we were missing.

My first informed impression, and what I would like to achieve, I can perhaps only realize when I am impelled as in a vision. One of my figures, perhaps one from the Temptation, sang his strange song to me one night –.. We are playing hide-and-seek, we are playing hide-and-seek across a thousand seas, we gods.... when the skies are red in the middle of the night, when the skies are red at night. You cannot see us, you cannot see us but you are ourselves.... that is what makes us laugh so gaily... Stars are our eyes and nebulae our beards.... we have people's souls for our hearts. We hide ourselves and you cannot see us, which is just what we want.

Thoughts are strange creatures. They lead you from one thing to another. Sometimes you don't know how you got from one to the next.

Franny Billingsley

Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.

I hope you never hear those words. Your mom. She died. They are different than other words. They are too big to fit in your ears. They belong to some strange, heavy, powerful language that pounds away at the side of your head, a wrecking ball coming at you again and again, until finally, the words crack a hole large enough to fit inside your brain. And in so doing, they split you apart.

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

Vladimir Nabokov

Life had always been chancy. And now life had found ways of surviving the ultimate extinction event. In new oceans and on strange lands, evolution had begun again.
But it had nothing to do with mankind.

I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me is transformed through intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

O Memory ! noble power ! thy reign is here.
Strange destiny, how thus, from age to age,
Doth man complain of that which he has lost.
Still do departed years, each in their turn,
Seem treasures of happiness gone by:
And while mind, joyful in its far advance,
Plunges amid the future, still the Soul
Seems to regret some other ancient home
To which it is drawn closer by the past.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

There is a strange taboo in our society against ending something merely because it is not pleasant— life, love, a conversation, you name it, the etiquette is that you must begin in ignorance & persevere in the face of knowledge, & though I naturally believe that this is profoundly wrong it's not nice to go around constantly offending people.