#strangers

In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down. ↗

— James Wolcott

#chicken #direction #down #easy #edited

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

#love #people #strangers #death

Good things happen when you meet strangers. ↗

— Yo-Yo Ma

#good things #happen #meet #strangers #things

That is what has happened to the United States in the international economic scene. We have deteriorated into a debtor status so that we are now dependent upon the kindness of strangers. That is not where the world's leading power should find itself. ↗

— Paul Sarbanes

#dependent #deteriorated #economic #find #happened

Admiration and familiarity are strangers. ↗

— George Sand

#familiarity #strangers

I reached my hand up when he catches me by the wrist stopping me. "No touching," he speaks so low it is barley a whisper. I gasped, damn what a turn on, I try reaching for his hair with my other hand when he stops me again. Roughly he tells me again, "No touching. ↗

— Glenna Maynard

#beauty

I want to speak, to sing to total strangers. It's my way of talking to the world. ↗

— Adrian Mitchell

#sing #speak #strangers #talking #total

Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people. ↗

— Bill Moyers

#depend #ethics #lives #most #other

The first band I was in, I think was called The Strangers. I got the sack because I was too small! ↗

— Noel Redding

#because #called #first #got #i

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

#christianity #clothing #compassion #evangelism #faithfulness