Overheard Quotes

#1. A style is the consequence of recurrent habits, restraints, or rules invented or inherited, written or overheard, intuitive or preconceived.

Paul Rand

#2. One day, when my son was eight, he came into the kitchen while I was cooking and said: 'You put bad words in your books, don't you?' No doubt he had overheard my mother, who often tells people who ask about my work: 'Well, you'll never find her books in the Christian bookstore.'

Jill McCorkle

#3. I know exactly what he means. I had overheard Poirot talking to my parents. He was using words like "psychosis" and "schizophrenic". Words that people feel they have to whisper, or not repeat at all. The Mental-Illness-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.

Neal Shusterman

#4. Overheard vampire conversation.
"Is that Ophelia?"
"yep"
"She doesn't look well"
"Ever since she drank from that hemophiliac everything just goes right through her.

Neil Leckman

#5. It is a long time since I saw you lose a life, Bluestar." Firepaw overheard Tigerclaw's whispered words. "How many have you lost now?" Firepaw couldn't help feeling surprised at Tigerclaw's open curiosity.

Erin Hunter

#6. overheard her." "And

Lisa Jackson

#7. Overheard in a Washington D.C. church confessional: "Bless me Father, for sins have been committed."

Robert Breault

#8. Mma Makutsi had overheard this remark and had been so cross that her glasses misted over; that was always a bad sign, Mma Ramotswe knew.

Alexander McCall Smith

#9. Don't tell me the sky is the limit - there's footprints on the Moon. - Overheard at a flee market.

Joseph Shellim

#10. When he overheard the boys whispering that he was a queer, he said he regarded that as a compliment since so many of the world's great men had been homosexual. Alas, I've been sentenced to a life mundane heterosexuality. I can only hope that a few of you will be more fortunate.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips

#11. From all that I heard, and overheard, fate was a grim reaper, never kind, with little respect for who was loved and needed.

V.C. Andrews

#12. I overheard Dorothy talking to Mr Montrose and she was telling Mr Montrose that she thought that I would be great in the movies if he would write me a part that only had three expressions, Joy, Sorrow, and Indigestion.

Anita Loos

#13. There is no friendship that cares about an overheard secret.

Alexandre Dumas

#14. How do you know it was him? Did he introduce himself?" He shakes his head. "Nah, but he overheard Marshall introducing me to someone as 'Lily's date.' I thought the look he gave me was going to set me on fire. That's why I came in here. I like you, but I'm not willing to die for you." I

Colleen Hoover

#15. I'm shocked," St. Vincent said gravely, "but I'll recover." Looking around them as if to ascertain that he wouldn't be overheard, he whispered conspiratorially, "I'm not really a gentleman, you know.

Lisa Kleypas

#16. The child probably overheard their voices; for, looking up to the window, with a bright, but naughty smile of mirth and intelligence, she threw one of the prickly burrs at the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The sensitive clergyman shrunk, with nervous dread, from the light missile.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#17. But have you ever overheard two women discussing men? Men are crude liars, comparing their drabs, but women - I'd rather have [an] anatomist dissect me alive than to listen to the things the ladies say about us when they think they are alone.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#18. New York is a city of conversations overheard, of people at the next restaurant table (micrometers away) checking your watch, of people reading the stories in your newspaper on the subway train.

Bill Geist

#19. Overheard at O'Banion's Beer Emporium: "Pardon me, darlin', but I'm writin' a telephone book. C'n I have yer number?

Henry D. Spalding

#20. I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.

Anne Tyler

#21. The characters in my stories all have quite loud lives in my head. It's a relief to get them on the page. Often they come from people I've noticed or overheard - but that is only a part of them. It's only by writing that I discover who these people really are.

Rachel Joyce

#22. Writing is talking to yourself-with the hope of being overheard.

Marty Rubin

#23. Actors should be overheard, not listened to, and the audience is 50 percent of the performance.

Shirley Booth

#24. They record thoughts and overheard conversations, as well as maps of their personal paths, phone numbers for hotels, restaurant recommendations, airline flight numbers. Eventually,

Danny Gregory

#25. I overheard Nona talking about my little buds and how she remembered back when she was developing into a woman, and that was enough for me.

Holly Hood

#26. And of course there was no help for it, except recalling bits of conversations she had overheard from time to time about marriage. That's what knitting groups and sewing groups were for, wasn't it? Commiserating about marriage.

Jane Smiley

#27. Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard ... All poetry is of the nature of the soliloquy.

John Stuart Mill

#28. Gilbert Keith Chesterton (that fabulously large Catholic writer) overheard someone making fun of Milton (it didn't matter that the insults were all true).

N.D. Wilson

#29. A story can start from the oddest things: a magic lamp, a conversation overheard, a shadow moving on a wall.

Ahdaf Soueif

#30. Somebody told me ... that he overheard a banker's wife saying her husband was working for free this year-this was 2009. What she meant was, he was just getting his basic salary of £300,000, and no bonus. Their sense of entitlement is, in the proper sense of the word, psychotic.

John Lanchester

#31. Tragically, it was Vince Masuoka who finally answered that lame question. "Grasshopper," he said, shaking his head wisely, on the morning when he overheard me turning down Miami Hoy for the third time. "When temple bell rings, crane must fly.

Jeff Lindsay

#32. I took notes on the people around me, in my town, in my family, in my memory. I took notes on my own state of mind, my grandiosity, the low self-esteem. I wrote down the funny stuff I overheard. I learned to be like a ship's rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down.

Anne Lamott

#33. Everyone claims to be a billionaire these days. But you're not really a billionaire until you spend your billions. - OVERHEARD AT THE HONG KONG JOCKEY CLUB

Kevin Kwan

#34. Was he again
I had never forgotten that overheard phrase of Eve's
being kind to be cruel? I only knew I had been given back enough to live on. And dimly, dimly, I began to see a new Last Act to crown my play.

Dodie Smith

#35. A four year old girl was overheard whispering in her newborn baby brother's ear: "Baby," she whispers, "tell me what God sounds like. I'm starting to forget." -- Between the Dreaming and the Coming True

Robert Benson

#36. When I was young, I overheard a Brit say Canada wasn't a real country because it doesn't have any poets. Even then, I kind of knew that was wrong, but I still thought, 'Wow, here's my chance to do something, to be of service to my country.'

David McFadden

#37. Much of what happens in Love Always is really from overheard conversations in the Russian Tea Room. It's an improvisation of the way certain Hollywood agents think and talk to each other.

Ann Beattie

#38. She's one of those third year girls who gripe my liver ... You know, American college kids. They come over here to take their third year and lap up a little culture ... They're officious and dull. They're always making profound observations they've overheard.

Gene Kelly

#39. God did not direct His call to Isaiah - Isaiah overheard God saying, " ... who will go for Us?" The call of God is not just for a select few but for everyone. Whether I hear God's call or not depends on the condition of my ears, and exactly what I hear depends upon my spiritual attitude.

Oswald Chambers

#40. If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days
listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)

Anne Lamott

#41. She remembered something she overheard at a dinner party -- Everyone loses their mind at least once in this lifetime. Everyone.

Lawren Leo

#42. It was Snape who had overheard the prophecy. It was Snape who had carried the news of the prophecy to Voldemort. Snape and Peter Pettigrew together had sent Voldemort hunting after Lily and James and their son

J.K. Rowling

#43. History,' Mari muttered, as if she'd overheard his thoughts. 'Why do we need to know what happened before we were born?'
'So hopefully we get smarter and don't make the same mistakes again.

Cinda Williams Chima

#44. Dean Martin's pancreas, who overheard his liver singing I got a right to sing the blues. Never got a dinner!

Red Buttons

#45. Bud's relationship with the female sex was governed by a gallimaufry of primal impulses, dim suppositions, deranged theories, overheard scraps of conversation, half-remembered pieces of bad advice, and fragments of no-doubt exaggerated anecdotes that amounted to rank superstition.

Neal Stephenson

#46. The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things ... the trivial pleasure like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.

Barbara Pym

#47. You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

Joan Didion

#48. I overheard things in the Woolworths when I was a child, people saying, 'Oh, poor, little thing,' as if they had some understanding that I was being born biracial into a world that was still very difficult for interracial marriages and biracial children.

Natasha Trethewey

#49. I'm sure you know by now, Jesse Jackson was overheard saying, and I'll put this more delicately, that he wanted to cut Barack Obama's testicles off. And Jesse has been on several news programs the last couple of days, explaining what he meant by those comments. Do you need to explain that?

Jay Leno

#50. We went to lunch and were talking about procrastination and the waitress overheard us and she said, 'I have a problem with procrastination, too.' I said 'Really? ... Get my sandwich.'

Ellen DeGeneres

#51. As a young boy I won a few dollars in 1972 when Riva Ridge won the Kentucky Derby. I had overheard someone say he was going to win, and I guess that made an impression on me.

Matt Gonzalez

#52. What is this Chocho business?' Will muttered to himself. But his friends overheard the comment.
'It's a term of great respect,' they chorused, and he glared at them.
'Oh, shut up,' he said.

John Flanagan

#53. I'd once overheard my daddy tell my momma that the six Winston boys had inherited their father's ability to charm snakes, the IRS, and women.

Penny Reid

#54. But there are some words that when overheard will always twist a person's guts sideways.

Heather Hildenbrand

#55. The smaller the dinner table, the better the side conversation: you can gossip about the guests without fearing whether you will be overheard. It just isn't good table manners to exclude someone from their own ridicule. That's why the juiciest side conversations occur at a table for one.

Bauvard

#56. Betty had forgotten how you only get slivers of stories from children - usually what they echo from overheard adult conversations.

Molly Ringwald

#57. I'd overheard her several times on her lunch breaks, talking about how she wanted to be married before she turned twenty five. She also apparently wanted to be a stay-at-home mom with six kids, and live in a house in the suburbs. In other words, she was completely out of her fucking mind.

Whitney Gracia Williams

#58. At the outer door to bestow the greetings of the season on the clerk, who, cold as he was, was warmer than Scrooge; for he returned them cordially. "There's another fellow," muttered Scrooge; who overheard him: "my clerk, with fifteen

Charles Dickens

#59. The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded.

Vance Packard

#60. He could sell snow to an Eskimo.
--Overheard in a Real Estate Office

Bob Eckstein

#61. You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Anonymous

#62. All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else?

William S. Burroughs

#63. It reminded me of that tongue-in-cheek quick history of art I'd overheard ... Used to be people couldn't draw very well, then they could, and now they can't again.

Charles De Lint

#64. I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me.

George Santayana

#65. I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, "Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing - loads of Indian people." To which you want to reply, "Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing - loads of white people.

Zadie Smith

#66. After we left the bedroom, I overheard Henry teasing Bryce about adding a little more nuts to his candy bars, and I had to leave the room so he wouldn't see me laughing.

Kristen Middleton

#67. I should have told you I overheard. Let you explain. I'm sorry." Straight up apology. It took balls to do shit like that, even for sweet, cute, shy women.

Kristen Ashley

#68. I once overheard someone telling someone else "Don't confuse kindness with something else." Even though this was not directed at me, I took heed and never hedged my bets.

Shawn Michael Severud

#69. Observation #3: They gossip.
Can you believe it? I overheard Finn and Doug in the backyard talking about some girl named Dawn who blew off some guy named Simon for some other guy named Rick for like twenty minutes! They sounded like those old mole-hair ladies at Sal's Milshakes.

Kate Brian

#70. New Labour leader Ed Miliband announces plan to 'make this party slightly less unelectable by 2015'. He added: 'I am Ed, the Almighty One.'
Defeated brother David Miliband overheard muttering: 'Now I know how Wayne Christ felt after little Jesus came along.

Andy Zaltzman

#71. Did you hear about the baby just born that was both sexes? It had a penis and a brain. - overheard at the University of Oregon Medical School

David James Duncan

#72. For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.

Rita Dove

#73. Overheard today in restaurant: Can you stop listening to our conversation?

Demetri Martin

#74. I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#75. so entering a conversation that you'd overheard but hadn't been invited to join was sort of like peeing in someone's coffee while they stood there and watched you do it.

Johnny B. Truant

#76. In this book I will teach you, based on stuff I have either made up, observed, or overheard, how to live the life you want
the life you Will. Obviously, if your name is Will and you are slow, this book will be confusing/upsetting. Be careful. Thanks.

Eugene Mirman

#77. My writing table has seen all my wretchedness, knows all my plans, has overheard all my thoughts.

Honore De Balzac