GOSSIP QUOTES III
quotations about gossip
Gossip is like stickin' a busted feather pillow out the window in a strong wind. When you'uns shakes that busted pillow, all them there feathers are's goin' to start flyin' everywheres. There ain't no way you can put them there feathers back in that busted pillow. It's the same with gossip; you can't take the gossip back if it's wrong or right.
JOHN W. MILLER
The Curse of Satan's Collar
Even the absurdest report may in nearly every instance be traced to an actual occurrence; and had there been no such actual occurrence, this preposterous misrepresentation of it would never have existed. Though the distorted or magnified image transmitted to us through the refracting medium of rumour, is utterly unlike the reality; yet in the absence of the reality there would have been no distorted or magnified image.
HERBERT SPENCER
First Principles
Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.
CHINA MIEVILLE
Embassytown
Gossip is like the silent electrical waves crisscrossing in the air above the city, like formless clouds that enshroud the whole city, slowly brewing into a shower, intermixing right and wrong. The rain comes down not in a torrent but as a hazy springtime drizzle. Although not violent, it drenches the air with an inescapable humidity. Never underestimate these rumors: soft and fine as these raindrops may be, you will never struggle free of them.
WANG ANYI
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow
Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip.
STEVE TOLTZ
A Fraction of the Whole
In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
attributed, Identifying, Treating, and Preventing Childhood Trauma in Rural Communities
In the provinces there is always a valve or a faucet through which gossip leaks from one social set to another.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
It's only gossip if you repeat it. Until then, it's gathering information.
MERCEDES LACKEY
Intrigues
Possibly the gossip would be just as ready to speak well of his victims, to circulate stories to their credit rather than the reverse, but for the melancholy fact that he would thus be left without an audience.
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
"The Psychology of Gossip", Vanishing Roads and Other Essays
People everywhere are about the same, but ... it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Light in August
Gossip, as usual, was one-third right and two-thirds wrong.
L. M. MONTGOMERY
Chronicles of Avonlea
Gossip is putting two and two together, and making it five.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.
SOCRATES
attributed, The Progressive Revolution: History of Liberal Fascism through the Ages
To speak evil of any one, unless there is unequivocal proofs of their deserving it, is an injury for which there is no adequate reparation.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to George Washington Parke Custis, Nov. 28, 1796
Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one another. In all times it has been in this field of inter-racial and international prejudice that the gossip has found the widest scope for his gleeful activity, sowing broadcast dissensions and misunderstandings which have persisted for centuries. They are the fruitful cause of wars, insuperable barriers to progress, fabulous growths which the enlightenment of the world painfully labours to weed out, but will perhaps never entirely eradicate.
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
"The Psychology of Gossip", Vanishing Roads and Other Essays
Gossips turn out in rain and storm to go first to tell startling news.
ST. CLEMENT
attributed, Day's Collacon
Still, as of old, the world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent; and the name of the serpent is Gossip. Wherever man is, there may you hear its sibilant whisper, and its foul spawn squirm and sting and poison in nests of hidden noisomeness, myriad as the spores of corruption in a putrefying carcass, varying in size from some hydra-headed infamy endangering whole nations and even races with its deadly breath, to the microscopic wrigglers that multiply, a million a minute, in the covered cesspools of private life.
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
"The Psychology of Gossip", Vanishing Roads and Other Essays
The mystery of gossip is bound up with the mysterious human need of talking. Talk we must, though we say nothing, or talk evil from sheer lack of subject-matter. When we know why man talks so much, apparently for the mere sake of talking, we shall probably be nearer to knowing why he prefers to speak and hear evil rather than good of his fellows.
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
"The Psychology of Gossip", Vanishing Roads and Other Essays
Even that thing which is universally decried, which no one would dream of defending--gossip--has itself, whether it is aimed at ourselves and thus becomes especially disagreeable to us, or whether it tells us something about a third person of which we were unaware, a certain psychological value. It prevents the mind from falling asleep over the factitious view which it has of what it imagines things to be and which is actually no more than their outward appearance. It turns this appearance inside out with the magic dexterity of an idealist philosopher and rapidly presents to our gaze an unsuspected corner of the reverse side of the fabric.
MARCEL PROUST
Sodom and Gomorrah