Wendelin Van Draanen Quotes

None of the people are what you think when you first meet them, who you think they are, and they turn out to be maybe something a little different.

Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.

A woman I should like to think I know rather well and a woman I had always considered a mystery, are in fact the same person.

It strikes me how strange people are. You can see them every day - you can think you know them - and then you fшnd out you hardly know them at all.

Certainly I've had the experience of thinking a person was one thing, and finding out they were another.

Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.

Things do not pass for what they are, but for what they seem. Most things are judged by their jackets.

Everything is more complicated than it looks to most people.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

How little do they see what really is, who frame their hasty judgment upon that which seems.

Brass shines as fair to the ignorant as gold to the goldsmith.

The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.

We think that we know people from this constellation of points: 'I know that story. I know that girl. I've heard that story a thousand times.' But actually, you never know that story.

You meet lots of people in your life, and sometimes you think that people are a certain way, and then they reveal themselves to be a different way.

I've always loved the idea that you think you know what you're looking at from a distance, yet when you come up close, it gets intricate and nutty and obscene and provocative.

Everything was a miracle until we solved it. ... the first man who ever saw a flying fish probably thought he was witnessing a miracle - and the first man who ever described a flying fish was doubtless called a liar.

Things are NEVER what they seem, Pa, I thought. I used to think they were, but I was wrong or stupid or blind or something. Old folks are forever complaining about their failing eyesight, but I think your vision gets better as you get older. Mine surely was.

It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.

Life is not always what we think it is.

Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.

Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.

It's shocking the things we call love.

Odd how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love-soaked, drenched in love-only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well as you had imagined.

With girls, I don't think right. I had a date with one girl, she had mirrors all over her bedroom. She told me to come over and bring a bottle. I got Windex.