Anonymity Quotes

“I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.”
― Oprah Winfrey

“Who are you?"
"No one of consequence."
"I must know."
"Get used to disappointment.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I don't know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower.”
― Banksy

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste it's fragrance on the desert air.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that's too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life!”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“On the late afternoon streets, everyone hurries along, going about their own business.

Who is the person walking in front of you on the rain-drenched sidewalk?

He is covered with an umbrella, and all you can see is a dark coat and the shoes striking the puddles.

And yet this person is the hero of his own life story.

He is the love of someone’s life.

And what he can do may change the world.

Imagine being him for a moment.

And then continue on your own way.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“The oppression of anonymity and lack of human contact can inveigle people to reinvent themselves, rethink their lives and give hope a chance. Once they have broken down the wall of apathy and reached the wellness of concern, they can realize what it feels to be missed. ("Knowing someone was waiting")”
― ERIK PEVERNAGIE

“When we home in on the sidelined, we can give them a glimmer of hope. Trapped in direst conditions and stuck in the darkest corners of their being, they sense a splinter of human warmth and a flake of joy, thus escaping the anonymity enforced by their social stance. ("Homeless, down in the corner")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Many of the bravest never are known, and get no praise. [But]that does not lessen their beauty...”
― Louisa May Alcott

“It was the anonymity. He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others' knowledge of him. That was freedom.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was. Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was immaculate anonymity.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“The world forgetting by the world forgot.”
― Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

“A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of doing so; only comparable power or anonymity can do that.”
― Nick Harkaway, The Blind Giant

“In trying to be perfect,
He perfected the art of anonymity,
Became imperceptible
And arrived nowhere from nowhere.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through--and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one's own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families.”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

“I can claim copyright only in myself, and occasionally in those who are either dead or have written about the same events, or who have a decent expectation of anonymity, or who are such appalling public shits that they have forfeited their right to bitch.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences.”
― Nick Harkaway, The Blind Giant

“Everything in her wanted to run -fly back to California, back to her quiet existence working among strangers. Hiding out in the folds of tree trunks and tropical petals, tucked away safely among so many foreign plants and people.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.”
― Salman Rushdie

“I meant it. But only if it was both of us. If it was just me, I would melt into the city. I would disappear and give up my name and my past and any hope of a home, and become no one.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“Kierkegaard disparages the irresponsibility afforded by the modern press which allows people to address the crowd in an arena where public opinion has become the hallmark of truth, but in which the opinion-formers remain hidden. Everyone seeks anonymity--in the press, in the crowd, to the point where everyone is no one!
,”
― Stephen Backhouse, Kierkegaard's Critique of Christian Nationalism

“In our modern urban civilization, multitudes of our people have been condemned to urban anonymity — to living the kind of life where many of them neither know nor care about their own neighbors. They find themselves isolated from the life of their community and their nation, driven by social forces beyond their control into little individual worlds in which their own individual objectives have become paramount to the collective good. Social objectives, social welfare, the good of the nation, the democratic way of life — all these have become nebulous, meaningless, sterile phrases.

This course of urban anonymity, of individual divorce from the general social life, erodes the foundations of democracy. For although we profess to be citizens of a democracy, and although we may vote once every four years, millions of our people feel deep down in their heart of hearts that there is no place for them that they do not “count.” They have no voice of their own, no organization (really their own instead of absentee) to represent them, no way in which they may lay their hand or their heart to the shaping of their own destinies.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“My brother-in-law has admitted that the anonymity makes his job much easier, as it would be difficult to inflict suffering on a person you had to face daily, an outlook that accounts for many things about our sad era, including the current state of the internet.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“I always say there's no way for a young person to understand the value of anonymity. I think the thing that I miss most in life is just the ability to be in the world unobserved. There's just a beauty in being able to sit on a sidewalk cafe with a cup of coffee.”
― Michelle Obama

“It seems I cannot be convinced; that somehow, within some human frame, there might possibly begin the decomposition of hope, into the truest of satisfactory beliefs; that of which, May lead one-in whole through means of transitory refraction-to the momentous regulation of one’s own Griefs and Pains, Plights and Sorrowfull-thoughts (.)
How can I Retrieve my love?
-that is I have been replaced herein by misadventure, how May I then return to thine own spirit? to thy guileless self I re-form and intreat what once you were: retrieve what cannot be so cruelly confirmed as to truthfully, with whole-heartedness become in any way, worthy of Replacement.”
― Anonymous

“It seems I cannot be convinced; that somehow, within some human frame, there might possibly begin the decomposition of hope, into the truest of satisfactory beliefs; that of which, May lead one-in whole through means of transitory refraction-to the momentous regulation of one’s own Griefs and Pains, Plights and Sorrowfull-thoughts (.)
How can I Retrieve my love?
-that is I have been replaced herein by misadventure, how May I then return to thine own spirit? to thy guileless self I re-form and intreat what once you were: retrieve what cannot be so cruelly confirmed as to truthfully, with whole-heartedness become in any way, unworthy of Redemption.”
― Anonymous

“It seems I cannot be convinced; that somehow, within some human frame, there might possibly begin the decomposition of hope, into the truest of satisfactory beliefs; that of which, May lead one-in whole through means of transitory refraction-to the momentous regulation of one’s own Griefs and Pains, Plights and Sorrowfull-thoughts (.)
How can I Retrieve my love?
-that is I have been replaced herein by misadventure, how May I then return to thine own spirit? to thy guileless self I re-form and intreat what once you were: retrieve what cannot be so cruelly confirmed as to truthfully, with whole-heartedness become in any way, unworthy of Retrieval.”
― Anonymous