Top 65 Overheard Quotes & Sayings

I was eight when I found out I was adopted. My step-brother told me. He'd overheard my mum and my stepdad at the time talking about it, and he threw it in my face. But I didn't really care. It didn't seem relevant, because I never once in my life felt unloved or like I was a burden.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

It's free of hip dialing. You can have some pretty confidential conversations and not get overheard by the camera man by talking into this flip phone.

I often think about how my sons will come to know about September 11th. Something overheard? A newspaper image? In school? I would prefer that they learn about it from my wife and me, in a deliberate and safe way. But it's hard to imagine ever feeling ready to broach the subject without some impetus.

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

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.)

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

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.

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.

I'm actually a very lazy person. Most of the time, I'm happy to sit around and stare. Or watch bad TV soaps. It's quite rare for me to get inspired by anything, but it could be something small. A view of the Serpentine. A snatch of music. Or a little shred of conversation overheard on a bus, such as, 'You also will marry someone of my choice.'

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.

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?

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

I once overheard the sweetest old woman behind me on a train tell her adorable old husband as he scoffed down a ham sandwich she had brought along, "If you ever yell at me to "stop bringing a ham sandwich with me every where we go" again? Next time I'm bringing a gun. And I'm blowing your God damn head off."

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

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.

Suddenly so many things she'd overheard her brothers and Quinn saying when Grimm had been in residence made sense, and upon reflection she suspected a part of her had always known. Her love was a legendary warrior who had grown to despise himself, cut off from his roots. But now that he was home and given the time to explore those roots, he might be able to make peace with himself at long last.

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

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

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

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

I overheard people saying, 'She thinks she's so great because she's Debbie Reynolds' daughter!' And I didn't like it; it made me different from other people, and I wanted to be the same.

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.

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

Singer and actress Gertrude Lawrence once overheard an assistant describing the beauty of a coat she knew she could never even dream of affording. Having ascertained the exact shop, coat and price, Ms. Lawrence returned from her lunch break wearing that coat, apparently in order to flaunt and emphasize her greater purchasing power and, by inference, her superior status.

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.

Inspiration is everywhere - film, television, newspapers, novels, overheard conversations, whatever you can tap into. It's out there, and I've been at this long enough to know that it won't always just come to me; sometimes I have to go get it.

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.'

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.'

There's been some people I've overheard talking about 'Mindhunter.' I'll lean in and say, 'Hey, I haven't seen it yet. Is it any good?' And they'll say, 'Yeah, you should go check it out.'

... I am more of an ambler. I once overheard my old boss in Dublin describe me as very "hello trees, hello flowers." It was intended as an insult and it fulfilled its brief; I was insulted. I had little interest in greeting trees and flowers but nor did I treat life as a treadmill, on which it was vital to keep fleeing forward in order to avoid being sucked off the back and out of the game.

Before I had a double mastectomy, I was already pretty flat-chested, and I made so many jokes over the years about how small my chest was that I started to think that maybe my boobs overheard me... and were just like, 'You know what? We're sick of this. Let's kill her.'

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.

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.

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.

I overheard one of my friends say, 'If Amari scores, I bet he's real happy and he'll get real excited.' I just so happened to score, and since I heard him say that, I was like, 'Nah, I'm not going to get really excited.' And for some reason, that felt like the right thing to do. I been the same way since.

If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as I think all of these poems are. It seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others.

I know, and know of, people who said they have taken a hit of crack and never tried it again. I overheard one woman in LA say she took one hit and it mad her feel so good, she was afraid to try it again. I am not a doctor, but I do believe that if one is predisposed to addiction, taking one hit may be all it takes. Certainly that is how it worked out for me.

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

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

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

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.'

Grief is like wandering through a minefield, as my mother puts it: however carefully you tread, a sudden detonation can happen out of nowhere. A song played in a supermarket; an overheard phrase; someone in the distance who your mind cruelly suggests is your loved one for a fleeting moment.

For every grand and finely worded statement by the CEO, the brand is also defined by derisory consumer comments overheard in a hallway, or in a chat room on the Internet. Brands are sponges for content, for images, for fleeting feelings. They become psychological concepts held in the minds of the public, where they may stay forever. As such you can’t entirely control a brand. At best you can only guide and influence it.

I'm inspired by watching and listening to people. For example, my first novel, The Scale, came to life after I overheard two women discussing their struggle with their weight at the gym.

For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay.

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.

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.

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.

I love to write down things I notice about people or things I've overheard people saying that are interesting. I love people-watching, and I love taking the time to notice the small things.

There is no friendship that cares about an overheard secret.

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.

I was a bartender in New York and I overheard this girl saying she made $3000 doing a commercial. A kid at work told me, 'Hey, I know this director and he'd really like you!'. So I walked into this guy's office and was like 'I was thinking maybe I could make $3000' and he hired me for commercials, short films, like 15 jobs in a row.

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.

I heard an Englishman, who had been long resident in America, declare that in following, in meeting, or in overtaking, in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffee-house, or at home, he had never overheard Americans conversing without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them. Such unity of purpose ... can ... be found nowhere else, except... in an ant's nest.