Quotes about street
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“I was twenty then. What the hell, I used to say, take your time, Bandini. You got ten years to write a book, so take it easy, get out and learn about life, walk the streets. That’s your trouble: your ignorance of life.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust

Life, Books, Hell, Learning

“Max lifted his head, with great sorrow and great astonishment.
'There were stars,' He said. 'They burned my eyes.’
… from a Himmel street window, he wrote, the stars set fire to my eyes.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Star

“We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.”

Aimee Bender (1969) Novelist, short story writer

Source: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

World

“I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Source: Geek Love

“I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.”

Jon Ronson (1967) British journalist, documentary filmmaker, radio presenter and nonfiction author

Source: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

Family

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies. To be in the window and watch people being sent to concentration camps or being attacked in the street and do nothing, that's being dead.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

US News & World Report (27 October 1986)

Love, Life, Death, Hate

“Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

“It could be a meeting on the street, or a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, then suddenly there is a flash of recognition and the embers of kinship glow. There is an awakening between you, a sense of ancient knowing.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Sense

“Ah, Los Angeles! Dust and fog of your lonely streets. I am no longer lonely. Just you wait, all of you ghosts of this room, just you wait, because it will happen yet, and that Camilla, she can have her Sammy in the desert, with his cheap short stories and stinking prose, but wait until she has a taste of me, because it will happen, as sure as there's a God in heaven.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939)

God, Angels, Waiting

“Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.”

Michael Cunningham book The Hours

Source: The Hours

Love, Night

“They don't realize evil lives on their streets”

Lisa Scottoline (1955) American writer

Source: Every Fifteen Minutes

Evil

“Unbelievable! I said, "What would I be doing walking the streets at night as a stuffed olive- gate-crashing cocktail parties?”

Louise Rennison book Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging

Source: Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging

Night

“There are just some kind of men who-who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

Men, World, Business, Learning

“You can knock down kingdoms on a whim. What you need is someone to make sure you don't get hit by a carriage when you cross the street.”

Scott Lynch book The Republic of Thieves

Source: The Republic of Thieves

“You better hope that I never see you walking down the street while I’m driving my car! (Tory)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

Hope, Cars

“Sorry but nothing of much importance ever happened to me… I'm just a girl who forgot to look both ways before crossing the street.”

Gabrielle Zevin book Elsewhere

Source: Elsewhere

Way, Girl

“I'm becoming
the street.
Who are you in love with?
me?
Straight against the light I cross.”

Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) American poet, art critic and writer

Love, Light

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

essay, first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (November, 1945)
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

World, Weather

“What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 89
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

People

“And that is a story that no one can beat,
When I say that I saw it on Mulberry Street.”

Dr. Seuss book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937)
Source: And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street

“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer (1934), Chapter Four, Pappin
Context: I am a free man-and I need my freedom. I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion. I need sunshine and paving tones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself with only the music of my heart for company. What do you want of me? When I have something to say, I put it in print. When I have something to give, I give it. Your prying curiosity turns my stomach! Your compliments humiliate me. Your tea poisons me! I owe nothing to anyone, I would've responsible to God alone-if he exited!

Music, Heart, Despair

“But on that sunlit Sunday, Alexander knew nothing, thought nothing, imagined nothing. He forgot Dimitri and war and the Soviet Union and escape plans, and even America, and crossed the street for Tatiana Metanova.”

Paullina Simons book Tatiana and Alexander

Source: Tatiana and Alexander

War, Imagination

“So I find words I never thought to speak

In streets I never thought I should revisit

When I left my body on a distant shore.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Distant

“The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Death, Fashion

“All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Girl

“Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Love, Sadness, Angels, Way

“I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home”

Tracy Chevalier book Girl with a Pearl Earring

Source: Girl with a Pearl Earring

Life, Home

“Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

The Waves (1931)

Death

“I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

Source: Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose

Life, People, World, Thinking

“I don't know why it's called "getting lost." Even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turnd to sand, you are somewhere. It just isn't where you expected to be.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Vanishing Acts

Dead

“There was a time when I liked a good riot. Put on some heavy old street clothes that could stand a bit of sidewalk-scraping, infect myself with something good and contagious, then go out and stamp on some cops. It was great, being nine years old.”

Warren Ellis (1968) English comics and fiction writer

Time, Clothes

“… he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?" I said, "I don't know how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.”

Nelson Algren (1909–1981) American novelist, short story writer

Smile

“At this point, a spaceship could land on Main Street and Elvis could saunter out singing "Love Me Tender," and I wouldn't be surprised”

Michele Bardsley (1970) American writer

Source: Come Hell or High Water

Love, Singing

“Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.”

Elena Ferrante book My Brilliant Friend

Source: My Brilliant Friend

Children, Night

“You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city… you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes.”

Samuel R. Delany book Dhalgren

Source: Dhalgren

Change, Housing, Personality

“i usedta live in the world
really be in the world
free & sweet talkin
good mornin & thank-you & nice day
uh huh
i cant now
i cant be nice to nobody
nice is such a rip-off
regular beauty & a smile in the street
is just a set-up”

Ntozake Shange for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

Source: for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

World, Smile, Beauty

“Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.”

Ross Macdonald (1915–1983) Novelist

Angels, Sun

“There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets… when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.”

Charles Bukowski book Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Source: Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“I drive around the streets
an inch away from weeping,
ashamed of my sentimentality and
possible love.”

Charles Bukowski book Love Is a Dog from Hell

Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell

Love

“in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Source: Selected Poems

Night

“Anyway, seeking work is a tad difficult given the poor design of the streets with their prohibitive curbs and driveways that don't quite line up.”

Steve Martin book The Pleasure of My Company

Source: The Pleasure of My Company

“LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; NY gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

God, Feeling, Winter

“In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home.
It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard.
I walked the streets, savoring that long lost perfume.”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

Home, Spring

“People fear anyone who differs from what is considered normal, and in a small town the idea of normal can be as narrow as the streets.”

Elizabeth Chandler (1954) writer

Source: The Back Door of Midnight

People, Fear, Idea

“I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Source: 100 Love Sonnets

“It was strange, I reflected, as we went out into the golden evening of the Byzantine streets, that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one’s life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy.”

Elizabeth Kostova book The Historian

Source: The Historian (2005), Ch. 37

Life, Home, Joy

“The street finds its own uses for things.”

William Gibson Burning Chrome

Burning Chrome (1982)

“Ragnor and Catarina both begged him to give the instrument up. Random strangers on the street begged him to give the instrument up. Even cats ran away from him.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: What Really Happened in Peru

Cats

“I pray. I go to mass. I even remember to respect my elders and help little old ladies across the street. What the hell did I do to deserve this?”

Lora Leigh (1965) American writer

Source: Wild Card

Hell, Help

“I will tell you the secret to getting rich on Wall Street. You try to be greedy when others are fearful. And you try to be fearful when others are greedy.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Secret, Fear

“Truly we work and live on a streetful of splendid people, whom we are to love and serve even if they are uninterested in us!”

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

Source: The Neal A. Maxwell Quote Book

Love, People

“When this is over… we will got to the rainforest, or a beach as white as bone. We will eat grapes from the vine, we will swim with sea turtles, we will walk miles on cobblestone streets. We will laugh and talk and confess. We will.”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

Sea

“Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

“he came to think, It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

Thinking

“You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

Men

“When Tatiana looked up from her ice cream, she saw a soldier staring at her from across the street.”

Paullina Simons book The Bronze Horseman

Source: The Bronze Horseman

“You destroy buildings, fight monsters openly in the streets of the city, work with the police, show up in newspapers, advertise in the phone book, and ride zombie dinosaurs down Michigan Avenue, and think that you work in the shadows? Be reasonable.”

Jim Butcher book Skin Game

Source: Skin Game

Books, Thinking, Fight

“In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.”

Carson McCullers book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Peace

“If you drive a car, I'll tax the street;
if you try to sit, I'll tax your seat; if you get too cold, I'll tax the heat; if you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.”

George Harrison (1943–2001) British musician, former member of the Beatles

Cars

“Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.”

Hilary Mantel Bring Up the Bodies

Source: Bring Up the Bodies

Truth, Personality

“I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to.”

Jonathan Safran Foer (1977) Novelist

Way, Time

“There are more balls in twenty feet of street here then there are in all of Dublin, and I'm proud to be swaying in the nut sack.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Iced

“They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow.”

Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly

Author’s Note (p. 276)
Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977)

Children, Time

“We shall throw him out onto the streets, I promise you he'll be gone by morning.
Oh-no, you can't mean that-
Of course I don't. But you felt better for a moment there, didn't you?”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

“Life's just a cocktail party - on the street.”

Mick Jagger (1943) British rock musician, member of The Rolling Stones

Life

“Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.”

Janet Frame (1924–2004) New Zealand author

Imagination

“Sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whiskey and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind but falling in love and not getting arrested.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Love, Drink, Sleep

“Shame, isn’t it? That we only like our heroes out in the street when they are looking their best and their uniforms are ‘spit and polished,’ and not when they’re showing us the wounds they suffered on our behalf.”

Jacqueline Winspear Maisie Dobbs

Source: Maisie Dobbs

Suffering

“You pass people on the street, some are for you, some are not.”

Robert Henri (1865–1929) American painter

Source: The Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students, Bearing on the Concept and Technique of Picture Making, the Study of Art

People

“He crossed the street toward the man in the trench coat, which left me with two choices: follow my dad and see what was going on, or do what I was told.
I decided on the slightly less dangerous path.
I went to retrieve my sister”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

Sister

“Nothing is more deadly than a deserted, waiting street.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

Waiting

“The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: The Hero With a Thousand Faces

Beauty, Light, Change, Waiting

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.”

Allen Ginsberg book Howl

Howl (1956)

Madness, Night

“What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

Chance

“Everything is perfect on the street again, the world is permeated with roses of happiness all the time, but none of us know it. The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.”

Jack Kerouac book Lonesome Traveler

Source: Lonesome Traveler

Happiness, World, Dreams, Time

“Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.”

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Jewish-American political theorist

" Thoughts on Politics and Revolution: A Commentary http://books.google.com/books?id=iMIPAQAAMAAJ&q=&quot;Revolutionaries+do+not+make+revolutions+The+revolutionaries+are+those+who+know+when+power+is+lying+in+the+street+and+when+they+can+pick+it+up+Armed&quot;". <br class="br">Crises of the Republic (1969)

Lying

“Done time in the lock-up, done time on the streets. Done time on the upswing, and time in defeat. I know what I'm askin'. I know it's a lot. Just to say that I love you. Believe it or not.”

Jerry Garcia (1942–1995) American musician and member of the Grateful Dead

Love, Time

“i am like a survivor
of the flood
walking through the streets
drenched with
God
surprised that all of the
drowned victims
are still walking and talking”

Saul Williams (1972) American singer, musician, poet, writer, and actor

Source: , said the shotgun to the head.

God

“Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Way

“And I shall drive my chariot
Down your streets and cry
'Hey, it's me, I'm dynamite
And I don't know why'
We shall walk and talk
In gardens all misty wet with rain
And I will never, never, never
Grow so old again”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Sweet Thing
Song lyrics, Astral Weeks (1969)

Cry

“live out where the real winds blow—to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested… Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

1980s, Generation of Swine (1988)
Context: Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish — a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow — to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested...
Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.

Love, Drink, Sleep, Time