Quotes about subway (42 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Everything I ever projected New York to be, it was—even the stinky, ratty, vomity part of it. Everybody has to do the subway. Everybody has to smell the same smells. And people get mad all the time. When people don’t like something, like ‘Get out of my way you blah, blah, blah.’ But [in L. A. ] it’s like, ‘How ya doing? Let’s do lunch! I love you!”

Jeff Buckley (1966–1997) American singer, guitarist and songwriter

KCRW – Man In The Moon (January 4, 1994)
From Interviews

Love , People , Way , Time

“Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.”

Terry Pratchett book Moving Pictures

Source: Moving Pictures

Understanding

“The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Hope

“And that phrase - 'sleeping like a baby.' Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.”

Jenny Offill book Dept. of Speculation

Source: Dept. of Speculation

Lie , Sleep , Baby

“Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

Relationship , Feeling , Time

“Demon slayers take the subway?”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

“Wall Street is the only place that people ride to work in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.”

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

As quoted in The Money Adventure (1998) by Egbert Sukop, p. 128

People

“Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

Suicide , Parting

“I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

People

“I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totallylife. It's more important to confirm the least sincere. The clouds get enough attention as it is…”

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

People , Grass , Sincerity

“Does the cosmos contain keys for opening my diving bell? A subway line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back? We must keep looking.”

Jean-Dominique Bauby book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Source: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Freedom , Strong

“Working your whole life wondering where the day went, the subway stays packed like a multicultural slaveship. It's rushhour 2.30 to 8 non-stoppin and people coming home after corporate sharecropping.”

Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist

Harlem Streets
Albums, Revolutionary Vol. 2 (2003)

Life , People , Home

“Those without a chip will not be allowed in high security places like military installations, prisons, government buildings of all sorts and of course airports, subways, trains and later cars and trucks. Eventually, after some major planned crisis of course, it will become mandatory and anyone who does not take this chip will not only not be allowed to do those things, they will become “enemies of the state” for “disrupting the economy” or “threatening public security” or whatever phrase they can dream up to excuse arresting, imprisoning and eventually executing those who don't cooperate. Wars and civil unrest have always been great “cover” for implementing grabs for power.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), pp. 140-141

War , Dreams , Cars , Training

“Let's transplant the primitive soul to the ultramodern New York, inject his soul with the noise of the subway, of the 'el', and may his brain become a long street of buildings 224 stories high.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

Barcelona - Dada, 1917
1915 - 1940
Source: a letter to Enric C. Ricart, 1 October 1917; as quoted in Calder Miró, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 47

Soul

“I am a very careless person in some ways, I lose everything. But I never lost anything of this Course. People would would stop me in the subway and say, “Miss, you forgot your something or other, and hand it back to me.” Taxis would honk their horns, you know and say, “You left something in the back seat.” My secretary would say, “Are you sure this belongs in this case report, it doesn't sound right?” It was impossible to lose this Course, and I tried. But it… followed me around in an odd kind of way. People would send it back to me, anything. And I always got it back. We never lost anything, which is incredible.”

Helen Schucman (1909–1981) Clinical Psychologist

Helen Schucman (1976), in interview by David Hammond August 1976 in Belvedere, California. Republished in: " An interview with Helen Schucman http://merelyacim.wikispaces.com/An+interview+with+Helen+Schucman" at merelyacim.wikispaces.com. Accessed May 21, 2014.

People , Way , Personality

“My life is ticking away one subway token at a time - a never ending pirouette of arriving and departing, pushing through turnstiles, nodding goodbye and hello. In eight hours I'll be allowed to turn around and go home.”

Rob Payne (1973) Canadian writer

Source: Working Class Zero (2003), Chapter 1, p. 1 (opening line...)

Life , Home , Time

“Once again he began to feel bad in the best of environments. And he noticed that other people did too. So bad did they feel, in fact, that it took the worst of news to cheer them up. On the finest mornings he noticed that people in the subway looked awful until they opened their newspapers and read of some airliner crashing and killing all hundred and seven passengers. Where there had been misery in their happiness, now as they shook their heads dolefully at the tragedy they became happy in their misery.”

Walker Percy book The Last Gentleman

The Last Gentleman (1966)

People , Feeling , Reading , Happiness

“So I'm eating Subway this evening when a beetle flies down and burrows into my sandwich. Never a bad time to start losing weight, is there.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

6 October 2010
Twitter

Time

“One of the most extraordinary things about industrial society of the present day is its idiot lack of memory. Tabloids and movies take the place of mental processes and revolts, crimes, despairs pass off in a dribble of vague words and rubber stamp phrases without leaving a scratch on the mind of the driven instalment-paying, subway-packing mass.”

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter

"Sacco and Vanzetti," review of Eugene Lyons's The Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti, Nov 1927

Memory , Despair

“And the goddamn subway reeked like a sewer. All those goddamn animals jammed into the train like the ark... yeah, thats what they are, a bunch of stinking animals.”

Hubert Selby Jr. book The Demon

The Demon (1976)

Animals , Training

“I mean, I did ride the Paris subway in an attempt to get pick-pocketed in order to see how exactly they did it. My buddy was videoing the whole thing. No one picked my pocket. We got bolder and bolder as we went, but it didn’t pan out for us.”

Matt Damon (1970) American actor, screenwriter, and producer

"Matt Damon Discusses Ocean's 12, (8 December 2004) http://movies.about.com/od/oceanstwelve/a/oceansmd120804.htm

“And so I continue in borderline poverty, save for my one indulgence, no, my single absolute necessity: I take cabs. Yes, on occasion, when I wish to see what people with unpleasant skin conditions are wearing, I do take the subway. I have never, I am proud to say, taken the bus, because people who take the bus have given up.”

Paul Rudnick book I Shudder

Source: I Shudder (2009), p. 188

People

“We live in a system described in obsolete terms. We have come to believe our own repeated declarations that our society is based on individual initiative – whereas, in fact, most of it is no more individual than an infantry division. We assume that our economic system is based on “private property.” Yet most industrial property is is no more private than a seat in a subway train, and indeed it is questionable whether much of it can be called “property” at all. We indignantly deny that we are collectivist, yet it is demonstrable that more than two-thirds of our enterprise is possible only because it is collectivist: what is really meant is that the State did not do the collectivizing.”

Adolf A. Berle (1895–1971) American diplomat

Source: Power Without Property, 1959, p. 27; Cited in asociologist.com http://asociologist.com/2009/12/07/retrosociology-quotes-of-the-day-berle-power-without-property/, 2009/12/07.

Question , Training

“This proposal will help protect everyone from hazardous lead paint chips falling onto the street. We need to remove this dangerous problem from our above ground subway lines.”

Jose Peralta (1971–2018) American politician

Problem , Help , Painting

“The clarity of Socrates' situation is remarkable. … his exit is wonderfully seductive. It is calm, clear, convincing. Friends are present, wise words are said, the ethical unfolding of life is tied up in a neat package. And then he slips away, slowly becoming stone-cold from the feet up. It is our fantasy of the normal death, with the addition of social and prophetic implications, to say nothing of heroic proportions. Again, most of us will likely drop dead on a subway platform, in the middle of an orgasm or straining on a toilet seat early in the morning. The real tragedy of death may be just how often it is comic.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

On Equilibrium (2001)

Life , Death , Dead

“I am a Black revolutionary woman, and because of this i have been charged with and accused of every alleged crime in which a woman was believed to have participated. The alleged crimes in which only men were supposedly involved, i have been accused of planning. They have plastered pictures alleged to be me in post offices, airports, hotels, police cars, subways, banks, television, and newspapers. They have offered over fifty thousand dollars in rewards for my capture and they have issued orders to shoot on sight and shoot to kill.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

To My People (July 4, 1973)

Men , Cars

“By any precise definition, Washington is a city of advanced depravity. There one meets and dines with the truly great killers of the age, but only the quirkily fastidious are offended, for the killers are urbane and learned gentlemen who discuss their work with wit and charm and know which tool to use on the escargots.
On New York's East Side one occasionally meets a person so palpably evil as to be fascinatingly irresistible. There is a smell of power and danger on these people, and one may be horrified, exhilarated, disgusted or mesmerized by the awful possibilities they suggest, but never simply depressed.
Depression comes in the presence of depravity that makes no pretense about itself, a kind of depravity that says, "You and I, we are base, ugly, tasteless, cruel and beastly; let's admit it and have a good wallow."
That is how Times Square speaks. And not only Times Square. Few cities in the country lack the same amenities. Pornography, prostitution, massage parlors, hard-core movies, narcotics dealers — all seem to be inescapable and permanent results of an enlightened view of liberty which has expanded the American's right to choose his own method of shaping a life.
Granted such freedom, it was probably inevitable that many of us would yield to the worst instincts, and many do, and not only in New York. Most cities, however, are able to keep the evidence out of the center of town. Under a rock, as it were. In New York, a concatenation of economics, shifting real estate values and subway lines has worked to turn the rock over and put the show on display in the middle of town.
What used to be called "The Crossroads of the World" is now a sprawling testament to the dreariness which liberty can produce when it permits people with no taste whatever to enjoy the same right to depravity as the elegant classes.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"Cheesy" (p.231)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

Life , People , Age , World

“You know, the media and the politicians would have us believe that there's something inherently immoral about terrorism. That is, they would have us believe that it's not immoral for us to destroy a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan with cruise missiles, but it is immoral for someone like Bin Laden to blow up a government building in Washington with a truck bomb. It's okay for us to take out an air-raid shelter full of women and children in Baghdad with a smart bomb, but it's cowardly and immoral for an Iraqi or Iranian agent to pop a vial of sarin in a New York subway tunnel. Really, what should we expect? They don't have aircraft carriers and cruise missiles and stealth bombers. So should we expect them to just sit there and take their punishment when we wage war on them? I think that it is the most reasonable thing in the world for them to hit back at us in the only way they can. It actually takes more courage to be a terrorist behind enemy lines than it does to push the firing button for a cruise missile a hundred miles away from your target. And yet we certainly will see Bill Clinton and every other Jew-serving politician in our government on television denouncing as a "cowardly act" the first terrorist bomb which goes off in the United States as a result of a war against Iraq. And don't be surprised when the FBI and the CIA announce that they have studied the evidence carefully and have determined that it was Iranian terrorists who built the bomb, so that the Jews will have an excuse for expanding the war to take out Iran as well as Iraq.”

William Luther Pierce (1933–2002) American white nationalist

Why War? (November 21, 1998) http://web.archive.org/web/20070324011124/http://www.natvan.com/pub/1998/112198.txt, American Dissident Voices Broadcast of November 21, 1998 http://archive.org/details/DrWilliamPierceAudioArchive308RadioBroadcasts
1990s, 1990

Women , War , Children , World

“[in regards to the subway breakfast sandwich not being available after 11AM] I'll go "Uh, hey man, uh gimme an egg and cheese", and the kid will say, "I'm sorry, sir, it's after 11, we put all that stuff away." You didn't put it away… it's in the second green cabinet, it's right there. This place is as big as a photo-mat, there is no "away" in the building, you don't own "away". There's no Brink's truck that pulls up at 11:02 and yanks out the eggs under armed guard.”

Doug Stanhope (1967) American stand-up comedian, actor, and author

Deadbeat Hero (2004)

Photo

“Well I've seen travel in many ways
I've traveled in cars and old subways
But in Birmingham some people chose
To fly down the street from a fire hose.
Doin' some hard travelin'…from hydrants of plenty.”

Phil Ochs (1940–1976) American protest singer and songwriter

"Talking Birmingham Jam" http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/ochs/lyrics/talking-birmingham-jam.html from I Ain't Marching Anymore (1965)
Lyrics

People , Cars , Way , Travel

“We are growing from a cheerful small town where everyone waves off their front porch to the subway of New York City where everyone rushes by. How do you preserve the culture that has worked so well?”

Jimmy Wales (1966) Wikipedia co-founder and American Internet entrepreneur

As quoted in ExpressIndia (7 September 2005) http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=54191

“It's easy to be cynical; harder is remembering that on any given day the person beside you on the subway or taking to long to pay for a tub of yogurt at the supermarket could be going through something tremendous and sorrowful and arduous.”

Rob Payne (1973) Canadian writer

Source: Working Class Zero (2003), Chapter 33, p. 250

Personality

“I see Professionalism as a spreading disease of the present-day world, a sort of poly-oligarchy by which various groups (subway conductors, social workers, bricklayers) can bring things to a halt if their particular demands are not met. (Meanwhile, the irrelevance of each profession increases, in proportion to its increasing rigidity.) Such lucky groups demand more in each go-round - but meantime, the number who are permanently unemployed grows and grows.”

Ted Nelson (1937) American information technologist, philosopher, and sociologist; coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia"

Computer Lib
Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974, rev. 1987)

World , Disease

“Morgenbesser was leaving a subway station in New York City and put his pipe in his mouth as he was ascending the steps. A police officer told him that there was no smoking on the subway. Morgenbesser pointed out that he was leaving the subway, not entering it, and hadn't lit up yet anyway. The cop again said that smoking was not allowed in the subway, and Morgenbesser repeated his comment. The cop said, "If I let you do it, I'd have to let everyone do it." Morgenbesser replied, "Who do you think you are, Kant?" The word "Kant" was mistaken for a vulgar epithet and Morgenbesser had to explain the situation at the police station.”

Sidney Morgenbesser (1921–2004) American philosopher

"Kant", properly pronounced, sounds much like a vulgar "C-word" which is what he was mistaken for having said The Independent, The Independent, Professor Sidney Morgenbesser: Philosopher celebrated for his withering New York Jewish humour http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-sidney-morgenbesser-550224.html, 6 August 2004. The Times, Sidney Morgenbesser: Erudite and influential American linguistic philosopher with the analytical acuity of Spinoza and the blunt wit of Groucho Marx https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sidney-morgenbesser-5cz8gg8qfvm, September 8, 2004.

Thinking

“I put my books in a bag because I don't care anymore if people in the subway look at me admiringly. I can't hold on to a girl, I can't keep an office job, I make a fool of myself in my first literature class and I wonder why I left Limerick at all. […] I could have read Jonathan Swift to my heart's content not giving a fiddler's fart whether he was a satirist or a seanachie.”

Frank McCourt book 'Tis

§23
'Tis (2000)

People , Books , Fools , Girl

“You don't need to do nation building in Israel, we're already built. You don't need to export democracy to Israel, we've already got it. You don't need to send American troops to Israel, we defend ourselves… Israel is not what is wrong about the Middle East, Israel is what is right about the Middle East… The tyranny in Tehran brutalizes its own people. It supports attacks against American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. It subjugates Lebanon and Gaza. It sponsors terror worldwide… A nuclear-armed Iran would ignite a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. It would give terrorists a nuclear umbrella. It would make the nightmare of nuclear terrorism a clear and present danger throughout the world. I want you to understand what this means. They could put the bomb anywhere. They could put it on a missile. It could be on a container ship in a port, or in a suitcase on a subway… Now the threat to my country cannot be overstated. Those who dismiss it are sticking their heads in the sand. Less than seven decades after six million Jews were murdered, Iran's leaders deny the Holocaust of the Jewish people, while calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state. Leaders who spew such venom, should be banned from every respectable forum on the planet. But there is something that makes the outrage even greater: The lack of outrage. In much of the international community, the calls for our destruction are met with utter silence. It is even worse because there are many who rush to condemn Israel for defending itself against Iran's terror proxies… When we say never again, we mean never again! Israel always reserves the right to defend itself… In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers. We are not the British in India. We are not the Belgians in the Congo. This is the land of our forefathers, the Land of Israel, to which Abraham brought the idea of one God, where David set out to confront Goliath, and where Isaiah saw a vision of eternal peace… No distortion of history can deny the four thousand year old bond, between the Jewish people and the Jewish land… Peace cannot be imposed. It must be negotiated. But it can only be negotiated with partners committed to peace.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

Address to joint meeting of the U.S. Congress http://www.c-span.org/video/?299666-1/israeli-prime-minister-netanyahu-address-joint-meeting-congress (24 May 2011).
2010s, 2011, Address to joint meeting of the U.S. Congress (May 2011)

God , People , World , Peace

“Alfie was an organizer. He would telephone the other kids a week before that first practice session (which he euphemistically called spring training), and he would knock on their doors the morning of, and they would look out the windows and say, "Hey, it's snowing," and he would say, "It's not snowing all that hard. See you in a half-hour." So we would gather our tired, cold bodies together, throw on our baseball clothes—old shirts, old pants, sneakers, old baseball gloves—and grab a couple of bats and scuffed-up balls, and we would pile onto the subway and ride to Van Cortland Park. We would run to make sure we'd be first to claim a ball field. Of course we were first. Nobody else was that crazy. My brother would direct practice for a couple of hours, batting practice, catching fungoes, fielding, practicing our curves and drops on the sidelines, fingers aching from contact with batted or thrown baseballs. We threw ourselves across that hard bone of a field so we would be ready when the spring suns finally thawed the ground at our feet. If the still-awake dreams of hunting lions in Africa were the peak moments of my night life, those frozen ball fields of February were the highlights of my days.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

Recalling his late brother, from "Life with Alfie," https://books.google.com/books?id=PWEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA233&dq=%22Alfie+was+an+organizer%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAGoVChMIiqWJ2oHaxwIVipANCh2Utw2g#v=onepage&q=%22Alfie%20was%20an%20organizer%22&f=false in Orange Coast Magazine (November 1990), pp. 233–234
Other Topics

Life , Dreams , Spring , Sun

“Roberto Clemente doesn't care too much for New York. Says there are too many people and everybody is in too much of a hurry. He had one ride on the subway with Felipe Montemayor as his guide and they got lost.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As paraphrased in "The Scoreboard: Thursday" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=b0EqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=000EAAAAIBAJ&pg=4340%2C3027303 by Les Biederman, in The Pittsburgh Press (Saturday, June 11, 1955), p. 6
Other, <big><big>1950s</big></big>, <big>1955</big>

People

“And the sign said "The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence"”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

The Sound of Silence
Song lyrics, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. (1964)
Context: And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said "The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence"

Silence

“I would spend a nickel on the subway and go arbitrarily to some other stop and look around there.”

Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) American–Canadian journalist, author on urbanism and activist (1916-2006)

Interview in Toronto Canada (6 September 2000), by Jim Kunstler, Metropolis Magazine (March 2001) http://www.kunstler.com/mags_jacobs1.htm
Context: I would spend a nickel on the subway and go arbitrarily to some other stop and look around there. So I was roaming the city in the afternoons and applying for jobs in the morning. And one day I found myself in a neighborhood I just liked so much…it was one of those times I had put a nickel in and just invested something. And where did I get out? I just liked the sound of the name: Christopher Street — so I got out at Christopher Street, and I was enchanted with this neighborhood, and walked around it all afternoon and then I rushed back to Brooklyn. And I said, "Betty I found out where we have to live."

“Every artist who’s really into their work disappears into the creative flow. This is akin to some of the concentration-oriented meditations of the various sacred traditions. Images come in all different ways. You can get visions when you’re tripping on drugs, when you’re dreaming or in a hypnogogic state before dropping off to sleep, while listening to music or even waiting for the subway.”

Alex Grey (1953) American artist

High Times interview (2002)

Sleep , Waiting , Dreams , Music

“He had the high degree of courage so common in the human race, a race capable of conceiving death, yet able to face its probability daily, on the highway, on the obstetrics table, on the battlefield, in the air, in the subway—and to face lightheartedly the certainty of death in the end.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Goldfish Bowl

Goldfish Bowl (p. 381)
Short fiction, Off the Main Sequence (2005)

Courage , Death