Street Quotes (page 2)
the world has become man's right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for friendship the right to friendship, the desire to exceed the speed limit the right to exceed the speed limit, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book the right to publish a book, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night the right to shout in the street.
Milan Kundera
I like walking heavy on these disease-ridden streets. I like walking the streets knowing that underneath my jacket is the perfect solution to any dilemma I might encounter. I look at people differently. I meet their gaze until they look away. I like taking my gun for walks. I do not believe in hope. I do not believe that people are going to someday get it together and live in peace and harmony. I don't have time for political correctness. I'm not going to try to talk my way out of a bad...
Henry Rollins
Haunted. Gulp down your wine, old friends of mine, Roar through the darkness, stamp and sing. And lay ghost hands on everything, But leave the noonday's warm sunshine. To living lads for mirth and wine. I met you suddenly down the street, Strangers assume your phantom faces, You grin at me from daylight places, Dead, long dead, I'm ashamed to greet. Dead men down the morning street.
Robert Graves
...I had stood outside of Poe's house on 3rd street, too, and had done the same thing, staring mournfully up at the windows. The city was like some uncarved block without any name or shape and it showed no favoritism. Everything was always new, always changing. It was never the same old crowd upon the streets.
Bob Dylan
Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into...
Vladimir Nabokov
There is a place where the sidewalk ends. And before the street begins, And there the grass grows soft and white, And there the sun burns crimson bright, And there the moon-bird rests from his flight. To cool in the peppermint wind. Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black. And the dark street winds and bends. Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow. We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow, And watch where the chalk-white arrows go. To the place where the sidewalk...
Shel Silverstein
And here he is, letting the massive steel street door click shut behind him, standing at the top of the three iron steps that lead down to the shattered sidewalk. New York is probably, in this regard at least, the strangest city in the world, so many of its denizens living as they (we) do among the unreconstructed remnants of nineteenth-century sweatshops and tenements, the streets potholed and buckling while right over there, around the corner, is a Chanel boutique. We go shopping amid the...
Michael Cunningham
Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.
Walter Benjamin
By day they’re full of
meaningless activity; by night they’re full of a
meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night
I am I. There is no diference between me and these
streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which
perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things.
Fernando Pessoa
If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.
Martin Luther King jr.
Dark house, by which once more I stand. Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat. So quickly, waiting for a hand, A hand that can be clasp'd no more -Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep. At earliest morning to the door. He is not here; but far away. The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain. On the bald street breaks the blank day.
Alfred Lord Tennyson