Asphalt Quotes

• You could cover the whole earth with asphalt, but sooner or later green grass would break through.

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Break Through, Environmental, Earth

  78 Copy quote

• True friendship is like the asphalt of life. It fills in the potholes and makes the journey smooth.

  Richard G. Scott

  True Friend, Journey, Smooth

  12 Copy quote

• How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?

  Charles Lindbergh

  Wall, Men, Wind

  "Aviation, Geography, and Race". Reader's Digest, pp. 64-67, November 1939.

  20 Copy quote

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• Here were decent godless people;
  Their only monument the asphalt road
  And a thousand lost golf balls.

  T. S. Eliot

  Golf, People, Balls

  "Choruses from the Rock" pt. 3 (1934)

  19 Copy quote

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• If he'd just crowded me down to the side of the asphalt, I'd have been OK. But when he ran me completely off the racetrack, I lost it.

  Cale Yarborough

  Lost Friendship, Sides, Ran

  17 Copy quote

• [It is] the most hideous waterfront structure ever inflicted on a city by a combination of architectural conceit and official bad taste. the Cathedral of Asphalt.

  Robert Moses

  Cities, Taste, Architecture

  33 Copy quote

• At the Tour, you always have some fantastic days and some days where you hit the asphalt. Today was an asphalt day for me.

  Jens Voigt

  Today, Fantastic

  18 Copy quote

• I learned to swing on monkey bars over asphalt. I learned that if you fall, it hurts, so you try not to fall. But it's still worth swinging.

  Tim Cordes

  Hurt, Fall, Swings

  4 Copy quote

• The street curves in and out, up and down in great waves of asphalt; at night the granite tomb is noisy with starlings like the creaking of many axles; only the tired walker know how much there is to climb, how the sidewalk curves into the cold wind.

  Charles Reznikoff

  Tired, Night, Journey

  Charles Reznikoff, Seamus Cooney (2005). “The Poems of Charles Reznikoff: 1918-1975”, p.157, David R. Godine Publisher

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• 

  Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
  For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
  America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
  And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.

  George Carlin

  Beautiful, Song, Nature

  "Class Clown". Comedy album by George Carlin, 1972.

  36 Copy quote

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• The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.

  Karl Kraus

  Cities, Vienna, Culture

  Jonathan Franzen, Karl Kraus (2013). “The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus”, p.13, Macmillan

  167 Copy quote

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• Experience has taught me never to trust a policeman. Just when you think one's all right, he turns legit.

  Ben Maddow

  Trust, Thinking, Noir

  "Fictional character: Doc Riedenschneider". "The Asphalt Jungle", 1950.

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• A guy walks into a pub with a lump of asphalt on His shoulder, He says to the bar man give us a pint and one for the road.

  Tommy Cooper

  Funny, Humor, Men

  11 Copy quote

• One way or another we all work for our vice.

  Ben Maddow

  Weakness, Vices, Way

  "Fictional character: Doc Erwin Riedenschneider". "The Asphalt Jungle", www.imdb.com. 1950.

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• The inside of the old Camaro smelled like asphalt and desire, gasoline and dreams.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Dream, Desire, Gasoline

  Maggie Stiefvater (2013). “The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, Book 2)”, p.237, Scholastic Inc.

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• A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.

  Edward Abbey

  Men, Cities, Feet

  Edward Abbey (1968). “Desert Solitaire”, p.129, Simon and Schuster

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• It was the day of the worms. That first almost-warm, after-the-rainy-night day in April, when you bolt from your house to find yourself in a world of worms. They were as numerous here in the East End as they had been in the West. The sidewalks, the streets. The very places where they didn't belong. Forlorn, marooned on concrete and asphalt, no place to burrow, April's orphans.

  Jerry Spinelli

  Night, House, Finding Yourself

  Jerry Spinelli (1991). “Maniac Magee”

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• Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss.... We easily forget that we are track-markers, through, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete--and these are substances not easily impressed.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Animal, Journey, Snow

  9 Copy quote

• For some of us, the soul is resident in the sole, and yearns ceaselessly for light and air and self-expression. Our feet are our very selves. The touch of floor or carpet, grass or mud or asphalt, speaks to us loud and clear from the foot, that scorned and lowly organ as dear to us as our eyes and ears.

  Barbara Holland

  Eye, Feet, Light

  6 Copy quote

• Woods and forests have been essentialt to the imagination of these islands, and of countries throughout the world, for centuries. It is for this reason that when woods are felled, when they are suppressed by tarmac and concrete and asphalt, it is not only unique species and habitats that disappear, but also unique memories, unique forms of thought.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Country, Memories, Unique

  Robert Macfarlane (2008). “The Wild Places”, p.69, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

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• Think about all the selfish non-smokers out there, driving around on asphalt, drinking water out of the tap, not even thinking about how smokers' taxes help pay for it all.

  George Singleton

  Selfish, Drinking, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

  3 Copy quote

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• [London is] like the sight of a heavy sea from a rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic.... One lives in it, afloat but half submerged in a heavy flood of brick, stone, asphalt, slate, steel, glass, concrete, and tarmac, seeing nothing fixable beyond a few score white spires that splash up like spits of foam above the next glum wave of dirty buildings.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Dirty, Sight, Sea

  V.S. Pritchett (2009). “Mr. Beluncle: A Novel”, p.13, Modern Library

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• Marilyn was one step from oblivion when I directed her in The Asphalt Jungle. I remember she impressed me more off the screen than on…there was something touching and appealing about her.

  John Huston

  Touching, Steps, Remember

  11 Copy quote

• After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.

  Louis Calhern

  Left Hand, Crime, Form

  "Fictional character: Alonzo Emmerich". "The Asphalt Jungle", 1950.

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• In a future that portends stronger and more-frequent hurricanes striking North America's Atlantic coast, ferocious winds will pummel tall, unsteady structures. Some will topple, knocking down others. Like a gap in the forest when a giant tree falls, new growth will rush in. Gradually, the asphalt jungle will give way to a real one.

  Alan Weisman

  Real, Fall, America

  6 Copy quote