Pavement Quotes - Page 3

• Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

  Allen Ginsberg

  Reading, Eye, Winter

  Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish, Part I”

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• She went out in the city with its lights like a radioactive phosphorescence, wandered through galleries where the high-priced art on the walls was the same as the graffiti scrawled outside by taggers who were arrested or killed for it, went to parties in hotel rooms where white-skinned, lingerie-clad rock stars had been staying the night their husbands shot themselves in the head, listened to music in nightclubs where stunning boyish actors had OD'd on the pavement.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Art, Stars, Wall

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• Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Civilization, Feet, Illusion

  Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.396, Faber & Faber

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• Suppose I lay down on the pavement and you run over me a few times with my own car...just for old times.

  Janet Evanovich

  Running, Car, Old Time

  Janet Evanovich (2011). “Stephanie Plum One, Two, Three: One for the Money, Two for the Dough, Three to Get Deadly”, p.102, Simon and Schuster

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• You're assuming they would listen to me," I said. Cole lifted his hands off the roof of the Volkswagen; cloudy fingerprints evaporated seconds ater he did. "We all listen to you, Sam." He jumped to the pavement. "You just don't always talk to us.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Hands, Assuming, Fingerprints

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• You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together - until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.

  Nell Freudenberger

  Self, Tree, Together

  Nell Freudenberger (2012). “The Newlyweds”, p.207, Vintage

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• The basic scam in the Internet age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out fiftieth-story windows, and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

  Matt Taibbi

  Phones, Games, Age

  Matt Taibbi (2010). “Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America”, p.213, Spiegel & Grau

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• I was lingering out on the pavement. There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him . . . I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck . . . Wherever I am, I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows.

  Bob Dylan

  Rocks, Missing, Done

  Bob Dylan (2004). “Chronicles: Volume One”, p.147, Simon and Schuster

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• The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

  Penelope Lively

  Block, Grief, Eye

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.58, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• It was so quiet that morning in Paris that the heels of my two companions and myself were loud on the deserted pavements. It was a city of shuttered shops, and barred windows, and deserted avenues.

  Philip Gibbs

  Morning, High Heels, Cities

  Philip Gibbs (1946). “The Pageant of the Years: An Autobiography”

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• He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman.

  Lewis Mumford

  New York, Manhattan, Soil

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• All our institutions rest upon business. Without it we should not have schools, colleges, churches, parks, playgrounds, pavements, books, libraries, art, music, or anything else that we value.

  Charles Gates, Jr.

  Art, Business, Book

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• Should I give up or should I just keep chasing pavement, even if it leads nowhere?

  Adele

  Giving Up, Should, Chasing

  Song: Chasing Pavements, Album: 19, 2008

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• We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud.

  Jay Griffiths

  Animal, Blood, Skins

  Jay Griffiths (2015). “Savage Grace: A Journey in Wildness”, p.53, Counterpoint

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• I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core.

  William Butler Yeats

  Heart, Loss, Lakes

  "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" l. 10 (1893)

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• Rhoda comes now, having slipped in while we were not looking. She must have made a tortuous course, taking cover now behind a waiter, now behind some ornamental pillar, so as to put off as long as possible the shock of recognition, so as to be secure for one more moment to rock her petals in her basin. We wake her. We torture her. She dreads us, she despises us, yet she comes cringing to our sides because for al our cruelty there is always some name, some face which sheds a radiance, which lights up her pavements and makes it possible for her to replenish her dreams.

  Virginia Woolf

  Dream, Light, Rocks

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• What’s the good of these great fragile fits of enthusiasm, these jaded jumps of joys? We know nothing anymore, but the dead stars; we gaze at their faces; and we gasp with pleasure. Our mouths are dry as the lost beaches, and our eyes turn aimlessly and without hope. Now all that remain are these cafés where we meet to drink these cool drinks, these diluted spirits, and the tables are stickier than the pavements where our shadows of the day before have fallen.

  Andre Breton

  Beach, Stars, Eye

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• Do you believe in spirits? Or ghosts?...Yes, I do. I believe in ghosts....They're the ones who haunt us. The ones who have left us behind." "Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn the corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles." "The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin.

  Christina Baker Kline

  Believe, Ideas, People

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• For me, it feels like driving from truth into a lie, from adulthood to childhoold. I watch the land of pavement and glass and metal turn into an empty field. The snow is falling softly now, and I can faintly see the city's skyline up ahead, the buildings just a shade darker than the clouds.

  Veronica Roth

  Lying, Fall, Glasses

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• I remember I was a child, and when I grew up I was a poet. It all happened at sixty miles an hour and on days when the clock stopped and all of humanity fit into a little chapel, into a pinecone, a shot of ouzo, a snail's shell, a piece of soggy rye on the pavement.

  Mary Ruefle

  Children, Humanity, Pieces

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• It's kinda hard to be optimistic, When your homies lying dead on the pavement twisted.

  Tupac Shakur

  Lying, Optimistic, Rapper

  Song: How Long Will They Mourn Me?

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• Mrs. Murdo, walkind even more briskly to keep her spirits up, was crossing Harken Square when something fell to the pavement just in front of her with a terrific thump. How extraordinary, she thought, bending to pick it up. It was sort of a bundle. She began to untie it.

  Jeanne DuPrau

  Squares, Bending, Spirit

  Jeanne DuPrau (2016). “The City of Ember Complete Series”, p.198, Random House Books for Young Readers

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• Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment. If one recognizes the difference and prepares oneself - it is extraordinarily brave. Because when it comes to certain human miseries, the only witnesses should be the pavement and maybe the trees. (Gareth van Meer)

  Marisha Pessl

  Differences, Tree, Brave

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• So you have 25 days to make every dream you ever dreamed of for your country come true. But to beat the system, you have to pound the pavement, get your friends and co-workers out, organize your neighbors and fight for the country you want.

  Donald Trump

  Dream, Country, Fighting

  Source: time.com

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• On the pavement
  of my trampled soul
  the steps of madmen
  weave the prints of rude crude words.

  Vladimir Mayakovsky

  Rude, Soul, Steps

  Vladimir Mayakovsky (1975). “Klop, Stikhi, Poėmy”, p.53, Indiana University Press

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