Pavement Quotes - Page 6

• Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets, you usually take it for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.

  Richard Wright

  Thinking, Land, Cities

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• Data is the fabric of the modern world: just like we walk down pavements, so we trace routes through data, and build knowledge and products out of it.

  Ben Goldacre

  Data, Fabric, World

  "There's a wealth of data out there - why not let us use it?" by Ben Goldacre, www.theguardian.com. October 7, 2011.

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• Night, like a giant, fills the church, from pavement to roof, and holds dominion through the silent hours. Pale dawn again comes peeping through the windows: and, giving place to day, sees night withdraw into the vaults, and follows it, and drives it out, and hides among the dead.

  Charles Dickens

  Night, Giving, Church

  Charles Dickens, Hablot Knight Browne, George Cruikshank, John Leech, Sir John Tenniel (1868). “Works of Charles Dickens: Dombey and son”, p.17

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• Jehovah's Witness are welcomed into my home...You gotta respect anybody who gets all dressed up in Sunday clothes and goes door-to-door on days so hot their high heels sink a half-inch into the pavement.The trick is to do all the talking yourself. Pretty soon, they'll look at their watches and say, 'Speaking of end times, wouldja look at what time it is now!

  Celia Rivenbark

  Home, Sunday, Doors

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• We were land-based agrarian people from Africa. We were uprooted from Africa, and we spent 200 years developing our culture as black Americans. And then we left the South. We uprooted ourselves and attempted to transplant this culture to the pavements of the industrialized North. And it was a transplant that did not take. I think if we had stayed in the South, we would have been a stronger people. And because the connection between the South of the 20's, 30's and 40's has been broken, it's very difficult to understand who we are.

  August Wilson

  Thinking, Years, Land

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• Dreamers of dreams may be pathfinders; but they may be mere vagrants. Of those who depart from the pavements, only a few are explorers: the rest are mere jaywalkers

  Gilbert Ryle

  Dream, May, Vagrants

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• I never walked through the streets of any city with as much satisfaction as those of Philadelphia. The neatness and cleanliness of all animate and inanimate things, houses, pavements, and citizens, is not to be surpassed.

  Frances Wright

  Cities, Philadelphia, House

  Frances Wright (1821). “Views of society and manners in America: in a series of letters from that country to a friend in England, during the years 1818, 1819, and 1820”, p.83

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• Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.

  Virginia Woolf

  Looks, Littles, Wonder

  Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.39, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In Koln, a town of monks and bones,
  And pavement fang'd with murderous stones,
  And rags and hags, and hideous wenches,
  I counted two-and-seventy stenches,
  All well defined, and several stinks!
  Ye nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks,
  The River Rhine, it is well known,
  Doth wash your city of Cologne;
  But tell me, nymphs! what power divine
  Shall henceforth whash the river Rhine.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Cities, Two, Rivers

  1828 'Cologne', first published in Friendship's Offering (1834), as 'Lightheartedness in Rhyme', no.4.

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• When we got off the streetcar at Times Square, it was somewhat of a letdown. Newspapers were blowing about the road and pavement, and Broadway looked seedy, like a slovenly woman just out of bed.

  Charlie Chaplin

  Funny, New York, Humorous

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• If a lady comes up to you and tells you that your dear mama is lying in a faint on the pavement round the corner, don't you believe her, don't have anything to do with her, do not go with her into the cab. It is the White Slave Traffic.

  Stevie Smith

  Lying, Believe, White

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• Stand on the highest pavement of the stair- Lean on a garden urn- Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

  T. S. Eliot

  Garden, Hair, Sunlight

  'La Figlia Che Piange' (1917)

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• Parks are but pavement disguised with a growth of grass.

  George Gissing

  Cities, Growth, Parks

  George Gissing (2016). “The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft”, p.29, The Floating Press

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• How many of us are able to distinguish between the odors of noon and midnight, or of winter and summer, or of a windy spell and a still one? If man is so generally less happy in the cities than in the country, it is because all these variations and nuances of sight and smell and sound are less clearly marked and lost in the general monotony of gray walls and cement pavements.

  Lin Yutang

  Summer, Country, Wall

  Lin Yutang (2013). “Lin Yutang - The Importance Of Living”, p.74, Read Books Ltd

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• To its committed members (the Democratic Party) was still the party of heart, humanity, and justice, but to those removed a few paces it looked like Captain Hook’s crew–ambulance-chasing lawyers, rapacious public policy grants persons, civil rights gamesmen, ditzy-brained movie stars, fat-assed civil servant desk squatters, recovering alcoholics, recovering wife-beaters, recovering child-buggers, and so forth and so on, a grotesque line-up of ill-mannered self-pitying, caterwauling freeloaders banging their tin cups on the pavement demanding handouts.

  Nicholas von Hoffman

  Stars, Children, Party

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• As the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball. As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball. Down came the ropes. Down came the balls. Over and over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm. All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Children, Flower, Jumping

  Madeleine L'Engle (2013). “A Wrinkle in Time Trilogy”, p.60, Macmillan

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• In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.

  John Banville

  Cities, Venice, Squares

  John Banville (2011). “The Newton Letter”, p.31, Pan Macmillan

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• Music is my love and to me acting is more mercenary. I don't pound the pavements for roles: if it happens, it happens. I hate that auditioning thing.

  David Johansen

  Hate, Acting, Roles

  "My mind is as blank as fresh snow" by John Aizlewood, www.theguardian.com. February 4, 2001.

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• White swan of cities slumbering in thy nest . . . White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of the palaces and strips of sky.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Swans, Sky, Cities

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1912). “The complete poetical works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”, p.1218, Library of Alexandria

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• People think that I popped out of my mother's womb singing 'Chasing Pavements'.

  Adele

  Mother, Thinking, People

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• Up against Goliath, to bring butter home.
  I'm David on pavement, sling another stone.

  Ka

  Rap, Home, Hip Hop

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• A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught... Better go down upon your marrow-bones / And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones... For to articulate sweet sounds together / Is to work harder than all these, and yet / Be thought an idler by the noisy set.

  William Butler Yeats

  Sweet, Hard Work, Kitchen

  William Butler Yeats (1931). “Later Poems”, p.31, Library of Alexandria

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• You see, even though back then Barack was a Senator and a presidential candidate... to me, he was still the guy who'd picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger side door... he was the guy whose proudest possession was a coffee table he'd found in a dumpster, and whose only pair of decent shoes was half a size too small.

  Michelle Obama

  Coffee, Shoes, Doors

  Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., www.npr.org. September 4, 2012.

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• Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Sky, Tree, Pages

  Jonathan Lethem (2014). “Motherless Brooklyn”, p.208, Faber & Faber

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• In London, people can be so... well, it's not even a case of people being unkind or unfriendly. You just don't make any contact in London. You go from A to B with your eyes on the pavement.

  Carey Mulligan

  Eye, People, London

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