These Streets Quotes

• Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid

  Raymond Chandler

  Hero, Mean, Men

  "The Simple Art of Murder," Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1944

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• Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid...He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world

  Raymond Chandler

  Hero, Mean, Men

  Raymond Chandler (2014). “The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words”, p.69, Vintage

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• Fancy living in one of these streets, never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury, never saying anything clever!

  Winston Churchill

  Beautiful, Clever, Fancy

  Winston Churchill (1963). “The Yankee Marlborough”

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• Brothers and sisters, our democracy has been hijacked. Brothers and sisters, all electoral freedoms in this country are over so long as it's controlled by corporations. Brothers and sisters, we are not going to allow these streets to be taken over by the Democrats or the Republicans. Because it's all of us who have built this city, and we can tear it down unless they give us what we need.

  Zack de la Rocha

  Country, Brother, Taken

  93 Copy quote

• I mean, the radical contingency that is - that exists and the fact that I'm going into the streets and finding random strangers any given day - who's in these streets that day?

  Kehinde Wiley

  Mean, Facts, Stranger

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• I feel like a lot of niggas in the rap game ain't do what I did in these streets and a lot of niggas in the streets ain't do what I did in the rap game. I still feel like a lot of people don't feel where we come from.

  Bobby Shmurda

  Rap, Games, People

  "Exclusive: Bobby Shmurda and Rowdy Rebel Give First Interview Since Plea Deal". Interview with Angel Diaz, www.complex.com. September 16, 2016.

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• These New York City streets get colder, I shoulder every burden every disadvantage I've learned to manage. I don't have a gun to brandish. I walk these streets famished.

  Lin-Manuel Miranda

  New York, Gun, Cities

  "Song: "My Shot" ("Hamilton")". 2015.

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• I was too tired to think. I merely felt the town as a unique unreality. What was it? I knew -- the moon's picture of a town. These streets with their houses did not exist, they were but a ludicrous projection of the moon's sumptuous personality. This was a city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonnight. -- Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of color. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I must not, or lose all.

  e. e. cummings

  Tired, Unique, Moon

  E.E. Cummings (2015). “The Enormous Room”, p.46, Xist Publishing

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• The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.

  Richard Yates

  Running, Grief, Night

  29 Copy quote

• Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost.

  Roberto Bolano

  Laughter, Dark, Laughing

  4 Copy quote

• I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Falling In Love, School, Cutting

  11 Copy quote

• I was interested in this relationship between the armed robber and the banker who were from different worlds but had similar goals. It was kind of a metaphor for this larger marriage of the banks selling off their debt and these street guys scrapping over it.

  Jake Halpern

  Goal, Guy, Bankers

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• My dad was dead, so these streets had to raise me.

  Ludacris

  Death, Dad, Raises

  Song: Growing Pains

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• You can hide beneath the covers and study your pain, make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain. Waste your summer praying in vain, for a savior to rise from these streets.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Summer, Pain, Rain

  4 Copy quote

• I just love to play rock and roll. I love to write songs all the time
  about what's up on these streets. I write songs about people getting killed; I write songs about people getting beaten up; I write songsabout people getting taken to jail by the police; and I also write songs about love and happiness.

  Wesley Willis

  Song, Taken, Writing

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• I've walked these streets, in a carnival of sights to see. All the cheap thrill seekers, the vendors & the dealers, they crowded around me. Have I been blind? Have I been lost, inside myself and my own mind? Hypnotized, mesmerized, by what my eyes have seen? I've walked these streets, in a spectacle of wealth & poverty. In the diamond market, the scarlet welcome carpet that they just rolled out for me.

  Natalie Merchant

  Travel, Eye, Sight

  5 Copy quote

• This is what history is: all those centuries of bodies, moving over these canals, twisting and blooming into life in these houses, these streets; all that flesh hungering, coming together, separating, continuing, accumulating, relinquishing, aging and breaking down. Bodies as tulips bent to the demands of light, colored into blossom, spent.

  Mark Doty

  Moving, Light, House

  Mark Doty (2001). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon”, Beacon Press (MA)

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• I walk these streets, a loaded six string on my back I play for keeps, 'cause I might not make it back; I been everywhere, and I'm standing tall I've seen a million faces an I've rocked them all.

  Jon Bon Jovi

  Play, Might, Faces

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• I'm that neighborhood blizzard flooding these streets with snow.

  Kool G Rap

  Rap, Snow, Hip Hop

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• Who can depart from his pain and aloneness without regret? Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache. It is not a garment I cast off this day, bit a skin that I tear with my own hands... Yet I cannot tarry longer.

  Khalil Gibran

  Children, Pain, Regret

  16 Copy quote

• Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they’re full of meaningless activity; by night, they’re full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference 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

  Fall, Night, Essence

  "The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, "A Factless Autobiography", number 3, translation by Richard Zenith, 1982.

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• There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.

  Ian Mcewan

  Sweet, Teenage, Distance

  Ian McEwan (2010). “Saturday”, p.158, Random House

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