Towns Quotes - Page 11

• Your old home town's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing, a song called 'Hold On

  Tom Waits

  Song, Home, Records

  Song: Hold On, Album: Mule Variations

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• ...he was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he had left, yet does not say 'The town is near,' but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Eye, Men, Doe

  Thomas Wolfe (1997). “Look Homeward, Angel”, p.508, Simon and Schuster

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• [In 1951] we were also told that the Russians could be parachuting from planes over our town at any time. These were the same Russians that my uncles had fought alongside only a few years earlier. Now they had become monsters who were coming to slit our throats and incinerate us. It seemed peculiar. Living under a cloud of fear like this robs a child of his spirit. It's one thing to be afraid when someone's holding a shotgun on you, but it's another thing to be afraid of something that's just not quite real.

  Bob Dylan

  Uncles, Children, Real

  Bob Dylan (2011). “Chronicles”, p.32, Simon and Schuster

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• Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

  William Gibson

  New York, Lag, Hours

  William Gibson (2003). “Pattern Recognition”, p.8, Penguin

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• A circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge.

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan

  Knowledge, Tree, Library

  1775 Sir Anthony Absolute. The Rivals, act 1, sc.2.

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• We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one's life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Adventure, Encounters, Flags

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• Quick, name some towns in New Jersey

  James Thurber

  Names, Jersey, New Jersey

  James Thurber (1996). “James Thurber: Writings & Drawings (including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)”, p.190, Library of America

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• Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town!

  John Fante

  Flower, Feet, Giving

  John Fante (2002). “Ask The Dust”, p.3, Canongate Books

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• One day in the country Is worth a month in town

  Christina Rossetti

  Inspirational, Country, Nature

  Christina Rossetti (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Christina Rossetti (Illustrated)”, p.186, Delphi Classics

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• Hallucinations are bad enough. But after awhile you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip-the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Grandmother, Vegas, Knives

  Hunter S. Thompson (2010). “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream”, p.47, Vintage

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• Oh God, are there so many of them in our land! Students who can’t be happy until they’ve graduated, servicemen who can’t be happy until they are discharged, single folks who can’t be happy until they’ve found a mate, workers who can’t be happy until they’ve retired, adolescents who aren’t happy until they’re grown, ill people who aren’t happy until they’re well, failures who aren’t happy until they succeed, restless who can’t wait until they get out of town, and in most cases, vice versa, people waiting, waiting for the world to begin.

  Tom Robbins

  Land, People, Waiting

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• To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.

  Freya Stark

  Adventure, World, Strange

  Freya Stark (1964). “The Journey's Echo: Selections”

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• How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls "Come" through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.

  E. M. Forster

  Country, Home, Men

  E. M. Forster (2010). “A Passage to India”, p.136, RosettaBooks

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• ... and we are not alone in this slavery. there are millions of others throughout the world, of all colors and races and creeds. this we must remember. there are many of our people who hate the poor of the white race, and they hate us. the people in this town living by the river who work in the mills. people who are almost as much in need as we are ourselves. this hatred is a great evil, and no good can ever come from it... the injustice of need must bring us all together and not separate us. we must remember that we all make the things of this earth of value because of labor.

  Carson McCullers

  Hate, Race, Color

  Carson McCullers (2010). “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”, p.191, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I have never fit into this town, this marriage, this skin. I am the child who was picked last to play tag; I am the girl who laughed although she did not get the joke; I am the piecemeal part of you that you pretend doesn't exist, except it is all I am, all the time.

  Jodi Picoult

  Girl, Children, Play

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• Beulah has a husband?' I know. It's a miracle. There can't be more than two people on the planet who'd be willing to sleep with her, and here we are both in the same town.

  Bill Bryson

  Husband, Sleep, Two

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• and in some of the people of the town and community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were somewhere else.

  Wendell Berry

  Somewhere Else, People, Community

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• For without you, I swear, the town Has become like a prison to me. Distraction and the mountain And the desert, all I desire.

  Rumi

  Spiritual, Desire, Mountain

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• Who’s to say that it takes something like a drug to mess with your perception of reality? How did Hitler deceive a nation? How can one group of people look at the world and see one thing, and another see something completely different? One sees a town, another sees a desert. One sees beauty, another sees chaos.” The skin of this world,” he said quietly.

  Ted Dekker

  Reality, People, Drug

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• How can the mind be so imperfect?" she says with a smile. I look at my hands. Bathed in the moonlight, they seem like statues, proportioned to no purpose. "It may well be imperfect," I say, "but it leaves traces. And we can follow those traces, like footsteps in the snow." "Where do the lead?" "To oneself," I answer. "That's where the mind is. Without the mind, nothing leads anywhere." I look up. The winter moon is brilliant, over the Town, above the Wall. "Not one thing is your fault," I comfort her.

  Haruki Murakami

  Wall, Winter, Moon

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• The public library is the most dangerous place in town

  John Ciardi

  Library, Dangerous, Public Library

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• Water, water, water....There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

  Edward Abbey

  Home, Animal, Cities

  Edward Abbey (1968). “Desert Solitaire”, p.126, Simon and Schuster

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• It is these black clothes," said Strange. "I am like a leftover piece of funeral, condemned to walk about the Town, frightening people into thinking of their own mortality.

  Susanna Clarke

  Thinking, Clothes, People

  Susanna Clarke (2009). “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell”, p.681, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart

  Ayn Rand

  Distance, Past, Rivers

  Ayn Rand (2011). “Ayn Rand Novel Collection”, p.1972, Penguin

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• One day he said, "I'll tell this town How it feels to be an unfunny clown." And he told them all why he looked so sad, And he told them all why he felt so bad. He told of Pain and Rain and Cold, He told of Darkness in his soul, And after he finished his tale of woe, Did everyone cry? Oh no, no, no, They laughed until they shook the trees... And while the world laughed outside. Cloony the Clown sat down and cried.

  Shel Silverstein

  Pain, Rain, Tree

  Shel Silverstein, “Cloony The Clown”

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