Street Quotes

“The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“I am not a finished poem, and I am not the song you’ve turned me into. I am a detached human being, making my way in a world that is constantly trying to push me aside, and you who send me letters and emails and beautiful gifts wouldn’t even recognise me if you saw me walking down the street where I live tomorrow
for I am not a poem.
I am tired and worn out and the eyes you would see would not be painted or inspired
but empty and weary
from drinking too much
at all times
and I am not the life of your party who sings and has glorious words to speak
for I don’t speak much
at all
and my voice is raspy and unsteady from unhealthy living and not much sleep and I only use it when I sing and I always sing too much
or not at all
and never when people are around because they expect poems and symphonies and I am not
a poem
but an elegy
at my best
but unedited and uncut and not a lot of people want to work with me because there’s only so much you can do with an audio take, with the plug-ins and EQs and I was born distorted, disordered, and I’m pretty fine with that,
but others are not.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

“Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“And then I crossed the street, with no arm to hold me back.”
― Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End

“Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

“...he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?" I said, "I don't know how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.”
― Nelson Algren

“Haunted trees
covered behind the curtains of their own leaves
stare at the dark
from the fringe of streets.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“I would see
one man fallen off me
shambling down the street.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“I spry my closed vision over
the streets of this city and the shadows lurching within it.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“She was perfectly sane in streets unknown. She loved conversing with people tagged as strangers. She was social, amiable & all that is her. Yet, with known people she felt unknown, she choked words and fought inside. And indeed she tripped insane while traversing those streets known. She stared at others and consumed their happiness through senses cold. And so she waits for Winter's warmth to touch her in streets of distant shore, in her own world of simple happiness.”
― Debatrayee Banerjee

“That weekend the city blushed with a great heat wave but on Monday it rained, cooling the ache in the street’s burn.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“If a street has a spirit, no matter how narrow it is, we can breathe comfortably over there.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“When I reached the street I didn't know whether to go right or left. Soon I'd have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.”
― Denis Johnson, The Name of the World

“You may have the dark and cold street life, ruled by the lessor light of the moon. During this time I restore my temple, and later awake to greet the awesome radiance of the sun-star.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence

“You've got the key of the street.”
― Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

“All you need is love...and a great story.”
― Hank Fielder

“Street culture is a culture of containment. Most young people do not realize that it all too often leads to a “dead end”. “Street culture,” as I am using the term, is a counterforce to movement culture. Street culture in contemporary urban reality is synonymous with survival at all costs. This world view is mostly negative, because it demands constant adjustment to circumstances that are often far beyond young people’s control or understanding, such as economics, education, housing, employment, nutrition, law, and so forth.”
― Haki R. Madhubuti

“Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“In the shadows he could just make out a rough, ghostly wall that stood out in the pitch darkness. As if drawn by an irresistible black beacon, he slowly advanced step by step towards that incandescent wall of shale. Far off, the city was vanishing into the air. The fiesta disappeared somewhere beyond his eyelids. The wall was increasing in size, growing amidst a mixture of shadows and sparks. It was a wall of smoke from which sprouted candles that resembled asteroids. In fact, it was not one wall but two. Two tall, crackling walls, silently burning. But it wasn't two walls either. It was, in fact, a street.”
― Eugenio Fernandez Granell, LA Novela Del Indio Tupinamba

“This twinned twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying; or rather it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade, and I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed to transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in the world's socket.

Through peacocked lashes I saw the dazzling diamond reflection of the low sun on the round back of a parked automobile. To all kinds of things a vivid pictorial sense had been restored by the sponge of the thaw. Water in overlapping festoons flowed down one sloping street and turned gracefully into another. With ever so slight a note of meretricious appeal, narrow passages between buildings revealed treasures of brick and purple. I remarked for the first time the humble fluting - last echoes of grooves on the shafts of columns - ornamenting a garbage can, and I also saw the rippling upon its lid - circles diverging from a fantastically ancient center. Erect, dark-headed shapes of dead snow (left by the blades of a bulldozer last Friday) were lined up like rudimentary penguins along the curbs, above the brilliant vibration of live gutters.

I walked up, and I walked down, and I walked straight into a delicately dying sky, and finally the sequence of observed and observant things brought me, at my usual eating time, to a street so distant from my usual eating place that I decided to try a restaurant which stood on the fringe of the town. Night had fallen without sound or ceremony when I came out again. ("The Vane Sisters")”
― Vladimir Nabokov, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

“Моята консерватория е улицата. А разумът ми - инстинктът.”
― Edit Piaf

“Abolition of the public sector means, of course, that all pieces of land, all land areas, including streets and roads, would be owned privately, by individuals, corporations, cooperatives, or any other voluntary groupings of individuals and capital.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

“When you see a tiny plant, flower or tree in a dark stone street, be happy as if you saw a friend you love very much, and be even happier because this is such a friend that does wonderful things for your existence, it gives you oxygen!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Banks will only give you a mortgage if you are low risk and if anything goes wrong in the future, they will throw you out onto the street!”
― Steven Magee

“Empty streets have a two-way benefit: They can fill the empty mind with thoughts, or it can drain the full mind by sucking it out!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“If you don't have a high awareness, all streets are just streets; if you have a high awareness, all streets are a magic box! The world only deepens when your look to the world deepens!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Altogether, cities correspond closely to the ideas and ideals of their inhabitants. They are the tangible expression of a nation’s spirit, or lack of spirit”
― Bernard Rudofsky, Streets for People: A Primer for Americans

“No matter how quiet a street is, if the inside of your head is not quiet, you cannot truly experience the silence of the street!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Così i due, Augusto ed Eugenia, procedettero in direzioni opposte, tagliando con le loro anime la fitta ragnatela spirituale della strada. Perché la strada forma una tela in cui si incrociano sguardi carichi di desiderio, di invidia, di disprezzo, di compassione, di amore, di odio, parole dette chissà quando, il cui senso è rimasto cristallizzato, pensieri, aneliti, tutto un intreccio misterioso che avvolge le anime di quelli che la attraversano.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“You found an empty street, and it was very quiet, and foggy, and it was dusk, the ground was made of stone and mossy, and the coming of night was very close, surrender yourself completely to this peace around you, and stop your mind, experience timelessness!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan