Famous quotes containing the words west, eighth, street, york, aquarium, city and/or subway:
“All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“We do not weary of eating and sleeping every day, for hunger and sleepiness recur. Without that we should weary of them. So, without the hunger for spiritual things, we weary of them. Hunger after righteousness—the eighth beatitude.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“Outside America I should hardly be believed if I told how simply, in my experience, Dover Street merged into the Back Bay.”
—Mary Antin (1881–1949)
“When the typewriter stops in a New York office everybody’s embarrassed; men start to quarrel or to make love to the stenographer or drop lighted cigarettes in the wastebasket.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine,
one is at the aquarium tending a seal,
one is dull at the wheel of her Ford,
one is at the toll gate collecting,
one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona,
one is straddling a cello in Russia....”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“New York has never learnt the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)
“In New York—whose subway trains in particular have been “tattooed” with a brio and an energy to put our own rude practitioners to shame—not an inch of free space is spared except that of advertisements.... Even the most chronically dispossessed appear prepared to endorse the legitimacy of the “haves.””
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. “Cleaning and Cleansing,” Myths and Memories (1986)