Quotes About Subways

There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.

While I began writing 'Rules of Civility' in 2006, the genesis of the book dates back to the early 1990s, when I happened upon a copy of 'Many Are Called,' the collection of portraits that Walker Evans took on the New York City subways in the late 1930s with a hidden camera.

I love New York. I was in New York at the age of 13, at the School of American Ballet, walking around the subways in my little bunhead and thinking I was so cool.

11th arrondissement, one of the largest in Paris, spanning from Père Lachaise Cemetery to the Place de la République, as well as bordering the Marais. It's considered hip, or bobo; les bobos are the upscale Parisian version of a hipster—although none are knitting bonnets, like they do on the subways in Brooklyn;

I avoid subways like the plague because I'm claustrophobic.

I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.

In Paris, even the subways are required to be beautiful.

I believe building new subways must be a top priority.

Picture what this country felt like in the weeks and months after 9/11. Can you imagine anyone even beginning to allow an advertising campaign promoting Islam, being endorsed and supported by a man the feds believe to be a terrorist, on New York City subways?

People want subways, folks... subways, subways. They don't want these damn streetcars blocking up our city!

Yes. I did more research than I ever wanted to and saw some things I wish I didn't. I went on ride-alongs, spent time with Homicide, Cold Case, and SVU detectives, hung out in subways learning how to spot pervs and pick-pockets, viewed an autopsy, went to a police firing range, and witnessed court cases and I read, read, read.

That's the first thing you learn when you busk in the New York City subways: you immediately join the ranks of the marginalized, the unhinged prophets, the Christian shouters, the Hare Krishnas, the Jehovah's witnesses, the father-and-daughter kitaro team, the violinists playing for their sickly wives.

But if pressed, I'd have to say that what I love most about the subways of New York is what they do not do. One may spend a lifetime looking back—whether regretfully or wistfully, with shame or fondness or sorrow—and thinking how, given the chance, things might have been done differently. But when you enter a subway car and the doors close, you have no choice but to give yourself over to where it is headed. The subway only goes one way: forward.

You don't know what narrow lives girls have, how few real adventures there are for them; misadventures, yes, like abortions and little men following them in subways, but seldom anything like seeing ships at night.

When I say infrastructure it's not just roads and bridges and subways - it's also housing. It's also schools and fire departments and water departments and sewer departments. That's all infrastructure and it's all important. Little by little this country is crumbling and everyone knows it.

Nathaniel Rich wrote 'Odds Against Tomorrow' well before Hurricane Sandy and its surge crashed onto the isle of Manhattan, well before the streets were flooded and the subways drowned, only the Goldman Sachs building sparkling above the darkened avenues.

Hydrogen peroxide-based bombs were used in the London bombings in 2005; in al Qaeda's foiled plot to attack subways in New York City in 2009 and also in the ISIS-directed Paris attacks in 2015 and the ISIS-directed attacks in Brussels a year later.

I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.

I am not a fan of rats or pigeons. In New York City, they have become very confident. When I was a child, you went on the subways, and the rats would stay down on the tracks, but now they hang out on the platform.

I've done my share of busking, and it's fun until it isn't. There are musicians in the subways that will make you cry, they're so good.

Identity is above all else the product of shared experience, so Hip Hop let the boroughs develop new identities with their own styles and stars, all connected by subways bombed by artists like Lee Quiñones, Dondi, and Zephyr.

New York City subways are now getting high speed Internet. How about some high speed subway trains?

In the subways, in many of the streets, in corners of the park at night, contact could be dangerous. Contact was not a word or a touch but the air that flashed between strangers.

Yes. I did more research than I ever wanted to and saw some things I wish I didn't. I went on ride-alongs, spent time with Homicide, Cold Case, and SVU detectives, hung out in subways learning how to spot pervs and pick-pockets, viewed an autopsy, went to a police firing range, and witnessed court cases and I read, read, read.