Queues Quotes

• An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.

  George Mikes

  Form, Englishmen, Orderly

  'How to be an Alien' (1946) p. 44

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• Saving the world happens one person at a time. Be at the front of the queue.

  Yaya Toure

  World, Saving, Persons

  "Interview with International Football Star Yaya Touré". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com. May 1, 2014.

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• Waiting is so unusual that many of us can't stand in a queue for 30 seconds without getting out our phones to check for messages or to Google something.

  Julian Baggini

  Phones, Waiting, Google

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• People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It's a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it's the togetherness of modern technology.

  J. G. Ballard

  Italian, Technology, Cities

  29 Copy quote

• Everyone queue up!' Malfoy roared to the crowd. 'Harry Potter's giving out signed photos!

  J. K. Rowling

  Giving, Potters, Crowds

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• I live very normally, I go out with my friends, we go to the movies, I queue, we go to restaurants.

  Catherine Deneuve

  Restaurants, My Friends

  Interview with Geoff Andrew, www.theguardian.com. September 21, 2005.

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• The English are always ready to admire anything so long as they can queue up.

  George Mikes

  Long, Admire, Ready

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• I have liked many but loved very few. Yet no-one has been as sweet as you. I'd stand and wait in the world's longest queue. Just for the pleasure of a moment with you.

  Abhijeet Bhattacharya

  Love, Sweet, Waiting

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• A slowly moving queue does not move uniformly. Rather, waves of motion pass down the queue. The frequency and amplitude of these waves is inversely related to the speed at which the queue is served.

  Anthony Stafford Beer

  Moving, Doe, Speed

  "Management Science" by Anthony Stafford Beer, (p. 108), 1968.

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• I used to fish the Border rivers, but nowadays you have to queue up for a shot and I can't stand that.

  Norman MacCaig

  Rivers, Fish Tanks, Borders

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• Perhaps we've time to have a look at the Number Thirty-One bus queue before we turn in.

  Calvin Trillin

  Numbers, Looks, Thirty

  Calvin Trillin (1974). “American fried; adventures of a happy eater”

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• Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.

  George Monbiot

  Country, Fighting, Night

  "After this 60-year feeding frenzy, Earth itself has become disposable" by George Monbiot, www.theguardian.com. January 4, 2010.

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• I became a welder. I was actually becoming an Engineer and I joined the wrong queue. And so I became a welder, without knowing what a welder was.

  Billy Connolly

  Knowing, Becoming, Engineers

  "Billy Connolly: An Audience with Billy Connolly". www.imdb.com. 1985.

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• Apparently the Dutch now prided themselves on being better at queues than the English, which was absurd, because standing cheerfully in line was the English national sport.

  Orson Scott Card

  Sports, Lines, Dutch

  Orson Scott Card (2003). “Shadow Puppets”, p.165, Macmillan

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• I watched, along with all of you, as the tens of thousands of our people stood patiently in long queues for many hours. Some sleeping on the open ground overnight waiting to cast this momentous vote.

  Nelson Mandela

  Sleep, Long, People

  Nelson Mandela (2003). “Nelson Mandela: from freedom to the future : tributes and speeches”, Jonathan Ball Publishers

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• A foreign observer is struck by our gentleness: by the orderly behaviour of the English crowds, the lack of pushing and quarrelling, the willingness to form queues.

  George Mikes

  Behaviour, Crowds, Pushing

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• If, as an actor, you allow yourself to be cocooned from the boring pin-pricks of day-to-day existence - like standing in a queue at the butcher's or any of the other dreary little events that we all have in our daily lives - you begin to lose your lifeline to what people are. And if you lose that, you eventually lose the ability to act.

  Glenda Jackson

  People, Actors, Littles

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• When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exposed.

  Adolf Hitler

  Christian, Religious, Morning

  Adolf Hitler (1942). “The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939: An English Translation of Representative Passages Arranged Under Subjects and Edited by Norman H. Baynes”

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• If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?

  Julian Barnes

  World, Next, Spirit

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• When all is said, its atmosphere [England's] still contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus, pub or queue than in any other country in which I have lived

  Arthur Koestler

  Country, Feet, Atmosphere

  Arthur Koestler (1973). “The lion and the ostrich: the eighth annual lecture under the "Thank-offering to Britain Fund."”, Not Avail

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• Do this. Don't do that. Stay back in line. Where's tax receipt? Fill out form. Let's see license. Submit six copies. Exit only. No left turn. No right turn. Queue up and pay fine. Take back and get stamped. Drop dead— but first get permit.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Lines, Pay, Firsts

  Robert A. Heinlein (2014). “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, p.73, Hachette UK

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• During the terrible years of the Yekhov terror I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone ‘identified’ me. Then a woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear—(we all spoke in whispers there): ‘Could you describe this?’ I said, ‘I can!’ Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.

  Anna Akhmatova

  Blue, Numbness, Years

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• People are free to campaign and they will be free to vote. There won't be any soldiers, you know, at the queues. Anyone who has the right to vote is free to go and cast his vote anywhere in his own area, in his own constituency.

  Robert Mugabe

  People, Soldier, Campaigns

  "Mugabe slams Blair, vows free vote". Interview with Jeff Koinange, www.cnn.com. March 30, 2005.

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• I really hate airport queues. I almost feel they should have cattle prods to hurry us up down the aisles. You can't even complain because they might stop you getting on to the flight.

  Len Goodman

  Hate, Airports, Should Have

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• It's interesting when you're doing signing sessions with other writers and you look at the queues at each table and you can see definite human types gathering there.... My queue is always full of, you know, wild-eyed sleazebags and people who stare at me very intensely, as if I have some particular message for them. As if I must know that they've been reading me, that this dyad or symbiosis of reader and writer has been so intense that I must somehow know about it.

  Martin Amis

  Reading, People, Interesting

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