Railroads Quotes - Page 7

• When you are waiting for a train, don't keep perpetually looking to see if it is coming. The time of its arrival is the business of the conductor, not yours. It will not come any sooner for all your nervous glances and your impatient pacing, and you will save strength if you will keep quiet. After we discover that the people who sit still on a long railroad journey reach that journey's end at precisely the same time as those who "fuss" continually, we have a valuable piece of information which we should not fail to put to practical use.

  Anna Brackett

  Travel, Journey, Long

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• The first time I knew what I wanted to do with my life was when I was about four years old. I was listening to an old Victrola, playing a railroad song...I thought that was the most wonderful, amazing thing...That you could take this piece of wax and music would come out of that box. From that day on, I wanted to sing on the radio.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Years, Listening

  "Music's Man in Black". Academy of Achievement interview, www.achievement.org. June 25, 1993.

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• The peoples of the old world have their cities built for times gone by, when railroads and gunpowder were unknown. We can have cities for the new age that has come, adopted to its better conditions of use and ornament. We want, therefore, a city planning profession.

  Horace Bushnell

  Cities, Age, Gunpowder

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• Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.

  Willa Cather

  Book, Years, House

  Willa Cather (2003). “A Lost Lady”, p.7, U of Nebraska Press

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• What would you call America's most priceless asset? Surely not its limitless natural resources, not its matchless national wealth, not its unequalled store of gold, not its giant factories, not its surpassing railroads, not its unprecedented volume of cheap power. Is not its most priceless asset the character of its people, their indomitable self-confidence, their transcendent vision, their sleepless initiative and, perhaps above all, their inherent, irrepressible optimism?

  B. C. Forbes

  Character, Self Confidence, America

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• As to the Income Tax, my opinion is that the needful revenue would be fairly and most fairly raised if paid by property, and by individuals in proportion to their property. A Property Tax should be an assessment upon all land and buildings, and canals and railroads, but not on property such as machinery, stock in trade, etc. The aristocracy have squeezed all they can out of the mass of the consumers, and now they lay their daring hands on those not wholly impoverished.

  John Bright

  Assessment, Hands, Land

  Letter to his sister Margaret, 1842. "The Life Of John Bright". Book by G. M. Trevelyan, pp. 72-73, 1913.

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• I'll give you an example. Henry, the old black guy who cooks the corn bread, he worked on the railroads for about 20 years so he knows how to lay and build track.

  Marc Singer

  Years, Track, Giving

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• Finally I got to carbon, and as you all know, in the case of carbon the reaction works out beautifully. One goes through six reactions, and at the end one comes back to carbon. In the process one has made four hydrogen atoms into one of helium. The theory, of course, was not made on the railway train from Washington to Ithaca ... It didn't take very long, it took about six weeks, but not even the Trans-Siberian railroad [has] taken that long for its journey.

  Hans Bethe

  Taken, Journey, Hydrogen Atom

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• A railroad may have to be carried over a gorge or arroya. Obviously it does not need an Engineer to point out that this may be done by filling the chasm with earth, but only a Bridge Engineer is competent to determine whether it is cheaper to do this or to bridge it, and to design the bridge which will safely and most cheaply serve.

  Henry R. Towne

  Bridges, Design, Doe

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• One was Texas medicine, the other was just railroad gin, and like a fool I mixed them.

  Bob Dylan

  Medicine, Texas, Alcohol

  Song: Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again, Album: Blonde On Blonde, 1966

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• Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.

  Don DeLillo

  Dream, Morning, Powerful

  Don DeLillo (2015). “Underworld: Picador Classic”, p.76, Pan Macmillan

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• In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his hip, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford.

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Couple, Party, Men

  Elizabeth Gaskell (2009). “Cranford”, p.4, The Floating Press

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• Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.

  Margaret Atwood

  War, Safe, Canada

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• I knew when the ball was going out (over the Green Monster). It was something I worked into the decoy, but it used to tick the pitchers off. Bill Monbouquette used to say, 'Can't you at least make it look like you can catch it?' Meanwhile, the ball would be on its way over the fence to a spot three-quarters of the way out to the railroad tracks.

  Carl Yastrzemski

  Track, Monsters, Would Be

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• Whom do I write for? I write for the story. Each story, it seems to me, knows best how it should be told. As I once put my ear to the railroad track, I listen now for the voice of my story.

  Jerry Spinelli

  Writing, Voice, Track

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• I don't care a damn for their guns, or you either, sir! What I want is the Southside Railroad!

  Philip Sheridan

  War, Gun, Care

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• There was one moment, and it happened in school. I had a big final exam - we were supposed to write a 20-page report on this book about Houdini. I probably would have loved reading it, but I didn't, so I just decided to make a little super-8 movie based on it. I tied myself to the railroad tracks and all that. I mean, this is kid stuff, but it impressed the teacher, and I got an A. And that was maybe my first turning point, when I said, 'Yeah, I wouldn't mind being a filmmaker.'

  Tim Burton

  Teacher, Reading, Book

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• It would be difficult, indeed, to overestimate the transcendent importance of the part the railroad has played in making the Nation what it is to-day. Perhaps it would be within bounds to say that without railroads to bind the States into one homogeneous whole, the Nation never could have attained its present size and importance.

  Charles Frederick Carter

  Would Be, Size, States

  Charles Frederick Carter (1909). “When railroads were new”

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• A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.

  Russell Baker

  Airports, Towns, Miles

  "Inside the Suit, a Man!". The New York Times Opinion Page, www.nytimes.com. November 05, 1986.

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• Semi-automatic weapons are not just about gun control, they're about national security. You know that these weapons can shoot down airplanes, they can blow up railroads. This is really a whole national security issue.

  Jesse Jackson

  Airplane, Blow, Gun

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• My parents moved to Los Angeles when I was really young, but I spent every summer with my grandparents, and I'd stay with my grandfather on the farm in Longview. He was retired from the railroad, and he had a small farm with some cows and some pigs. I remember part of my youth was feeding hogs and plowing fields and stuff, so that's a part of me.

  Forest Whitaker

  Summer, Pigs, Grandparent

  Interview with Evan Smith, www.texasmonthly.com. December 2006.

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• The morning we left South Bend, every student and professor was out of bed long before breakfast and marched downtown accompanying the team to the railroad station. It was the first time I'd seen anything like this mass hysteria generated on the Notre Dame campus over a football game.

  Knute Rockne

  Football, Morning, Team

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• We who have lived before railways were made belong to another world. It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and then! Then was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armor, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue, and so forth -- all these belong to the old period. But your railroad starts the new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one. We who lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Horse, Father, Blue

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• My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Towns are too distracting.

  Eric Hoffer

  Writing, Lunch, Waiting

  Letter to Margaret Anderson, 1941.

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• All this piling up of one technology on top of another-railroad on steamboat, interstate highway on railroad, hydroelectric dam on watermill-had reduced the Mississippi from a wonder of nature to this sluggish canal on the wrong side of the tracks.

  Jonathan Raban

  Technology, Rivers, Track

  Jonathan Raban (1981). “Old Glory, an American Voyage”, Simon & Schuster

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