Railway Quotes

• Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.

  E. M. Forster

  Travel, Adventure, Sunshine

  Howards End ch. 2 (1910)

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• Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown

  E. M. Forster

  Howards End, Glorious, Gates

  Howards End ch. 2 (1910)

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• Most men who have really lived have had, in some share, their great adventure. This railway is mine.

  James J. Hill

  Travel, Adventure, Men

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• The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Technology, Years, Machines

  1880 TheWanderer and His Shadow, aphorism 278.

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• I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

  Dylan Thomas

  Development, Lectures, Week

  Dylan Thomas, Paul Ferris (1985). “The collected letters”, Scribner

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• I wanted to invent an engine that could run for ever. I could have developed a new train, had I stayed in the railway. It would have looked like the AK-47 though.

  Mikhail Kalashnikov

  Running, Ak 47, Wanted

  "Mikhail Kalashnikov: 'I sleep soundly'" by Nick Paton Walsh, www.theguardian.com. October 9, 2003.

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• I lived at home and I cycled every morning to the railway station to travel by train to Johannesburg followed by a walk to the University, carrying sandwiches for my lunch and returning in the evening the same way.

  Sydney Brenner

  Travel, Morning, Home

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• I can't quite define my aversion to asking questions of strangers. From snatches of family battles which I have heard drifting up from railway stations and street corners, I gather that there are a great many men who share my dislike for it, as well as an equal number of women who ... believe it to be the solution to most of this world's problems.

  Robert Benchley

  Believe, Men, Numbers

  Robert Benchley (1954). “The Benchley Roundup”

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• If God had intended us to fly, he'd have never given us railways.

  Michael Flanders

  Given, Flanders, Ifs

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• Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.

  Paul Theroux

  Travel, Upset, Bazaars

  Paul Theroux (2006). “The Great Railway Bazaar”, p.9, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Railway stations can become growth points for the nearby villages.

  Narendra Modi

  Motivation, Growth, India

  40 Copy quote

• I can never think of the time I spend idling in railway stations as lost; it's a waiting liberated from the three temporal vices of regret, anticipation or boredom, the weak echo of that bliss spent between lifetimes.

  Eric Morecambe

  Regret, Thinking, Echoes

  27 Copy quote

• Spring is noticed, if at all By people sitting in railway trains.

  Bertolt Brecht

  Spring, People, Sitting

  Bertolt Brecht, Ralph Manheim (1987). “Poems, 1913-1956”, p.158, Taylor & Francis

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• Before you ridicule, remember somebody on a railway platform who seems to be train spotting may actually be writing poetry.

  John Hegley

  Writing, May, Remember

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• Give me snuff, whiskey, and Swedes, and I will build a railroad to hell.

  James J. Hill

  Funny, Giving, Sweden

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• I wish you wouldn't walk in and out of my mind as though it was a railway station!

  Charlotte Lamb

  Understanding, Mind, Wish

  16 Copy quote

• There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.

  H. G. Wells

  Engineering, Bridges, Iron

  H. G. Wells (2016). “A Modern Utopia”, p.79, H. G. Wells

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• I want to see a publicly-owned railway, publicly accountable.

  Tony Blair

  Want

  "Why the unions aren't rocking Blair's boat". Independent on Sunday, October 8, 1995.

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• People's lives are in the care of the railways when they get on a train. The railways should remember that.

  Nina Bawden

  People, Care, Remember

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• I'm proud to be a railway modeler. It means more to me to be on the cover of Model Railroader than to be on the cover of a music magazine.

  Rod Stewart

  Mean, Magazines, Proud

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• Failure seems to be regarded as the one unpardonable crime, success as the all-redeeming virtue, the acquisition of wealth as the single worthy aim of life. Ten years ago such revelations as these of the Erie Railway would have sent a shudder through the community, and would have placed a stigma on every man who had had to do them. Now they merely incite others to surpass by yet bolder outrages and more corrupt combinations.

  Charles Francis Adams, Sr.

  Men, Years, Community

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• Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just glad to see me? (She made this remark in February 1936, at the railway station in Los Angeles upon her return from Chicago, when a Los Angeles police officer was assigned to escort her home)

  Mae West

  Home, Sassy, Police

  16 Copy quote

• Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.

  Cyril Connolly

  Growing Up, Moving, Son

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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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• People's backyards are much more interesting than their front gardens, and houses that back on to railways are public benefactors.

  John Betjeman

  Home, Garden, People

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