Tenements Quotes

• I inhabit a weak, frail, decayed tenement; battered by the winds and broken in on by the storms, and, from all I can learn, the landlord does not intend to repair.

  John Quincy Adams

  Learning, Wind, Broken

  77 Copy quote

• The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenements halls and whispered in the sounds of silence.

  Paul Simon

  Wall, Silence, Words Of Wisdom

  Song: The Sound Of Silence

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• It was impossible for me to believe that conditions in Europe could be worse than they were in the Polish section of Chicago, and in many Italian and Irish tenements, or that any workshops could be worse than some of those I had seen in our foreign quarters.

  Alice Hamilton

  Believe, Italian, Europe

  Alice Hamilton, (2013). “Exploring the Dangerous Trades - The Autobiography of Alice Hamilton, M.D.”, p.93, Read Books Ltd

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• I was brought up in a tenement house in a working district. We didn't even have a bathroom! We had a gaslight in the hallway and a black-and-white TV.

  Annie Lennox

  Black And White, House, Tvs

  31 Copy quote

• I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

  William Faulkner

  Moving, Reality, Bereavement

  William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, John Steinbeck (1971). “William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill [and] John Steinbeck”

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• I grew up in a slum neighborhood - rows of tenements, with stoops, and kids all over the street. It was a real neighborhood - we played kick-the-can and ring-a-levio.

  Bonnie Bedelia

  Real, Kids, Grew

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Like the East Side tenement, our house was seldom without the sound of music or laughter or questions being asked or stories being told.

  Harpo Marx

  Laughter, House, Sides

  "Harpo Speaks". Book by Harpo Marx, 1961.

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• Upon the clothes behind the tenement, That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines, Linking each flat, but to each indifferent, Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.

  Claude McKay

  Clothes, Shining, Lines

  Claude McKay (1953). “Selected poems”

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• No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps, and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts.... That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.

  Betty Smith

  Sky, People, Tree

  Betty Smith (2009). “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”, p.6, Harper Collins

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• When I was four years old, my mother owned some tenements in the Bronx.

  Cy Coleman

  Mother, Years, Four

  26 Copy quote

• The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Сrown. It may be frail - its roof may shake - the wind may blow through it - the storm may enter - the rain may enter - but the King of England cannot enter.

  William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham

  Kings, Rain, Blow

  William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham's speech on the Excise Bill in the House of Commons (March 1763), as quoted in Lord Brougham "Historical Sketches of Statesmen Who Flourished in the Time of George III, Volume I" (p. 42), 1839.

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• When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city...

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Freedom, Cities, I Have A Dream Speech

  "I Have a Dream". Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Address Delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, kinginstitute.stanford.edu. August 28, 1963.

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• Since the industrial revolution, cities, and especially the inner cities, were the places for the newly arrived. Voluntary immigrants seeking economic betterment, refugees, the bohemians, the artists - all of those people were crammed into densely populated neighborhoods and tenements. And as people climbed up the economic ladder they moved out, which really accelerated with the "white flight" phenomenon in the '60s and '70s.

  Cleve Jones

  Artist, Cities, White

  "Legendary LGBT Activist Wants You to Get Up and Fight". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. December 6, 2016.

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• Plan the town, if you like; but in doing it do not forget that you have got to spread the people. Make wider roads, but do not narrow the tenements behind. Dignify the city by all means, but not at the expense of the health of the home and the family life and the comfort of the average workman and citizen.

  Thomas Adams

  Home, Mean, Average

  8 Copy quote

• It's the anarchy of poverty
  delights me, the old
  yellow wooden house indented
  among the new brick tenements

  William Carlos Williams

  Yellow, House, Delight

  William Carlos Williams, Charles Tomlinson (1985). “Selected Poems”, p.129, New Directions Publishing

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• The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow though it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.

  William Pitt

  Kings, Rain, Blow

  Speech in House of Commons, ca. March 1763 See Coke 1; Coke 8; Otis 2

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• To me, you can't have style without being inspired. When I design a collection, I am inspired by so many things. The color of a flower. The shape of a butterly's wing. The juxtaposition of an old tenement building next to a shiny new skyscraper.

  Isaac Mizrahi

  Fashion, Flower, Color

  18 Copy quote

• An unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark, no stable loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional, no tenement room too small for his workroom as these conditions imply
  low rental.

  Jane Addams

  Dark, Hull House, Rooms

  Jane Addams (2012). “Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes”, p.65, Courier Corporation

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• In the house in Beverly Hills where our four children grew up, living conditions were a few thousand times improved over the old tenement on New York's East 93rd Street we Marx Brothers called home.

  Harpo Marx

  Brother, New York, Children

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• I was saying as a joke the other day that I love film editing, I know how to cut a picture, I think I know how to shoot it, but I don't know how to light it. And I realize it's because I didn't grow up with light. I grew up in tenements.

  Martin Scorsese

  Growing Up, Cutting, Thinking

  8 Copy quote

• If matter mute and inanimate, though changed by the forces of Nature into a multitude of forms, can never die, will the spirit of man suffer annihilation when it has paid a brief visit, like a royal guest, to this tenement of clay?

  William Jennings Bryan

  Men, Suffering, Clay

  William Jennings Bryan (1968). “The Credo of the Commoner”

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• Some day you will read in the papers that D.L. Moody of East Northfield, is dead. Don't you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now; I shall have gone up higher, that is all, out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal-a body that death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint; a body fashioned like unto His glorious body.

  Dwight L. Moody

  Death, Prayer, Children

  Dwight L. Moody (2017). “Secret Power: The Secret of Success in Christian Life and Work”, p.75, Aneko Press

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• She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.

  Isabel Allende

  Mother, Wall, Fate

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• Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:---touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am's private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to take in any any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.

  William Faulkner

  Fall, Cutting, Color

  "Daughter of the Swan: Love and Knowledge in Eudora Welty's Fiction". Book by Rosa Coldfield (p. 32), 1994.

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• From the Berlin tenement reform law of 1897 to H. P. Berlage's plan for Amsterdam South of 1917, designers and theorists in Germany and Holland moved toward the development of a perimeter residential block that would preserve the plastic continuity of the street while opening up the resultant courtyard for use as an enclosed semi-public space.

  Kenneth Frampton

  Block, Opening Up, Space

  6 Copy quote