Track Quotes - Page 6

• The train is roaring toward you and the villain is twirling his moustache and you're fussing that he's tied you to the tracks with the wrong kind of rope.

  Robin McKinley

  Roaring, Rope, Kind

  7 Copy quote

• From the place by the railing at the edge of the tracks on the summer evening I return across the city to my own room. I am vividly aware of my own life that escaped the winter on the boat. How many such lives I have lived. Then I only made a dollar and a half a day and now I sometimes make more than that in a few minutes. How wonderful to be able to write words. ... Again I begin the endless game of reconstructing my own life, jerking it out of the shell that dies, striving to breathe into it beauty and meaning. ... I wonder why my life, why all lives, are not more beautiful.

  Sherwood Anderson

  Beautiful, Summer, Writing

  4 Copy quote

• It is still news to her that passion could steer her wrong though she went down, a thousand times strung out across railroad tracks, off bridges under cars, or stiff glass bottle still in hand, hair soft on greasy pillows, still it is news she cannot follow love (his burning footsteps in blue crystal snow) & still come out all right.

  Diane di Prima

  Passion, Glasses, Hair

  12 Copy quote

• I said it before and I’ll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there’s only movies. Music is still okay, because music is sound track. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I’d be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. Not write movies. You don’t write movies. You make movies.

  Stephen Fry

  Art, Book, Writing

  Stephen Fry (2014). “Making History”, p.95, Soho Press

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• I feel quite lost INSIDE myself, like I'm looking for my train tracks for my life, as if they would just appear and solve the growing questions I seem to face (my reflection in the morning).

  Sabrina Ward Harrison

  Morning, Reflection, Growing

  6 Copy quote

• I gotta cut smoking or I'll never make track next year

  S. E. Hinton

  Cutting, Years, Smoking

  4 Copy quote

• It was a bad one, the Winter of 1933. Wading home that night through flames of snow, my toes burning, my ears on fire, the snow swirling around me like a flock of angry nuns, I stopped dead in my tracks. The time had come to take stock. Fair weather or foul, certain forces in the world were at work trying to destroy me.

  John Fante

  Home, Winter, Night

  John Fante (2013). “1933 Was A Bad Year”, p.1, Canongate Books

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• What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms.

  Thomas Sowell

  Men, Years, Class

  Thomas Sowell (1995). “The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy”, Basic Books

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• The beach has a language of its own, with its undulating ribbons of silt, the imponderable hieroglyphs of bird tracks. The receding waves catch on innumerable holes in the sand. Bubbles form and fade. A new language, with a new alphabet.

  Franny Billingsley

  Beach, Bird, Ribbons

  4 Copy quote

• I do not see why I should e’er turn back, Or those should not set forth upon my track To overtake me, who should miss me here And long to know if still I held them dear. They would not find me changed from him they knew — Only more sure of all I thought was true.

  Robert Frost

  Long, Missing, Miss Me

  Robert Frost (2014). “The Letters of Robert Frost”, p.6, Harvard University Press

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• This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Moving, Men, Garden

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Book House (2016). “F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Complete Novels (Book House)”, p.393, Book House

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• It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.

  C. S. Lewis

  Elephants, Missing, Way

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “The World's Last Night: And Other Essays”, p.72, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Every year, at 8:00 PM on the second Saturday of July, hundreds of people gather along a section of Los Angeles rail track to drop their pants and moon passing passenger trains.

  James Frey

  Moon, July, Years

  4 Copy quote

• Well, finally, the events I've been through have been tremendously complicated. All kinds of characters have come on the scene, and strange things have happened one after another, to the point where, if I try to think about them in order, I lose track.

  Haruki Murakami

  Character, Thinking, Order

  4 Copy quote

• You can't just plan a moment when things get back on track, just as you can't plan the moment you lose your way in the first place.

  Sarah Dessen

  Life, Choices, Way

  Sarah Dessen (2004). “Someone Like You”, p.166, Penguin

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• Those single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters.

  Robin McKinley

  Military, Thinking, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• High school wasn't a trial by fire or some ordeal that had to be survived. It was all a big joke. You just had to provide the laugh track.

  Scott Westerfeld

  School, Fire, Laughing

  Scott Westerfeld (2009). “Midnighters #3: Blue Noon”, p.15, Harper Collins

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• This morning, as Charlotte approached the brick facade of Hartnett, she found herself overcome with a great sense of dread. It hit her with a strange and sudden force, and she had an overwhelming urge to turn back, get into bed and not go out for about three weeks. She stopped in her tracks. The feeling itself was alarming to Charlotte - was she sensing something? Something dangerous? And was it something supernatural or just middle school? Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.

  Anne Ursu

  Morning, School, Differences

  4 Copy quote

• If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.If you say "No! I don't want it right now," that's when you'll get it for sure. Love will make a way out of no way. Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.

  Lynda Barry

  Love Is, Sure Love, Want

  17 Copy quote

• No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries.

  Boris Pasternak

  Kings, War, Men

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• And that was as far as he got before i heard it. The thumping of footsteps, running up the lawn toward me: It seemed like I could hear it through the grass, like leaning your ear to a railroad track and feeling the train coming, miles away. As the noise got closer I could hear ragged breaths, and then a voice. It was my mother.

  Sarah Dessen

  Mother, Running, Voice

  Sarah Dessen (2004). “Dreamland”, p.216, Penguin

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• Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.

  Boris Pasternak

  Flower, Book, Eye

  34 Copy quote

• I think I'll be a clown when I get grown,' said Dill. Jem and I stopped in our tracks. Yes sir, a clown,' he said. 'There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off.' You got it backwards, Dill,' said Jem. 'Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them.' Well I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks.

  Harper Lee

  Thinking, Tkam, Laughing

  Harper Lee (2014). “To Kill A Mockingbird”, p.176, Random House

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• Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.

  Thomas Sowell

  Thinking, Long, Racism

  17 Copy quote

• Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleance me in the great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

  Oscar Wilde

  Sweet, Hurt, Stars

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.152, Oxford University Press on Demand

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