M Train Quotes
"The end of November. The small café feels chilly."
"—This is the last time I’ll be serving you, he says solemnly."
"Nothing seemed more romantic than just to sit and write poetry in a Greenwich Village café."
"Every morning I would wipe down the tables with aromatic tea like they do in Chinatown. No music no menus. Just silence black coffee olive oil fresh mint brown bread."
"My yearning for him permeated everything—my poems, my songs, my heart."
"In his Journal he wrote of a hierarchy of inviolable criminality, a manly saintliness that flowered at its crown in the terrible reaches of French Guiana."
"What really bothers me is why I have spring fever in January."
"My father worked the night shift. He slept in the day and left while we were at school and returned late at night when we were sleeping."
"You should sit on me, his chair urges, but I can’t bring myself to do it."
"—Hello, Curly, I whisper, and am instantly gladdened."
"Without a doubt we sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality."
"I wipe dust from the glass protecting my Polaroid of that same chair."
"We are a nation of spies, she cried, all spying on one another. We used to help one another! We used to be kind!"
"I follow Sarah Lund yet dream of Sarah Linden."
"I thought for a moment. What is mathematic and scientific theory but projection?"
"—But shouldn’t we hear the end of Twenty-three’s talk? It was the compassionate gravedigger speaking."
"Man gives us war. A mother profits from it and pays with her children; they fall one by one like wooden pins at the end of a bowling alley."
"I never get it. Why can’t things be just as they are?"
"How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?"
"We are guided by roses, the scent of a page."
"What a drug this little book is; to imbibe it is to find oneself presuming his process."
"There are two kinds of masterpieces. There are the classic works monstrous and divine like Moby-Dick or Wuthering Heights or Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus. And then there is the type wherein the writer seems to infuse living energy into words as the reader is spun, wrung, and hung out to dry."
"We search for them in close-up, as we search for our hands in a dream."
"So much easier to write a list of what to pack for a forthcoming journey."
"The truth is that there is only one kind of masterpiece: a masterpiece."
"All doors are open to the believer. It is the lesson of the Samaritan woman at the well."
"I scoured the niches of former joys, halting at a moment of secret exaltation."
"Greek legends don’t tell us anything, he was saying. Legends are stories. People interpret them or attach morals to them."
"Love is the most precious jewel of all, she whispers, unclasping the pearls that drop from her throat, scales of sorrow that soar and diminish."
"The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there."
"The human mood was frenetic. People were crowding the normally laid-back deli, piling up supplies, preparing for an impending storm."
"They know, I thought, like the birds of Iraq before shock and awe on the first day of spring."
"Fred believed that if he ever entered a hospital he would never leave."
"I could feel Fred closer than ever. His rage and sorrow for being torn away."
"You never can pay too much for peace of mind."
"Joining them I felt their proud fury mingled with degrees of helplessness."
"Like butterflies that will one day just disappear."
"It is what you can see of your eyes without a mirror."
"The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen."
"Every once in a while I would look up at my drawing."
"I was about to wipe the table with my sleeve when I noticed the droplets eerily formed the shape of an elongated island, perhaps a sign."
"All writers are bums. May I be counted among you one day."
"Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line."
"I have lived in my own book. One I never planned to write, recording time backwards and forwards."
"We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation."
"It’s the loneliest thing in the world, waiting to be found."
"What do we do when one of them commingles with our own sense of self, only to be transferred into a finite space within an on-demand portal?"
"I’m going to remember everything and then I’m going to write it all down."