Chicago Quotes

“Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.”
― Warren Ellis

“I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“Leave the fireworks for those who cast no spark of their own.”
― Karen Abbott, Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

“... Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“Let me tell your something. I'm from Chicago. I don't break.”
― Barack Obama

“Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“There have been times I have thought some dreams should never be dreamt, but I would hate a world where that was true.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“...a city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“I don’t think I’ve ever referred to any girl I dated as my girlfriend. I think that would freak me out. Even the girl that I dated for two years in college I don’t think I ever referred to her as my girlfriend.”
“How would you introduce her?” I asked.
“I’m just going to say her name,” he said.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“Chicago has so much excellent architecture that they feel obliged to tear some of it down now and then and erect terrible buildings just to help us all appreciate the good stuff.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife

“It is wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago”
― Dan Quayle

“That weekend the city blushed with a great heat wave but on Monday it rained, cooling the ache in the street’s burn.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“Look, girls know when they’re cute,” he said. “You don’t have to tell them. All they need to do is look in the mirror. I have one friend out in New York, an attorney. She moved out there after the school year to take the bar. She doesn’t have a job. I was like, ‘How are you going to get a job there in this market?’ And she’s like, ‘I’ll wink and I’ll smile.’ She’s a pretty girl. Whether that works despite her poor grades is yet to be seen.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“It's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities most like Man himself— loneliest creation of all this very old poor earth.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“The great trains howling from track to track all night. The taut and telegraphic murmur of ten thousand city wires, drawn most cruelly against a city sky. The rush of city waters, beneath the city streets. The passionate passing of the night's last El.”
― Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning

“Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning...proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.”
― Carl Sandburg

“When I burn please bury me deep
Somewhere on West Division Street
Put a bottle beneat' my head
'n a bottle beneat' my feet”
― Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning

“I often wonder what Einstein would have done in my position. At Peterson, I kept an Einstein poster in my room, the one that says 'Imagination is more important than knowledge.' Einstein was smart, maybe even as smart as Laserator, but he played it way too safe. Then again, nobody ever threw a grappling hook at Einstein. I like to think he would have enjoyed my work, if he could have seen it. But no one sees anything I do, not until it's hovering over Chicago.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“One of the professors told me last week that he feels bad teaching with the way the economy is now. ‘What’s the point?’ he said. ‘Kids aren’t getting jobs.’ You never hear faculty talk that way. He did.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“I bet you think fellas are the ones to remember a girl -- don't you?"

He shook his head hurriedly, that he'd always thought that.

"Fellas have all the fun 'n she just sees one right after another, so it seems like HE'D remember her, better 'n SHE'D remember him, only it works the other way around. I ain't forgot one single fella, all these years. But I bet there ain't TWO 'd know me from a big of bananas this minute.”
― Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning

“Partying means drinking. It also means playing records by Lou Reed and Chicago, which I thought was a city but is also a band it turns out.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“I’ve officially turned into a loser,” she whispered cynically. “I’m looking forward to going home and having cereal for dinner and walking Mitchell and studying a little and then going to sleep. I’ve had my ‘going out and having fun’ quota for the year, I guess, and it’s June.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“I heard Mr. Ingersoll many years ago in Chicago. The hall seated 5,000 people; every inch of standing-room was also occupied; aisles and platform crowded to overflowing. He held that vast audience for three hours so completely entranced that when he left the platform no one moved, until suddenly, with loud cheers and applause, they recalled him. He returned smiling and said: 'I'm glad you called me back, as I have something more to say. Can you stand another half-hour?' 'Yes: an hour, two hours, all night,' was shouted from various parts of the house; and he talked on until midnight, with unabated vigor, to the delight of his audience. This was the greatest triumph of oratory I had ever witnessed. It was the first time he delivered his matchless speech, 'The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child'.

I have heard the greatest orators of this century in England and America; O'Connell in his palmiest days, on the Home Rule question; Gladstone and John Bright in the House of Commons; Spurgeon, James and Stopford Brooke, in their respective pulpits; our own Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, and Webster and Clay, on great occasions; the stirring eloquence of our anti-slavery orators, both in Congress and on the platform, but none of them ever equalled Robert Ingersoll in his highest flights.

{Stanton's comments at the great Robert Ingersoll's funeral}”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“On the Rolling Stones - You will walk out of the Amphitheatre after watching the Stones perform and suddenly the Chicago stockyards smell clean and good by comparison.”
― Tom Fitzpatrick

“I will have both of you," he said. "My Sentinel and my city. And the GP will learn exactly how stubborn we both can be.”
― Chloe Neill, Wild Things

“Boys with hands in pockets, waiting for everything to begin”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“Sunbeams were coming down from the bottom of the cloudcover, pointing to different areas of Chicago.
And I wanted to break off a sunbeam right where it met with the clouds and use it as a sword to protect the city.
Anyone coming in comes through me.
Anyone leaving leaves through me.
Anyone not wanted, denied.
Everyone else inside safe-but always in view of my sunbeam sword as I hold it, arms crossed and expressionless.”
― Sam Pink