Subway Quotes

“It’s not that we have to quit
this life one day, but it’s how
many things we have to quit
all at once: music, laughter,
the physics of falling leaves,
automobiles, holding hands,
the scent of rain, the concept
of subway trains... if only one
could leave this life slowly!”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“Anyway, I think Florence and I noticed each other before the local train screeched to a halt at the 110th Street station, because as I boarded it felt as though we were supposed to step into the same car, and hold onto the same moist metal bar. My wishful hunch now seems confirmed by the way she's reading her Time magazine article next to me.”
― Zack Love, City Solipsism

“There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

“...And on my fourth morning in Naples, I woke up alone. There was a note on the table with the breakfast that Cinzia had quietly prepared for me. It read, "It could never be. But that's why it will always be - perfectly divine. Cinzia"

City Solipsism: A Short Story”
― Zack Love, Stories and Scripts: an Anthology

“The text also just grows increasingly garbled. For instance, here it says that our new subway system will streamline the rush-hour commute, but about halfway down, it's a series of nearly indecipherable glyphs our experts insist hint at "non-Euclidian emotions" and "appeasement" (though we think this may be a euphemism for "fares").”
― Joseph Fink, The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe

“Improbable as it may be, the day still has a few indignities left. The day waters down indignity with frustration to make it last longer. Abomination, thy name is Subway. He cannot enter. They flood through turnstiles, hips banging rods, and will not let him enter. He must get home, but it's all he can do to get halfway in before another one charges at him. A fish out of school. Everybody knows how it works except for him. All of them from every floor are crammed into this one subway car: the makers of memos, the routers of memos, the indexers filers and shredders of memos, the always-at-their-desks and the never-around. How do they all fit. Squabbling like pigeons over stale crumbs of seats. Everyone thinks they are more deserving, everyone thinks their day has been harder than everyone else's, and everyone is correct.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York

“People ask me if I like golfing, and I look at them and reply, "Does The Pope wipe his ass with tuna fish sandwiches?" That response is NOT sponsored by Subway.”
― Jarod Kintz, To be good at golf you must go full koala bear

“Freedom is taken for granted by the free and longed for by those who never had it. But for those who have lost it, the loss burns like the hottest flame.”
― S.W. Lothian, Subway | Palliatopia

“As nearly all great fortunes in America are made on land stolen while the public's back is turned — and by people who want money but don't want to work for it, by men who use the title of builder and yet never have driven a nail into a board — nowhere was the relationship between politician and merchant closer than at the time the subways of New York were built.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Damon Runyon

“Her logic was a combination of half-truths and clichés, her worldview a compound of misconceptions deriving from a history of our nation as written from the perspective of a subway tunnel.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“The subway was the great leveler—underground, the Wall Street titans stood in the shuddering car and clutched the same poles as the junior IT guys to create a totem of fists, the executive vice presidents in charge of new product marketing pressed thighs with the luckless and the dreamers, who got off at their stations when instructed by the computer’s voice and were replaced by devisers of theoretical financial instruments of unreckoned power, who vacated their seats and were replaced in turn by unemployable homunculi clutching yesterday’s tabloids. They jostled one another, competed for space below as they did above, in a minuet of ruin and triumph. In the subway, down in the dark, no citizen was more significant or more decrepit than another. All were smeared into a common average of existence, the A’s and the C’s tumbling or rising to settle into a ruthless mediocrity. No escape. This was the plane where Mark Spitz lived. They were all him. Middling talents who got by, barnacles on humanity’s hull, survivors who had not yet been extinguished. Perhaps it was only a matter of time.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“It is no surprise this is the reputed to be the greatest city in the world. It is a blob of brick and neon connected by the arterial subway, equal parts fear and wonder. It breathes, more robotic than organic, but alive.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Holidays with Bigfoot

“I loved the abandoned subway stations, rushing past the darkened platforms, the sprawl of graffiti like old letters. Letters left by ghosts.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“Tramway is more close to human soul than the subway because it touches to the passengers’ souls with a sweet sunshine!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“At the subway station you wait fifteen minutes on the platform for a train. Finally a local, enervated by graffiti, shuffles into the station. You get a seat and hoist a copy of the New York Post. The Post is the most shameful of your several addictions. You hate to support this kind of trash with your thirty cents, but you are a secret fan of Killer Bees, Hero Cops, Sex Fiends, Lottery Winners, Teenage Terrorists, Liz Taylor, Tough Tots, Sicko Creeps, Living Nightmares, Life on Other Planets, Spontaneous Human Combustion, Miracle Diets and Coma Babies.”
― Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City

“The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.”
― Denise Levertov, O Taste and See

“Meteorites are not just in the sky; get down on the subway of a city, and you will find people who do not know what they are doing, scattering around in space just like meteorites!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“A man in disheveled clothing approaches you with a knife and tells you to give him your belongings.

Imagine...

You take a deep breath and blow your community assistance horn, and the local de-escalation enthusiast arrives on his unicycle. He drapes him with the comfort blanket and gives him a hug, whispering in his ear that things will be okay.

You are stabbed 37 times and he uses the Subway gift card that was in your purse to buy himself a sweet onion chicken teriyaki sandwich from the $3.99 Sub of the Day menu

Isn't this public safety?”
― stained hanes, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“If I took the nicer subway, it meant I had to go through Manhattan every morning to get there, and that took a really long time. The subway line that ran the short way was the G line, which stopped exclusively in Brooklyn and Queens. That might be the only time the word exclusive has been used to describe the G train.”
― Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

“Editors keep pushing
deadline strain while people sleep
on benches and subway grates;
a welter weight boxer dances
on the platform at 125th Street
station, commuters look unfazed...”
― Kristen Henderson, Of My Maiden Smoking

“Stressen, tänker han där han svänger av mot spärrarna, det är Guds gåva till människan.”
― Pooneh Rohi, Araben

“subway stations...
passengers who token through life”
― Richard L. Ratliff

“Isolation was the final blow. Scattering their unity like a body chopped into seven. Life cannot prevail in each piece; it can only survive as one. With every new grenade that the Institute lobbed, the body of hope died a little bit more.”
― S.W. Lothian, Subway | Palliatopia

“It was impeccably clean, and smelled like an old library might smell if someone was eating a Subway sandwich in it. Because someone was eating a Subway sandwich in it.”
― Mandy Ashcraft, Small Orange Fruit

“He would usually go into the subway tunnels, where he could be alone. That’s where he preferred to get high. There was no one around, but the rats and cockroaches, to see him at his all-time low. He was too embarrassed to be around people whenever he got high. At least, in the tunnels he could hide from the rest of the world.”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“Sometimes, he would have to hide from track workers or urban explorers. It amazed him how busy the subway tunnels could be with activity. He constantly asked himself why teenagers would want to lurk around those dark tunnels seeking adventure. What was the point? Personally, he hated being down there. Most tunnels were dark, damp, and dirty.”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“He slept in the park, on the subway trains, or with friends from work. He never had a home of his own.”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“In reality, he was living off of his victims. He stole purses, broke into cars, robbed people that were coming out of the subway, and did a lot of shoplifting. He was like a human parasite, which was ironic considering what was going through his body this very moment.”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“El metro va ple. En hora punta els vagons són càpsules de realitat que contenen una munió permanent de persones que sovint només comparteixen el desig de blindar-se en la pròpia intimitat teclejant els mòbils o amagats darrere un llibre. Quan surtin a fora la vida serà urgent, però durant el trajecte, l'espera en moviment es converteix en una treva obligatòria.”
― Marta Orriols, Dolça introducció al caos

“So: the end of the line. How slow its approach, how sudden its arrival. We never truly believe it's coming, he thought, and then before we know it, it's here. All the things we've done in our lives, and the undone things as well, extinguished in an instant.”
― Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors