Quotes about brooklyn

Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn't happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and b

I had to say it gave me a warm feeling to picture Meredith Winslow spending twenty years or so in an ill fitting orange jumpsuit, cozying up to a great big girl named Beulah

He'd once explained that when he was a boy his very proper parents had forbidden him and his brothers to curse in the house so 'feather buckets' was the young boys coded way of saying 'f*ck it

Men were good for one thing only. Killing spiders. Other than that, I was on my own. It was sad though. Where was the chivalry of yesteryear?

I had a blind date with a dentist — and he told me to come back in six months.

People say it is not the key to happiness, but I have always figured if you have enough money you can have a key made.

I said, "Is there!" I told him there is a Mafia school where they teach them math — if Johnny has ten fingers and they cut off two, how many does he have left?

Somehow, some way, every person in the arts has to find an accommodation with disappointment and embarrassment. They are the pollen in the air we breathe.

It gathers emotionally inside you, in a strange way a by-product of struggle, of a willingness to do anything, try anything, expose yourself to anything — staying in motion because sooner or later those ripples will cause change.

Laughing made me feel safe. I was not going to be enveloped by the seediness that coated this world like dust.

When you begin to losing your audience, do not get loud; get quiet, make them find you and come back to you.

I am driven. Being driven is my energy source. It is my fun.…I believe that where there is action, there is movement, and those ripples will eventually produce something positive.

The revelation that personal truth can be the foundation of comedy, that outrageousness can be cleansing and healthy…

The act of creation fascinates me. You can only sit with blank page and wait. You cannot press a button, cannot program it.

Everything comes out of smoke and mist and nothingness, a mystical happening…

Liked" was the kiss of death. "Loved" or "hated" interested him. At least the performer had aroused emotion.

Maybe that is why in my comedy I try and puncture the hypocrisy all around us, why it is almost a crusade with me to strip life down to what really is true.

…but I think comedy is more aggressive than that. It is a medium for revenge. We can deflate and punish the pomposity and the rejection which hurt us. Comedy is power.

…you either do or do not have a comedy mind, whatever that is, maybe a heightened sense of the ridiculous and the absurdity of life…We are all crazy and crazed.

Your technique means nothing if you're not using your talents for the betterment of humanity.

Even the worst things about Devonairre Street are better than the rest of the city.

Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.

Florence, listen to me carefully.... Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place

Who is she, after all? Not a member of the Party. Not even a Russian...What can she do, really, but watch the ginger-haired sacrificial lamb get slaughtered? One wrong move and Florence herself might be on the chopping block herself

The immediate difficulty, Florence realised while riding the high rail back to Brooklyn, was how to break the news to her parents, even if she could convince them that being a chaperone to six foreign men was a legitimate occupation for a twenty-three-year-old girl. What choice did she have? A paycheck could not win a girl’s independence

Well, I didn't really know what to say. So maybe I should say that I have thought about you and I like you, I like seeing you, I care for you and maybe I love you too. And the next time if you tell me you love me, I'll--" She stopped."You'll what?""I'll say I love you too.

Maybe it wasn’t rational, but she didn’t like the idea of Leo invading her little world. Yesterday, Brooklyn had belonged to her. The Long Island ’burbs where she’d grown up had felt far away from the brick streets and renovated factory spaces of Brooklyn. In this job, she’d felt truly independent, putting down her own fragile roots in a new place. Fast forward twenty-four hours, and her daddy had joined the workplace and her ex-boyfriend had shown up to remind her of all that she’d lost. Really

When the Brooklyn rain comes downhopefully it will be to fuckin' wake you up

To the bankrupt poet, to the jilted lover, to anyone who yearns to elude the doubt within and the din without, the tidal strait between Manhattan Island and her favorite suburb offers the specious illusion of easy death. Melville prepared for the plunge from the breakwater on the South Street promenade, Whitman at the railing of the outbound ferry, both men redeemed by some Darwinian impulse, maybe some epic vision, which enabled them to change leaden water into lyric wine. Hart Crane rejected t

Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.

I have never learned how to tell somebody something good about myself that should be a secret they must find out .

We’re all a little broken, on the sidewalk. On the street. In the city.

To people from 'Brooklyn-Brooklyn' North Brooklyn is really just South Queens.

They pine for the hip, frosty girlfriend they abandoned for a pleasant if unexciting marriage to her sunnier, less mentally present sister coast.

His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.

Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it's obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.