Quotes about trains

Early youth is a baffling time. The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you. Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made. In this respect early youth is exactly like old age; it is a time o

It's not getting from A to B. It's not the beginning or the destination that counts. It's the ride in between...This train is alive with things that should be seen and heard. It's a living, breathing something -- you just have to want to learn its rhythm.

It’s been my experience that most folk who ride trains could care less where they’re going. For them it’s the journey itself and the people they meet along the way. You see, at every stop this train makes, a little bit of America, a little bit of your country, gets on and says hello. That’s why trains are so popular at Christmas. People get on to meet their country over the holidays. They’re looking for some friendship, a warm body to talk to. People don’t rush on a train, because that’s not wha

In America, Fredericka, they don't really have trains for people. The trains here are used mainly to transport pigs, television sets, and fruit.

Trains are beautiful. They take people to places they've never been, faster than they could ever go themselves. Everyone who works on trains knows they have personalities, they're like people. They have their own mysteries.

So when I watch trains, it makes me think about how much movement there is in the world. How every train has dozens of cars and every car has hundreds of parts, and all those parts and cars work day after day. And then there are all these other motions. People are born and die. Seasons change. Rivers flow to the sea. Earth circles the sun and the moon circles Earth. Everything whirring and spinning toward something. And I get to be part of it for a little while, the way I get to watch a train fo

Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he’d been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.

The rage for railroads is so great that many will be laid in parts where they will not pay.

The train hit her with the sound of a meat-filled hefty bag smacking the pavement, and the effect was much the same, I guess. (Dark City Lights)

I've always felt that distant train whistles heard in the dead of night are the universe's way of letting us know the best days are neither ahead nor behind us...they're happening right now, cradled in the palms of our hands. But that doesn't change the fact that the whiskey, weed, and romance eventually runs out and the night will soon turn to day.

The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn't really in the whistle—it is in you.

The last wendigo died in 1962, or so the story goes. Reputedly, he (it?) stood in front of the train to Churchill, Manitoba, believing that the train would stop for him, a supernatural being, and then he would be able to eat the passengers. The train ran him over. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.

The train may fall in love with a station, but it has to go and it goes! Don’t be like the train; stay at the station you fell in love, go nowhere!

Do you remember the long orphanage of the train stationsWe crossed cities that turn-tabled all dayAnd vomited at night the sunshine of the day ("The Voyager")

This is Denmark. We are Danes. We keep our distance. We do not pick a seat close to strangers if other seats are available. We do not talk to strangers in the trains.”William Wilson in the short story 'Metro' by Steen Langstrup

The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, po

I miss your silent stature, your avoided days of disaster, your present state of distress.I’m cinnamon, cloves and fire, you are the rested cedarwood of desire.

The train rolled right through dinner and over the sunset and around ten o'clock and into a nap and out the next day...

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?'WorriesForget your worriesAll the stations full of cracks tilted along the wayThe telegraph wires they hang fromThe grimacing poles that gesticulate and strangle themThe world stretches lengthens and folds in like an accordion tormented by a sadistic handIn the cracks of the sky the locomotives in angerFleeAnd in the holes,The whirling wheels the mouths the voicesAnd the dogs of misfortune that bark at our heelsThe demons are unleashedIron railsE

Writers do not have the privilege of sleep. There is always a story coming alive in their heads, constantly composing. Whether they choose it or not.

Maybe she had it wrong all this time and her empty heart could never be filled by his ingenious broken spirit. Maybe this yearning had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with her.

What is it about me that gets them all crying? It’s not the end of the world.

It's a finger snapping kind of day.

He had let me know time after time that he was a thinking man, a man of intellect and wit. Yet one unintended hungry look into my eyes and he betrayed each of his words he had carefully spoken to me. I knew it in that instant. He was a viscerally driven man. And one day, he would possess me.

You’re a mess, I confess, I despise you in the best kind of way.

He offered her power, money, status...a giant prison, all in exchange for only...her soul.

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!

When we are in love, we are convinced nobody else will do. But as time goes, others do do, and often do do, much much better.

I remember when your name was just another name that rolled without thought off my tongue.Now, I can’t look at your name without an abundance of sentiment attached to each lettter.Your name, which I played with so carelessly, so easily, has somehow become sacred to my lips.A name I won’t throw around lightheartedly or repeat without deep thought.And if ever I speak of you, I use the English language to describe who you were to me. You are nameless, because those letters grouped together in that

It was the day after Thanksgiving. I was the 3 p.m. backwaiter, but the trains were running irregularly, and while I had heard one sighing into the station as I ran down the stairs, my card was out of money. Which is to say, I was late.

A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.

Through the dark night chasing the morning lightThat headlight streaming white through the night

We'd seen it a million times before, since girls on the Tracks rarely knew of loyalty. She'd be gone when the breeze got under her skin. "You can't trust Vagabond hearts. They are already so broken that they think nothing of breaking yours," he had explained once. I wondered who was the first to break his heart–where he'd gained that knowledge the first time around.

I woke up feeling alone, so lonely. The night before, I had cried myself to sleep. I lay there on the floor, listening to the tube trains passing beneath me. I thought, All those hundreds and thousands and millions of people. London, London - I hate you. I picked myself up and got ready.

I’m mistaken….for thinking you were someone with a heart worth breaking.

Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.

I lie down on many a station platform; I stand before many a soup kitchen; I squat on many a bench;--then at last the landscape becomes disturbing, mysterious, and familiar. It glides past the western windows with its villages, their thatched roofs like caps, pulled over the white-washed, half-timbered houses, its corn-fields, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the slanting light, its orchards, its barns and old lime trees. The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and my heart trembles.

I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.

I’ll use my divination and look into the future. Hey, you know what, I’m seeing the future right now. If I stand here and wait, then in three minutes a train’s going to come. And after that, another train’s going to come. Here, I’ll let you guess what’s going to happen afterwards. I’ll give you a hint—there’s a train.