Boulevards Quotes & Sayings

Contrasts
The windows of my poetry are wide open on the boulevards and in the shop windows
Shine
The precious stones of light
Listen to the violins of the limousines and the xylophones of the linotypes
The sketcher washes with the hand-towel of the sky
All is color spots
And the hats of the women passing by are comets in the conflagration of the evening
Unity
There's no more unity
All the clocks now read midnight after being set back ten minutes
There's no more time.
There's no more money.
In the Chamber
They are spoiling the marvelous elements of raw material
("Contrasts") — Blaise Cendrars

But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people. — James Lee Burke

(And did I mention how in summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan and dumped onto the ground, huge piles of pulpy fruit lying in the dirt, with dirty women steeping them in salt water and children squatting to defecate behind the clusters? Did I mention how the reek of the fig women mixed with pleasanter smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach, and how everybody wore masks on Mardi Gras and had elaborate dinners on the decks of frigates? I want to mention these things because they all happened in that city that was no place exactly, that was part of no country because it was all countries, and because now if you go there you'll see modern high-rises, amnesiac boulevards, teeming sweatshops, a NATO headquarters, and a sign that says Izmir ... ) — Jeffrey Eugenides

The police helicopters were rising so far away that it seemed someone had blown the gray head off a dry dandelion flower. Two dozen of them flurried, wavering, indecisive, three miles off, like butterflies puzzled by autumn, and then they were plummeting down to land, one by one, here, there, softly kneading the streets where, turned back to beetles, they shrieked along the boulevards or, leapt back to beetles, they shrieked along the boulevards or, as suddenly, leapt back into the air, continuing their search. — Ray Bradbury

I thought of women in other places, streets and boulevards in major cities, wind blowing, a woman's skirt lifting in the breeze, the way the wind tenses the skirt, giving shape to the legs, making the skirt dip between the legs, revealing knees and thighs. Were these my father's thoughts or mine? — Don DeLillo

She changes everything she touches. And everything she touches changes. — Starhawk

When our boulevards are lined with an infinity of bad eating houses filled with dead-faced people placed like mute beasts in their stalls; today, when one out of every three marriages ends in divorce ... It seems incredible that normal human beings not only tolerate the average American restaurant food, but actually prefer it to eating at home. The only possible explanation for such deliberate mass-poisoning, a kind of suicide of the spirit as well as the body, is that meals in the intimacy of a family dining-room or kitchen are unbearable. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

The only way to solve the traffic problems of the country is to pass a law that only paid-for cars are allowed to use the highways. That would make traffic so scarce, we could use our boulevards for children's playgrounds. — Will Rogers

My loneliness ... still comes over me sometimes ... It's a liminal, lost sensation of having wandered wide, endless boulevards, among rows of orange trees, winter butterflies, seasons reversed and out of order, dogs barking from behind fences meant to keep out intruders. It's not the place that impoverishes me but I who bring my own sense of poverty, of loss, to the place. It's a sense of near nothingness, as though I were not so much a blank slate as an erased chalkboard, still bearing illegible smudges of smoothed-over writing. — Marco Roth

But they will build no more barricades, they will break no more soldiers' heads with paving-stones. Louis Napoleon has taken care of all that. He is annihilating the crooked streets and building in their stead noble boulevards as straight as an arrow - avenues which a cannon ball could traverse from end to end without meeting an obstruction more irresistible than the flesh and bones of men - boulevards whose stately edifices will never afford refuges and plotting places for starving, discontented revolution breeders. Five of these great thoroughfares radiate from one ample centre - a centre which is exceedingly well adapted to the accommodation of heavy artillery. The mobs used to riot there, but they must seek another rallying-place in future. And this ingenious Napoleon paves the streets of his great cities with a smooth, compact composition of asphaltum and sand. No more barricades of flagstones - no more assaulting his Majesty's troops with cobbles. — Mark Twain

I went without health insurance until 'Roger & Me,' basically - from about age 20 till about age 35. With 'Roger & Me,' I joined the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild, and since then I've had excellent health care managed by the union. — Michael Moore

Boulevards are like people: similar in their youth, they undergo gradual change according to what ferments in them. — M. Ageyev

I plucked a honeysuckle where The hedge on high is quick with thorn, And climbing for the prize, was torn, And fouled my feet in quag-water; And by the thorns and by the wind The blossom that I took was thinn'd, And yet I found it sweet and fair. — Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Parents, teachers, government - they all teach you how to live the dreary , deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally. — Ryu Murakami

Love knows no answer for it does not question. — Silent Lotus

He started as a maker of Cartesian devils - imps of bottle glass bobbing up and down in methylate-filled tubes hawked during Catkin Week on the boulevards. He — Vladimir Nabokov

To view, I had started for the first time in my adult life to live in a world without secrets. I looked at all the laughing women, hips swinging, sashaying down the wide boulevards of Paris, and as spring became summer I started to believe anything was possible. The problem with the spy business, though, is that while you can resign, you can never leave. I suppose I didn't want to acknowledge it then, but too much wreckage floats in the wake of a life like mine - people you've hurt don't forget. And at the back of your mind is the — Terry Hayes

Anyone who is not in love with the life itself can never find real happiness! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing - the existing landowners wanted things as they had been. — Norman Foster

Like a blazing comet, I've traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear. I've been a man, a woman, an old person, a little girl, I've been the crowds on the grand boulevards of the capital cities of the West, I've been the serene Buddha of the East, whose calm and wisdom we envy. I've known honor and dishonor, enthusiasm and exhaustion.
... I've been the sun and the moon, and everything because life is not enough. — Antonio Tabucchi

Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets
as vast and indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her
and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris. — Anne Rice

It was all still there, an immense quilt of bold, fantastical human will: the faded tawny golds and grays of the descending rooftops and scorched chimney pots, the cold steel-blue river with its fabled Left and Right Banks, the towers and steeples and crooked cobblestone streets, bisected by wide, brutish boulevards. As seductive as a mirage, but every slab of stone, every silent or uproarious inch of it, real. She had not returned triumphant as a brilliant painter or a self-made woman whose only worry about money was how to spend it ... but she had come back to Paris anyway. It was hard to imagine being unhappy here. — Christine Sneed

As long as we have books, we are not alone. — Laura Bush

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx. — James Baldwin

They were utterly fearless. I did not understand it until I looked out on the street. That was where I saw white parents pushing double-wide strollers down gentrifying Harlem boulevards in T-shirts and jogging shorts. Or I saw them lost in conversation with each other, mother and father, while their sons commanded entire sidewalks with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The reason there are so many tree-lined boulevards in Paris is so the German army can march in the shade. — George S. Patton

You really need to learn to take a compliment....And it wasn't just men who took this view; is was women, too--telling me I was getting worked up about nothing, or being oversensitive... — Laura Bates

The city might be savage, stray dogs might share the streets with grimy urchins whose blank eyes reflected the knowledge that they might soon be covered over, blinded forever, by the same two pennies just begged from some gentleman, and no one in the fuming, fulminous boulevards of trade might know who actually ran Ambergris-or, if anyone ran it at all, but, like a renegade clock, it ran on and wound itself heedless, empowered by the insane weight of its own inertia, the weight of its own citizenry. — Jeff VanderMeer

Everyone goes to the 'Grands-Boulevards' (in Paris, ed.) and let himself loose ... Do not picture these in costume, they are not for the most part ... perhaps a clown with a big nose, or two girls with bare necks and short skirts ... the parade of the queens of the halls (markets) is also one of the events ... Some are pretty but look awkward in their silk dresses and crowns, particularly as the broad sun displays their defects - perhaps a neck too thin or a painted face which shows ghastley white in the sunlight. — Edward Hopper

By nature independent, gay, even exuberant, seductively responsive and given to those spontaneous sallies that sparkle in the conversation of certain daughters of Paris who seem to have inhaled since childhood the pungent breath of the boulevards laden with the nightly laughter of audiences leaving theaters, Madame de Burne's five years of bondage had nonetheless endowed her with a singular timidity which mingled oddly with her youthful mettle, a great fear of saying too much, of going to far, along with a fierce yearning for emancipation and a firm resolve never again to compromise her freedom. — Guy De Maupassant

I'm not even sure he would have realized he was permitted to have his own desires and preferences. That it would have been okay for him to have a favorite place, to walk with satisfaction down the long straight boulevards of whatever post he may have gone to next, to admire the uniformity of the grass, green and neatly shorn beneath a blue, limitless sky, to bury himself in a sandy shallow of some clear cold stream and let the water wash over the pitted skin of his scarred body. I don't know what his favorite place would have been like, because I don't believe he would have let himself have one. He would have waited for one to be assigned to him. That's the way he was ... Everything he'd done had been a response to a preexisting expectation. — Kevin Powers

I had a mother who walked to the library with me, and you can't walk to a lot of libraries in San Antonio because - guess what? - there are no sidewalks, except in the neighborhoods. And they're across big boulevards, and it's so hot, you can't even walk to the corner. So things like that affect how children can get to libraries. So there are a lot of things involved. — Sandra Cisneros

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing. — Rainer Maria Rilke

But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to a few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solititude and want of faith in himself and others. — Joseph Conrad

The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house. Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre. — John Berger

On the 11th anniversary of 9/11, it is some consolation that the man most responsible for that terrible morning will not be smiling smugly to himself as satellite TV brings to the leafy boulevards of Abbottabad the somber images of New Yorkers commemorating those who perished in the Twin Towers. — Bobby Ghosh

You can only cruse the boulevards of regret so far, and then you've got to get back up onto the freeway again. — Thomas Pynchon

This was the kind of kiss that couldn't really be called a kiss, the kind that involves arms and legs and necks and hair, the kind where the quilt finally slides down to the floor, and in this case, the windows unshatter themselves, the bureau rights itself, the clothes return to their hangers, and the freezing cold room is finally warm. — Kami Garcia

I had thought about landing in the Kremlin, but there wasn't enough space. — Mathias Rust