Corner Store Quotes & Sayings

I can feel the irrationality and anxiety draining my store of energy like a battery-operated racecar grinding away in the corner. This is the energy I will need to get through the next day. But I just lie in bed and watch it burn, and with it any hope for a productive tomorrow. There go the dishes, there goes the grocery store, there goes exercise, there goes bringing in the garbage cans. There goes basic human kindness. — Maria Semple

i met this girl down the block from me. used to tell myself she was to hot for me,but then i saw her at the corner store,so i ran on over just to grab the door,i got her number we started chillen [ hay] we started buzzen we got addicted,now i,i'm the one she can't live with out... i bet that her right now, shorty hiten me up,says she wants a re-up,knows i got the best in town cause when she gets the shivers,she knows i'll deliver, i'm the one who holds her down,she's about to break +4,nd know i won't let her wait +4,its geten kinda late,late,late, late,and she just wanna shake, shake,shake,shake.. — Jesse McCartney

New Yorkers love the bigness
the skyscrapers, the freedom, the lights. But they also love it when they can carve out some smallness for themselves. When the guy at the corner store knows which newspaper you want. When the barista has your order ready before you open your mouth. When you start to recognize the people in your orbit, and you know that, say, if you're waiting for the subway at eight fifteen on the dot, odds are the redhead with the red umbrella is going to be there too. — David Levithan

Hats have been my thing pretty much my whole life but finance has not. I would go to the corner store and buy really cheap baseball style caps and wear those to school. — Ne-Yo

That good or bad momentS never be forgetten. It Store alwayS in any corner it will remembered at right time automaticaly. No one can eraSe it but Simply it forgotten for Some time till the true time. — Sumit Lakhani

These stories at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationary store, when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke to the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like 'the Cleveland Chicken,' sail for Europe on ships, who were nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are. — John Cheever

Everywhere I went during those days, the streets were filled with talk of the Mets. It was one of those rare moments of unanimity when everyone was thinking about the same thing. People walked around with transistor radios tuned to the game, large crowds gathered in front of appliance store windows to watch the action on silent televisions, sudden cheers would erupt from corner bars, from apartment windows, from invisible rooftops. First it was Atlanta in the playoffs, and then it was Baltimore in the Series. Out of eight October games, the Mets lost only once, and when the adventure was over, New York held another ticker-tape parade, this one even surpassing the extravaganza that had been thrown for the astronauts two months earlier. More than five hundred tons of paper fell into the streets that day, a record that has not been match sense. — Paul Auster

The event that will light the way for immigration in North America is the talking picture. The silent film brings nothing but entertainment - a pie in the face, a fop being dragged by a bear out of a department store - all events governed by fate and timing, not language and argument. The tramp never changes the opinion of the policeman. The truncheon swings, the tramp scuttles through a corner window and disturbs the fat lady's ablutions. These comedies are nightmares. The audience emits horrified laughter as Chaplin, blindfolded, rollerskates near the edge of the unbalconied mezzanine. No one shouts to warn him. He cannot talk or listen. North America is still without language, gestures and work and bloodlines are the only currency. — Michael Ondaatje

Do you believe in spirits? Or ghosts? ... Yes, I do. I believe in ghosts ... They're the ones who haunt us. The ones who have left us behind."
"Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn the corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles."
"The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin. — Christina Baker Kline

At the corner store they invaded a hot dog stand and drank pina colada to sober up. It did no good. — Thomas Pynchon

To jump-start our economy, we must leave cash in your hands - because if you've got money in your pocket, you'll spend it at the hardware store or the corner market, and that will drive job growth in our private sector. — Tim Walz

Who am I? You know who I am. Or you think you do. I'm your florist. I'm your grocer. I'm your porter. I'm your waiter. I'm the owner of the dry-goods store on the corner of Elm. I'm the shoeshine boy. I'm the judo teacher. I'm the Buddhist priest. I'm the Shinto priest. I'm the Right Reverend Yoshimoto. So prease to meet you. ( ... ) I'm the one you call Jap. I'm the one you call Nip. I'm the one you call Slits. I'm the one you call Slopes. I'm the one you call Yellowbelly. I'm the one you call Gook. I'm the one you don't see at all - we all look alike. I'm the one you see everywhere - we're taking over the neighborhood. I'm the one you look for under your bed every night before you go to sleep. ( ... ) I'm your nightmare ... — Julie Otsuka

I turn the corner and go into the store and get what I need. The lady at the checkout asks me how I'm doing, and I know she doesn't really want to know so I don't say anything. These people always make me want to destroy. — Henry Rollins

I started 'American Born Chinese' as a mini-comic. I would write and draw a chapter, photocopy a hundred or so copies at the corner photocopy store, and then try to sell them on consignment through local comics shops. If I could sell maybe half a dozen, I'd be doing okay. — Gene Luen Yang

My hope that Thatcher would inadvertently bring about a new political revolution was well and truly bogus. All that sprang out of Thatcherism were extreme financialisation, the triumph of the shopping mall over the corner store, the fetishisation of housing and Tony Blair. — Yanis Varoufakis

These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. — John Cheever

I change clothes at least three times a day. It's the only way I can justify all the shopping I do. Prada to the grocery store? Yes! Gucci to the dry cleaner's? Why not? Dolce & Gabbana to the corner deli? I insist! — RuPaul

Any good Irwin can make going to the corner store for a candy bar and a Coke lood death defying and suicidal. — Mira Grant

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless: I am living. I remember you. — Marie Howe

Here's an Advent illustration for kids - and those of us who used to be kids and remember what it was like. Suppose you and your mom get separated in the grocery store, and you start to get scared and panic and don't know which way to go, and you run to the end of an aisle, and just before you start to cry, you see a shadow on the floor at the end of the aisle that looks just like your mom. It makes you really happy and you feel hope. But which is better? The happiness of seeing the shadow, or having your mom step around the corner and it's really her?

That's the way it is when Jesus comes to be our High Priest. That's what Christmas is. Christmas is the replacement of shadows with the real thing. — John Piper

I'm a really big Juice Press fan. There is a store right around the corner from my apartment in New York. — Gigi Hadid

When a scientist splits an atom, the event is locked away like a jewel in a castle, funneling down to the public through a myriad of institutions. But when an artist stumbles upon the key to unleashing universal evil, the forbidden fruit of his painstaking labor is packaged and sold at every corner store from Bangor to Bangkok. I'm still unsure whether this is the result of a lack of respect for artists (compared to scientists) or the moral corruption of artists (compared to scientists). — Anthony Marais

I remember the day I discovered James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. I don't know why it affected me so strongly, but I walked down to the corner store and bought every poster of them, and I did my whole room up. Overnight. — Gwen Stefani

Ambition. Yes, that is my God.

When Ambition is your God, the office is your temple, the employee handbook your holy book. The sacred drink, coffee, is imbibed five times a day. When you worship Ambition, there is no Sabbath, no day of rest. Every day, you rise early and kneel before the God Ambition, facing in the direction of your PC.

You pray alone, always alone, even though others may be present. Ambition is a vengeful God. He will smite those who fail to worship faithfully, but that is nothing compared to what He has in store for the faithful. They suffer the worst fate of all. For it is only when they are old are tired, entombed in the corner office, that the realize hits like a Biblical thunderclap.

The God Ambition is a false God and has always been. — Eric Weiner

. . .what does the computer know of the comforting weight of a book in one's lap? Or of the excitement that comes from finding a set of books, dusty and tucked away in the back corner of some store? The computer can only reproduce the information in a book, and never the joyful experience of reading it. — Ammon Shea

The proprietor of the grocery store on the corner was bidding a silent farewell to a tomato which even he, though a dauntless optimist, had been compelled to recognize as having outlived its utility. — P.G. Wodehouse

Love and cities are always inextricably entwined. There's no restaurant or corner store or run-down dive in any city that doesn't double as a monument for a lost love. I think that's why we always stop and stare whenever we come across a girl crying in public. We sense the imprint of a memory being pressed onto the sidewalk, onto the building contours, onto the names of the streets. — Jay Caspian Kang

People want to think that staying in shape costs a lot of money. They couldn't be more wrong. It doesn't cost anything to walk. And it's probably a lot cheaper to go to the corner store and buy vegetables than take a family out for fast food. — Florence Griffith Joyner

All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store. — William Gibson

Sybil entered, with a plate.
"You're not eating enough, Sam," she announced. "And the canteen here is a disgrace. It's all grease and garbage!"
"That's what the men like, I'm afraid," said Vimes guiltily.
"I've cleaned out the tar in the tea urn, at least," Sybil went on, with satisfaction.
"You cleaned out the tar urn?" said Vimes in a hollow voice. It was like being told that someone had wiped the patina off a fine old work of art.
"Yes, it was like tar in there. There really wasn't much proper food in the store, but I managed to make you a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich."
"Thank you, dear." Vimes cautiously lifted a corner of the bread with his broken pencil. There seemed to be too much lettuce, which is to say, there was some lettuce. — Terry Pratchett

I thought, My name is Matt and I'm an alcoholic. A woman I know got killed last night. She hired me to keep her from getting killed and I wound up assuring her that she was safe and she believed me. And her killer conned me and I believed him, and she's dead now, and there's nothing I can do about it. And it eats at me and I don't know what to do about that, and there's a bar on every corner and a liquor store on every block, and drinking won't bring her back to life but neither will staying sober, and why the hell do I have to go through this? Why? — Lawrence Block

Mason poked his head around the corner. "Dad and I are going to the store. Be back later."
Lucas sighed. They were probably going out to buy man tools. Or chips and beer. Or jock straps, he thought bitterly. — Madison Parker

If I were to open a corner store, I'd call it 90 Degrees. — Jarod Kintz

The world would be a healthier place if oral contraceptives were available in every corner store and cigarettes were limited to prescription use. — Malcolm Potts

In my entire life, any time I've ever lost something, I've gotten something even better going around the next corner. It's like one door closes and another door opens. As long as I can walk through the produce section in every grocery store in this country and eat the grapes that they're going to throw away, I know I can be fine. — Wayne Dyer

I think Amazon is the preeminent pioneer in building a new way of doing commerce: personalized, database-driven commerce, where the big value is not in the purchase fulfillment, but in knowing as much about a customer base of ten or twenty million people as a corner store used to know about a customer base of a few hundred. In today's mass-merchandising world, that's largely gone; Amazon is trying to use computer technology to re-establish it. — Andy Grove

You know, surprisingly, they don't sell a lot of brains in the local 24-hour grocery store around the corner from my house. — Rusty Fischer

But disasters are made of paper. You make a decision or two, then walk in to them like you would a harmless corner store, and soon they're behind you, on the enormous pile of dead and harmless disasters that once had you worried sick.

The sky has fallen a thousand times already. — David Cain

Tradition is something you can't bottle.You can't buy it at the corner store.But it is there to sustain you when you need it most.I've called upon it time and time again.And so have countless other Michigan athletes and coaches.There is nothing like it.I hope it never dies. — Fritz Crisler

It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I'm not sure anyone's ever experienced enlightenment, been born again, been called to repentance or decided to sell their belongings on account of a system. The voice, the tale, the image, the parable that gets through to you
that wins your heart
religiously is the one that makes it past your defenses. You've been won over, and you probably didn't see it coming. You've been enlisted into a drama, whether positively or negatively, and it shouldn't be controversial to note that it happens all the time. When you really think about it, there's one waiting around every corner. It's as near as the story, song or image you can't get out of your head. Religion happens when we get pulled in, moved, called out or compelled by something outside ourselves. It could be a car commercial, a lyric, a painting, a theatrical performance or the magnetic pull of an Apple store. The calls to worship are everywhere. — David Dark

People who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn a corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles. — Christina Baker Kline

I would run into the corner store, the bodega, and just grab a paper bag or buy juice - anything just to get a paper bag. And I'd write the words on the paper bag and stuff these ideas in my pocket until I got back. Then I would transfer them into the notebook. — Jay-Z

Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store. — Charles Krauthammer

If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture. — Edith Wharton

I grew up in the middle of a block where there was an Irish grocery store on one corner, an Italian bar on another corner and the Nazi Party was on the third corner. — Andrew Young

My father ran a corner drug store where he worked night and day, seven days a week, until he died of a stroke. He literally worked himself to death. — R. T. Rybak

Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn a corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles. Vivian — Christina Baker Kline

Vegetable seed catalogs have replaced the penny candy store. The fireballs, the root-beer barrels, and the licorice whips aren't sold at the corner anymore. Now the sweets are sold by seed companies instead. There's "candystick" and "sweet slice" and "sugar rock" but these aren't types of candy, they are varieties of sweet corn, cucumber and musk melon. — Roger B. Swain

Whenever the sadness got too much, I would hire a rickshaw and go to the Upper Bazaar. Those little rickshaw trips to the market and back, shopping for lipsticks and imitation Gucci bags and wind-chimes and what not, are some of my happiest memories today. You know, one day, during one of those trips, I sold all my well-thumbed copies of 'Inside Outside' to the Tibetan guy who ran the old book store on Netaji Road for seventy rupees, six Tintins and a disarming smile. And all of a sudden, that moment, standing at the corner of Netaji road, I found out who I was.'
('Left from Dhakeshwari') — Kunal Sen

When we first moved to Scarborough, there was one Sri Lankan grocery store - now there's a take-out on every corner, each with some specialty or another. You can get what you want the way you want it, and that's very different from the way it used to be. — Shyam Selvadurai

I always wanted to tell stories. From the time I had 20 cents or a quarter in my pocket, I could peddle my old Rambler 500 down to the corner store and buy comic books. — Patrick Lussier

And speaking of this wonderful machine:
[840] I'm puzzled by the difference between
Two methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet's mind,
A testing of performing words, while he
Is soaping a third time one leg, and B,
The other kind, much more decorous, when
He's in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought,
The abstract battle is concretely fought.
The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar
[850] A canceled sunset or restore a star,
And thus it physically guides the phrase
Toward faint daylight through the inky maze.
But method A is agony! The brain
Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.
A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the will
Can interrupt, while the automaton
Is taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before. — Vladimir Nabokov

Go down to the corner store and beat the Jap up, clean all the crap up. — Ice Cube

What they are is a small tablet about six inches square, which has a screen in it. As you walk it shows a scrolling digital map of the area you're in, telling you what each store you pass sells, who lives in what block, the whole works, updated by small beacons on every street corner. If you tap in a destination the screen shows you a red line to follow, and the tablet whispers at you to tell you when to make a turn. — Michael Marshall Smith

In the corner store we pulled fat bottles of water from the shelves. No one thinks it's weird that we have to buy clean water, and that's how I know we're going to hell. — Michelle Tea

The mission sat in a converted store front on the corner of a medium-busy street. There was a small crowd gathered in front - no real surprise, since they gave out food and clothing, all all you had to do was spend a few moments of your life listening to the good reverend explain why you were going to Hell. It seemed like a pretty good bargain, even to me, but I wasn't hungry. — Jeff Lindsay

Activism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark. — Rebecca Solnit

Many a man that couldn't direct ye to th' drug store on th' corner when he was thirty will get a respectful hearin' when age has further impaired his mind. — Finley Peter Dunne

The lady who works in the grocery store at the corner of my block is called Denise, and she's one of America's great unpublished novelists. Over the years she's written forty-two romantic novels, none of which have ever reached the bookstores. I, however, have been fortunate enough to hear the plots of the last twenty-seven of these recounted in installments by the authoress herself every time I drop by the store for a jar of coffee or can of beans, and my respect for Denise's literary prowess knows no bounds. So, naturally enough, when I found myself faced with the daunting task of actually starting the book you now hold in your hands, it was Denise I turned to for advice. — Dave Gibbons