Motorway Quotes & Sayings

Maybe not quite so simple. Because - all the way driving here, driving all night, Christmas lights on the motorway and I'm not ashamed to tell you, I got choked up - because I was thinking, couldn't help it, about the Bible story - ? you know, where the steward steals the widow's mite, but then the steward flees to far country and invests the mite wisely and brings back thousandfold cash to widow he stole from? And with joy she forgave him, and they killed the fatted calf, and made merry?" "I think that's maybe not all the same story. — Donna Tartt

I can do the equivalent of 150 miles per hour and not get stopped. I could quite happily pursue people down the motorway in my helicopter. — Jay Kay

The old religion is what gets the crops up and keeps your cock hard and makes sure that nobody builds a bloody great motorway through an area of outstanding natural beauty. The Gateway stands, and the hill stands, and the place stands. It's well, well over two thousand years old. You don't go mucking about with anything that powerful. — Neil Gaiman

The past is an immense area of stony ground that many people would like to drive across as if it were a motorway, while others move patiently from stone to stone, lifting each one because they need to know what lies beneath. — Jose Saramago

In their eyes I must have appeared like some kind of nightmarish totem, a domestic idiot suffering from the irreversible brain damage of a motorway accident and now put out each morning to view the scene of his own cerebral death. — J.G. Ballard

He had about the same life expectancy as a three legged hedgehog on a six lane motorway. — Terry Pratchett

We should all let our inner voices take control from time to time. Let them have their say. We let them take control when we're driving down the motorway sometimes, and they don't do a bad job. Maybe we all need to have a little more faith in ourselves. — Peter James

My adolescence was a kind of motorway pile-up. I wish I had known that one day the geek would inherit the Earth. — Peter Capaldi

I drove to Oxford with my van full of petrol and tin cans, as I didn't know there were service stations on the motorway. I pulled up on the hard shoulder and got my cans out. Then I filled up and set off again. That's how naive I was - so much not a cosmopolitan girl. — Jeanette Winterson

-so that for these few moments it actually seems that Ruprecht could be right, that everything, or at least the small corner of everything that is the Seabrook Sports Hall, is resonating to the same chord, the same feeling, the one that over a lifetime you learn a million ways to camouflage but never quite to banish - the feeling living in a world of apartness, of distances you cannot overcome; it's almost as if the strange out-of-nowhere voice is the universe itself, some hidden aspect of it that rises momentarily over the motorway-roar of space and time to console you, to remind you that although you can't overcome the distances, you can still sing the song
out into the darkness over the separating voids, towards a fleeting moment of harmony ... — Paul Murray

At night, in the garden, it occurs to you that it might have been your heart that left you as you reached the capital. Your heart might not have travelled well, closed up in its cavity, quivering and gnawing at the bars of your ribcage during the commute. It might be tracking north now, along edgelands, past spoil-heaps and stands of pylons, under motorway passes, back to the higher ground. Back to him. — Sarah Hall

This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees
Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was deja-vu, some film made
Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.
Is there a life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and sup:
we hug our little destiny again.
-Whatever You Say Say Nothing — Seamus Heaney

From 1997 when we came in, you guys and the public bought seven million more cars. You didn't get rid of the second car, did you? So what is happening is the growth of cars on the motorway. — John Prescott

Wherever there is a large motorway enabling the transport of ton after ton of German goods, you will inevitably find a sweet little rabbit trembling by the roadside. — Timur Vermes

And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy
and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see. — Anne Enright

Because, what does it mean, to say that things aren't going well? Compared to what? You can say: compared to how things were going a couple of hours ago, or a couple of years ago. But that's not the point. If two cars are speeding towards a brick wall with no brakes, and one car hits the wall moments before the other, you can't spend those moments saying that the second car is much better off than the first.
Death and disaster are at our shoulders every second of our lives, trying to get at us. Missing, a lot of the time. A lot of miles on the motorway without a front wheel blow-out. A lot of viruses that slither through our bodies without snagging. A lot of pianos that fall a minute after we've passed. Or a month, it makes no difference.
So unless we're going to get down on our knees and give thanks every time disaster misses, it makes no sense to moan when it strikes. Us, or anyone else. Because we're not comparing it with anything. — Hugh Laurie

To have some idea what it's like, stand in the outside lane of a motorway, get your mate to drive his car at you at 95 mph and wait until he's 12 yards away, before you decide which way to jump. — Geoffrey Boycott

It's a child's world, full of separate places. Give me a paper and pencil now and ask me to draw a map of the fields I roamed when I was small, and I cannot do it. But change the question, and ask me to list what was there and I can fill pages. The wood ant's nest. The newt pond. The oak covered in marble galls. The birches by the motorway fence with fly agarics at their feet. These things were the waypoints of my world. And other places became magic through happenstance. When I found a huge red underwing moth behind the electricity junction box at the end of my road, that box became a magic place. I needed to check behind it every time I walked past, though nothing was ever there. I'd run to check the place where once I'd caught a grass snake, look up at the tree that one afternoon had held a roosting owl. These places had a magical importance, a pull on me that other places did not, however devoid of life they were in all the visits since. — Helen Macdonald

When you buy me, you are buying a Ferrari. If you drive a Ferrari, you put premium petrol in the tank, you hit the motorway, and you step on the gas. — Zlatan Ibrahimovic

I exist in the eye of the storm, the calm in the centre of a perpetual hurricane of cars and lorries heading for the M6, the north and Scotland, or south to Penzance and Land's End. I sometimes wonder if they don't go on the motorway at all, that I hear the same vehicles circling endlessly, a kind of multiple Flying Dutchman, doomed to travel for ever. I don't regret for one minute that I am no longer one of them. — Clare Morrall

As soon as Todd drove off the motorway it vanished from the mirror, and so did the sun across the moor. — Ramsey Campbell

We [fiction writers] are much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie. — Jeanette Winterson

This particular type of road was a motorway. A motorway is the most advanced type of road there is, which as with most forms of human advancement essentially meant accidental death was considerably more probable. — Matt Haig

From Geneva, we drove for a time on the motorway illegally without buying a vignette, but our consciences got the better of us and we took a slight deviation on minor roads through the towns that line the north of the lake with tantalising glimpses of the water, before picking up the road that would take us through the mountains. This was quite interesting, but slightly boring after the much more imposing Alps. — Kate Foster

Every year, more than 120,000 new books are published in Britain, creating millions of volumes that will never be opened, let alone read. Many of these unread books are shredded into tiny fibre pellets called bitumen modifier, which can beused to make roads, holding the blacktop in place and doubling up as a sound absorber. A mile of motorway consumes about 50,000 books. The M6 Toll Road used up two-and-a-half million old Mills and Boon novels, romantic dreams crushed daily by juggernauts...Having your unread books vanish into the authorless anonymity of a road feels pleasingly melancholic, like having your ashes scattered in a vast ocean. — Joe Moran

When I was four I almost fell down the shaft of a tin mine and when I was five the car rolled over on the motorway and when I was seven we went on holiday and the gas ring blew out in the caravan and nobody noticed
I've been dying all my life — Jenny Downham

At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through
and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one's own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families. — Alain De Botton

Large motorway flyovers are the cathedrals of the modern world. — Barbara Castle, Baroness Castle Of Blackburn

It is not true what everyone always says that the only way to see America is to go across it by car. Apart from the fact that it is impossible given its enormous size, it is also deadly boring. A few outings on the motorway are enough to give an idea of what small-town and even village America is like on average, with the endless suburbs along the highways, a sight of desperate squalor, with all those low buildings, petrol stations or other shops which look like them, and the colours of the writing on the shop signs, and you realize 95 per cent of America is a country of ugliness, oppressiveness and sameness, in short of relentless monotony. — Italo Calvino

Brake lights, brake lights, brake lights; a domino topple of red stop lights ripples back from some non-event up ahead. Some idiot blew his nose too abruptly and a Mexican wave of mini traffic lights all went red in neat little pairs.

There are no green lights on a motorway to tell you that you can go. You just go when you can. Another short burst of hemmed in freedom until the next tsunami of 'stop' floods the road. — Christian Cook

Fifteen minutes later I'm hunched over the steering wheel of a two-seater that looks like something you'd find in your corn flakes packet. The Smart is insanely cute and compact, does about seventy miles to a gallon, and is the ideal second car for nipping about town but I'm not nipping about town. I'm going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsches and Mercedes. Meanwhile, I'm stuck driving something that handles like a turbocharged baby buggy. I've got my fog lights on in a vain attempt to deter the other road users from turning me into a hood ornament, but the jet wash every time another executive panzer overtakes me keeps threatening to roll me right over onto my roof. And that's before you factor in the deranged Serbian truck drivers driven mad with joy by exposure to a motorway that hasn't been cluster-bombed and then resurfaced by the lowest bidder. — Charles Stross

Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A. — Neil Gaiman

Death and disaster are at our shoulders every second of our lives, trying to get at us. Missing, a lot of the time. A lot of miles on the motorway without a front wheel blow-out. A lot of viruses that slither through our bodies without snagging. A lot of pianos that fall a minute after we've passed. Or a month, it makes no difference. So unless were going to get down on our knees and give thanks every time disaster misses, it makes no sense to moan when it strikes. — Hugh Laurie

The one appalling thing about electric cars is that one plugs them into already overtaxed municipal power grids. Try mentioning this to a politician or manufacturer who wants to ride the green wave and you will quickly find yourself escorted out of the room. Mention this twice and you'll magically find yourself on the No Fly List. Mention this three times and your cold lifeless body will be found in a clump of brambles off the nearest motorway. — Douglas Coupland

Today, the real England sometimes feels like 50 million people driving around a motorway forever. — Paul Kingsnorth

My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets. Streets to define you and streets to confine you, with no sign of motorway, freeway or highway. — Morrissey

I like the light that comes off metal shutters at siesta time in the summer, having a break from driving in the shops at motorway services, the odour of petrol at petrol stations, rolling down little slopes. I hate it when you tread in a puddle and the water soaks your socks. — Audrey Tautou

George: 'Ringo would always say grammmatically incorrect phrases and we'd all laugh. I remember when we were driving back to Liverpool from Luton up the M1 motorway in Ringo's Zephyr, and the car's bonnet hadn't been latched properly. The wind got under it and blew it up in front of the windscreen. We were all shouting, 'Aaaargh!' and Ringo calmly said, 'Don't worry, I'll soon have you back in your safely-beds. — George Harrison

Who was the mad bastard who taught you to drive?' he asked, holding on tight as they swerved in and out between cars on the three-lane motorway leading to Ekeberg tunnel. 'Self-taught,' Beate said. — Jo Nesbo

There wasn't much to coo at when driving along a post-apocalyptic motorway. A stalled vehicle here, a mini pile-up there. — Wayne Simmons

Many people fear the unknown. They busy themselves at motorway speed so to excuse their lack of understanding of the world around them. — Fennel Hudson

Her face is a map of remembered trouble and absorbed guilt, The green eyes look broken, as if their glass has shattered. A motorway pile-up of wrecked mascara. Lashes jeweled with tears. — Glen Duncan

Because - all the way driving here, driving all night, Christmas lights on the motorway and I'm not ashamed to tell you, I got choked up - because I was thinking, couldn't help it, about the Bible story - ? you know, where the steward steals the widow's mite, but then the steward flees to far country and invests the mite wisely and brings back thousandfold cash to widow he stole from? And with joy she forgave him, and they killed the fatted calf, and made merry?" "I think that's maybe not all the same story." "Well - Bible school, Poland, it was a long time ago. — Donna Tartt

There is no enough.' Tarin flicked her indicator on, the clicking noise filling the car as she merged on to the motorway. 'You seem to be forgetting that she's in a clinical facility getting professional help. Which is great, obviously. Let them worry about how to deal with depression. You're going to visit your friend, remember? Yes, she's a patient, but she's not your patient. So for God's sake, don't treat her like one. — Sara Barnard

Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner. — Alain De Botton