Not A One Way Street Quotes & Sayings

There are a lot of things that aren't fair, Aladdin."
She drew back from him, still holding his hands, and looked into his eyes.
"That's just the way life is- which is why it's so important for us Street Rats to take care of each other. That's a good instinct you have. You should always look out for your friends and your family. Because no one is looking out for us.
But that doesn't mean you should become a thief."
Aladdin looked at the ground, chagrined.
She put her hand under his chin to make him look up at her.
"Don't let life's unfairness, don't let how poor you are decide who you are. You choose who you will be, Aladdin. Will you be a hero who looks after the weak and powerless? Will you be a thief? Will you be a beggar- or worse? It's up to you, not the things-or people- around you. You can choose to be something more. — Liz Braswell

Life is a one-way street and you're not coming back. — Thomas Dewar, 1st Baron Dewar

The greatest religion gives suffering to nobody," reads a weather-beaten sign, quoting the Buddha, at Chele La pass, the highest motorable point in the country, near Paro. This maxim is everywhere evident. As a Bhutanese friend and I walked in the mountains one afternoon, he reflexively removed insects from the path and gently placed them in the verge, out of harm's way. Early one morning in Thimphu, I saw a group of young schoolboys, in their spotless white-sleeved ghos, crouching over a mouse on the street, gently offering it food. In Bhutan, the horses that trudge up the steep trail to the Tiger's Nest monastery are reserved for out-of-shape tourists; Bhutanese don't consider horses beasts of burden and prefer not to make them suffer under heavy loads. Even harvesting honey is considered a sign of disrespect for the industrious bees; my young guide, Kezang, admonished me for buying a bottle of Bhutanese honey to take home. (Chastened, I left it there.) In — Madeline Drexler

Not being assaulted is not a privilege to be earned through the judicious application of personal safety strategies. A woman should be able to walk down the street at 4 in the morning in nothing but her socks, blind drunk, without being assaulted, and I, for one, am not going to do anything to imply that she is in any way responsible for her own assault if she fails to Adequately Protect Herself. Men aren't helpless dick-driven maniacs who can't help raping a vulnerable woman. It disrespects EVERYONE. — Emily Nagoski

It's not easy to look the way I do: in popular culture, one only sees a face like mine on the Phaontom of the Opera, on Freddie Krueger from Elm Street, or on Leatherface from deep in the heart of Texas. Sure, a burn victim may "get the girl" - but usually only with a pickax. — Andrew Davidson

He stands before a door that will not open
wood sometimes, iron, but always the same door, set into a well, maybe in the anonymous middle of some city block, unattended, no one in control of who enters and who can't, a blank door hardly different from the wall it is set into, silent, insert, no handle or knob, no lock or keyhole, fitting so tightly into its wall that not even a knifeblade can be slipped between them ... He could wait across the street, keep vigil all night and day and night again, praying though not in the usual way, exactly, for the unmarked hour when at last the quality of shadow at the edge of the door might slowly begin to change, the geometry deepen and shift, the unasked-for as that, the route to some so-far-undreamable interior lie open, a way in whose way back out lies too far ahead in the dream to worry about — Thomas Pynchon

I looked at the door, at war with myself. On the one hand, I hated going anything Reth wanted me to. On the other hand, there was a mop with my name on it inside.
"Fine, but if you try anything-"
"Really, Evelyn,how I've missed your charming company."
Keeping a wary eye on the faerie, I followed hi, through the alley. We made our way down the lamp-lined street, his step so light it bordered on dancing. I felt like a graceless clod next to him. Then there was the aspect of his ethereal, near-angelic beauty compared to my..well, for the sake of my self-esteem, it was probably best not to compete. — Kiersten White

Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. — Joan Didion

Communication is not a two way street.
It is a bridge.
Either you have one or you build one.
It's about connecting, not correcting. — Farshad Asl

She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything. The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there. In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar. Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday. Nothing maybe except sleep, and she was not even certain she was looking forward to sleep. In any case, she could not sleep yet, since it was not yet nine o'clock. There was nothing she could do. It was as though she had been locked away. — Colm Toibin

I'd have you see the like this; I'd have you see them very well. Will you? They are clustered around Suzie's Cruisin Trike, embracing in the aftermath of their victory. I'd have you see them this way not because they have won a great battle - they know better than that, every one of them - but because now they are ka-tet for the last time. The story of their fellowship ends here, on this make-believe street and beneath this artificial sun; the rest of the tale will be short and brutal compared to all that's gone before. Because when ka-tet breaks, the end always comes quickly.
Say sorry. — Stephen King

Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in street look not just indeferent but ugly ... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is real sickness
the ache of the uprooted plant the breathing method — Stephen King

Character is not purchased with a dance in the street. It's expensive and hard to come by. Though it is the heir of disappointment, betrayal and frustration, it is not the inheritance that matters but what you do with it. No one ever developed their character by arranging their experiences in such a way that only 'good' things are allowed to happen. — Billy Marshall Stoneking

A Manifesto for Introverts
1. There's a word for 'people who are in their heads too much': thinkers.
2. Solitude is a catalyst for innovation.
3. The next generation of quiet kids can and must be raised to know their own strengths.
4. Sometimes it helps to be a pretend extrovert. There will always be time to be quiet later.
5. But in the long run, staying true to your temperament is key to finding work you love and work that matters.
6. One genuine new relationship is worth a fistful of business cards.
7. It's OK to cross the street to avoid making small talk.
8. 'Quiet leadership' is not an oxymoron.
9. Love is essential; gregariousness is optional.
10. 'In a gentle way, you can shake the world.' -Mahatma Gandhi — Susan Cain

[H]alf blinded you embraced your own body, and with the warmth still under your jacket, you walked up the pavement along the square, moving through the grey light, and let your thoughts seep softly in, undisturbed, on the way up to the station, but also walking as one of many in the chill of December. I liked the feeling being a we, being more than myself, being larger than myself, being surrounded by others in a way I had never experienced before, of belonging, and it made no difference if those who walked to the left or the right of me, in front or behind me on this street, did not share the same feeling. — Per Petterson

I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and in spite of what most people might have expected from a young girl growing up deaf, life for me was like one long episode of 'The Brady Bunch.' Despite whatever barriers were in my way, I imagined myself as Marcia Brady skating down the street saying 'hi' to everyone, whether they knew me or not. — Marlee Matlin

intriguing, not standard Hollywood stuff. He was not a street kid who'd had to claw his way to respectability. His reasonably well-to-do family's roots traced back to George Washington's mother, and he was always proud of the fact that he was distantly related to "one of the founders of our country." Bill was Irish-English-German, "mixed in an American shaker," as he liked to say. His maternal grandfather was a cousin of Warren G. Harding, twenty-ninth president of the United States. Bill had been born William Franklin Beedle Jr. in O'Fallon, Illinois, on April 17, 1918. When he was three, the family moved to Pasadena, California. His father, William, was an industrial chemist; his mother, Mary, a teacher. He had two younger brothers, Robert (Bob) Westfield Beedle, and Richard (Dick Porter) Beedle. — Edward Z. Epstein

Probit analysis provides a mathematical foundation for the doctrine first established by the sixteenth-century physician Paracelsus: "Only the dose makes a thing not a poison." Under the Paracelsus doctrine, all things are potential poisons if given in a high enough dose, and all things are nonpoisonous if given in a low enough dose. To this doctrine, Bliss added the uncertainty associated with individual results. One reason why many foolish users of street drugs die or become very sick on cocaine or heroin or speed is that they see others using the drugs without being killed. They are like Bliss's insects. They look around and see some of their fellow insects still alive. However, knowing that some individuals are still living provides no assurance that a given individual will survive. There is no way of predicting the response of a single individual. — David Salsburg

Alexander: "First we will send the frontovik into the streets with guns. When they are dead, we will send me, with a tank, like the one you've been making me. When I'm dead, all the barricades down, all the weapons and tanks gone, they will send you with a rock."
Tania: "And when I'm dead?"
Alexander: "You're the last line of defense. When you're dead, Hitler will march through Leningrad the way he marched through Paris. Do you remember that?"
Tania: "That's not fair the French didn't fight"
Alexander: "The didn't fight Tania, but you will fight. For every street and for every building. And when you lose - — Paullina Simons

Communication is not a one-way street. — Jim George

She was smart and terribly determined, this girl-her will was pure steel, through and through-but she was as human as anyone else. She was lonely, too. Lonely in a way that perhaps only single girls fresh from small Midwestern towns know. Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly ... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness- the ache of the uprooted plant. — Stephen King

In benighted, incompetent Africa, I had never encountered an orphan: the American streets resembled nothing so much as one vast, howling, unprecedented orphanage. It has been vivid to me for many years that what we call a race problem here is not a race problem at all: to keep calling it that is a way of avoiding the problem. The problem is rooted in the question of how one treats one's flesh and blood, especially one's children. — James Baldwin

By April 1999, the plain was nearly filled, all the way to the foothills. But the fiercely independent residents refused to incorporate. A new town would only impose new rules and new taxes. The 100,000 new arrivals filled one continuous suburb with no town center: no main street, no town hall, town library, or town name. No one was sure what to call it. Littleton is a quiet suburb south of Denver where the massacre did not actually occur. Although the name would grow synonymous with the tragedy, Columbine lies several miles west, across the South Platte River, in a different county with separate schools and law enforcement. The postal system slapped "Littleton" onto a vast tract of seven hundred square miles, stretching way up into the foothills. — Dave Cullen

I must try to enjoy all the graces that God has given me today. Grace cannot be hoarded. There are no banks where it can be deposited to be used when I feel more at peace with myself. If I do not make full use of these blessings, I will lose them forever.
God knows that we are all artists of life. One day, he gives us a hammer with which to make sculptures, another day he gives us brushes and paints with which to make a picture, or paper and a pencil to write with. But you cannot make a painting with a hammer, or a sculpture with a paintbrush. Therefore, however difficult it may be, I must accept today's small blessings, even if they seem like curses because I am suffering and it's a beautiful day, the sun is shining, and the children are singing in the street. This is the only way I will manage to leave my pain behind and rebuild my life. — Paulo Coelho

See, what you're talking about is why hanging out with ME would be fun for YOU. It doesn't explain anything about why it'd be fun for ME. You don't bring banter. You aren't witty. You aren't funny. There is nothing to pick from your brain. You're looking for me to entertain you. A relationship is an exchange, not a one-way street. Look beyond your own personal desires for a second and understand what you bring to the exchange- nothing. — Tucker Max

It is harder to lie in an interview. A good interview - and it can be polite - is not a one way street like a candidate controlled ad. An interview is not programmed by the candidate and so the candidate can't be exactly sure what will be asked. — Greta Van Susteren

Here, listen to this; a poem by a Greek who lived in Alexandria, one Cavafy: "You said, 'I shall go to another land to another sea Another city will be found better than this. My every effort is a written indictment And my heart - like the dead - is buried. How long will my mind be in this decay,' "and so on like that, it's the same old song we know so well - if only I were somewhere else, I would be happy. Until the poet replies to his poor friend, "New lands you will not find, you won't find other seas. The city will follow you. The streets you roam will be the same. There is no boat for you, there is no street. In the same way your life you destroyed here In this petty corner, you have spoiled it in the entire universe. — Kim Stanley Robinson

I learned (what I suppose I really knew already) that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back - that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a One Way Street, isn't it? — Agatha Christie

Change is not a one-way street- it involves two parties: the person who is changing and the people who notice it. — Marshall Goldsmith

Our car is constantly in motion. It is raining in the streets we glide through, and this constitutes one more added pleasantness. Some people find it frightfully agreeable to see that it is raining and at the same time be permitted to sense that they themselves are not getting wet. The image produced by a gray, wet street has something consoling and dreamy about it, and so you stand now upon the rear platform of the creaking car that is rumbling its way forward, and you gaze straight ahead. Gazing straight ahead is something done by almost all the people who sit or stand in the electric. — Robert Walser

One day, the soldiers chased out everybody in the street where we were "Yudengasse" (Jew Street). My parents and myself took our sacks to go to the rail road station. While we were going with the rest of that day's contingent, half way to the station, a woman walked by and said: "They called your name at the certificate station." On the spur of the moment, I said to my parents: "You continue going. I am going back, get the certificate and will take you out." Nobody would have let all three of us go back without a permit. Of course, it was easier said than done. The military watched all along the roads and they said that Jews can go only one way - toward the rail road station, not back. I was a young girl, 21 years old and desperate to go look for that elusive piece of paper. — Pearl Fichman

I think we have to understand that when tolerance becomes a one-way street, it will lead to cultural suicide. We should not allow the Muslim Brotherhood or associated groups to be influencing our national security strategy. — Allen West

I don't believe in mistakes. Never have. I believe that there are a multitude of paths before us and it's just a matter of which way we walk home. I don't believe in regret. If you regret things about your life, than I'll bet that you're not paying attention. Regret is just imagining that you know what would have happened if you took that job in California or married your high-school sweetheart or just looked one more time before you stepped out into the street ... or didn't. But you don't know; you can't possibly know. — Lisa Unger

You see - the moulded whimsy of a frieze
on a portico keeps us from recognizing,
sometimes, the symmetry of the whole ...
You will leave; we'll forget one another;
but now and then the name of a street,
or a street organ weeping in the twilight,
will remind us in a more vivid and more
truthful way than thought could resurrect
or words convey, of that main thing
which was between us, the main thing which
we do not know ... And in that hour, the soul
will miraculously sense the charm
of past trifles, and we will understand
that in eternity all is eternal — Vladimir Nabokov

I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed. — Paulo Coelho

Generations of British writers would look up to Roget as a kindred soul who could offer both emotional as well as intellectual sustenance. In the stage directions to Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie includes an homage to Roget: The night nursery of the Darling family, which is the scene of our opening Act, is at the top of a rather depressed street in Bloomsbury. We might have a right to place it where we will, and the reason Bloomsbury is chosen is that Mr. Roget once lived there. So did we in the days when his Thesaurus was our only companion in London; and we whom he has helped to wend our way through life have always wanted to pay him a little compliment. For Barrie, Roget's masterpiece was synonymous with virtue itself. To describe the one saving grace of the play's villain, Captain Hook, Barrie adds, "The man is not wholly evil--he has a Thesaurus in his cabin. — Joshua Kendall

Punishment? You don't have any right to punish me. And I can curse. I choose not to most of the time, but don't think it doesn't go through my head, asshole. I was trying to give you something. I was trying to give you my body."
"That's where you fucked up, little girl. I don't want your body. I want your soul. I want your everything. And I definitely want your orgasms. I want them all. I'll be a greedy bastard, savoring them and hoarding them all for myself. You wanted to give me your body? I can buy that on a street corner, sweetheart. You're the one who's being selfish now."
"How is it selfish to offer to have sex? I don't understand what you want."
"First off, I want you to stop hiding yourself from me. You're the one making this tawdry by pretending it's dirty and not worthy of the light of day."
"I didn't mean it that way."
"We're going to do this my way. We tried yours and it didn't work, so I'm taking control. I should have done it in the first place. — Lexi Blake

Throw those Germans into a carriage, will you," said he to one of his hirelings, a man who was accustomed to doing what was needed under these circumstances, "get them out of here, they'll not wake up. Strip them and dump them naked in some out-of-the-way street. God takes care of his little children. — Marquis De Sade

If this were a proper world, beautiful faces would belong to beautiful people. Good people with kind hearts and clever minds would always have bright eyes and dazzling smiles, and bad people would have scraggly hair and warty noses. That way if you saw one of them coming, you could cross to the other side of the street and avoid them altogether.
But this is not a proper world. In our world, many bad people look quite nice, and many good people are not beautiful at all. Many good people aren't pretty or cute or even interesting-looking. — Brit Trogen

***A LATE-NIGHT EXCERPT***
I realized much later that I actually visited 33 Himmel Street in that period of time. It must have been one of the few moments when the girl was not there with him, for all I saw was a man in bed. I Knelt. I readied myself to insert my hands through the blankets. Then there was a resurgence - an immense struggle against my weight. I withdrew, and with so much work ahead of me, it was nice to be fought off in that dark little room. I even managed a short, close-eyed pause of serenity before I made my way out. — Markus Zusak

It wasn't a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. — Barack Obama

We [Vietnam] happen to offer good investment opportunities for foreigners, although this is not a one-way street. Both we and the foreign investors benefit greatly as a result. — Nguyen Minh Triet

My main concern while in New York wasn't becoming a hot shot. I was more concerned with staying alive, and that took all the pleasure out of the experience. I didn't know where to find a grocery store so I subsisted on hot dogs, peanuts and whatever else I could buy from a street vendor. I didn't know how to hail a cab (apparently there's an art to it). I stood on the edge of the sidewalk and waved my arms around but no one stopped, so I limited my entire universe to however far I could walk and I never walked too far because I was afraid I'd get lost and never find my way back home again. Perhaps that's why there are so many homeless people in New York; maybe they're not really lost, maybe some of them have homes but they just don't know how to get there. — Marlin Bressi

I live on a one-way street that's also a dead end. I'm not sure how I got there. — Steven Wright

It was a quiet way -
He asked if I was his -
I made no answer of the tongue
But answer of the eyes -
And then He bore me on
Before this mortal noise
With swiftness, as of Chariots
and distance, as of Wheels.
This World did drop away
As acres from the feet
of one that leaneth from Balloon
Upon an Ether Street.
The Gulf behind was not,
The Continents were new -
Eternity was due.
No Seasons were to us -
It was not Night nor Morn -
But Sunrise stopped upon the place
And Fastened in Dawn. — Emily Dickinson

Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street. -William Blake
This admirable couplet should be posted in conspicuous places all over England. The truth it embodies is threatened by two parties of opinion: on the one hand by those who hold it as a sin against nature to try and control the increase of population in any way and on the other by those who believe in 'growth', the pursuit at all costs of a standard of living which entails more and more industrialization and urbanization. If the believers in nature have their way, England will in the end be so full of people that they will be jostling each other even on mountains: if the believers in 'growth' have their way, the whole country will be covered with streets and we shall hardly be aware that mountains exist. — David Cecil

I think of a person I haven't seen or thought of for years, and ten minutes later I see her crossing the street. I turn on the radio to hear a voice reading the biblical story of Jael, which is the story that I have spent the morning writing about. A car passes me on the road, and its license plate consists of my wife's and my initials side by side. When you tell people stories like that, their usual reaction is to laugh. One wonders why.
I believe that people laugh at coincidence as a way of relegating it to the realm of the absurd and of therefore not having to take seriously the possibility that there is a lot more going on in our lives than we either know or care to know. Who can say what it is that's going on? But I suspect that part of it, anyway, is that every once and so often we hear a whisper from the wings that goes something like this: You've turned up in the right place at the right time. You're doing fine. Don't ever think that you've been forgotten. — Frederick Buechner

I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I'm not home when people knock. There's daytime silent where I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's how this machine works. — Ada Limon

Respect is not a one way street — Henry Rollins

One more consideration also weighed with Smiley, though in his paper he is too gentlemanly to mention it. A lot of ghosts walked in those post-fall days, and one of them was a fear that, buried somewhere in the Circus, lay Bill Haydon's chosen successor: that Bill had brought him on, recruited and educated him against the very day when he himself, one way or another, would fade from the scene. Sam was originally a Haydon nominee. His later victimisation by Haydon could easily have been a put-up job. Who was to say, in that very jumpy atmosphere, that Sam Collins, manoeuvring for readmission, was not the heir elect to Haydon's treachery?
For all these reasons George Smiley put on his raincoat and got himself out on the street. Willingly, no doubt - for at heart, he was still a case man. Even his detractors gave him that. — John Le Carre

No one ever developed their character by arranging their experiences in such a way that only 'good' things are allowed to happen to them. Character is not purchased with a dance in the street. It is not cheap, and it's hard to come by, owing partly to the fact that it is the heir of disappointment, frustration, betrayal and deceit. However, it is not the inheritance that matters so much as what you do with it. In the face of seemingly insurmountable problems what do you do, and why do you do it? The same holds for dramatic characters whose strength, courage, insight and wisdom have to be earned. — Billy Marshall Stoneking

Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks. — Walter Benjamin

First World countries may have great infrastructure, material comfort and modernity, but these cannot compare with the way the homeland speaks to a Filipino's heart. There may be potholes in the street where I live but they 'speak' to me in a way that a flawless highway in a developed foreign country cannot. I may be upset by the potholes, but the feeling is a familiar one, and it is easier to endure than alienation in a foreign land. The things that upset me about the country 'speak' to me in that same familiar language. In fact, it is so familiar that my sense of humor can run circles around the very things I complain about. But that is precisely the problem: because these have become too familiar, I am no longer moved by them - at least not enough to be able to change things. Indeed, they have become 'my' potholes. Life in the Philippines may be hell at times, but it remains our home. — Jim Paredes