Portland Or Quotes & Sayings

[What a great way to describe how a city takes its unique "shape"...beautiful turn-of-phrase by Kieran Shields(!)]:

"It was a city of slopes, curves, and dips carved by glaciers and now criss-crossed by a network of angled streets and blocks, unfettered by any sense of regularity and uniformity. Portland's maze of cobbled roads was the result of two and a half centuries of fisherman and merchants driven by immediate necessity and that economy of steps that occurs naturally in a place where winters often lasted five months out of the year. — Kieran Shields

Athenaeum, or Jonathan Edwards at thirteen entering Yale College, and while yet of a tender age shining in the horizon of American literature; while the same age finds H. W. Longfellow writing for the Portland Gazette. At fourteen John Quincy Adams was private secretary to Francis H. Dana, American Minister to Russia; at fifteen Benjamin Franklin was writing for the New England Courant, and at an early age became a noted journalist. Benjamin West at sixteen had painted "The Death of Socrates," at seventeen George Bancroft had won a degree in history, Washington Irving had gained — Charles Stewart Given

The issue is the ethnocentric history that the New York task force, the Portland Baseline essayists, and other Afrocentric ideologues propose for American children. The issue is the teaching of bad history under whatever ethnic banner. Cn any historian justify the proposition that the five ethnic communities into which the New York state task force wishes to divide the country had equal influence on the development of the United States? Is it a function of schools to teach ethnic and racial pride? When does obsession with differences begin to threaten the idea of an overarching American nationality? — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Portland hardly got to have an identity before that identity became a joke - I live in a joke. Seattle at least got to wear out its identity before it became a joke. — Isaac Brock

I lived in Portland for almost 20 years, and that's where my eldest daughter went to college. I missed the sunshine. I grew up in L.A. — Art Alexakis

She's a Portland girl. So I guess that makes us in-laws. Be gentle with me, yeah? — Kylie Scott

Whether it's in in livability, transportation, or the environment, Portland is always leading the country. We have more to do before we achieve our goals, but we should all be encouraged by our progress and this recognition. — Earl Blumenauer

We had no idea what we were getting into. We thought we were just doing this little vampire movie in Portland. There was just a lot of silliness, a lot of hijinks and bad behavior. — Elizabeth Reaser

Always was Morocco. And recently the country's leadership seems to have embraced it in all its ill-reputed glory. The days of predatory poets in search of literary inspiration and young flesh are probably over for good. Hippies can just as easily get their bong riffs in Portland or Peoria. But the good stuff, the real good stuff, the sounds and smells and the look of Tangier
what you see and hear when you lean out the window and take it all in
that's here to stay. — Anthony Bourdain

I live in Portland now. It's beautiful from day one. The Food and the beer, and no sales tax. Get your iPad while you're here. — David Giuntoli

There's a food revolution going on throughout the country. And it doesn't matter if you're down south, up north in Maine, if you're out west in Portland or Seattle. — Tom Colicchio

I did grow up in a rough neighborhood in Portland, which is an abstract concept for anybody who's rolled through Portland because now it looks like a TV set, literally. — Esperanza Spalding

I stare at her blankly. We don't have elevators in Portland. This is my first elevator ride. How do they work exactly? — Fanny Merkin

We've concocted a system where local trips take an auto. That's our biggest tragedy. Streetcars, such as those used in Portland's Pearl District, and elevated people movers, like those in downtown Miami, are moving people from rail stations to their final destinations. But a new concept, PRT, may help revolutionize urban transportation, providing a cost-effective way to get people from train stations to where they need to go. — Peter Calthorpe

Oh, little Eden from the forests of Portland, welcome to the real world. — Estelle Maskame

Once I was in a cafe in Portland and the woman at the next table and I began chatting and in the course of our conversation she strongly recommend I visit this web site called 'The Rumpus' so I could read this advice column called 'Dear Sugar.' It was so painful not to tell her that in fact I was Sugar, but I didn't. — Cheryl Strayed

I collect old Coon Chicken Inn memorabilia. I collect black memorabilia, like old minstrel posters. It was a real place. There was one in Seattle, one in Portland, and one in Salt Lake City. They started in 1925, and then they went out of business around 1958. — Terry Zwigoff

You can ride your bike to anywhere in Portland if you want to. I think there was a charming underdog mentality when I first moved here in the late '80s that is definitely gone. People acted more like underdogs, dressed more like underdogs. — Janet Weiss

I don't think I would live outside of the Northwest. I think the quality of life in Portland is really good. People move from intense, high-powered jobs, and move to Portland, work half as much and live twice as good. — Carrie Brownstein

Cities like Portland, Seattle, and Long Beach, which have made these investments in their infrastructure, are seeing not only health advantages, but also a lot more exchange in the community, which leads to better policy-making and stronger communities. — Ben Sollee

At Lockwood & Co., George was famous for not being able to throw or catch with any accuracy. Back in the kitchen at Portland Row, even the casual passing out of fruit or bags of chips became an exercise fraught with danger. — Jonathan Stroud

Portland, Maine was the site of one of the northernmost battles of the Civil War. — Hank Bracker

I think in some ways, whether you've ever actually been to Portland, people definitely understand this highly curated niche lifestyle, because a lot of people are sort of striving for that now. Or they're hating on it. — Carrie Brownstein

I've been living in Portland for five months and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I probably won't really know for years because that's how it works right? You don't really develop feelings about a place till you've left it. It's like a girl or a dog. — Adam Rapp

The War on Drugs, from the Hastings-facing window of the Portland
Hotel, is manifested in the pregnant Celia kneeling on the sidewalk,
handcuffed wrists behind her back, eyes cast on the ground. There
was no Detective-Sergeant Gillespie to protect her when, as a little
girl, she was raped by her stepfather and subjected to the nocturnal
spitting ritual, so in the War on Drugs she has become one of the
enemy. — Gabor Mate

Is it me or is Bush going everywhere Kerry goes? So far in the past week, President Bush has followed John Kerry to Davenport, Iowa; New Mexico; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; and he follows him to Portland, Oregon. The only place he never followed John Kerry was Vietnam. — Jay Leno

Portland, Maine, is more like a big town than a booming metropolis. It was built around fishing, turned to manufacturing, but then eventually became one of those cities that you don't really know why it exists other than to take care of itself. The population was only around sixty thousand, but that still made it the biggest city in Maine. — D.J. MacHale

My blog is a celebration of the unexpected, settled, happy life I find myself living in Portland, Maine, at the ripe old age of fifty with someone I deeply love and am very happy with. That's part of why I started the blog. — Kate Christensen

Portland is a place where you can find a community as a feminist, a vegan or a fat activist. Artists, musicians, knitters, and filmmakers can all meet like-minded souls. It's proved the perfect place for me and all my punk friends. — Beth Ditto

My sister does all this community-service type stuff in Portland that makes the world a much better place. And I make as much in a two-day commercial shoot as she does in five years, which is ridiculous. — Alex Honnold

I think perfect dates involve walking a lot, and not a bunch of driving around in cars. Ideally, you can walk together and go to a restaurant, and then walk from there to another nice place - this is, I guess, because of really great dates that I've had with my wife here in Portland. — James Mercer

Fred is officially the mayor of Portland now. — Lauren Oliver

We lived in the Portland Avenue Stacks, a sprawling hive of discolored tin shoeboxes rusting on the shores of I-40, just west of Oklahoma City's decaying skyscraper core. — Ernest Cline

At 13, when I was a runaway, I was taken in by the most amazing drag queens in Portland, Ore. We didn't always know where our next meal was coming from, but there was so much camaraderie and love. Not to mention, those girls could paint a face, and I learned how because of them. — Rose McGowan

the investment pullback came after Portland leaders determined the mega-retailer is "not a socially responsible company." Portland had about $36 million invested in Walmart, or about 2.9 percent of the city's investment portfolio. The city announced Thursday that it would be free of all remaining holdings by 2016. The move was preceded by Portland's adoption of socially responsible investment protocol in October 2013. Portland Commissioner Steve Novick has advocated ending involvement with Walmart based on the retailer's "controversial business and labor practices, — Anonymous

Summer explodes into Portland. In early June the heat was there but not the color
the green were still pale and tentative, the morning had a biting coolness
but by the last week of school everything is Technicolor and splash, outrageous blue skies and purple thunderstorms and ink-black night skies and red flowers as brights as spots of blood. — Lauren Oliver

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss's daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even get rich - small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city. — Raymond Chandler

To talk of comparing the Bible with other "sacred books" so called, such as the Koran ... or the book of Mormon, is positively absurd. You might as well compare the sun with a rushlight, or Skiddaw with a molehill, or St. Paul's with an Irish hovel, or the Portland vase with a garden pot, or the Kohinoor diamond with a bit of glass. God seems to have allowed the existence of these pretended revelations, in order to prove the immeasurable superiority of His own Word. — J.C. Ryle

After the raid, the neighborhood was officially repossessed by the city of Portland, and a number of the houses were razed. The plan was to set up new low-income condos for some of the municipal workers, but construction stalled after the terrorist incidents, and as I cross over into the Highlands, all I see is rubble: holes in the ground, and trees felled and left with their roots exposed to the sky, dirty, churned earth, and rusting metal signs declaring it a hard-hat area.
It's so quiet that even the sound of my wheels as they turn seems overloud. A thought comes to me suddenly, unbidden - Quiet through the grave go I; or else beneath the graves I lie - the old rhyme we used to whisper as kids when we passed a graveyard.
A graveyard: That's exactly what the Highlands is like now. — Lauren Oliver

The fact that people go to Portland to visit a tiny feminist bookstore-no matter what the impetus is for them getting there-the fact that they go in there and look around and shop for books or stationery or whatever, is a major source of pride for me, — Carrie Brownstein

So if my ability to meditate was what was going to save the world, or at least save Portland, then I was pretty sure we should all think about moving to Seattle. — Devon Monk

Traditionally, when we lived here [in Portland], we have a record player in the living room, and there's lots of stuff playing, all different kinds of music. I don't listen to any of those Internet radio things. I have iTunes on my thing, but I've never bought a single thing on it. Except for "Call Me Maybe," for the kids or whatever. Carly Rae Jepsen. — Stephen Malkmus

Are we going to Portland?" I asked. "Or Multnomah Falls?"
He smiled at me. "Go to sleep."
I waited three seconds. "Are we there yet?"
His smile widened, and the last of the usual tension melted from his face. For a smile like that, I'd ... do anything. — Patricia Briggs

There's a spirit of freedom in Portland you can't find many other places. Austin has it a little, and Boulder has it. Nashville is glowing with it. It's not just a hippie thing either. It's something other, a feeling everybody else in the country is being corralled into buying just a few kinds of clothes, a couple of different records and watching the same television shows, while in these rare cities, these bastions of freedom, people have turned off their televisions to realize there are more than binary options for us to choose from. We don't have to be either conservative or liberal or religious or atheist or divided into this or that categories. We can be ourselves, a conglomerate of nuanced beliefs and opinions. — Donald Miller

Well, my dad was into music, but he wasn't into me being into music. In my house when I was a kid, when I was real young, my dad wanted us all to play sports, and we were jock-like. We had a lot of money. And my brother was sort of the light of our family, and he was a good athlete. And I wasn't a very good athlete, but I tried to be. And then when I was 15 my dad went bankrupt, and we moved to Houston. And I went with him, but then I went back to Portland. — Todd Snider

This is the hospital's idea of nondenominational." She points around the chapel. There is a crucifix mounted on the wall, a flag of a cross draped over the lectern, and a few paintings of the Madonna and Child hanging in the back."We have a token Star of David," she says, gesturing to the six-pointed star on the wall. "But what about the Muslims? No prayer rugs or symbol to show which way is east towards Mecca? And what about the Buddhists? Couldn't they spring for a gong? I mean there are probably more Buddhists than Jews in Portland anyway. — Gayle Forman

Holy, holy, holy", seems written on every page. To talk of comparing the Bible with other "sacred books" so-called, such as the Koran, the Shasters, or the book of Mormon, is positively absurd. You might as well compare the sun with a rushlight, or Skiddaw with a mole hill, or St. Paul's with an Irish hovel, or the Portland vase with a garden pot, or the Koh-i-noor diamond with a bit of glass. — J.C. Ryle

So many questions crowd my brain at once, it's like one of the famous Portland fogs has swept up from the ocean and settled there, making it impossible to think normal, functional thoughts. We're sitting on the floor of the living room, which is squashed up right next to the "dining room", and I'm holding Jenny's workbook on my knees, reciting the problems to her, but my mind is on autopilot and my thoughts are a million miles away. Or rather, they're exactly 3.4 miles away, down at the marshy edge of Back Cove. — Lauren Oliver

Are you in Portland on business? I ask, and my voice is too high, like I've got my finger trapped in a door or something. Damn! Try to be cool, Ana! — E.L. James

I am going to a conference tomorrow," she said. "In Portland. Dr. Melissa Sanchez will speak. She says you think your way to a sexier you. Hormones are powerful drugs. Unless we tell them what we want, they backfire. They work against us." Dorothea turned, pointing the Ajax can at me for emphasis. "Now I wake in the morning and take red lipstick to my mirror. 'I am sexy,' I write. 'Men want me. Sixty-five is the new twenty-five. — Becca Fitzpatrick

I dropped out of Reed College [Portland, Oregon] after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? — Steve Jobs

It took two hours to drive from Portland to Boston. It felt like two days. We — D.J. MacHale

Sort of Coping"

Why is anyone in the world so terrible. Real catastrophe
and catastrophizing. If we only knew when it was going to
happen.

I saw you put your hands on the floor. Intimacy without
disturbances.
The scope here of memorization, planets. The history of children

sitting still. You are so cute in all your facebook photos.
When you moved to Portland I forgot we used to call you

Tumbleweed Tex. All those barking dogs, feathered hair.
We have something in common I never mention. I wish

I'd written it down and folded it into one of your piles
saying I want to read every one of these books! Do you think

you'll have read them all before the end of time. Did you go in
to see her when she was dead. Maybe you already knew. — Farrah Field

Space is about 100 kilometers away. That's far away - I wouldn't want to climb a ladder to get there - but it isn't that far away. If you're in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea. — Randall Munroe

If you want to know how important Portland is to me, there's no Saturday night gigs here. They weren't available. So our whole thing coming into Portland, which is going to be different from anybody else, any other city, is every night is Saturday night. — Garth Brooks

The entire time I was in Portland, which was the five years, I had absolutely no contact with any of my family. — Kenneth Choi

If Portland can truly have a true comics show that doesn't become a media show but retains its focus on comics, I think it's going to serve the city well. If this becomes a big show, it's going to bring in a lot of money for the city. — Greg Rucka

AS WE DRIVE BACK into Portland, — E.L. James

Portland is the perfect weekend getaway. I studied acting in Portland and lived there for five years. It's a small city with so much to do. There's beautiful scenery, a great bar scene, and so many fabulous restaurants. — Kenneth Choi

Driving back to Portland I'd puzzle over my sudden success at selling. I'd been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I'd despised it to boot. I'd been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I'd felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn't selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible. Sometimes — Phil Knight

I love Portland. I think it's one of the best cities - I obviously haven't been to very many places, but I had one of the best times I've had on a set there. — Mia Wasikowska

President Obama answered questions on YouTube today. He was asked 7,500 times about legalizing marijuana. And that was just from Chad in Portland. — Conan O'Brien

But I was also doing odd jobs around Portland, like spreading gravel and transplanting bamboo trees. — Elliott Smith

The Chicken: As I was walking down Stanton Street early one Sunday morning, I saw a chicken a few yards ahead of me. I was walking faster than the chicken, so I gradually caught up. By the time we approached Eighteenth Avenue, I was close behind. The chicken turned south on Eighteenth. At the fourth house along, it turned in at the walk, hopped up the front steps, and rapped sharply on the metal storm door with its beak. After a moment, the door opened and the chicken went in. (Linda Elegant, Portland, Oregon) — Paul Auster

When producing low-heat Portland cement the percentage of C2S is increased and that of C3S and C3A is decreased. This type of cement is of particular use in construction of dams, massive foundation, etc. to reduce the production of heat. — P.C. Varghese

Craziness is only a matter of degree, and there are lots of people besides me who have the urge to roll heads. They go to stock-car races and the horror movies and the wrestling matches they have in Portland Expo. Maybe what she said smacked of all those things, but I admired her for saying out loud, all the same
the price of honesty is always high. She had an admirable grasp of the fundamentals. Besides, she was tiny and pretty. — Richard Bachman

And yeah, this is definitely not Portland, since even though I'm in a city, and even though it's very damp out, I don't see any mountains in the distance or anybody riding a tall bike while juggling. — BikeSnobNYC

Portland's good at wet. The best. — Devon Monk

George Orr stayed in Portland because he had always lived there and because he had no reason to believe that life anywhere else would be better, or different. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that's holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It's gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it's trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren't doing it in the streets." He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. "Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule - meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean. — Daniel Suarez

Beau never stays within the lines. He's not just my roommate, he moves through Portland as if it's his city, as though all the people at this party are his best friends, as if he invented beer pong, even. He's that drop of water that runs and seeps into the paper, smearing the other watercolors until they've run wild as well. — Rebecca Paula

People at the University of Portland were accepting and loving and open-minded. When you have a safety net, it allows you to take risks. — Kunal Nayyar

How was I supposed to survive here? These Portlanders were an entirely different breed of white people. — Gabby Rivera

Portland and Seattle and Vancouver, they were beautiful cities, with their own positive qualities . . . but what they weren't was infinitely capable of expansion. There were protected wetlands and forests to every side, mountain microclimates and endangered species under the protection of the federal government. The Pacific Northwest was already full, sorry, and it wasn't looking to double its population any time soon. — Anonymous

The reason I like Portland is the idea of going to a supermarket and knowing there's no way to be recognized. L.A. is so social. — Patrick DeWitt

I am very proud to be taking command of a Type 23 frigate, which is an extremely flexible warship, and I'm looking forward to taking HMS Portland on operations with a professional and focused team. — Sarah West

I just wanted to move out of Portland to do something. — Elliott Smith

I trained with the FBI in Portland and I also had many conversations with female FBI agents in Los Angeles, as well. That was again something that also came in very handy for Basic, because I'd learned already how to handle a gun and how to behave just physically when you're in a situation, a threat. That was very good to know. — Connie Nielsen

Dense urban environments may do away with nature altogether - there are many vibrantly healthy neighborhoods in Paris or Manhattan that lack even a single tree - but they also perform the crucial service of reducing mankind's environmental footprint. Compare the sewage system of a midsized city like Portland, Oregon, with the kind of waste management resources that would be required to support the same population dispersed across the countryside. Portland's 500,000 inhabitants require two sewage treatment plants, connected by 2,000 miles of pipes. A rural population would require more than 100,000 septic tanks, and 7,000 miles of pipe. The rural waste system would be several times more expensive than the urban version. — Steven Johnson

Portland's as good a place as any. The food is good, the people are nice. I'm in love with it. — Sasha Roiz

It is impossible for a stranger traveling through the United States to tell from the appearance of the people or the country whether he is in Toledo, Ohio, or Portland, Oregon. Ninety million Americans cut their hair in the same way, eat each morning exactly the same breakfast, tie up the small girls curls with precisely the same kind of ribbon fashioned into bows exactly alike; and in every way all try to look and act as much like all the others as they can. — Alfred Harmsworth

For London, Blampied claimed, was of all cities in the world the most autumnal - its mellow brickwork harmonizing with fallen leaves and October sunsets, just as the etched grays of November composed themselves with the light and shade of Portland stone. There was a charm, a deathless charm, about a city whose inhabitants went about muttering, "The nights are drawing in," as if it were a spell to invoke the vast, sprawling creature-comfort of winter. — James Hilton

People come to Portland, many of them for the quality of life. They love the physical space here. And yet every year, people climbing the mountain get killed by avalanches. — Chelsea Cain

Once he gave her a Rothko book - an interesting choice, since like Elliott, Rothko also attended Lincoln High School in Portland (as had poet Gary Snyder and Simpsons creator Matt Groening). The — William Todd Schultz

I had loved Portland. It was a clean city, with weather so delicate that at night you had to look at the streetlights to tell whether it was raining or snowing. Everything was heavier near Boston: air, accents, women. — Elizabeth McCracken

Sometimes I felt that there was something physical connecting us, a long rope that stretched between Boston and Portland: when she tugged on her end, I felt it on mine. Wherever she went, wherever I went, there it would be, that shining twined string that stretched and pulled but never broke, our every movement reminding us of what we would never have again. — Hanya Yanagihara

Portland is where young people go to retire. — Fred Armisen

But hope got in, no matter how hard and fast I tried to stomp it out. Like these tiny fire ants we used to get in Portland. No matter how fast you liked them, there were always more, a steady stream of them, resistant, ever-multiplying.
Maybe, the hope said. Maybe. — Lauren Oliver