Strangers On A Train Quotes & Sayings

It was their haughtiness that preserved them intact from all human sympathy, from arousing the least interest in the strangers seated round about them, among whom M. de Stermaria kept up the glacial, preoccupied, distant, stiff, touchy and ill-intentioned air that we assume in a railway refreshment-room in the midst of fellow-passengers whom we have never seen before and will never see again, and with whom we can conceive of no other relations than to defend from their onslaught our cold chicken and our corner seat in the train. — Marcel Proust

This was the night bus, not a Journey song. Two strangers were not on a midnight train going anywhere. I was going home, and he was probably going to knock over a liquor store. — Jenn Bennett

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories. — Paul Theroux

Longing is the call of ney to ney to restore the direction broken by the horses' hooves in a military campaign. It is an intermittent ailment, neither contagious nor lethal, even when it takes the form of an epidemic. It is an invitation to stay up late with the lonesome and an excuse not to be on equal footing with train passengers who know their own addresses well. It is the transparent fabric of that beautiful nothingness, gathered to roast the coffee of wakefulness for the dreams of strangers. — Mahmoud Darwish

Earth to Beatrix: This was the night bus, not a Journey song. Two strangers were not on a midnight train going anywhere. I was going home, and he was probably going to knock over a liquor store. When — Jenn Bennett

And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts. — Andre Aciman

It was a train full of strangers, and they were all the same. — Cherie Priest

For here it was now, as clear as it had ever been. And, worst of all, he was aware of an impulse to tell Bruno everything, the stranger on the train who would listen, commiserate, and forget. The idea of telling Bruno began to comfort him. Bruno was not the ordinary stranger on the train by any means. He was cruel and corrupt enough himself to appreciate a story like that of his first love. — Patricia Highsmith

We haven't been strangers since I pulled you out of the slave quarters to train you as a soldier. — Susan Ee

I looked up at this train car full of strangers, and my heart soared. In New Hampshire, I'd always felt like a goat among sheep; until I got to New York it had never occurred to me that there could be a place filled with other goats. — Sarah Silverman

DYNAMITE (13 Sticks for Immediate Use - Handle with Care) PLAN tomorrow's work today. Review the events of the day, very briefly before retiring. Keep your voice down. No screamers wanted. Train yourself to write very legibly. Keep your good humor even if you lose your shirt. Defend those who are absent. Hear the other side before you judge. Don't cry over spilt milk. Learn to do one thing as well as anyone on earth can do it. Use your company manners on the family. If you must be rude, let strangers have it. Keep all your goods and possessions neat and orderly. Get rid of things that you do not use. Every day do something to help someone else. Read the Bible every day. These points may seem to be trite and obvious, but each one has hidden behind it, an invincible law of psychology and metaphysics. Try them. — Emmet Fox

Anyway, I think Florence and I noticed each other before the local train screeched to a halt at the 110th Street station, because as I boarded it felt as though we were supposed to step into the same car, and hold onto the same moist metal bar. My wishful hunch now seems confirmed by the way she's reading her Time magazine article next to me. — Zack Love

But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him. — Patricia Highsmith

Englishmen did not speak to strangers on trains ... — Ken Follett

Long-distance train conversations are unlike the perfunctory exchanges one normally associates with strangers, or the truncated, cut-to-the-chase kind that sometimes take place between seatmates on a plane. — Alan Huffman

You spoke to strangers for hours. Afterward you walked the streets in search of other cafes, but they were closed. You stretched out on the park benches of a square near the Gare Saint-Lazare, and you remarked on the shape of the clouds. At six o'clock you had breakfast. At seven you took the first train home. When, the next day, your friends repeated to you the words you had spoken to strangers in the cafe, you remembered nothing of them. It was as though someone else inside you had spoken. You recognized neither your words, nor your thoughts, but you liked them better than you would have if you had remembered saying them. Often all it took was for someone else to speak your own words back to you for you to like them. — Edouard Leve

That's how it goes these days, huh? Moving forward at the sounds of horns on highways, at the cue of traffic signals, turnstiles, tollbooths, ushered and rushed to the next stop on the itinerary, and there are days on the commuter train in the winter when it's got dark early and you can't see out because of the reflection and you might put down your paper or put aside your book and really look at yourself, because amid the noise and the smoke and the strangers and what's become of your life: there you are. — Wilton Barnhardt

But the remarkable thing about the beetles was their sensitivity to all the grammar and directives and slogans and even unstated desires of the ant world, which they learned to manipulate. They first memorized the proper antenna-vibration and foreleg-tap which the ants themselves used to request food. The poor workers, busy going here and there and back again all day and never getting a chance to think, automatically assumed that these fearsome strangers had been authorized by the Central Committee since they knew the password, and so they regurgitated a drop or two of fruit juice on cue, much the same as when one is traveling across Europe or Asia on the train and a person in uniform requests one's passport, one's ticket, takes them away, and comes back, or else does not come back, having sold them; a badge and a superior manner can obtain anything in this world. — William T. Vollmann

I know you have it in you, Guy," Anne said suddenly at the end of a silence, "the capacity to be terribly happy. — Patricia Highsmith

The entire city was his hunting ground. In the summer months, dressed in a blazer and wearing his straw hat at a jaunty angle, he would regularly stroll along under the arches, and then along the pier. Next he would ride on the Volks Railway, where in the cramped intimacy of its hard seats he liked to talk to strangers, telling them this was the world's oldest still-running electric train, and boring them with facts about it. — Peter James

I'm an off-the-charts introvert. To me, being around groups of strangers is exhausting. I've had to sort of train myself to think about two tactics: finding common ground and invoking humor. — Sam Yagan

Do people who wave at trains Wave at the driver, or at the train itself? Or, do people who wave at trains Wave at the passengers? Those hurtling strangers, The unidentifiable flying faces? — Roger McGough

The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea. — Jean-Luc Godard

The politeness was unbearable. They avoided touching each other, careful as strangers on a train ... A family can go on for years without the love that once bound it together, like a lovely old wall that stays standing long after rain has crumbled the mortar. — Kathleen Winter

The world that spun from the web of her imagination was manifestly more real to [Patricia Highsmith] than what she saw before her. It was as if, like her fiction, she inhabited a paraxial region, and area which, like one of the working titles for Strangers on a Train, could be said to lie at 'The Other Side of the Mirror'. — Andrew Wilson

What chance combination of shadow and sound and his own thoughts had created it? — Patricia Highsmith

Their arrogance protected them against any liking for their fellow-man, against the slightest interest in the strangers sitting all about them, amidst whom M. de Stermaria adopted the manner one has in the buffet-car of a train, grim, hurried, stand-offish, brusque, fastidious and spiteful, surrounded by other passengers whom one has never seen before, whom one will never see again and towards whom the only conceivable way of behaving is to make sure that they keep away from one's cold chicken and stay out of one's chosen corner-seat. — Marcel Proust

He turned to her and said, "About time," when the train finally creaked in, with the familiarity strangers adopt with each other after sharing in the disappointment of a public service. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie