Street Boys Quotes & Sayings

Periodically, 'The New York Times' runs a business news story lamenting how few women still make it to the top in the Wall Street boys' club. Could it be that women are choosing to be conscientious objectors in these wars of one against all? — Tina Brown

The very first hit factory was T.B. Harms, a Tin Pan Alley publishing company overseen by Max Dreyfus. With staff writers like Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers, T.B. Harms was the dominant publisher of popular music in the early twentieth century. Dreyfus called his writers "the boys" and installed pianos for them to compose on around the office on West Twenty-Eighth, the street that gave Tin Pan Alley its name, allegedly for the tinny-sounding pianos passersby heard from the upper-story windows of the row houses. The sheet-music sellers also employed piano players in their street-level stores, who would perform the Top 40 of the 1920s for browsing customers. — John Seabrook

Conservative concepts believe in little government - take care of yourself, and that makes men who invent things like the constitution! Liberal thought has big government - we'll take care of you - and that creates boys and they create things like Occupy Wall Street! There's a difference between the way men and boys behave. — Brad Stine

A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street. When the Boys are in a good mood, the market thrives; when they get scared or sullen, it is time for each one of us to look into the retail apple business. — Barbara Ehrenreich

It was too late to tell Dally. Would he have listened? I doubted it. Suddenly it wasn't only a personal thing to me. I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities, boys with black eyes who jumped at their own shadows. Hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better. I could see boys going under street lights because they were mean and tough and hated the world, and it was too late to tell them that there was still good in it, and they wouldn't believe you if you did. It was too much of a problem to be just a personal thing. — S.E. Hinton

Warren had a most unusual household. A recent widower with four children between the ages of two and eight, he was not only a leading patriot but also had one of the busiest medical practices in Boston. He had two apprentices living with him on Hanover Street, and he sometimes saw as many as twenty patients a day. His practice ran the gamut, from little boys with broken bones, like John Quincy Adams, to prostitutes on aptly named Damnation Alley, — Nathaniel Philbrick

... everything was quiet, except for some boys playing soccer in the middle of the street. He honked the horn and the boys took a long time to get out of the way. In the rearview mirror he saw a Rand Charger appear at the other end of the street, He coasted along and let the Rand Charger catch up. The driver and his companion showed not the least interest in him and at the corner the Rand Charger passed his car and left him behind. — Roberto Bolano

A gang of teenage boys had gathered on the steps of the Odeon. Boys Collin knew, from the fourth and fifth year, boys with braying laughs and sudden, falsetto giggles, boys who stood on street corners and watched girls walk past, who punched each other with painful tenderness, who cultivated small moustaches that broke down, when shaved, into crusts of acne thicker than the moustaches had ever been, who lit cigarettes behind cupped hands, narrowing their eyes in pretended indifference to the smoke. — Pat Barker

'Boyz-n-the-Hood' was actually supposed to be written for Eazy's group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them. — Ice Cube

If I hadn't trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn't have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys. — Toni Morrison

Joey glanced at his alarm clock and saw it was just before midnight. His eyes drifted to his bookshelf. Lined up in a row, in the order of their publication, were all of the Spook Boys books, a series of kids' books about two adventurous brothers who were constantly getting into mischief as they explored haunted houses and spooky old castles, or tried to solve mysteries involving missing diamonds or stolen paintings. Joey envied the characters in those books - he wanted his own life to be made up of such exciting, implausible adventures. But maybe his imagination had gotten carried away. Maybe his mind, saturated with such fictional tales, was more than willing to play tricks on him when it came to houses like the one on Creep Street. — The Blood Brothers

He received in essence the same answer from every other shop he tried. No one recognized his description of Hester, and none of them had sold digitalis to any member of the Farraline household, or indeed to anyone not known to them personally. He pursued the other sources of information, the public house, the street peddlers and crossing sweepers, the errand and delivery boys and the news vendors, but all he learned was very general gossip that seemed to serve no purpose. — Anne Perry

Perhaps there lives some dreamy boy, untaught
In schools, some graduate of the field or street,
Who shall become a master of art,
An admiral sailing the high seas of thought
Fearless and first, and steering with his fleet
For lands not yet laid down in any chart. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I would not have voted for the man," Doc admitted, "but this - " He lifted a fine-boned hand toward the street, where small groups of Cow Boys were now tearing down Allen on horseback, shooting at the sky and racing beyond the city limits before the police could do anything about the ruckus. "This is indecent. — Mary Doria Russell

What boy well raised can compare with your street gamin who has the knowledge and the shrewdness of a grown-up broker. — Elbert Hubbard

Abraham Lincoln once walked down the street with his two sons, both of whom were crying. "What's the matter with you boys?" asked a passerby. "Exactly what is wrong with the whole world," said Lincoln. "I have three walnuts, and each boy wants two." — George Sweeting

Ben noticed the odd procession making its way up Gardam Street. Batty slowly pushing Lydia in her stroller-this he understood-but what kind of creature was that, struggling to keep up with them? "Batty's got a huge guinea pig on a leash," said Rafael, squinting to bring the scene into better focus. "Like the hugest one in the world." "Its nose is too pointy for a guinea pig. More like the hugest rat in the world." neither of the boys wanted to meet a huge rat, but they refused to run from something Lydia didn't seem to be afraid of. So they stood their ground and, as the procession came closer, were relieved to see that the giant rat was only a fat dog with short legs. — Jeanne Birdsall

Hopefully when you see the movie, Maybe you don't have the Orlando in your life, but you know that guy. He goes to church. He's down the street. He's one of the boys at the schoolyard. They exist. — Shemar Moore

Son unas cualquieras, she mutters. Nobodies. No culture, no family life, illiterates, she means. The kind of people who make her cross to the other side of the street if she meets them in the dark on payday. They're her worst nightmare of what a Latin girl can become in the United States. Their big hoop earrings and plucked eyebrows, their dark lips painted like those stars in the old black-and-white movies, their tight T-shirts that show too much curve and invite boys' touches. — Meg Medina

Nate stared, slack-jawed as the cab merged with the traffic and became impossible to spot. That was it.
They chose each other.
Just then, the dark sky lit up with fireworks. A cab sailing the street honked in celebration . In the night air , Nate thought he could hear Serena and Blairs' laughter, though he knew that was impossible; they were too far away by now.
But as we know, in this city anything is possible — Cecily Von Ziegesar

So long, Lee. Give our regards to the Kaiser. And tell him there's a few boys on 58th Street who'll throw a party for him if he'll drop around. — James T. Farrell

Familiar words for dead black boys portrayed as complicit in their own demise. Michael Donald's body had been hanged on a Mobile street, and the police were doing the same thing to his name. — Ravi Howard

We laugh and jest at what we call "street boys or area boys" instead of thinking of what we could do, to get them occupied or send them to school and create work opportunities for them. We rather choose to build walls around our compounds, electrocuted fences to protect out interest and personal comfort. That only shows lack of Personal Responsibility. — Sunday Adelaja

Vimes shook some lather off the blade. "Hah! I bet they have. Tell me, Willikins, did you fight much when you were a kid? Were you in a gang or anything?"
"I was privileged to belong to the Shamlegger Street Rude Boys, sir," said the butler.
"Really?" said Vimes, genuinely impressed. "They were pretty tough nuts, as I recall."
"Thank you, sir," said Willikins smoothly. "I pride myself I used to give somewhat more than I got if we needed to discuss the vexed area of turf issues with the young men from Rope Street. Stevedore's hooks were their weapon of choice, as I recall."
"And yours ... ?" said Vimes, agog.
"A cap-brim sewn with sharpened pennies, sir. An ever-present help in times of trouble."
"Ye gods, man! You could put someone's eye out with something like that."
"With care, sir, yes," said Willikins, meticulously folding a towel. — Terry Pratchett

Why hang about in long drawn out fights, you want them to be over as quick as possible and I was blessed with a pitiless punch that sorted the men out from the boys. The only drawback to having such a vicious punch is that my hands have been broken so many times over the years. — Stephen Richards

I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I'm walking down the street. — Angelina Jolie

Yes, the wildness was in me, yes it kept my heart beating fast all the long day, yes it danced around me while I walked down the street, yes it let me look boys straight in the face when they stared at me, yes it turned my laugh from a cough into a long wild fever, but I was still scared. How could I not be? I was my mother's daughter. Her hold on me stronger than love. — Junot Diaz

The time of dangling insects arrived. White houses with caterpillars dangling from the eaves. White stones in driveways. You can walk at night down the middle of the street and hear women talking on the telephone. Warmer weather produces voices in the dark. They are talking about their adolescent sons. How big, how fast. The sons are almost frightening. The quantities they eat. The way they loom in doorways. These are the days that are full of wormy bugs. They are in the grass, stuck to the siding, hanging in the hair, hanging from the trees and eaves, stuck to the window screens. The women talk long-distance to grandparents of growing boys. They share the Trimline phone, beamish old folks in hand-knit sweaters on fixed incomes.
What happens to them when the commercial ends? — Don DeLillo

I began to watch places with an interest so exact it might have been memory. There was that street corner, with the small newsagent which sold copies of the Irish Independent and honeycomb toffee in summer. I could imagine myself there, a child of nine, buying peppermints and walking back down by the canal, the lock brown and splintered as ever, and boys diving from it.
It became a powerful impulse, a slow intense reconstruction of a childhood which had never happened. A fragrance or a trick of light was enough. Or a house I entered which I wanted not just to appreciate but to remember, and then I would begin. — Eavan Boland

Suddenly it wasn't only a personal thing to me. I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities, boys with black eyes who jumped at their own shadows. Hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better. I could see boys going down under street lights because they were mean and tough and hated the world, and it was too late to tell them that there was still good in it, and they wouldn't believe you if you did. — S.E. Hinton

I grew up around a lot of boys - all my friends on my street were boys, so I was the only girl for a while hanging out with them. I have a little bit of a tomboy aspect; I love to be comfortable. But, I do have a sexy girly side as well - I just love sportswear. — LIZ

I never understood why, but the best of girls like gangsters. This was something that was always odd to me. Here, you have fine working girls who are involved with someone who isn't working, just sitting on the blocks all day with a big gun in his waist. For some girls, they like that. I don't know why. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members — Drexel Deal

I can't help feeling as if this is my last chance, Evan said. He was sitting opposite Dr. Lorne, a psychiatrist at the Havilland Recovery Cabin in north western New Jersey. It was the next to the last day of his fourth pass through a twenty-eight day program for sex and alcohol addiction. The sex addiction was questionable; the alcohol was not. — Ryan Field

Good gracious!" she exclaimed, "she's been more than an hour in there! When the priests set about cleansing her of her sins, the choir-boys have to form in line to pass the buckets of filth and empty them in the street! — Emile Zola

Robert Louis Stevenson, one evening, stood transfixed at his nursery window watching the lamplighter in the street. When his nanny asked the boy what he was doing he replied: 'I'm watching the man knocking holes in the darkness.' We live in a universe made dark by sin. Let's knock holes in the darkness. — Selwyn Hughes

Ladies and Gentlemen this fellow combines the classic stylings of a 1950's robot with the dynamic flair of a 1970's street pimp ... that's right, boys and girls every where, your friend Pimpbot 5000! — Conan O'Brien

More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying out loud to him in the street - which was, of course, I love you. — Donna Tartt

I'd like a stocking made for a giant, And a meeting house full of toys, Then I'd go out in a happy hunt For the poor little girls and boys; Up the street and down the street, And across and over the town, I'd search and find them everyone, Before the sun went down. — Eugene Field

I have spent much of my life where the boys are, first as a tomboy and then on Wall Street. Growing up, I loved every and any sport. I was frustrated by girls who didn't, so I spent most of my afternoons with the boys. — Karen Finerman

My siblings and I were friends with the boys who would become our stepbrothers - we grew up on the same street. I feel very special to have these amazing people in my life and if we hadn't all moved into this big house together I think I would have missed out on that, because we would have drifted apart. — Florence Welch

My first day of high school, I wore brown boys' corduroys that my mom had sewn Sesame Street elastic into - they were my coolest pants - and a lime green Patagonia fleece that my mom found at Goodwill. I loved fleece. — Cameron Russell

An odd by-product of my loss is that I'm aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don't. Some funk it altogether. R. has been avoiding me for a week. I like best the well brought-up young men, almost boys, who walk up to me as if I were a dentist, turn very red, get it over, and then edge away to the bar as quickly as they decently can. Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers. — C.S. Lewis

A boy told me if he roller-skated fast enough his loneliness couldn't catch up to him, the best reason I ever heard for trying to be a champion. What I wonder tonight pedaling hard down King William Street is if it translates to bicycles. A victory! To leave your loneliness panting behind you on some street corner while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas, pink petals that have never felt loneliness, no matter how slowly they fell. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Of course I like to look at pretty girls in the street. What hot-blooded boy doesn't. — Brian Littrell

If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result. — Leonard Sax

Where had they learned to converse and to dance? I couldn't converse or dance. Everybody knew something I didn't know. The girls looked so good, the boys so handsome. I would be too terrified to even look at one of those girls, let alone be close to one. To look into her eyes or dance with her would be beyond me.
And yet I know that what I saw wasn't as simple and good as it appeared. There was a price to be paid for it all, a general falsity, that could be easily believed, and could be the first step down a dead-end street. — Charles Bukowski

It was Christmas night in the Castle of the Forest Sauvage, and all around length. It hung on the boughs of the forest trees in rounded lumps, even better than apple-blossom, and occasionally slid off the roofs of the village when it saw the chance of falling on some amusing character and giving pleasure to all. The boys made snowballs with it, but never put stones in them to hurt each other, and the dogs, when they were taken out to scombre, bit it and rolled in it, and looked surprised but delighted when they vanished into the bigger drifts. There was skating on the moat, which roared with the gliding bones which they used for skates, while hot chestnuts and spiced mead were served on the bank to all and sundry. The owls hooted. The cooks put out plenty of crumbs for the small birds. The villagers brought out their red mufflers. Sir Ector's face shone redder even than these. And reddest of all shone the cottage fires down the main street of an evening, — T.H. White

Why does a salmon rise? Why does a small boy cross the street just to kick a tin can? — Lee Wulff

Among the wartime survivors was a four-year-old Makassan girl with a large mole dangling like a pigeon egg under her left eye, who was looking for her lost parents. She was picked up by a brothel woman, but later ran away to live among street boys left homeless by the war.

They gave her the nickname Big Mole. — Ming Cher

And down she walked along the street,
A handsome lad she hoped to meet
And sore by dawn were her dainty feet
But all the boys were gay. — Elka Cloke

Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys' clubs, girls' clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses - 120 war-horses - musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. "The whole of society," concludes the Japanese study, "was laid waste to its very foundations."2698 Lifton's history professor saw not even foundations left. "Such a weapon," he told the American psychiatrist, "has the power to make everything into nothing. — Richard Rhodes

I think one things that's really important in the boy community or whatever, or the boy things, is like, to realize that oppression is a two-way street. You know what I mean? That it's like, white men are really missing out - I don't wanna say white men are oppressed but ... — Kathleen Hanna

Former spider boys came from all walks of life - they ranged from homeless street kids and school dropouts to decent kids, but the best ones were those who had gone anywhere and everywhere to search out and capture their fighting spiders; they even ventured into dangerous bushes infested with black mambas. These boys were risk-takers and crowd-pullers, always on the move, always looking for worthy opponents with which to fight their spiders. — Ming Cher

All the girls walk by dressed up for each other, and the boys do the boogie woogie on the corner of the street. — Van Morrison

We hit every jazz and blues club on and off Bourbon Street, dancing and drinking until we girls were drunk enough to go with the boys to the strip clubs which outnumbered all other businesses in the French Quarter. Here is where my solution unfolded. — Darwun St. James

One night, walking along 8th Street in the East Village, I saw some adolescent boys, out too late and unattended. They were playing an arcade video game set up on the sidewalk, piloting a digital spacecraft through starlit infinity, blasting everything in their path to bits. Now and then, the machine would let out a robotic shout of encouragement: You're doing great! So the urchins flew on through the make-believe nothingness, destroying whatever they saw, hypnotized by the mechanical praise that stood in for the human voice of love. That, it seemed to me, was postmodernism in a nutshell. It ignored the full spiritual reality of life all around it in order to blow things apart inside a man-made box that only looked like infinity. You're doing great, intellectuals! You're doing great. Much — Andrew Klavan

He thought of the boys and girls who looked for sweethearts at Mountain View Cemetery, and chorus girls who met their beaux behind scrim, and office romances that flourished in the buildings on Market Street, and he felt like there were little lights in alcoves here and there across the city, in cozy dens, in doorways during rainstorms, or even a chilly balcony on the Ferry building. Everywhere, little pairs of glowing lights. When you walked a city, wherever you looked, someone had probably fallen in love. — Glen David Gold

Looking at a photograph by Helen Levitt of four boys in a New York street, we are likely to find ourselves longing to comfort the grim-faced, stoic young man in the corner, whose mother perhaps only half an hour ago did up the many buttons of his handsome coat, and whose distressed expression evokes a pure form of agony. But how very different the same scene would have looked from just a metre away and another viewpoint. To the boy at the far right, what appears to matter most is a chance to take a closer look at his friend's toy. He has already lost any interest in the overdressed crybaby by the wall, whom he and his classmates have just slapped hard for a bit of fun, on this day as on most others. — Alain De Botton

When boys grow into men, their boyishness is still apparent each time they abandon themselves a little. I stretch against them sometimes
lovesickness, it is the same ache as homesickness for me
and I marvel. The length of their bodies, it's where I find my house, my old street, Ashbury Park and all of its yowling
men, they walk around carrying my country, my motherland, and they don't even know. They don't have the tiniest idea. — Julianna Baggott

Where're we goin'?" he grumbled. "Across the street to grab a bite to eat. Everyone's waitin' on us." "Everyone?" Curtis frowned. "Yeah, you know, the other six who you donated sperm for." Curtis shook his head in disbelief. Some of the things that came out of his boys' mouths. — Nicole Edwards

Griffin Hansbury, who was born female but underwent a sex change after graduating from college, has another well-informed view of the powers of testosterone. "The world just changes," he said. "The most overwhelming feeling was the incredible increase in libido and change in the way I perceived women." Before the hormone treatments, Hansbury said, an attractive woman in the street would provoke an internal narrative: "She's attractive. I'd like to meet her." But after the injections, no more narrative. Any attractive quality in a woman, "nice ankles or something," was enough to "flood my mind with aggressive pornographic images, just one after another ... Everything I looked at, everything I touched turned to sex." He concluded, "I felt like a monster a lot of the time. It made me understand men. It made me understand adolescent boys a lot. — Christopher Ryan

But women are coming into Wall Street in large numbers - and they still are not making partner and are not getting into the positions that lead to the executive suites. There's still an old-boy network. You just have to keep fighting. — Muriel Siebert