Street Edge Quotes & Sayings

The spectacle shop was old, long, and narrow, with a glass front and a small thin door that opened onto a somewhat busy avenue in the antiques district on the South side of Lovat. It was a quiet enough area, away from the rougher warrens, but not particularly elevated. Across the cramped street hawkers sold vases, while up the road outside a rug merchant's shop a man sold antique suits. There was also Dubois' new storefront to the East; he dealt in religious artifacts and trinkets. The shopkeep hadn't liked when he had moved in; it had somehow changed the feel of the warren. Odd folks had started showing up shortly after Saint Olmstead Religious Antiques opened: black-clad priests, Hasturians in yellow robes, and a few Deeper cultists dressed in their gray sackcloth rags. It had set the entire warren on edge. — K.M. Alexander

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

The hem of a sheer curtain brushed a windowsill. Faintly, I heard traffic singing on the street. Sitting there on the edge of her bed, it felt like the waking-up moment between dream and daylight where everything merged and mingled just as it was about to change, all in the same, fluid, euphoric slide — Donna Tartt

She stepped back and frowned at me. "Open it."
"Me?" I felt sure she was picking on me because I was the only enslaved god she had. "I'm not Hermes! I'm not even Valdez!"
"Try."
As if that were a simple request! I attempted to get my fingertips under the edge and prise it open. I spread my arms and yelled the standard magic words: MELLON! SHAZAM! SESAME STREET! None of these worked. At last I tried my infallible ace in the hole. I sang 'Love Is an Open Door' from the Frozen soundtrack. Even this failed.
"Impossible!" I cried. "This door has no taste in music! — Rick Riordan

That air of electric tension, of a great city on the edge of an abyss, is more noticeable than ever at the White Russian cabaret called, not inappropriately, "New York." You wouldn't know you were in China. An almond-eyed platinum-blonde has just finished wailing, with a Mott Street accent, "You're gonna lose your gal." ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

The most painful part of street life is the loss of dignity, and that sends people over the edge. Dignity is the glue that holds the mind, body, and spirit together, and once that is gone, the person breaks apart, held together only by skin. Street life corrodes the decency that lines the soul of every wakeful human. — Kristina Wandzilak

Suddenly drained of the nervous excitement which had made her forget momentarily her tiredness and the monochromatic dullness of this early morning, she buried her face in the edge of the bed. Otto, somewhat apathetically, began to stroke her bag beneath her nightgown. She was grateful that they had not fought - she didn't have the energy - but a sullen disappointment roiled about just behind her gratitude. Was Otto going to make love to her while the Negro in the street slept in his own vomit? — Paula Fox

That done, I sank into an uneasy sleep wherein I dreamed of an assembly line of pale, bloodless girls walking down an endless dark street and moaning softly for help. Somewhere, toward the edge of my inner vision, a shadowy figure pursued them with long, beckoning arms.
Goddamn booze!
Somewhere in the midst of this ghoulish girl parade Cairncross materialized and hung a garland of garlic around my neck, glaring at me with his good eye and intoning, 'Go and sin no more.'
Vincenzo appeared at Cairncross' side and together they laughed insanely, then vanished in a puff of sulphurous smoke.
I made several high-minded resolutions, muttered half-heard but sincere-sounding prayers to all the recently deposed saints, thrashed and rolled clean off the bed.
I might just as well have stayed up. — Jeff Rice

Pops says he loves me just the way I am, but not everyone in the world is like my father. Maman, for example. A difficult and dissatisfied woman. She made me learn flower arranging and how to walk properly
books on my head, the whole bit. These things ruined me for life. Now it sets my teeth on edge when I see flowers carelessly flung into a vase, and I'm forever looking at other women in the street and thinking, [I]Sloppy ... sloppy[/I]. And I know I shouldn't care, and I want to poke myself in the eye for caring, but I care anyway, so thanks for that, Maman. — Helen Oyeyemi

You share the same destiny as everyone else, the same history, the same hardship, the same rot, the same Tram beer, the same dog kebabs, the same narrative as soon as you come into the world. You start out baby-chick or slim-jim or child-soldier. You graduate to endlessly striking student or desperado. If you've got a family on the trains, then you work on the trains; otherwise like a ship you wash up on the edge of hope - a suicidal, a carjacker, a digger with dirty teeth, a mechanic, a street sleeper, a commission agent, an errand boy employed by for-profit tourists, a hawker of secondhand coffins. Your fate is already sealed like that of the locomotives carrying spoiled merchandise and the dying. — Fiston Mwanza Mujila

Aldersgate Street, the bottom of the A1 - which was the modern designation of the original Great North Road, built by the Romans two thousand years ago to march its garrisons to the very edge of the empire three hundred miles to the north. Their duty was to reinforce Hadrian's Wall, keeping the outer darkness at bay and the empire safe. — Peter F. Hamilton

I told Ersken, "Lately it's been like living on the knife's edge, never knowing which side I'll fall off on"
Ersken clapped me on the shoulder as we stepped into the street. "Cheer up, Beka. Maybe you were going to fall off that razor's edge before, but not today," he said, as good humored as always. "Today we're doing to jump. — Tamora Pierce

Hand in hand with Brenda whom he'd met yesterday, Profane ran down the street. Presently, sudden and in silence, all illumination in Valletta, houselight and streetlight, was extinguished. Profane and Brenda continued to run through the abruptly absolute night, momentum alone carrying them toward the edge of Malta, and the Mediterranean beyond — Thomas Pynchon

Since the Leeburg Pike [at Tyson's Corner] carries six to eight lanes of fast-moving traffic and the mall lacks an obvious pedestrian entrance, I decided to negotiate the street in my car rather than on foot. This is a problem planners call the 'drive to lunch syndrome,' typical of edge nodes where nothing is planned in advance and all the development takes place in isolated 'pods'. — Dolores Hayden

But what if your kid runs into the street in front of a car? Don't you have to use Method I? ... If a child develops a habit of running into the street, a parent might first try to talk to the child about the dangers of cars, walk her around the edge of the yard, and tell her that anything beyond is not safe, show her a picture of a child hit by a car, build a fence around the yard, or watch her when she is playing in the front yard for a couple of days, reminding her each time she goes beyond the limits. Even if I took the punishment approach, I would never risk my child's life on the assumption that punishment alone would keep her from going into the street. I would want to employ more certain methods in any event. — Thomas Gordon

You have to evolve and change but you're always gonna get that street edge out of my music regardless. That's who I am. That's in me and that ain't gon' never go away. — Freddie Gibbs

Eve told him as she swung a leg over the steel safety wall, lowered herself over the edge. The wind didn't seem quite so pleasant when she was dangling seventy stories over the street, nudged on a steel ledge barely two feet wide. Here it buffeted and swirled, aided by the backwash from the air vans. It plucked at the clothes and slapped the skin. She ordered her heart to stop jumping and pressed her back to the building. "Isn't it beautiful," Cerise sighed. "I'd love to have some wine now, wouldn't you? — J.D. Robb

As far as my part in it is concerned, it began one night in the fall of 1956 in Lexington, Kentucky, when I walked into the Zebra Bar--a musty, murky coal-hole of a place across Short Street from the Drake Hotel (IF YOU DUCK THE DRAKE YOUR A GOOSE!! read the peeling roadside billboard out on the edge of town)--walked in under a marquee that did, sure enough, declare the presence inside of one 'Little Enis,' and came upon this amazing little stud stomping around atop the bar, flailing away at one of those enormous old electric guitars that looked like an Oldsmobile in drag--left-handed! — Ed McClanahan

He was nothing but a shadow on the horizon when that old basset hound of his escaped from the sheriff's office and went loping down the street. When she reached the edge of town, she sank down on her grizzled haunches, threw back her head, and let out a howl that broke nearly every heart that heard it.
Later, there would be many who would swear he'd reined in his mare and stood silhouetted against the sunset for a timeless moment. — Teresa Medeiros

the average branch of WH Smith today does not seem progressive or cutting edge, but back in the 1980s they were a major and dynamic force on the High Street. — Andrew Hewson

The smallest decisions made had such profound repercussions. One ten-minute wait could save a life ... Or end it ... One wrong turn down the right street or one seemingly unimportant conversation, and everything was changed. It wasn't right that each lifetime was defined, ruined, ended, and made by such seemingly innocuous details. A major life-threatening event should come with a flashing warning sign that either said ABANDON ALL HOPE or SAFETY AHEAD. It was the cruelest joke of all that no one could see the most vicious curves until they were over the edge, falling into the abyss below. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The three of them left the noodle shop and went to a nearby love hotel. It was on the edge of town, on a street where love hotels alternated with gravestone dealers. — Haruki Murakami

She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she'd read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art - she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle; looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene; a man in an office looking over Regent's Park, rain in the street outside - a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years. — Alan Hollinghurst

You know, I never knew if I had any talent when I started in this business. My first job was being a page at The Tonight Show. I saw Jack Paar come out one night and sit on the edge of his desk and talk about what he'd done the night before. I thought, 'I can do that!' I used to do that on a street corner in the Bronx with all my buddies. — Regis Philbin

I instantly thought the guy was cute, in that gaunt, never-sees-the-light-of-day, New York street urchin kind of way. And he never stood still for a second. From across the tracks I read his expression as I have everything on my side except destiny, only his expression clearly hadn't informed his head or heart yet. The guy looked over and caught me staring, and once his eyes met mine they never deviated. He took several cautious steps forward, stopping abruptly at the thick yellow line you weren't supposed to cross. His arms dangled like a puppet and he seemed to skim the ground when he walked, as if suspended over the edge of the world by a hundred invisible strings. — Tiffanie DeBartolo

Scientific facts are often described in textbooks as if they just sort of exist, like nickels someone picked up on the street. But science at the cutting edge, conducted by sharp minds probing deep into nature, is not about self-evident facts. It is about mystery and not knowing. It is about taking huge risks. — Richard Preston

To slide into the domed reading room at ten each morning, specially in summer, off the hot street outside, was a sensation as delicious as dropping into the water off the concrete edge of the Fitzroy Baths. — Helen Garner

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

I feel like I'm a trendsetter. I try to always stay on the edge of everything I do, whether it be music, fashion, film. I just like to stay abreast of what's going on. What's going on in the street and what's going on in the hood I put in my music and I feel like a lot of people follow that. — Gucci Mane

Your investor's edge is not something you get from Wall Street experts. It's something you already have. You can outperform the experts if you use your edge by investing in companies or industries you already understand. — Peter Lynch

Wait, you already know where you are?" Puck demanded as we edged toward the mouth of the alley, stepping over trash and piles of debris.
"How does that work, cat?"
"Most cities are very much the same, Goodfellow." Grimalkin reached the edge of the sidewalk and peered back, waving his tail. "Trods are everywhere, if you know where to look. Also, I am a cat." And he trotted off down the street. — Julie Kagawa

He turned down the street to Emilio's, trying to remember what "the edge of chaos" meant. It was something about flipping a coin, something about the edge being the moment when the coin was in the air. The point at which the system was pure potential, about to choose a path. Or something about a pile of sand, adding sand a grain at a time, and the edge of chaos being the point at which the critical grain landed and the pile either shifted or turned into an avalanche...
...Min bit her lip and smiled at him ruefully, and without another thought, he walked across the room to her, feeling almost relieved as the avalanche began. — Jennifer Crusie

My dad loved to 'arrange things' to take us kids to that scared the crap out of us on Halloween. He'd take us to the old 'Hermit's House' at the edge of town. He'd park the car 100 yards down the street and say, 'Go back there and get something off the front porch!' — Bill Moseley

Flashing Lights In My Mind
Going Back to The Time
Playing Games in the Street
Kicking Balls with My Feet
Theres a Numb in my toes
Standing close to the edge
Theres a ball of my clothes at the end of your bed
As I feel myself fall
Make a joke of it all — One Direction

But I couldn't. It was real; I knew it, even in the dark. Raised yellow streak of paint on the wing and feathers scratched in with the butt of the brush. One chip on the upper left edge that hadn't been there before, tiny mar less than two millimeters, but otherwise: perfect. I was different, but it wasn't. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past. — Donna Tartt

Suddenly, a car zoomed out of a side street to their right, slamming into the side of the car with a loud metallic crash. Tires screeched. The passenger window shattered, showering glass over Pam as the other car's momentum pushed them towards the opposite side of the road. Pam shrieked as the car tumbled over the edge of the road into the embankment. The car rolled until it came to a rest in the bottom of the ditch with creaks and groans. Neither Pam nor her mother stirred. — C.B. Cook

Although we have shared lodgings for seven years, we are not--on intimate terms."

I spoke earnestly, for I certainly could not afford to have her misunderstand the situation. She regarded me seriously.

"You are very fond of him, however, and would wish things otherwise," she said.

I gripped the edge of my seat and did not reply. Turning to look at the street, I observed that we were just passing the door of the Cafe Royal and were approaching Regent Circus. I shifted my gaze abruptly to the swaying interior of the hansom. I felt Miss D'Arcy's eyes upon me.

"Is it so very obvious?" I said at last. — Rohase Piercy

Hard to believe that it was only ten minutes ago that this actually seemed like a good idea,' Otto said, staring at the tiny cars passing by on the street hundreds of metres below him.

I would like it noted that I have never classified what you are about to do as a 'good idea', a calm voice with a slight synthetic edge said inside Otto's head. — Mark Walden

I'm really into a blush on the eyelid and on the high of the cheek. The singer of 'Cocteau Twins' used to do that - really pink eyelids. It added a little romance to the hard kind of street-edge clothes. — Chloe Sevigny

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

George paused just beyond the sawhorses at the edge of a deep ravine that had been cut through the tar surface of Witcham Street. This — Stephen King