Street Race Quotes & Sayings

You tell me you want to race down the street, I'm going to try to beat you. My grandmother asks me to race down the street, I'm going to try to beat her. And I'll probably enjoy it. Competitive to a fault, sometimes. — Derek Jeter

A fucking rat race that is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don't work harder because you're competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy - but what kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself. That's why nobody, not even the Nipponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform, proud to drive the car, proud to march up the front walks of innumerable Burbclave homes, a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on his shoulder, red LED digits — Neal Stephenson

Jerome Falsoner, aged forty-five, was a bachelor who lived alone in a flat on Cathedral Street, on an income more than sufficient for his comfort. He was a tall man, but of a delicate physique, the result, it may have been, of excessive indulgence on a constitution none too strong in the beginning. He was well-known, at least by sight, to all night-living Baltimoreans, and to those who frequented race-track, gambling-house, and the furtive cockpits that now and then materialize for a few brief hours in the forty miles of country that lie between Baltimore and Washington. — Dashiell Hammett

I thought the Wall Street Journal quote, they got a guy in Iowa to say I think exactly where I think this race is right now for a lot Republicans. He said, "Nobody in Iowa wants [Donald]Trump for president. But everybody in Iowa wants somebody like Trump for president." That's what you need. — Dalia Mogahed

A typical race morning usually starts out looking like a scene from a zombie movie: individuals or pairs of people walking down a deserted street, all headed in the same direction ... Inevitably, regardless of the weather, U2's "Beautiful Day" streams out of loudspeakers. — Sarah Bowen Shea

Surfers are members of a different race of people from the man in the street — Nat Young

People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being. — Don DeLillo

We all walked down the street together, looking like a sort of pick-and-mix adopted family: dad, disabled mum, and two differently mixed-race kids. Madonna would have been so proud of us. — J.L. Merrow

The street is no place to race. — Mick Doohan

In fact, I might be confident for the human race because of what the human race has given me. When I was in the street and bars, people always came up to me and said, "Don't stop, keep going." — Benjamin Clementine

I got all the respect in the world for the front-runners in this race, but ask yourself: If we replace a Democratic insider with a Republican insider, you think we're really going to change Washington, D.C.? You don't have to settle for Washington and Wall Street insiders who supported the Wall Street bailout and the Obamacare individual mandate. — Rick Perry

If I'm walking down an American street and anyone darker than a peanut shell approaches, I'll say, "Hello." This because, if I don't say it, he or she might think that I'm anxious. Which, of course, I must be, otherwise I'd walk by in silence, just as I do with my fellow Caucasians.
Does this make me racist, or simply race conscious? Either way, I'm more afraid of conservatives than I am of black people. — David Sedaris

I think there's something wrong with me - I like to win in everything I do, regardless of what it is. You want to race down the street, I want to beat you. If we're playing checkers, I want to win. You beat me, it's going to bother me. I just enjoy competition. — Derek Jeter

Race you, I challenged, leaping up. It was a real nice night for a race. The air was clear and cold and so clean it almost sparkled. The moon wasn't out but the stars lit up everything. It was quiet except for the sound of our feet on the cement and the dry, scraping sound of leaves blowing across the street. It was a real nice night. I guess I was still out of shape, because we all thee tied. No. I guess we all just wanted to stay together. — S.E. Hinton

I have the disadvantage of not being sociable. Wall Street men are fond of company and sport. A man makes one hundred thousand dollars there and immediately buys a yacht, begins to race fast horses, and becomes a sport generally. My tastes lie in a different direction. When business hours are over I go home and spend the remainder of the day with my wife, my children, and books of my library. Every man has natural inclinations of his own. Mine are domestic. They are not calculated to make me particularly popular in Wall Street, and I cannot help that. — Jay Gould

Mary Keitany from Kenya won the women's race at the New York City Marathon. You can tell she was fast because guys on the street didn't even have time to finish their catcalls. — David Letterman

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

Potential boyfriends could not smoke Merit cigarettes, own or wear a pair of cowboy boots, or eat anything labeled either lite or heart smart. Speech was important, and disqualifying phrases included "I can't find my nipple ring" and "This one here was my first tattoo." All street names had to be said in full, meaning no "Fifty-ninth and Lex," and definitely no "Mad Ave." They couldn't drink more than I did, couldn't write poetry in notebooks and read it out loud to an audience of strangers, and couldn't use the words flick, freebie, cyberspace, progressive, or zeitgeist ... Age, race, weight were unimportant. In terms of mutual interests, I figured we could spend the rest of our lives discussing how much we hated the aforementioned characteristics. — David Sedaris

We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible (even something as petty as being scorned or disdained by a stranger on a street corner). We try not to carry these things over to tomorrow. It is not strange, therefore, that the whole human race is trying to put Hiroshima, the extreme point of human tragedy, completely out of mind. — Kenzaburo Oe

The Head of the Charles in Cambridge, Mass., is the great American crew event, athletically and socially. It occurs the second weekend in October; secondary schools and colleges send shells in all categories in the three-mile race up the Charles River. Drunken Preps line the banks and bridges at Harvard, ready to howl with glee as a coxswain rams his shell into a stanchion of the Eliot Street Bridge (where the river narrows and curves with treacherous suddenness). — Lisa Birnbach

Trying to be white? What the hell does that mean? I've never understood that. How could anyone be white when they aren't white? Seems like a simple enough thing to prove, right? Hold out your arm next to someone else's arm and do a simple swatch test. Of course, what people mean when they say that is that there's some kind of authentic black experience that the accused isn't properly expressing. But what is the authentic experience? Clothes that wannabe gangbangers wear on the street? Hood style? What's authentic about that? For that matter, is fashion even a good marker of authenticity or race, anyway? Aren't clothes a second skin you wear over your real skin to obscure who you really are? Can they also express who you really are? — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

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

I'm very, very competitive. If my grandmother asks to race me down the street, I'm going to try to beat her. And I'll probably enjoy it! — Derek Jeter

I start to cross the street, stop, turn back. "You are not what I thought."
He smiles. A devastatingly beautiful smile.
I race across the street to my apartment building, to home, to safety. Because that smile scares me for reasons I can't explain. I only know that it makes me want to see him smile again. — J.A. London

I am struck by how, walking down the street, I'm rarely made aware of my race, but that among journalists, race is absolutely massive. — Chiwetel Ejiofor

Whenever I tell people I'm a misanthrope they react as though that's a bad thing, the idiots. I live in London, for God's sake. Have you walked down Oxford Street recently? Misanthropy's the only thing that gets you through it. It's not a personality flaw, it's a skill.
It's nothing to do with sheer numbers. Move me to a remote cottage in the Hebrides and I'd learn to despise the postman, even if he only visited once a year. I can't abide other people, with their stink and their noise and their irritating ringtones. Bill Hicks called the human race 'a virus with shoes', and if you ask me he was being unduly hard on viruses; I'd consider a career in serial killing if the pay wasn't so bad. — Charlie Brooker

Poetry is cathartic only for the unserious, for in front of the rush of expressive need stands the barrier of form, and when the hurdler's scissored legs and outstretched arms carry him over the bars, the limp in his life, the headache in his heart, the emptiness he's full of, are as absent as his street-shoes, which will pinch and scrape his feet in all the old leathery ways once the race is over and he has to walk through the front door of his future like a brushman with some feckless patter and a chintzy plastic prize. — William H Gass

Watch the walls come down, whether it's in the South or on Wall Street. When the walls come down, what do we find? More markets, more talent, more capital and growth. Which means that the race and sex discrimination stunt economic growth. It's not good for capitalism. It's not good for America's growth. And it's not morally right. — Jesse Jackson

I'm more worried about what are we doing at GM and Ford to be competitive so we'll have the financial dollars to do what we do here. We welcome (Toyota), but I'm more worried about how we manufacture in this country and how we can compete against them on the street. I know our whole point is to race on Sunday and sell on Monday. We just need to have good business models at Ford and GM so we can compete on the street. — Robert Lee Yates

It's neither our culture nor our race which
interconnects us. It's Street Photography. — Thomas Leuthard

It's very important to know the neighbor next door and the people down the street and the people in another race. — Maya Angelou

We were a religious, practicing, Catholic family - Mass together on Sunday, Catholic schools, and parents who practiced everything they preached. A great gift was their total absence of any derogatory talk about people of any race or culture and we were on a street of many faiths, though no other races at that early time. — Trina Paulus

There are many things that bother me. I know that I have never passed a man on the street that I liked - most of them giving off a kind of ether of disgust and stumbling and clay-eating, snot-eating grievance. I don't like the human race at all. this is my confessional, father, pass the wine. — Charles Bukowski

No, there wouldn't be," Holden said. "It'd be entirely different." Sally looked at him; he had contradicted her so quietly. "It wouldn't be the same at all. We'd have to go downstairs in elevators with suitcases and stuff. We'd have to call up everyone and tell 'em goodbye and send 'em postcards. And I'd have to work at my father's and ride in Madison Avenue buses and read newspapers. We'd have to go to the Seventy-second Street all the time and see newsreels. Newsreels! There's always a dumb horse race and some dame breaking a bottle over a ship. You don't see what I mean at all." "Maybe I don't. Maybe you don't, either," Sally said. Holden stood up, with his skates swung over one shoulder. "You give me a royal pain," he announced quite dispassionately. — J.D. Salinger

Mark Spitz had met plenty of the divine-retribution folks over the months. This was their moment; they were umbrella salesmen standing outside a subway entrance in a downpour. The human race deserved the plague, we brought it on ourselves for poisoning the planet, for the Death of God, the calculated brutalities of the global economic system, for driving primordial species to extinction: the entire collapse of values as evidenced by everything from nuclear fission to reality television to alternate side of the street parking. Mark Spitz could only endure these harangues for a minute or two before he split. It was boring.The plague was the plague. You were wearing galoshes, or you weren't. — Colson Whitehead

Street food, I believe, is the salvation of the human race. — Anthony Bourdain

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying. — Audre Lorde

Everyone should see at least one street race before they die. — Amanda Lance

It was a race he was running now, a race between his rent money and ... he did not know the name of the other contestant. Perhaps it was every man whom he passed on the street. — Ayn Rand

Overcopulation
The Main Street Babbitts
are fucking like rabbits,
competing and coping
in a crowded place,
overeating and moping,
bleating and hoping,
it's not the end
of the human race. — Beryl Dov

Do I race motorcycles? I do. I use the word 'race' because, I admit, what I do on a motocross bike is different than riding a Harley down the street. — Jeff Kent

We got a call from across the street that a black woman had broken into this house."
"And you were going to arrest her without even knocking on the door?"
"We had to secure her first. Um. Are you okay, ma'am?"
"Of course I am. Don't you see me?"
"Because we have her in custody. You don't have to be afraid."
"I'm not afraid of my daughter-in-law, Mrs. Theon Pinkney. She's the one who should be afraid. Four big men grabbing her and putting her in chains. What's wrong with you?"
The police stood there, slightly confused. I could see that they felt justified, even righteous, for grabbing me in Marcia's driveway. There was no question in their minds that I was a criminal and that they were on the side of the Law.
Marcia glanced at me then. We'd spent hours together but it was as if she hadn't really gotten a good look at me until seeing the tableau in her driveway. — Walter Mosley

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