Quotes & Sayings About Subway

There are places in New York where the city's anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental, irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets
these express with particular force the city's penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure. — Janet Malcolm

If you are the type who truly longs to be a Southern Belle at all times, regardless of taking twice the space available in bus, subway or elsewhere, you had best remove yourself to a large estate replete with servants. — Elizabeth Hawes

I remember once when I was young, and I was coming back from some place, a movie or something.
I was on the subway and there was a girl sitting across from me and she was wearing this dress that was bottoned queer up right to here, she was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
And I was shy then, so when she would look at me I would look away, then afterwards when I would look back she would look away.
Then I got to where I was gonna get off, and got off, the doors closed, and as the train was pulling away she looked right at me and gave me the most incredible smile. It was awful, I wanted to tear the doors open.
And I went back every night, same time, for two weeks, but she never showed up.
That was 30 years ago and I don't think that theres a day that goes by that I don't think about her, I don't want that to happen again.
Just one dance ?. — Jack Engelhard

If riding the bus or the subway doesn't incentivize you to improve your station in life, nothing will. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

What do you do when you're living in a hut for $500 a month and subsisting on Boston Market and Subway? You just keep doing what you're doing. — Sophia Amoruso

I got lost a lot, and I was a really bad waitress ... I got lost on the subway. — Piper Perabo

There are a lot of New York City Thanksgiving traditions. For example, a lot of New Yorkers don't buy the frozen Thanksgiving turkey. They prefer to buy the bird live and then push it in front of a subway train. — David Letterman

Whether a plane to Singapore, a subway in Manhattan, or the streets of Cincinnati, I search for meaningful conversation wherever I may travel. Without it, I believe we lose the ability to not only understand others, but more importantly, ourselves. — Dhani Jones

Spelling is very easy to practice yourself whereas signing is not. So I would sit on the subway riding around New York and I would spell whatever I would see. When I watched a movie I would spell words as they came up. — Richard Masur

And then there are the subway readers of difficult books. I like to imagine that New Yorkers are more literate than the riders of other American metropolises. — Sari Botton

Demon slayers take the subway? — Cassandra Clare

Women deserve better than organizations bearing the names of racist rapists funding million dollar campaigns on subway trains. These wealthy middle aged white men tell us what to do with our bodies while they wage wars and kill other people's babies. — Sonya Renee Taylor

In terms of theatrics and mind-boggling intimacies, the subway cannot be beat - people you see every day and smile at, people who subtly protect each other just by shifting how they're standing, people who compliment each other's outfits, ask where they bought them and for how much. I've seen people meet-cute, make out, and break — Isaac Oliver

And then, every time I didn't see her, there was a fall involved. I thought about dancing on the fifth-floor ledge outside out apartment. Every train she wasn't on felt something like hitting the pavement from five floors up. So maybe my father was right about that. Maybe happiness and excitement really are dangerous things. — Catherine Ryan Hyde

And that phrase - 'sleeping like a baby.' Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear. — Jenny Offill

I'd been living on the streets of New York, and I was sleeping at my friends' houses, sometimes in the subway. — Liz Murray

From reinforcing beaches in the Rockaways to installing generators at the Coney Island Houses and sealing holes in the subway system, New York is fortifying our ability to withstand future storm surges. — Frances Beinecke

What do you feel passionately about? What irks you the most at your office, or your campus? Create a protest around it. Ideas: Make stickers that say "FFC IS WATCHING" and place them over the mouths of sexist ads you see on the subway. Organize the women in your office to wear your bulkiest winter gear for a day - to protest how goddamn cold the air conditioning is. — Jessica Bennett

I love you because
Five floor walk up
1 to the 2 to the E
Three avenues — Darnell Lamont Walker

We are growing from a cheerful small town where everyone waves off their front porch to the subway of New York City where everyone rushes by. How do you preserve the culture that has worked so well? — Jimmy Wales

There's that stigma about New Yorkers, how they're so mean, but in my experience it was quite the opposite. People were very genuine and very nice, even on the subway. — Taylor Kitsch

Now, why was diagonal cutting better than cutting straight across? Because the corner of a triangularly cut slice gave you an ideal first bite. In the case of rectangular toast, you had to angle the shape into your mouth, as you angle a big dresser through a hall doorway: you had to catch one corner of your mouth with one corner of the toast and then carefully turn the toast, drawing the mouth open with it so that its other edge could clear; only then did you chomp down. Also, with a diagonal slice, most of the tapered bite was situated right up near the front of your mouth, where you wanted it to be as you began to chew; with the rectangular slice, a burdensome fraction was riding out of control high on the dome of the tongue. One subway stop before mine, I concluded that there had been logic behind the progress away from the parallel and toward the diagonal cut, and that the convention was not, as it might first have appeared, merely an affection of short-order cooks. — Nicholson Baker

I grew up learning this stuff on the streets of New York. My brother and I used to play in the subway for money. — Don Alias

I still can't go over a subway grating without looking down to see if there is some money there. — Eartha Kitt

People always write on my Facebook that they've seen somebody they thought was me on the subway, and I was cursing badly. — Gary Shteyngart

Don't sleep in the subway, darling. — Petula Clark

You're all alone when you're a writer. Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath. Even a ride on the subway will do that. But it's much more interesting to talk about books. After all, that's what life used to be for writers: they talk books, politics, history, America. Nothing has replaced that. — Saul Bellow

A lot of the time you see a warning, in the subway, or in a movie theater, the main thrust of the warning will be to not panic if there is an emergency. To listen to directions. Now that's a waste. They could have given you information, but you can see their expectation that you're going to screw up. — Amanda Ripley

Given a shave and a new suit, the pair wrote, a Neanderthal probably would attract no more attention on a New York City subway than some of its other denizens. — Elizabeth Kolbert

I see Professionalism as a spreading disease of the present-day world, a sort of poly-oligarchy by which various groups (subway conductors, social workers, bricklayers) can bring things to a halt if their particular demands are not met. (Meanwhile, the irrelevance of each profession increases, in proportion to its increasing rigidity.) Such lucky groups demand more in each go-round - but meantime, the number who are permanently unemployed grows and grows. — Ted Nelson

I think it is effective to constrict your anus 100 times, dent your navel 100 times in succession everyday. You can do so at a boring meeting or in a subway without being noticed for you to do so. I have known 70 year old man who has practiced it for 20 years. As a result, he has good complexion and has grown 20 years younger. His eyes sparkle. He is full of vigor, happiness, and joy. He has neither complained nor born a grudge under any circumstance. — Hiroyuki Nishigaki

We have the alternative. "Do I want to be on the subway looking at these people, or do I want to be in my phone looking at my people?" — Douglas Rushkoff

Wall Street is the only place that people drive to in a Rolls Royce to take advice from people who ride the subway. — Warren Buffett

I'm not like most designers, who have to set sail on an exotic getaway to get inspired. Most of the time, it's on my walk to work, or sitting in the subway and seeing something random or out of context. — Alexander Wang

Fast food is the one thing everyone can relate to. It's depressing, but also interesting, that people desire to eat the same sandwich in every single city in the world. But the biggest bummer is when you see a Subway in Berlin. Just devastating. — Patrick Carney

When I was applying to college, my mother told me I could apply to any school within the Boston subway map. — Susan Estrich

I like it when my five-year-old asks me if a woman in a burka on the subway is a ninja. — Jim Gaffigan

I love the comfort of daily life's routines: things like being able to read a paper on the subway. It's no accident that my favourite word is 'quotidian.' — Elizabeth Strout

I'm not a car guy. The subway gets me where I need to go efficiently and cheaply, and I don't worry about traffic. — Joe Scarborough

I had a very old woman come up to me on the subway and tell me that the faces that I made in the first episode when a guy is going down on me, that she still makes those faces when her husband goes down on her. — Zosia Mamet

I resolve to venture into the city on my own. I look at maps in the library - subway maps, bus maps, and regular maps - and try to memorize them. I'm afraid of getting lost; no, I'm afraid of sinking into the city as in a quicksand, afraid of getting sucked into something I can never escape. — Deborah Feldman

I had an overwhelming sense of the lonliness of this city - a trillion souls in their bedrooms, high in the cliffs of windows. I thought of what was underneath it all - I thought of the electricty cables, steam, water, fire, subway trains and lava in the city's guts, the subterranean rumbling of trains and earthquakes. I thought of the dead souls from the war, concreted over. — Mo Hayder

Wonderful, Annabeth thought. Her own mother, the most levelheaded Olympian, was reduced to a raving, vicious scatterbrain in a subway station. And, of all the gods who might help them, the only ones not affected by the Greek-Roman schism seemed to be Aphrodite, Nemesis and Dionysus. Love, revenge, wine. Very helpful. — Rick Riordan

Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on. — Joe Queenan

I do wait in line, and I do take the subway, and I do my own grocery shopping, and I do take the kids to school. But it almost doesn't matter to a certain segment of the populace. — Sarah Jessica Parker

It's been perfect. I can still ride a subway and work with great people. I can't imagine being Julia Roberts. I don't have the fortitude to withstand that kind of attention. — Jennifer Beals

Cracks Down On Subway Acrobats — Anonymous

amplified siren. I make it to the old subway entrance. — Lauren Oliver

Difference between TV and the internet was how far you sat from the screen. TV was an 8 foot activity, and you were a consumer. The internet was a 16 inch activity, and you participated. I think the sitting down thing is similar. You're not going to buy an armoir while standing on the subway. — Seth Godin

I've worked everywhere. I worked in a warehouse packing surf supplies, a restaurant washing dishes, in retail, and I was a 'sandwich artist' at Subway. — Margot Robbie

Robert Thurman, professor of Buddhist studies at Columbia University, often uses an amusing and powerful image to describe what living compassionately, with lovingkindness, could look like: 'Imagine you're on the New York City subway,' he begins, 'and these extraterrestrials come and zap the subway car so that all of you in it are going to be together...forever.' What do we do? If someone is hungry, we feed them. If someone is freaking out, we try to calm them down. We might not like everybody, or approve of them - but we're going to be together forever, so we need to get along, take care of one another, and acknowledge that our lives are linked. Isn't living on planet Earth like being in that subway car? We're all together forever; our lives are linked. — Sharon Salzberg

I'm an east coaster, you know, I'm brought up in Toronto where it's very much, like, kind of a miniature New York in that there's a subway and you're surrounded by people a lot and, you know, you bump into people and you have interactions and you communicate and la la la. — Paulo Costanzo

I think it's easy for directors to stay fresh more than actors, especially once an actor becomes a star. It's hard for Russell Crowe to walk down a street or take a subway. I can fly coach. — Michael Mann

Many believe that WMATA planned a station for Georgetown, then withdrew its plans in response to opposition from politically influential residents who feared that the subway would bring undesirables - the poor, the criminal, the nonwhite, and the tacky - to their exclusive neighborhood. In fact, although Georgetown residents did oppose a transit station, their attitude was essentially irrelevant, for a Georgetown station was never seriously considered. — Zachary M. Schrag

I wish I had an invisible plane to take me home to Brooklyn, and I wouldn't have to ride the subway. — Keri Russell

Subway is a real point of pride. We have influenced the way people eat. — Fred DeLuca

I like romantic dates - going on a long walk in Central Park and then taking the subway downtown and going out to eat and ordering oysters. After that, you walk around again and talk. — Ansel Elgort

With a track like 'White Christmas,' everybody has done that song in every format you can imagine, so I just looked at the chords at that particular song and what chords would make it work. That's kind of quite a sad song, and I had this idea of someone singing it in the subway, someone who is homeless, old and sad. — Vince Clarke

I hope you don't have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky. — Flannery O'Connor

I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program. — Billy Collins

My crazy fear is I'm always afraid my keys are going to fall down a subway grate when I walk over it. I'm afraid they're going to jump out of my pocket and fall down. Isn't that stupid? — John Carroll Lynch

One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever, and the chills - maybe even the cough - precede the major discharge of virus toward other people. Even among some of the superspreaders, in 2003, this seems to have been true. That order of events allowed many SARS cases to be recognized, hospitalized, and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren't emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or a subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode - not just lucky but salvational. — David Quammen

When I was designing, I had in mind Jimi Hendrix, and I could hardly find skinny indie black kids to wear my clothes. I remember one telling me he had to swap his skinny jeans for baggy ones in the subway before going home, so he wouldn't get in trouble in his neighborhood. — Hedi Slimane

I once asked a policeman how far it was to the subway. he said, "I don't know, no one has ever made it". — Rodney Dangerfield

I wouldn't go anywhere in confined spaces now. When one person sneezes it goes all the way through the aircraft. That's me. I would not be, at this point, if they had another way of transportation, suggesting they ride the subway. — Joe Biden

Writing on the subway or anywhere is writing. Maybe it's all just writing. — Rachel Zucker

I think that Subway has shown their own personal commitment as a company and how they believe in healthy choices. — Apolo Ohno

If you're a die-hard "foodie," hop off the road in DuBois and enjoy a Subway sandwich made at a place that is eighty percent gas station. — Tina Fey

New Year's Eve. It's a promise of a night. Single, married or widowed, in love, loveless or lovelorn, we all leave our apartments and pick through snow in high heels, or descend subway stairs in tuxedos, lured to wherever we're going
whether we know it or not, would deny it or not
by the kiss of a stranger. — Jardine Libaire

I envy the music lovers hear. I see them walking hand in hand, standing close to each other in a queue at a theater or subway station, heads touching while they sit on a park bench, and I ache to hear the song that plays between them: The stirring chords of romance's first bloom, the stately airs that whisper between a couple long in love. You can see it in the way they look at each other ... you can almost hear it. Almost, but not quite, because the music belongs to them and all you can have of it is a vague echo that rises up from the bittersweet murmur and shuffle of your own memories. — Charles De Lint

We're lost in each other, in the heart of Toronto, slow dancing to nothing but the beat of my heart and the sound of her breath on my neck. I know the subway trains are trembling beneath my feet and that we're amidst the constant buzz of city life, yet I hear nothing but my heart beating and feel nothing but her breath on my neck. — Shannon Mullen

If you're seeing a psychiatrist, you're wasting money because all you've got to do is get on a plane, get on a subway tomorrow and, inevitably, you're going to be seated in front of some guy who's playing with himself, and he'll be singing, 'Happy Days Are Here Again.' I tell you - when I see that guy, I feel pretty good about myself. — Lewis Black

In New York, you've got Donald Trump, Woody Allen, a crack addict and a regular Joe, and they're all on the same subway car. — Ethan Hawke

There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways. — Jonathan Lethem

To watch an American on a beach or crowding into a subway, or buying a theater ticket, or sitting at home with his radio on, tells you something about one aspect of the American character: the capacity to withstand a great deal of outside interference, so to speak; a willing acceptance of frenzy which though it's never self-conscious, amounts o a willingness to let other people have and assert their own lively, and even offensive, character. They are a tough race in this. — Alistair Cooke

And then beyond them, farther north, were the whites, in a dreamland accessible only by the Chicago L, and even at that a place you glimpsed momentarily - redbrick houses, wrought-iron fences, tree-lined streets - then left, swallowed by the subway if you were on the Douglas-Park B, or forced to watch it all fade from view if you rode the elevated Ravenswood A. — Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski

Who are the advertising men kidding, besides the European tourist? Between the tired, sad, gentle faces of the subway riders and the grinning Holy Families of the Ad-Mass, there exists no possibility of even a wishful identification. — Mary McCarthy

Out of perverseness, I jumped on the subway and went down to a sound stage on Fourth Street to watch the shooting of Kay Doubleday's big strip scene in Mad Dog Coll, a gangster film that can still, to my embarrassment, be seen occasionally on late-night TV... Kay Doubleday was in my class at Lee Strasberg's; it was in the interest of art, I told myself, to watch her prance down a ramp, singing and stripping her heart out. — Brooke Hayward

After facing backlash from customers, Subway says it will remove a chemical in its bread that is also found in yoga mats. Some people were like, 'You mean I've been eating a dangerous chemical?' While most people were like, 'You mean I can eat my yoga mat?' — Jimmy Fallon

It's easy to be cynical; harder is remembering that on any given day the person beside you on the subway or taking to long to pay for a tub of yogurt at the supermarket could be going through something tremendous and sorrowful and arduous. — Rob Payne

The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers
goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being bummed alive all along your nerves. — Sylvia Plath

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes - I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they're missing? Uh huh. — Frank O'Hara

And then we would leave, and by that time it would already be dark, and as we headed to the bus or the subway or went walking home, we would eat our sandwiches, enjoying the Mexico City night, which I've always thought is gorgeous, the nights here are mostly cool and bright but not cold, nights made for walking or fucking, nights made for talking. — Roberto Bolano

The rails intersect and combine in complex and convoluted ways. There are sixteen platforms in total. In addition, there are two private rail lines, the Odakyu line and the Keio line, and three subway lines plugged in, as it were, from the side. It is a total maze. During rush hour, that maze transforms into a sea of humanity, a sea that foams up, rages, and roars as it surges toward the entrances and exits. Streams of people changing trains become entangled, giving rise to dangerous, swirling whirlpools. No prophet, no matter how righteous, could part that fierce, turbulent sea. — Haruki Murakami

I try to preserve whatever balance society has between public and personal life. I never try to eat on the subway. I never try to listen to loud music on the subway. — Alex Karpovsky

We identify New York with the great bridges and tunnels and roadways and subway system and so forth. — Paul Goldberger

I take the subway because I don't like having someone else driving. It's hard for me to be in a cab, because the traffic makes me feel insane. On the subway you're getting there faster and it's easier. — Chloe Sevigny

Once I read a story about a butterfly in the subway, and today, I saw one. It got on at 42nd, and off at 59th, where, I assume it was going to Bloomingdales to buy a hat that will turn out to be a mistake - as almost all hats are. — Miklos Laszlo

Listening to hard rock on the subway doesn't work for me, especially modern hard rock. Driving in L.A. helped me to understand the appeal of that music. — Paul Dano

While in high school, I worked part time at Subway, then at the front desk of the local YMCA, then at a tennis club, until I landed an unpaid internship at 'The Mountain View Voice,' my hometown newspaper. — Jose Antonio Vargas

ripped. I got a glance at his abs when he picked up the woman's things. Yeah, I looked up his shirt. What of it? Plenty of men have looked up my skirt. Consider it karma.

~Julia — Adela Knight

People born in Queens, raised to say that each morning they get on the subway and "go to the city," have a resentment of Manhattan, of the swiftness of its life and success of the people who live there. — Jimmy Breslin

When you read a supernatural suspense story or a ghost story, or a horror story, the evil at play is something that you can dismiss. And I wonder if, in this time, if people really want to be sitting on the subway reading a book about someone releasing a dirty bomb on the subway. — Michael Koryta

An amount of bot tox the size of the dot over this i would be enough to easily kill ten people. Bot tox is a nerve agent. It is one hundred thousand times more toxic than Sarin, the nerve gas that the Aum Shinrikyo sect released in the Tokyo subway. — Richard Preston

A lot of American companies are now moving into Iraq. Iraq now has Pizza Hut, Subway, Taco Bell and Popeye's fried chicken. So, great, instead of oil for food, we're giving them oil in food. — Jay Leno

I like to go to the subway and hear what people are thinking and feeling and what their concerns are. You learn so much that way. You really do. — Chirlane McCray

No one is asking what happened to all the homeless. No one cares, because it's easier to get on the subway and not be accosted. — Richard Linklater

I used to play in the subway. If everyone tossed in a quarter, at the end of the day it would add up. It shows you aren't invisible. And it's better than being ignored, or kicked in the head, or worse. — Nellie McKay

In China, inaugurations are frequent affairs, though they have nothing to do with presidents. A news cycle rarely passes without some fanfare over the inaugural ride on a new subway line or the inaugural trip across an unusually large bridge. — Evan Osnos

The first four and a half years was me in the studio every day, writing songs for other people. I had jobs, too - eleven jobs. I worked at Kinko's, Fatburger, Subway - I was a sandwich artist - and I was a claims processor at Allstate Insurance. — Frank Ocean