The Railway Man Quotes & Sayings

Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole
they see all sorts of things
they see themselves ... — Virginia Woolf

Once, a woman attending a nonresidential metta weekend in New York City was on her way back to the retreat site on Saturday morning when a man approached her on the railway platform and asked a question about the train schedule. Even though she was holding a schedule in her hand, her thought was, "He looks really weird! I'd better get rid of him." Her initial claim to have no knowledge of the trains was belied by her clearly visible schedule. She tried a few ploys to have him go away, to no avail. Finally, she randomly pointed to someone else on the platform and said, "You should go ask him." The stranger looked at her uneasily and said, "Oh no! I couldn't ask him - he looks really weird! — Sharon Salzberg

It was a movie [The Railway Man] that stayed with me a long time. It's still one of the things I'm most proud of. I got to know the man that I was playing and unfortunately he passed away just before the movie came out. It's one that meant a huge amount to me, and one that I'm particularly proud of. — Jeremy Irvine

An individualist town councillor will walk along the municipal pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with municipal water and - seeing by the municipal clock in the municipal market, that he is too early to meet his children coming from the municipal school, hard by the country lunatic asylum and the municipal hospital, will use the national telegraph system to tell them not to walk through the municipal park, but to come by the municipal tramway to meet him in the municipal reading-room, by the municipal museum, art-gallery, and library, where he intends ... to prepare his next speech in the municipal town hall in favor of the nationalization of canals and in increase of Government control of the railway system. "Socialism, Sir," he will say, "don't waste the time of a practical man by your fantastic absurdities. Self-help, Sir, individual self-help, that's what has made our city what it is. — Sidney Webb

Failure seems to be regarded as the one unpardonable crime, success as the all-redeeming virtue, the acquisition of wealth as the single worthy aim of life. Ten years ago such revelations as these of the Erie Railway would have sent a shudder through the community, and would have placed a stigma on every man who had had to do them. Now they merely incite others to surpass by yet bolder outrages and more corrupt combinations. — Charles Francis Adams, Sr.

The names of Northern railway stations in a timetable where he would like to imagine himself stepping from the train on an autumn evening when the trees are already bare and smelling strongly in the keen air, an insipid publication for people of taste, full of names that he has not heard since childhood, may have far greater value for him than five volumes of philosophy, and lead people of taste to say that for a man of talent, he has very stupid tastes. — Marcel Proust

Aaron Sisson was the last man on the little black railway-line — D.H. Lawrence

So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled. — Paul Theroux

Boys, be ambitious. Be ambitious not for money, not for selfish aggrandizement, not for the evanescent thing which men call fame. Be ambitious for the attainment of all that a man can be. — William Clark

The Giraffe took the horse's head and led him along on the most level parts of the road towards the railway station, and two or three chaps went along to help get the sick man into the train. — Henry Lawson

The Railway Man was a particularly intense and immersive experience. I definitely got carried away. I lost about 35 pounds. I really was incredibly skinny and also quite unwell while we were filming. It wasn't very healthy. I don't recommend it. But then also doing the torture scenes, the water boarding stuff, there wasn't really any other way just to do it really. — Jeremy Irvine

Manners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impediments, and bring the man pure to energize. They aid our dealing and conversation, as a railway aids travelling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road, and leaving nothing to be conquered but pure space. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, who knows how to read, has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. — Aldous Huxley

In other fields of endeavor poverty has been the spur to action. Napoleon was born in obscurity, the son of a hand-to-mouth scrivener in the backward island of Corsica. Abraham Lincoln, the boast and pride of America, the man who made this land too hot for the feet of slaves, came from a log cabin in the Ohio backwoods. So did James A. Garfield. Ulysses Grant came from a tanyard to become the world's greatest general. Thomas A. Edison commenced as a newsboy on a railway train. — Joseph Devlin

To believe what?" "To believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate. I heard once of an American who so defined faith: 'that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.' For one, I follow that man. He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him; but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe. — Bram Stoker

Man always behave like a snail on the railway! He thinks he has infinite time and moves accordingly, with the speed of unbelievable and nerve-wracking slowness! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

A man who preferred to dress like a permanent tourist was just what a guide passionately looked for all his life. You may want to ask why I became a guide or when. I was a guide for the same reason as someone else is a signaler, porter, or guard. It is fated thus. Don't laugh at my railway associations. The railways got into my blood very early in life. Engines with their tremendous clanging — R.K. Narayan

What was a prisoner of war anyway? Less than a man, just material to be used to make the railway, like the teak sleepers and steel rails and dog spikes. — Richard Flanagan

How like a railway tunnel is the poor man's life, with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity! — Christian Nestell Bovee

I once knew a man who built a railway all for himself. — Alessandro Baricco

GEOLOGY, n. The science of the earth's crust
to which, doubtless, will be added that of its interior whenever a man shall come up garrulous out of a well. The geological formations of the globe already noted are catalogued thus: The Primary, or lower one, consists of rocks, bones or mired mules, gas-pipes, miners' tools, antique statues minus the nose, Spanish doubloons and ancestors. The Secondary is largely made up of red worms and moles. The Tertiary comprises railway tracks, patent pavements, grass, snakes, mouldy boots, beer bottles, tomato cans, intoxicated citizens, garbage, anarchists, snap-dogs and fools. — Ambrose Bierce

Capitalism is chronically unstable.Boom and bust has always marked capitalism in the United States. There were panics in 1785, 1791, 1819, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1907, 1929 and 1987.In economies and politics, as in war, an astonishing number of people die, like the man on the railway crossing, defending their right of way. This is a poorly developed instinct in Switzerland. No country so firmly avows the principles of private enterprise but in few have the practical concessions to socialism been more numerous and varied. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Science, as illustrated by the printing press, the telegraph, the railway, is a double-edged sword. At the same moment that it puts an enormous power in the hands of the good man, it also offers an equal advantage to the evil disposed. — Richard Jefferies

An artist is identical with an anarchist,' he cried. 'You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.'
'So it is,' said Mr. Syme.
'Nonsense!' said Gregory, who was very rational when any one else attempted paradox. — G.K. Chesterton

We are all such egotists that a sorrow or hardship - provided it is great enough - flatters our self-importance. We feel that a calamity by overtaking us has distinguished us above our fellows. A man likes not to be ignored even by a railway accident. A man with a grievance is always happy. — W.N.P. Barbellion

I once sat down on a bench at Cape Town railway station where the notice "Whites Only" was obscured. A few moments later a white man approached and shouted: 'Get off!' It never occurred to him that he was achieving the opposite of his dreams of superiority and had become a living object of contempt, that human beings, when they are human, dare not conduct themselves in such ways. — Bessie Head