Street Lights Quotes

1. "Ever since, New York has existed for me simultaneously as a map to be learned and a place to aspire too--a city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here. As a kid, I grasped that the skyline was a sign that could be, so to speak, relocated to New Jersey--a kind of abstract, receding Vision whose meaning would always be "out of reach," not a concrete thing signifying "here you are." Even when we are established here, New York still seems a place we aspire to. Its life is one thing--streets and hot dogs and brusqueness--and its symbols, the lights across the way, the beckoning skyline, are another. We go on being inspired even when we're most exasperated."
Author: Adam Gopnik

2. "You invented me. There is no such earthly being,Such an earthly being there could never be.A doctor cannot cure, a poet cannot comfort?A shadowy apparition haunts you night and day.We met in an unbelievable year,When the world's strength was at an ebb,Everything withered by adversity,And only the graves were fresh. Without streetlights, the Neva's waves were black as pitch,Thick night enclosed me like a wall ...That's when my voice called out to you!Why it did?I still don't understand.And you came to me, as if guided by a starThat tragic autumn, steppingInto that irrevocably ruined house,From whence had flown a flock of burnt verse."
Author: Anna Akhmatova

3. "Tell it, Fanny. About the crowds, streets, buildings, lights, about the whirligig of loneliness, about the humpty-dumpty clutter of longings. And then explain about the summer parks and the white snow and the moon window in the sky. Throw in a poignantly ironical dissertation on life, on its uncharted aimlessness, and speak like Sherwood Anderson about the desire that stir in the heart. Speak like Remy de Gourmont and Dostoevsky and Stevie Crane, like Schopenhauer and Dreiser and Isaiah; speak like all the great questioners whose tongues have wagged and whose hearts have burned with questions. He will listen bewilderedly and, perhaps, only perhaps, understand for a moment the dumb pathos of your eyes."
Author: Ben Hecht

4. "If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights."
Author: Bill Viola

5. "Daylight fires the ridges green, shifts the colors of the fog, touches the brick streets of Rock Camp with a reddish tone. The streetlights flicker out, and the traffic signal at the far end of Front Street's yoke snaps on; stopping nothing, warning nothing, rushing nothing on. --from The Honored Dead"
Author: Breece D'J Pancake

6. "The way I see it, I can either cross the street, or I can keep waiting for another few years of green lights to go by."
Author: Camryn Manheim

7. "I stared out the window the whole way, because it was raining, which is how I like the city best. It looks like it's been polished up. All the streets shine and lights from everywhere reflect off the black. It's like the whole place has been dipped in sugar syrup. Like the city is some kind of big candy apple."
Author: Carol Rifka Brunt

8. "I feel ugly" I said and you looked at me as if I spoke a different language. There are things you will never understand and if there were words to describe the rapture that takes place in my head from time to time I would put my hand in front of your eyes to protect you from all the ugliness in the world. I kept my eyes on the streetlights outside the window and you kissed every inch of my body as if you could kiss the pain away."
Author: Charlotte Eriksson

9. "Careful crossing the street," Tommy called back to her as he crossed. [Jody is drunk]"Ha!" Jody said. "I am a finely tuned predator. I am a superbeing. I --" And at that point she bounced her forehead off a light pole with a dull twang and was suddenly lying on her back, looking at the streetlights above her, which kept going out of focus, the bastards."
Author: Christopher Moore

10. "A scattering of pinpoint lights shows up in the blackness ahead. A town or village straddling the highway. The indicator on the speedometer begins to lose ground. The man glances in his mirror at the girl, a little anxiously as if this oncoming town were some kind of test to be met.An illuminated road sign flashes by: CAUTION! MAIN STREET AHEAD - SLOW UP The man nods grimly, as if agreeing with that first word. But not in the way it is meant.The lights grow bigger, spread out on either side. Street lights peer out here and there among the trees. The highway suddenly sprouts a plank sidewalk on each side of it. Dark store-windows glide by.With an instinctive gesture, the man dims his lights from blinding platinum to just a pale wash. A lunch-room window drifts by. ("Jane Brown's Body")"
Author: Cornell Woolrich

11. "She turned down her street once more, glaring at the garish lights someone had put up along their house. Might as well light the roof with "Santa Park Here". Sheesh. The closer she got to home, though, the lower her heart sank. The overly bright house looked suspiciously like... No. Oh, no. He wouldn't. He had. Light up animated animals were dotted all over her lawn. The circle of life has apparently found our power outlet. And why the fuck is there a Star of David on my roof? She wasn't exactly the most church-going member of the community, but you'd think Simon would know what religion she was. After all, she knew exactly who was going to officiate at his funeral. She picked up her cell phone and called Emma. "I'm going to kill him."
Author: Dana Marie Bell

12. "1821," I told him, noting mailboxes of castles and pirate ships and the street numbers painted on them. I had to fis hmy penlight from my pack to see the numbers; streetlights were scarce, and the sky bulged with low, sooty clouds instead of helpful moonlight."
Author: Dia Reeves

13. "You've walked those streets a thousand times and stillyou end up here. Regret none of it, not oneof the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,when the lights from the carnival rideswere the only stars you believed in, loving themfor their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a houseafter the TV set has been pitched out the upstairswindow. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptiedof expectation. Relax. Don't bother rememberingany of it. Let's stop here, under the lit signon the corner, and watch all the people walk by."
Author: Dorianne Laux

14. "Amory wandered slowly up the avenue and thought of the night as inevitably his-- the pageantry and carnival of rich dusk and dim streets... it seemed that he had closed the book of fading harmonies at last and stepped into the sensuous vibrant walks of life. Everywhere these countless lights, this promise of a night of streets and singing-- he moved in a half-dream through the crowd as if expecting to meet Rosalind hurrying toward him with eager feet from every corner... How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his. Even his dreams now were faint violins drifting like summer sounds upon the summer air."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

15. "It was a dark afternoon, threatening rain and the end of the world, and done in that particularly gloomy gray in which only New York afternoons indulge. A breeze was crying down the streets, whisking along battered newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were pricking out all the windows- it was so desolate that one was sorry for the tops of sky-scrapers lost up there in the dark green and gray heaven."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

16. "Witch Baby wanted to ask Ping how to find her Jah-Love angel. She knew Raphael was not him, even though Raphael had the right eyes and smile and name. She knew how he looked--the angel in her dream--but she didn't know how to find him. Should she roller-skate through the streets in the evenings when the streetlights flicker on? Should she stow away to Jamaica on a cruise ship and search for him in the rain forests and along the beaches? Would he come to her? Was he waiting, dreaming of her in the same way she waited and dreamed?"
Author: Francesca Lia Block

17. "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."
Author: Glen David Gold

18. "In Paris the swaying lanterns are lit in the streets; lights shine through water, fuzzy, diffuse. Saint-Just sits by an insufficient fire, in a poor light. He is a Spartan after all, and Spartans don't need home comforts. He has begun his report, his list of accusations; if Robespierre saw it now, he would tear it up, but in a few days' time it will be the very thing he needs. Sometimes he stops, half-glances over his shoulder. He feels someone has come into the room behind him; but when he allows himself to look, there is nothing to see. It is my destiny, he feels, forming in the shadows of the room. It is the guardian angel I had, long ago when I was a child. It is Camille Desmoulins, looking over my shoulder, laughing at my grammar. He pauses for a moment. He thinks, there are no living ghosts. He takes hold of himself. Bends his head over his task. His pen scratches. His strange letterforms incise the paper. His handwriting is minute. He gets a lot of words to the page."
Author: Hilary Mantel

19. "There was a sky somewhere above the tops of the buildings, with stars and a moon and all the things there are in a sky, but they were content to think of the distant street lights as planets and stars. If the lights prevented you from seeing the heavens, then preform a little magic and change reality to fit the need. The street lights were now planets and stars and moon."
Author: Hubert Selby Jr.

20. "Harry lost any sense of where they were: Streetlights above him, yells around him, he was clinging to the sidecar for dear life. Hedwig's cage, the Firebolt, and his rucksack slipped from beneath his knees —"No — HEDWIG!"The broomstick spun to earth, but he just managed to seize the strap of his rucksack and the top of the cage as the motorbike swung the right way up again. A second's relief, and then another burst of green light. The owl screeched and fell to the floor of the cage."No — NO!"The motorbike zoomed forward; Harry glimpsed hooded Death Eaters scattering as Hagrid blasted through their circle."Hedwig — Hedwig —"But the owl lay motionless and pathetic as a toy on the floor of her cage."
Author: J.K. Rowling

21. "Come again?' She asked. Yes tomorrow, under the sodium street lights, under the tick of the clock. Under my obligations, my history, my fears, this now. This fizzy, giddy all consuming now. I will not let time lie to me. I will not listen to dead voices or unborn pain. "What if?" Has no power against 'what if not?' The not of you is unbearable. I must have you...."
Author: Jeanette Winterson

22. "I feel more exposed here than if I were a john on a street corner with my pants around my ankles and the police headlights shining on the glossy wet of my dick that was polished by the mouth of the street vendor."
Author: Jessica Clare

23. "She is stunned that in this town there are no sidewalks to speak of, no streetlights, no public transportation, no stores for miles at at a time."
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

24. "We used to all come outside when the streetlights came on and prowl the neighborhood in a pack, a herd of kids on banana-seat bikes and minibikes. The grown-ups looked so silly framed in their living-room and kitchen windows. They complained about their days and sighed deep sighs of depression and loss. They talked about how spoiled and lucky children were these days. We will never be that way, we said, we will never say those things."
Author: Jill McCorkle

25. "If you don't have regular and accurate financial statements, you're driving your business 100 miles an hour down a one-way street the wrong way, at night, in the fog, without lights."
Author: Jim Blasingame

26. "Every inch of space was used. As the road narrowed, signs receded upwards and changed to the vertical. Businesses simply soared from ground level and hung out vaster, more fascinatingly illuminated shingles than competitors. We were still in a traffic tangle, but now the road curved. Shops crowded the pavements and became homelier. Vegetables, spices, grocery produce in boxes or hanging from shop lintels, meats adangle - as always, my ultimate ghastliness - and here and there among the crowds the alarming spectacle of an armed Sikh, shotgun aslant, casually sitting at a bank entrance. And markets everywhere. To the right, cramped streets sloped down to the harbor. To the left, as we meandered along the tramlines through sudden dense markets of hawkers' barrows, the streets turned abruptly into flights of steps careering upwards into a bluish mist of domestic smoke, clouds of washing on poles, and climbing. Hong Kong had the knack of building where others wouldn't dare."
Author: Jonathan Gash

27. "That was on a night in August. Dad Lewis died early that morning and the young girl Alice from next door got lost in the evening and then found her way home in the dark by the streetlights of town and so returned to the people who loved her. And in the fall the days turned cold and the leaves dropped off the trees and in the winter the wind blew from the mountains and out on the high plains of Holt County there were overnight storms and three-day blizzards."
Author: Kent Haruf

28. "He looked around at the perfectly white world, felt the wet kisses of the snowflakes, pondered hidden meanings in the pale yellow streetlights that shone in a world so whitely asleep. "Beautiful," he whispered."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

29. "They were still out on the sidewalk of West Eighty-sixth Street, the taxi pulling way, when Louise put down her travel bag, raised both arms and declared herself in love with New York City. 'It's exactly as I imagined it!' She let her arms fall and looked out at the street, at the honking, halting parade of cars, headlights bright in the dusking air. She turned to Cora with glistening eyes. 'I've always known it, my whole life. This is where I'm meant to be."
Author: Laura Moriarty

30. "This new world was a vicious, sleek world made of street lights and tight jeans, sharp smiles and fast cars. This was a city, edited. A city, pared down to its bare minimums, beautiful and abusive."
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

31. "And I go out of Father's house and I walk down the street, and it is very quiet even thought it is the middle of the day and I can't hear any noise except birds singing and wind and sometimes buildings falling down in the distance, and if I stand very close to traffic lights I can hear a little click as the colors change."
Author: Mark Haddon

32. "If there are no stars on the sky, you must try to be happy with the shining streetlights!"
Author: Mehmet Murat Ildan

33. "The streetlights had already lit up on Bronnaya, and a golden moon hung over the Patriarchs. In the ever deceiving lunar light, it appeared to Ivan Nikolayevich that, instead of a cane, the professor stood holding a sword under his arm."
Author: Mikhail Bulgakov

34. "It was not pitch-black. It was the kind of cloudy night where the clouds seem to gather up light from distant streetlights and houses below, and throw it back at the earth."
Author: Neil Gaiman

35. "The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers... 'It is escapism, true,' he said, aloud. 'But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape?"
Author: Neil Gaiman

36. "The world spins along outside, the sunrises and sets, the streets go dark, the lights come on. The future is happening, but it can wait until tomorrow. Neither of us knows what will come next, or where we go from here,or even what anyone will say about us, but none of it matters. We've got each other right now."
Author: Pete Wentz

37. "You come in off the street, through the doors of the theater. You sit down. The lights go down and the curtain goes up. And you're in another world."
Author: Robert Caro

38. "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."
Author: S.E. Hinton

39. "It's odd, because I used to see pictures, on telly or wherever, of what I now know to be Shaftesbury Avenue and I used to wonder what that amazing street with all the lights was. Well, now I know. I think when you get a wee taste of something, it maybe isn't what you thought it was."
Author: Shirley Henderson

40. "Party lights hang over the street, yellow and red and green. Sadie stumbles over someone's chair, but I'm ready for this and I catch her easily by the arm."Sorry, clumsy," she says."You always were, Sadie. One of your more endearing traits."Before she can ask about that I slip my arm around her waist. She slips hers around mine, still looking up at me. The lights skate across her cheeks and shine in her eyes. We clasp hands, fingers folding together naturally, and for me the years fall away like a coat that's too heavy and too tight. In that moment, I hope on thing above all others: that she was not too busy to find at least one good man …She speaks in a voice almost too low to be heard over the music. But I hear her – I always did. "Who are you, George?""Someone you knew in another life, honey."
Author: Stephen King

41. "Martin thought of the iron El trestles winding and stretching across the city, of department store windows and hotel lobbies, of electric elevators and street-car ads, of the city pressing its way north on both sides of the great park, of dynamos and electric lights, of ten-story hotels, of the old iron tower near the depot at West Brighton with its two steam-driven elevators rising and falling in the sky--and in his blood he felt a surge of restlessness, as if he were a steam train spewing fiery coal smoke into the black night sky as he roared along a trembling El track, high above the dark storefronts, the gaslit saloons, the red-lit doorways, the cheap beer dives, the dance halls, the gambling joints, the face in the doorway, the sudden cry in the night."
Author: Steven Millhauser

42. "Love, it's such a night, laced with running water, irreparable, riddled with a million leaks. A night shaped like a shadow thrown by your absence. Every crack trickles, every overhang drips. The screech of nighthawks has been replaced by the splash of rain. The rain falls from the height of streetlights. Each drop contains its own shattering blue bulb."
Author: Stuart Dybek

43. "Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.Five billion miles away, a galaxy dieslike a snowflake falling on water. Below us, some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death, snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barnback into the little system of his care.All night, the cities, like shimmering novas, tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his."
Author: Ted Kooser

44. "Although it was only six o'clock, the night was already dark. The fog, made thicker by its proximity to the Seine, blurred every detail with its ragged veils, punctured at various distances by the reddish glow of lanterns and bars of light escaping from illuminated windows. The road was soaked with rain and glittered under the street-lamps, like a lake reflecting strings of lights. A bitter wind, heavy with icy particles, whipped at my face, its howling forming the high notes of a symphony whose bass was played by swollen waves crashing into the piers of the bridges below. The evening lacked none of winter's rough poetry."
Author: Théophile Gautier

45. "She ate her breakfast in silence, then drove downtown in weather so lowering the streetlights seemed decapitated. This was when you could discover if your preparations for winter were adequate, and if you were ready for the restrictions of movement and light that were about to be upon you."
Author: Thomas McGuane

46. "So the avenues we walk down,full of bodies wearing faces,are full of hidden talent:enough to make pianos moan,sidewalks split,streetlights deliriously flicker."
Author: Tony Hoagland

47. "What is meant by "reality"? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates."
Author: Virginia Woolf

48. "A muddy little stream, a village grown unfamiliar with time and trees. I turn around and retrace my way up Main Street and park and have a Coke in the confectionery store. It is run by a Greek, as it used to be, but whether the same Greek or another I would not know. He does not recognize me, nor I him. Only the smell of his place is familiar, syrupy with old delights, as if the ghost of my first banana split had come close to breathe on me."
Author: Wallace Stegner

49. "He parked in a nearby street and walked out on to the bridge. Below him the lights of London spread away in a wash of low wattage, Their dimness gave the lie to the very vastless of the city. Bull heard its distant roar, its night-time sough, its terminal cough"
Author: Will Self

50. "I wander thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear. How the Chimney-sweeper's cry Every black'ning Church appalls; And the hapless Soldier's sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls. But most thro' midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlot's curse Blasts the new born Infant's tear, And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse."
Author: William Blake

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