Quotes on Streets

Every black American is bilingual. All of them. We speak street vernacular and we speak 'job interview.'

Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.

I never think about Wall Street - why should I - but to go down there so often while filming 'Working Girl,' to become acquainted with this whole different world, and to find out what goes on behind the scenes is so interesting. There's so much of the city that you don't really bother to investigate. Ahh... New York.

The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.

A street is a story in asphalt - so it's a paradox that the streets are the one place where the movies play fast and loose with continuity, something to which L.A. streets lend themselves as naturally as does the city's psyche.

The surest path to safe streets and peaceful communities is not more police and prisons, but ecologically sounds economic development. And that same path can lift us to a new, green economy - one with the power to lift people out of poverty while respecting and repairing the environment.

The vast majority of the guns in the U.S. are sold to white people who live in the suburbs or the country. When we fantasize about being mugged or home invaded, what's the image of the perpetrator in our heads? Is it the freckled-face kid from down the street - or is it someone who is, if not black, at least poor?

And we'd had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive.

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.

This is something everyone knows: A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe.

I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long... Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.

If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.

But I smiled, and smiling was easy, no matter how strange and disorienting the street seemed to be. I was a fugitive. I was a wanted man, a hunted man, with a price on my head. And I was still one step ahead of them. I was free. Every day, when you're on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.

With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.

I was 8 years old when I went across the street from my house to a fair, and they always had a used book sale. For a quarter I bought a book called 'Come On Seabiscuit.' I loved that book. It stayed with me all those years

And, while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions.

Oh, Mona, we're all damned fools! Some of us just have more fun with it than others. Loosen up, dear! Don't be so afraid to cry . . . or laugh, for that matter. Laugh all you want and cry all you want and whistle at pretty men in the street and to hell with anybody who thinks you're a damned fool!

Fashion is in the sky, in the street.

Wisdom is probably the ability to cope. That's why someone who has to walk seven miles every day to get water for their children can be wiser than someone sitting behind a desk in Wall Street.

She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.

Everything that I saw became something to be made, and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom: there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything. It all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory, with its broken and patched panels, lines on a road map, a corner of a Braque painting, paper fragments in the street. It was all the same: anything goes.