Best 138 quotes in «brooklyn quotes» category

Even the worst things about Devonairre Street are better than the rest of the city.

Florence, listen to me carefully.... Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place

Everything comes out of smoke and mist and nothingness, a mystical happening…

Florence could feel a constriction in her chest…She had been foolish enough to hope that whatever she was walking into would affect no one but herself. Now the truth was catching up with her at the speed of her galloping heartbeat…Now they had summoned her. And they knew everything

He'd once explained that when he was a boy his very proper parents had forbidden him and his brothers to curse in the house so 'feather buckets' was the young boys coded way of saying 'f*ck it

He was delighted by things, as he was delighted by her, and he had done nothing else ever but make that clear.

I am driven. Being driven is my energy source. It is my fun.…I believe that where there is action, there is movement, and those ripples will eventually produce something positive.

His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.

I had to say it gave me a warm feeling to picture Meredith Winslow spending twenty years or so in an ill fitting orange jumpsuit, cozying up to a great big girl named Beulah

I had a blind date with a dentist — and he told me to come back in six months.

I learned to keep my eyes open and my mouth shut.

I have never learned how to tell somebody something good about myself; that should be a secret they must find out .

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.

I said, "Is there!" I told him there is a Mafia school where they teach them math — if Johnny has ten fingers and they cut off two, how many does he have left?

It gathers emotionally inside you, in a strange way a by-product of struggle, of a willingness to do anything, try anything, expose yourself to anything — staying in motion because sooner or later those ripples will cause change.

Maybe that is why in my comedy I try and puncture the hypocrisy all around us, why it is almost a crusade with me to strip life down to what really is true.

Magnus Bane,” said Magnus. “High Warlock of Brooklyn and Scrabble champion.

Maybe it wasn’t rational, but she didn’t like the idea of Leo invading her little world. Yesterday, Brooklyn had belonged to her. The Long Island ’burbs where she’d grown up had felt far away from the brick streets and renovated factory spaces of Brooklyn. In this job, she’d felt truly independent, putting down her own fragile roots in a new place. Fast forward twenty-four hours, and her daddy had joined the workplace and her ex-boyfriend had shown up to remind her of all that she’d lost. Really, a girl could be forgiven for feeling slightly hysterical. Not that there was any time to panic.

Men were good for one thing only. Killing spiders. Other than that, I was on my own. It was sad though. Where was the chivalry of yesteryear?

Only then, as she prepared to cross the avenue, did she again spot the man in the fedora hat. He was at the opposite side of the street from where he’d stood before, but the caramel color of his coat was unmistakable. He was loitering in front of what looked like a Ford V8 parked nose-up on the sidewalk. Florence adjusted her shawl over her shoulders and crossed to the opposite corner of the plaza. When she turned back to look again, he was gone

My breath came out in a fog and rose into the milky sky. Snow fell on my eyelashes, and all of Brooklyn turned white, a world in a globe. Every snowflake that I caught was a miracle unlike any other.

Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it's obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.

My mother had been in the Soviet whirlpool for eleven years by this point. Enough time, I imagine, to unlearn the bourgeois habits of her native Brooklyn, to accustom herself to the farting and shouting of her neighbours, to doing her washing by hand in the collective tub, to keeping her dry food locked up in her wardrobe

That's what you get when a bunch of fucks in tights try to save the goddamn day.

People say it is not the key to happiness, but I have always figured if you have enough money you can have a key made.

She was arriving at a revelation that the secret to living was simply forgetting

Sunset was just then settling over Red Square. There seemed some hidden vision to be gleaned. A message about man’s chaotic spirit and his sombre dignity. His dignity and his power. His power and his purpose. She was sure that there was some thread there, but the burden of decoding it made her feel too tired

Somehow, some way, every person in the arts has to find an accommodation with disappointment and embarrassment. They are the pollen in the air we breathe.

The act of creation fascinates me. You can only sit with blank page and wait. You cannot press a button, cannot program it.

The most special times in a person's life are not meant to last forever. They're like bubbles rising from a plastic ring dipped into a soapy solution. The soap bubbles rise, with the sun flashing brilliant colors, then bursts into a showery memory mist.

The immediate difficulty, Florence realised while riding the high rail back to Brooklyn, was how to break the news to her parents, even if she could convince them that being a chaperone to six foreign men was a legitimate occupation for a twenty-three-year-old girl. What choice did she have? A paycheck could not win a girl’s independence

The revelation that personal truth can be the foundation of comedy, that outrageousness can be cleansing and healthy…

They pine for the hip, frosty girlfriend they abandoned for a pleasant if unexciting marriage to her sunnier, less mentally present sister coast.

Well, I didn't really know what to say. So maybe I should say that I have thought about you and I like you, I like seeing you, I care for you and maybe I love you too. And the next time if you tell me you love me, I'll--" She stopped. "You'll what?" "I'll say I love you too.

To the bankrupt poet, to the jilted lover, to anyone who yearns to elude the doubt within and the din without, the tidal strait between Manhattan Island and her favorite suburb offers the specious illusion of easy death. Melville prepared for the plunge from the breakwater on the South Street promenade, Whitman at the railing of the outbound ferry, both men redeemed by some Darwinian impulse, maybe some epic vision, which enabled them to change leaden water into lyric wine. Hart Crane rejected the limpid estuary for the brackish swirl of the Caribbean Sea. In each generation, from Washington Irving’s to Truman Capote’s, countless young men of promise and talent have examined the rippling foam between the nation’s literary furnace and her literary playground, questioning whether the reams of manuscript in their Brooklyn lofts will earn them garlands in Manhattan’s salons and ballrooms, wavering between the workroom and the water. And the city had done everything in its power to assist these men, to ease their affliction and to steer them toward the most judicious of decisions. It has built them a bridge.

Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.

Was it an instinct towards their future life together that she was already sensing, which made her pull back? For what she was seeing suddenly, in her mind’s eye, was an image of the two of them dancing on the edge of the world, not realising that they were about to fall off

When you begin to losing your audience, do not get loud; get quiet, make them find you and come back to you.

We’re all a little broken, on the sidewalk. On the street. In the city.

Who is she, after all? Not a member of the Party. Not even a Russian...What can she do, really, but watch the ginger-haired sacrificial lamb get slaughtered? One wrong move and Florence herself might be on the chopping block herself

A lot of my friends who grew up in Manhattan have a strange phobia about Brooklyn. It's big and scary and they get lost.

…you either do or do not have a comedy mind, whatever that is, maybe a heightened sense of the ridiculous and the absurdity of life…We are all crazy and crazed.

A lot of people who are passionate about digital or publishing, they either want to be in New York or Brooklyn.

Also, I preached to gangs on the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx - and miracles began to happen.

Your technique means nothing if you're not using your talents for the betterment of humanity.

And I'm sure than in Poland, or somewhere, it is considered cool to drive a Porsche and wear necklaces and black silk, but at least back in Brooklyn if you did those things you were either a drug dealer or from New Jersey.

And," Amber said, practically drooling as she ogled him, "it's tradition for new arrivals to help with the pep rally." Brooklyn quirked her lips in doubt. "Tradition?" "It's a new tradition," Amber shot back. "Clearly the deeper meaning of the word has escaped you.

At some point we all have to move on. Im here to create some kind of legacy in Brooklyn.

An egg cream can do anything. An egg cream to a Brooklyn Jew is like water to an Arab. A Jew will kill for an egg cream. It's the Jewish malmsey.

Before I moved to Brooklyn to pursue music, I was a high school dropout and speed freak who'd been living with her dealer boyfriend in Bucks County, Pennsylvania at 16.