Best 25 quotes in «harlem quotes» category

Editors keep pushing deadline strain while people sleep on benches and subway grates; a welter weight boxer dances on the platform at 125th Street station, commuters look unfazed...

Harlem sleeps late.

I wanted to hug them all. We belonged to each other somehow...But that sweet feeling hung on and I loved all of Harlem gently and didn't want to be Puerto Rican or anything else but my own rusty self.

That was 1993 grunge in suburbia. This was 2003 hell in Harlem. (Dark City Lights)

In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it

The proponents of Harlem jive talk ... do not hope that courses in the lingo will ever be offered at Harvard or Columbia. Neither do they expect to learn that Mrs. Faunteen-Chauncey of the Mayfair Set addresses her English butler as 'stud hoss', and was called in reply, 'a sturdy old hen.' -- Original Handbook of Harlem Jive, 1944.

This was the neighborhood of the cheap addicts, whisky-heads, stumblebums, the flotsam of Harlem; the end of the line for the whores, the hard squeeze for the poor honest laborers and a breeding ground for crime. Blank-eyed whores stood on the street corners swapping obscenities with twitching junkies. Muggers and thieves slouched in dark doorways waiting for someone to rob; but there wasn't anyone but each other. Children ran down the street, the dirty street littered with rotting vegetables, uncollected garbage, battered garbage cans, broken glass, dog offal — always running, ducking and dodging. God help them if they got caught. Listless mothers stood in the dark entrances of tenements and swapped talk about their men, their jobs, their poverty, their hunger, their debts, their Gods, their religions, their preachers, their children, their aches and pains, their bad luck with the numbers and the evilness of white people. Workingmen staggered down the sidewalks filled with aimless resentment, muttering curses, hating to go to their hotbox hovels but having nowhere else to go.

We have torn down the worst slums. The natural meeting-points for the lumpenproletariat have been eliminated, converted into pleasant, dull, clean blocks for dull, clean, adapted families. In the absence of ghettos for the losers, they gather around the centres of pride. If Harlem and its equivalents did not exist, they would gather outside the Rockefeller Center.

You know gentrification is deep when a garage rock band made up of three white boys is called "Harlem".

Despite everything that Harlem did to our generation, I think it gave something to a few. It gave them a strength that couldn't be obtained anywhere else.

Harlem is a stage. It's like its own planet, from the way we dress to the swag in the way we walk and talk.

If I go up to Harlem or down to Sixth Street, and I'm not dressed up or I'm not wearing my jewelry, then the people feel I'm talking down to them. People expect to see Mrs. Astor, not some dowdy old lady, and I don't intend to disappoint.

If there was a Harlem Globetrotters of rugby league, he’d be in it.

From 143rd Street in Harlem to the center court at Wimbledon is about as far as one can travel.

In the invincible and indescribable squalor of Harlem ... I was tormented. I felt caged, like an animal. I wanted to escape. I felt if I did not get out I would slowly strangle.

I like to go hear jazz late-night up in Harlem.

There are other tracks that are more reliant upon the beat. Like nobody's going to sit there and play "Harlem Shake" on the guitar!

Michael Ralph brilliantly plays the street prophet, a West Indian who foreshadows the Harlem riot.

Living at the YMCA in Harlem dramatically broadened my view of the world.

The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground.

We'll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites.

They [the police] learned something from them Harlem riots. They used to beat your head right in public, but now they only beat it after they get you down to the station house.

You white folks see UFOs in your dreams. You don't hear about Martians in Harlem.

Activists from all over the world--the known & the unknown--would find their way to the Kochiyamas' Fri & Sat night open houses. 'People were everywhere, eating, talking, laughing, spilling out into the hallway [outside their apt]. People were even int he bathroom. You couldn't close the front door bc there were so many people inside,' recalled Herman Ferguson. The Kochiyamas' apt also became a central meeting place for the Movement.

Wyatt Walker can walk through Harlem. No one would know him.