Bricks Quotes

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.

What's the point in wasting a perfectly good brick wall when you have someone to throw against it, that's what I always say.

Love is like a brick. You can build a house, or you can sink a dead body.

The thing about getting older is that you don't need everything to be possible any more, you just need things to be certain.

Here's something else to think about: calling when you say you're going to is the very first brick in the house you are building of love and trust. If he can't lay this one stupid brick down, you ain't never gonna have a house baby, and it's cold outside.

Brick by brick, I will destroy you.

Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go.

Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.

You can’t turn love on and off like a light switch, no matter how hard you try. All you can do is wall it off, one brick at a time, until you’ve created an impenetrable fortress around your emotions. And once that fortress is built, you camouflage it so well that even you can’t see it anymore.

Your mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid. You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation at high speed with total clarity.

You can destroy wood and brick, but you can't destroy a movement.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Ever hear of the phrase, Banging you're head on a brick wall?" Ah, but you forget, Darren, vampires can break brick walls with their heads.

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the effect of which is like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

I’ve wrestled with alligators, I’ve tussled with a whale. I done handcuffed lightning And throw thunder in jail. You know I’m bad. just last week, I murdered a rock, Injured a stone, Hospitalized a brick. I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

I swear, talking to you is like talking to a really good-looking and mildly stupid brick wall.

So why did I think about her every second? Why was I so much happier the minute I saw her? I felt like maybe I knew the answer, but how could I be sure? I didn't know, and I didn't have any way to find out. Guys don't talk about stuff like that. We just lie under the pile of bricks.

Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.

Wrapping my arms around her, I walked her backward into the brick. “Tell me you chose me, Echo.” She licked her lips. Those green eyes smoldered, calling me to her. “I chose you.

If it had been easy for Romeo to get to Juliet, nobody would have cared. Same goes for Cyrano and Don Quixote and Gatsby and their respective paramours. What captures the imagination is watching men throw themselves at a brick wall over and over again, and wondering if this is the time that they won't be able to get back up.

There's something about a place you've been with someone you love. It takes on a meaning in your mind. It becomes more than a place. It becomes a distillation of what you felt for each other. The moments you spend in a place with someone... they become part of its bricks and mortar. Part of its soul.

The warmth of his body shouldn’t have felt good. He was angry and every muscle was tense. It was like being leaned on by a very heavy, warm brick. A sexy brick.

We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyones arguing over where they're going to sit

I like talking to a brick wall- it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me!

Graffiti is beautiful; like a brick in the face of a cop.

Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound, then from my eyes, my ears, my mouth. It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps of the porch. My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout.

Stairway to Hell or Yellow Brick Road? Why don't you give your Magic 8 Ball a shake and see if it's ready to play again.

When I was alive, I believed — as you do — that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls. (...) You can strike your own time, and start the count anywhere. When you understand that — then any time at all will be the right time for you.

His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

Lord Maccon was built like a brick outhouse, with opinions twice as unmoving and often equally full of crap.

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.

People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.

Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

I don’t know what circumstances occurred in your life for you to build such a strong brick wall around your heart, but I do intend to tear it down." ~Cole

Data!data!data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay.

Nearing the Riefler's big red brick house he could see the yellow light spill out on the galerie Yvonne had insisted her German husband wrap around the house.  There was a tightening in Victor's chest.  It happened to him whenever he got close to the Riefler's house, or church on Sunday- anytime he thought he might catch a glimpse of Celena.

Brick by brick. Brick by brick, I will destroy you. "It was the promise that let him sleep at night, that drove him every day, that kept Jordie's ghost at bay. Because a quick death was too good for Pekka Rollins.

My disinterest in your bullshit is so tangible you could make bricks out of it

For God's sake, let's take the word 'possess' and put a brick round its neck and drown it ... We can't possess one another. We can only give and hazard all we have.

Outside, beyond the vast red bricked labyrinth of Kremlin walls, a humid night ensnarled the Soviet capital in its spell. Yet here in the womb-like private cinema Josef Stalin sat, eyes transfixed on the screen, as Johnny Weissmuller arced through a canopy of trees boldly screaming his signature jungle call.

You know when sometimes you meet someone so beautiful, and then you actually talk to them, and five minutes later they're dull as a brick. But then there's other people, and you meet them and you think 'not bad, they're okay', and then you get to know them, and their face sort of becomes them, like their personality's written all over it, and they just they turn into something so beautiful...

She spilled rice on my knee, and she smiled. I wanted her to spill a thousand things on me, lava, acid, bricks, anything, and smile each time

Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.

What happened when you woke up?" "I was having a dream. I don’t know what it was, but when I woke up, I had this awful realization that I was awake. It hit me like a brick in the groin." "Like a brick in the groin, I see." "I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare." "And what is that nightmare, Craig?" "Life." "Life is a nightmare." "Yes.

What on earth have you packed in here? Bricks?" asked Mo as he carried Meggie's book-box out of the house. You're the one who says books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them," said Meggie.

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.

What’s your name?' she asked, and surprised herself. But for some reason, she wanted to know. Dean’s brother—he hadn’t been just some nameless Bad Guy Number Four. This vampire wasn’t, either. He had a name, a history, maybe even people who cared what happened to him. 'My name is none of your business,' he said, and continued to stare out the window, even though there was nothing but blurry brick out there. 'Can I call you None for short?

But progress is always dangerous, isn't it? Most of the time, walls don't get dismantled brick by brick. Someone has to crash through them.

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.

The sky is raining bricks right into my skull.

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.

You’d give up your brothers for a woman?” Brick asked incredulously and Shy’s eyes moved to him. “Abso-fucking-lutely.” “Seriously?” Boz asked. “Not any woman,” Shy nodded my way then invited "now ask again.

A wall is a very big weapon. It's one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with.

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion

My main problem with cops is that they do what they're told. They say 'Sorry mate, I'm just doing my job' all the fucking time.

Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and a bottle of tequila.

Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha". It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.' 'Why not?' 'Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.

But one kiss levitates above all the others. The intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss. The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth, like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

Graves is going to shit a brick over this one.

If you can’t believe in miracles, then believe in yourself. When you want something bad enough, let that drive push you to make it happen. Sometimes you’ll run into brick walls that are put there to test you. Find a way around them and stay focused on your dream. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

I suddenly understood that even love and caring weren't always enough. They were the concrete bricks of our relationship, but unstable without the mortar of time spent together, time without the threat of imminent separation hanging over us.

Sophie said a bad word. In the dim light she had stubbed her toe on one of the many dusty bricks piled around the place. Naughty-naughty" Twinkle said. Oh shut up!" Sophie said , standing on one leg to hold her toe. "Why don't you grow up?

Careful with the accusations of insanity, oh my lady whose home is a tower with windows of brick, all for the sake of some skinny-ankled, laugh-prone boy of a khan.

Don't wish for bricks when you can build from stone.

He..." Richard began. "The marquis. Well, you know, to be honest, he seems a little bit dodgy to me." Door stopped. The steps dead-ended in a rough brick wall. "Mm," she agreed. "He's a little bit dodgy in the same way that rats are a little bit covered in fur.

It doesn't matter if you and everyone else in the room are thinking it. You don't say the words. Words are weapons. They blast big bloody holes in the world. And words are bricks. Say something out loud and it starts turning solid. Say it loud enough and it becomes a wall you can't get through.

On books and friends I spend my money; For stones and bricks I haven't any.

When you leave home to follow your dreams, your road will probably be riddled with potholes, not always paved in happy Technicolor bricks. You'll probably be kicked to the ground 150 million times and told you're nuts by friends and strangers alike. As you progress you may feel lonely or terrified for your physical and emotional safety. You may overestimate your own capabilities or fail to live up to them, and you'll surely fall flat on your face once in a while.

It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a half-brick in the path of the bicycle of history.

Isabel and Alma Trumbo are the sisters who reside in the brick rambler on Church Street. They are a bit, uh, different and unorthodox. Borderline eccentric, some of the townies say, especially Alma.” “What do the borderline eccentric sisters Isabel and Alma know about solving a murder case?” Dwight gave it a moment’s reflection. “They could probably write a book about it.

People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.

You know when sometimes you meet someone so beautiful — and then you actually talk with them, and five minutes later they're as dull as a brick. But then there's other people, and you meet them and you think: "Not bad, they're okay," and then you get to know them, and their face sort of becomes them, like their personality's written all over it; and they just — and they turn into something so beautiful. [Simultaneously, with Older Amy] Rory is the most beautiful man I've ever met.

I spray the sky fast. Eyes ahead and behind. Looking for cops. Looking for anyone I don't want to be here. Paint sails and the things that kick in my head scream from can to brick. See this, see this. See me emptied onto a wall.

Only when the last tree has been cut down and the last river has dried up will man realise that reciting red indian proverbs makes you sound like a fucking muppet.

Because I know.” Daemon appeared in front of me, eyes narrowed. He thumped his hand off his chest, directly above his heart. "Because I know what I feel in here. And I'm not the type of person to run from anything, no matter how hard it is. I'd rather face-plant against a brick wall than live for the rest of my life wondering what could’ve been. And you know what? I don’t think you were the type to run either. Maybe I was wrong

That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying I went closer, and I did not die. Surely God had his hand in this, as well as friends. Still, I was bent, and my laughter, as the poet said, was nowhere to be found. Then said my friend Daniel, (brave even among lions), “It’s not the weight you carry but how you carry it - books, bricks, grief - it’s all in the way you embrace it, balance it, carry it when you cannot, and would not, put it down.” So I went practicing. Have you noticed? Have you heard the laughter that comes, now and again, out of my startled mouth? How I linger to admire, admire, admire the things of this world that are kind, and maybe also troubled - roses in the wind, the sea geese on the steep waves, a love to which there is no reply?

In a lightning-fast move, he placed both of his hands on the brick wall, caging me with his body. He leaned toward me and my heart shifted into a gear I didn't know existed. His warm breath caressed my neck, melting my frozen skin. I tilted my head, waiting for the solid warmth of his body on mine. I could see his eyes again and those dark orbs screamed hunger . "I heard a rumor." "What's that?" I struggled to get out. "It's your birthday." Terrified speaking would break the spell, I licked my suddenly dry lips and nodded. "Happy birthday." Noah drew his lips closer to mine; that sweet musky smell overwhelmed my senses. I could almost taste his lips when he unexpectedly took a step back, inhaling deeply. The cold air slapped me into the land of sober.

In understanding the nature and the bigger picture of the game from an omniscient viewpoint, a player could manifest his own destiny infinitely more effectively than any two-dimensional-thinking dimwit on the street who repeatedly walked straight into brick walls, thinking a different outcome would magically materialize through persistence alone.

They want us to be afraid. They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes. They want us to barricade our doors and hide our children. Their aim is to make us fear life itself! They want us to hate. They want us to hate 'the other'. They want us to practice aggression and perfect antagonism. Their aim is to divide us all! They want us to be inhuman. They want us to throw out our kindness. They want us to bury our love and burn our hope. Their aim is to take all our light! They think their bricked walls will separate us. They think their damned bombs will defeat us. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that my soul and your soul are old friends. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that when they cut you I bleed. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that we will never be afraid, we will never hate and we will never be silent for life is ours!

Here you are! In the sacred present. I can’t heal you—or anyone—but I can celebrate your choice to dismantle the prison in your mind, brick by brick. You can’t change what happened, you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now. My precious, you can choose to be free.

What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed on order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why? Describe your street. Describe another. Compare.

There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of important things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home.

No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline.

Graffiti ultimately wins out over proper art because it becomes part of your city, it' s a tool; "I'll meet you in that pub, you know, the one opposite that wall with a picture of a monkey holding a chainsaw". I mean, how much more useful can a painting be than that?

No," he said calmly, filled with purpose. he took her arms lightly in his hands and shook her. "I am not giving you up." Emily looked at him, and for just a moment he could read her thoughts. Melanie use to say they were like twins, with their own secret, silent language. in that instant, Chris felt her fear and her resignation, and the knotty pain of coming up against a brick wall again and again. She glanced away, and he could breathe again. "The thing is, Chris" Emily said, "it's not your choice.

Percy was waiting for them. He looked mad. He stood at the edge of the glacier, leaning on the staff with the golden eagle, gazing down at the wreckage he'd caused: several hundred acres of newly open water dotted with icebergs and flotsam from the ruined camp. The only remains on the glacier were the main gates, which listed sideways, and a tattered blue banner lying over a pile of now-bricks. When they ran up to him, Percy said, "Hey," like they were just meeting for lunch or something. "You're alive!" Frank marveled. Percy frowned. "The fall? That was nothing. I fell twice that far from the St. Louis Arch." "You did what?" Hazel asked. "Never mind. The important thing was I didn't drown.

The Audi tires squealed as the vehicle tracked the same path. Jake hammered down the avenue, hunting for a getaway. Traffic thickened at the juncture ahead. A green light flickered into amber. He ramped up over the limit, punching over the white lines on a red signal. Tires screeched and a horn beeped. The needle sat on one hundred kilometers per hour. He fishtailed at a laneway. The GPS showed a right angle, car slid into a slot in an overhang. Jake got out and crept toward the opening, hugged the brick wall. He pulled the SIG and flicked off the safety. The Audi braked at the mouth. Door slammed. A shadow fell over the concrete. The swish of clothing indicated a possible weapon draw.

The less you say, the more weight your words will carry. Don’t argue. Never deign to deny. Meet insults with laughter. “You didn’t laugh at the Fjerdan captain,” I observed. “That wasn’t an insult. It was a challenge,” he said. “Know the difference.” Weakness is a guise. Wear it when they need to know you’re human, but never when you feel it. Don’t wish for bricks when you can build from stone. Use whatever or whoever is in front of you. Being a leader means someone is always watching you. Get them to follow the little orders, and they’ll follow the big ones. It’s okay to flout expectations, but never disappoint them.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by ten food steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant in the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.

Grown-ups love figures. When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essentail matters. They never say to you, “What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?” Instead, they demand: “How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?” Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him. If you were to say to the grown-ups: “I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof,” they would not be able to get an idea of that house at all. You have have to say to them: “I saw a house that cost $20,000.” Then they would exclaim: “Oh, what a pretty house that is!

In all my close friendships, words are the bricks I use to build bridges. To know someone I need to hear her, and to feel known, I need to be heard by her. The process of knowing and loving another person happens for me through conversation. I reveal something to help my friend understand me, she responds in a way that assures me she values my revelation, and then she adds something to help me understand her. This back-and-forth is repeated again and again as we go deeper into each other's hearts, minds, pasts, and dreams. Eventually, a friendship is built - a solid, sheltering structure that exists in the space between us - a space outside of ourselves that we can climb deep into. There is her, there is me, and then there is our friendship - this bridge we've built together.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words 'I have something to tell you,' a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

Sometimes I look back and I am shocked. Everyday of my life I have prepared for success, worked for it, waited for it, and you don't notice how the days pass until nearly a lifetime is finished. Then it hits you--the thing you have been waiting for has already gone by. And it was going in the other direction. It's like I've been waiting on the wrong side of the road for a bus that was already full." p. 265

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips black in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don't do it--she's the wrong woman, he's the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do bad things to children, you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty blank face turning to me, her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me, his pitiful beautiful untouched body, but I don't do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips like chips of flint as if to strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it

I would ask what it is you think you're doing, but... you are a teenager. I should have known better than to leave you in the car unattended. Next time, I'll seal you in there...probably with bricks. Maybe even mortar." Nick ignored his dry tone. "Just so long as you make sure nothing can get inside to kill me, I'm good with that." Ash frowned. "What are you talking about?" "The kid dead on the ground. Fourteen, Ash. Fourteen. I'm fourteen." "Yeah..." "Ash, I'm fourteen" "Got it. You're fourteen. I'm so proud you can count that high. It's a testament to the modern American educational system. But I should probably point out that you're no the only one. I'm told you go to a school with a whole class of -get this- kids who are fourteen." Nick rolled his eyes at the sarcasm. No wonder his mom wanted to hurt him for it. He finally understood. "Yeah, but they're not dead. Someone's killing fourteen-year-old boys, which I happen to be one. The cops said so. This is the second one in a day who's been murdered." "Yeah well given the lippiness of the average teenager, I can understand the urge" "You're not funny." "And you need to calm down. The only person you need to fear killing you when I'm around is me.

"The wanderer in Manhattan must go forth with a certain innocence, because New York is best seen with innocent eyes. It doesn't matter if you are younger or old. Reading our rich history makes the experience more layered, but it is not a substitute for walking the streets themselves. For old-timer or newcomer, it is essential to absorb the city as it is now in order to shape your own nostalgias. That's why I always urge the newcomer to surrender to the city's magic. Forget the irritations and the occasional rudeness; they bother New Yorkers too. Instead, go down to the North River and the benches that run along the west side of Battery Park City. Watch the tides or the blocks of ice in winter; they have existed since the time when the island was empty of man. Gaze at the boats. Look across the water at the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island, the place to which so many of the New York tribe came in order to truly live. Learn the tale of our tribe, because it's your tribe too, no matter where you were born. Listen to its music and its legends. Gaze at its ruins and monuments. Walk its sidewalks and run fingers upon the stone and bricks and steel of our right-angled streets. Breathe the air of the river breeze."

I want to be able to listen to recording of piano sonatas and know who's playing. I want to go to classical concerts and know when you're meant to clap. I want to be able to 'get' modern jazz without it all sounding like this terrible mistake, and I want to know who the Velvet Underground are exactly. I want to be fully engaged in the World of Ideas, I want to understand complex economics, and what people see in Bob Dylan. I want to possess radical but humane and well-informed political ideals, and I want to hold passionate but reasoned debates round wooden kitchen tables, saying things like 'define your terms!' and 'your premise is patently specious!' and then suddenly to discover that the sun's come up and we've been talking all night. I want to use words like 'eponymous' and 'solipsistic' and 'utilitarian' with confidence. I want to learn to appreciate fine wines, and exotic liquers, and fine single malts, and learn how to drink them without turning into a complete div, and to eat strange and exotic foods, plovers' eggs and lobster thermidor, things that sound barely edible, or that I can't pronounce...Most of all I want to read books; books thick as brick, leather-bound books with incredibly thin paper and those purple ribbons to mark where you left off; cheap, dusty, second-hand books of collected verse, incredibly expensive, imported books of incomprehensible essays from foregin universities. At some point I'd like to have an original idea...And all of these are the things that a university education's going to give me.