Columbus Circle Quotes

At Columbus Circle, a juggler wearing a trench cloak and top hat, who is usually at this location afternoons and who calls himself Stretch Man, performs in front of a small, uninterested crowd; though I smell prey, and he seems worthy of my wrath, I move on in search of a less dorky target. Though if he’d been a mime, odds are he’d already be dead.

It was easy to root for the winners. No, he liked the punch-drunk ones, half walking at mile twenty-three, tongues flapping like Labradors. Tumbling across the finish line by hook or by crook, feet pounded to bloody meat in their Nikes. The laggards and limpers who weren’t running the course but running deep into their character—down into the cave to return to the light with what they found. By the time they got to Columbus Circle, the TV crews have split, the cone cups of water and Gatorade litter the course like daisies in a pasture, and the silver space blankets twist in the wind. Maybe they had someone waiting for them and maybe they didn’t. Who wouldn’t celebrate that?

In full tumult the great afternoon current raced for Columbus Circle, where the mouth of midtown stood open and the skyscrapers gave back the yellow fire of the sun.

Ghost Dancers Rise: At the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing, tribal leaders gathered in Washington, DC, for a ceremony in front of the Capitol. They could have dwelt on the catastrophes that were Columbus's legacy, but instead they closed the ceremony with these words: We stand young warriors In the circle At dawn all storm clouds disappear The future brings all hope and glory, Ghost dancers rise Five-hundred years.

Felix Wenceslao Bernardino, raised in La Romana, one of Trujillo’s most sinister agents, his Witchking of Angmar. Was consul in Cuba when the exiled Dominican labor organizer Mauricio Báez was mysteriously murdered on the streets of Havana. Felix was also rumored to have had a hand in the failed assassination of Dominican exile leader Angel Morales (the assassins burst in on his secretary shaving, mistook the lathered man for Morales, and shot him to pieces). In addition, Felix and his sister, Minerva Bernardino (first woman in the world to be an ambassador before the United Nations), were both in New York City when Jesus de Galíndez mysteriously disappeared on his way home at the Columbus Circle subway station. Talk about Have Gun, Will Travel. It was said the power of Trujillo never left him; the fucker died of old age in Santo Domingo, Trujillista to the end, drowning his Haitian workers instead of paying them.

Columbus stuck to this error for the rest of his life. The idea that he had discovered a completely unknown continent was inconceivable for him and for many of his generation. For thousands of years, not only the greatest thinkers and scholars but also the infallible Scriptures had known only Europe, Africa and Asia. Could they all have been wrong? Could the Bible have missed half the world? It would be as if in 1969, on its way to the moon, Apollo 11 had crashed into a hitherto unknown moon circling the earth, which all previous observations had somehow failed to spot.

We took our food order to go, in greasy paper bags, and walked across Columbus Circle to Central Park. He helped me up the giant prehistoric-looking rock just off the playground.

In 1990 a congress of indigenous peoples met outside of Quito, Ecuador, to discuss the Columbian Quincentenary, a celebration by immigrant populations of the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the western hemisphere on his financed expedition to find a trade route to India. Tribal people came from all of the Americas and met to discuss the destructive and monumental changes since this European explorer’s arrival. We met together to gain insight and strength and ponder how we would continue to move forward past the massive destruction and disrespect of the earth mind, body and spirit, and to continue our sovereignty as Native nations. In the women’s circle, a striking Bolivian Indian woman in a bowler hat stood up. She welcomed us, and noted that she was surprised at all of the Natives attending from the United States. “We thought John Wayne had killed all of you.” (This was not a joke.)

A hundred years later, princes and bankers were willing to extend far more credit to Columbus’ successors, and they had more capital at their disposal, thanks to the treasures reaped from America. Equally important, princes and bankers had far more trust in the potential of exploration, and were more willing to part with their money. This was the magic circle of imperial capitalism: credit financed new discoveries; discoveries led to colonies; colonies provided profits; profits built trust; and trust translated into more credit. Nurhaci and Nader Shah ran out of fuel after a few thousand kilometres. Capitalist entrepreneurs only increased their financial momentum from conquest to conquest.

The 1-Train came to a slow stop somewhere between Columbus Circle and Lincoln Center. The lights went out and most everyone on board panicked. Tommy could easily tell which of the passengers were tourists and which were not by the levels of alarm they displayed. It was funny to him just how obvious people could sometimes be. He took the moment to appreciate the artwork spray-painted onto the tunnel walls just behind the window. There were areas of New York that Tommy knew he would never get the chance to see, which bothered him more than most anything else. It was moments like these that he savored, considering himself even luckier than he was just the moment before.

Sega capped off 1993 by introducing the Sonic the Hedgehog balloon into the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, the first such balloon based on a video game character. (True to form, Sonic went too fast, and crashed into a Columbus Circle lamppost.)

La enorme cristalera del local ahora se había tornado de un azul profundo y cremoso, como un claro de luna pintado por Maxfield Parrish. Era un azul que parecía presionar sobre el cristal para entrar a la fuerza en el restaurante. Despuntaba el alba en Columbus Circle. Era un alba mágica, cargada de expectación, que destacaba la gran estatua del inmortal Cristóbal, y se confundía, enigmática y extraña, con las luces eléctricas amarillas del interior, más débiles cada vez.

When social capital was at its peak in the postwar years, social organizations brought Democrats and Republicans together. Partisans of both stripes joined the Elks, the Knights of Columbus, bridge clubs, and knitting circles. More informally, they used to eat at each other’s houses and drink at the same neighborhood bars. These interactions produced, to use Putnam’s term, “bridging” social capital. They built bridges between people who might not naturally fit together. The act of being together with people who might not be similar politically or otherwise produced shared understanding. This is the kind of social interaction that could help to overcome prejudice, and help Americans see each other’s common humanity despite their differences.

I like the idea of having to travel to experience a French Laundry meal. The journey is part of the experience - or was for me - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent, of the otherness of everything Keller. I liked looking out the window and seeing hills and countryside. I don't know if I want to be able to just to pick up the phone, make a reservation, and, sooner or later, simply hop in a cab and zip down to Columbus Circle. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca. That experience, like the French Laundry, should be a pilgrimage.

Columbus believed he had reached a small island off the East Asian coast. He called the people he found there ‘Indians’ because he thought he had landed in the Indies – what we now call the East Indies or the Indonesian archipelago. Columbus stuck to this error for the rest of his life. The idea that he had discovered a completely unknown continent was inconceivable for him and for many of his generation. For thousands of years, not only the greatest thinkers and scholars but also the infallible Scriptures had known only Europe, Africa and Asia. Could they all have been wrong? Could the Bible have missed half the world? It would be as if in 1969, on its way to the moon, Apollo 11 had crashed into a hitherto unknown moon circling the earth, which all previous observations had somehow failed to spot. In his refusal to admit ignorance, Columbus was still a medieval man. He was convinced he knew the whole world, and even his momentous discovery failed to convince him otherwise.

Cut short by Cortés, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophes and the Taisho-period Kyoto school.

Cut short by Cortés, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophes and the Taisho-period Kyoto school. The musings of the tlamatinime occurred in intellectual neighborhoods frequented by philosophers from Brussels to Beijing, but the mix was entirely the Mexica’s own. Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence—and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.

You know what I’m realizing now?” he said to her. “What?” she asked, looking at him adoringly. “We are sitting in the center of the world.” She laughed. “You’re so funny.” “No, think about it,” he said. “Columbus Circle is the center of Manhattan. Manhattan is the center of New York. New York is the center of America, and America is the center of the world. So we are sitting in the center of the world, right?

What do we owe him, Uncle?” “He saw our way here. He honored his word.” Carlito rose as the train pulled into Fifty-ninth Street. One gloved hand rested for an instant on Tito’s shoulder. “Do well, nephew.” He turned and was gone. Tito glanced past boarding passengers, hoping to see Vianca still there, but she too was gone. He reached into his jacket’s side pocket, finding the Bulgarian’s singular, meticulously made weapon. It was folded loosely, within a fresh white cotton handkerchief from China, still stiff with sizing. On drawing it from your pocket, those around you might think you were about to blow your nose. Without looking, Tito knew that the cardboard cylinder of carefully milled salt filled the entirety of the very short barrel. He left it where it was. Now that the Bulgarian’s rubber gaskets had been replaced with silicone, an effective charge could be maintained for up to forty-eight hours. The salt, he wondered, was it Bulgarian? Where had those cartridges been made? In Sofia? In Moscow, perhaps? In London, where the Bulgarian was said to have worked before Tito’s grandfather had brought him to Cuba? Or in Havana, where he’d lived out his days? The train pulled away from Columbus Circle.