Dear Sidewalk Quotes

And I Decided (From Arabic) And I decided to go Round the world on freedom's bicycle By ways illegal As the travels of wind. When asked for my address I give the address of all sidewalks I chose as permanent residence. When asked for my papers, I show them your eyes And am allowed to pass For they know that travel in the cities of your eyes, my dear, Is the right of all world citizens. وقررت نزار قباني وقررت أن أطوفَ العالمَ على درّاجة الحرِّية.. وبنفسِ الطريقةِ غيرِ الشرعيِّة التي تستعملها الريح عندما تسافر.. وإذا سأَلوني عن عُنواني أعطيتُهم عنوانَ كلِّ الأرصِفة التي اخترتها مكاناً دائماً لإقامتي. وإذا سألوني عن أوراقي أريتُهُم عينيكِ، يا حبيبتي.. فَتَرَكوني أمرّ.. لأنهم يعرفونَ أنَّ السفر في مدائن عينيكِ.. من حق جميع المواطينَ في العالم

Dear Goat, How does one fall in love? Do you trip? Do you stumble, lose your balance and drop to the sidewalk, graze your knee, graze your heart? Do you crash to the stony ground? Is there a precipice, from which you float, over the edge, forever? I know I'm in love when I see you, I know when I long to see you. Not a muscle has moved. Leaves hang unruffled by any breeze. The air is still. I have fallen in love without taking step. When did this happen? I haven't even blinked. I'm on fire. Is that too banal for you? It's not, you know. You'll see. It's what happens. It's what matters. I'm on fire. I no longer eat, I forget to eat. Food looks silly to me, irrelevant. If I even notice it. But I notice nothing. My thoughts are full and raging, a house full of brothers, related by blood, feuding blood feuds: "I'm in love." "Typically stupid choice." "I am, though, I'm racked by love as if love were pain." "Go ahead. Fuck up your life. It's all wrong and you know it. Wake up. Face it." "There's only one face, it's all I see, awake or asleep." I threw the book out the window last night. I tried to forget. You are all wrong for me, I know it, but I no longer care for my thoughts unless they're thoughts of you. When I'm close to you, in your presence, I feel your hair brush my cheek when it does not. I look away from you, sometimes. Then I look back. When I tie my shoes, when I peel an orange, when I drive my car, when I lie down each night without you, I remain, As ever, Ram

God must be a season, grandma said, looking out at the blizzard drowning her garden. My footsteps on the sidewalk were the smallest flights. Dear god, if you are a season, let it be the one I passed through to get here. Here. That's all I wanted to be. I promise.

May I ask you if you've noticed, May I ask you if you've seen. My minnow Minnie Who was swimmin' In you Ovaltine? For you've gone and drunk it up, dear, And she isn't in the cup, dear. And she's nowhere to be found, dear. Do you think that she has drowned, dear?

I am not a New Yorker. There are so many unspoken rules when you live here, like the way you're never supposed to stop in the middle of the sidewalk or stare dreamily up at the tall buildings or pause to read graffiti. No giant folding maps, no fanny packs, no eye contact. No humming songs from Dear Evan Hansen in public. And you're definitely not supposed to take selfies at street corners, even if there's a hot dog stand and a whole line of yellow taxis in the background, which is eerily how you always pictured New York. You're allowed to silently appreciate it, but you have to be cool. From what I can tell, that's the whole point of New York: being cool.

I prayed to a mystery. Sometimes I was simply aware of the mystery. I saw a flash of it during a trip to New York that David and I took before we were married. We were walking on a busy sidewalk in Manhattan. I don't remember if it was day or night. A man with a wound on his forehead came toward us. His damp, ragged hair might have been clotted with blood, or maybe it was only dirt. He wore deeply dirty clothes. His red, swollen hands, cupped in half-fists, swung loosely at his sides. His eyes were focused somewhere past my right shoulder. He staggered while he walked. The sidewalk traffic flowed around him and with him. He was strange and frightening, and at the same time he belonged on the Manhattan sidewalk as much as any of us. It was that paradox -- that he could be both alien and resident, both brutalized and human, that he could stand out in the moving mass of people like a sea monster in a school of tuna and at the same time be as much at home as any of us -- that stayed with me. I never saw him again, but I remember him often, and when I do, I am aware of the mystery. Years later, I was out on our property on the Olympic Peninsula, cutting a path through the woods. This was before our house was built. After chopping through dense salal and hacking off ironwood bushes for an hour or so, I stopped, exhausted. I found myself standing motionless, intensely aware of all of the life around me, the breathing moss, the chattering birds, the living earth. I was as much a part of the woods as any millipede or cedar tree. At that moment, too, I was aware of the mystery. Sometimes I wanted to speak to this mystery directly. Out of habit, I began with "Dear God" and ended with "Amen". But I thought to myself, I'm not praying to that old man in the sky. Rather, I'm praying to this thing I can't define. It was sort of like talking into a foggy valley. Praying into a bank of fog requires alot of effort. I wanted an image to focus on when I prayed. I wanted something to pray *to*. but I couldn't go back to that old man. He was too closely associated with all I'd left behind.

What is so rewarding about friendship?” my son asked, curling his upper lip into a sour expression. “Making friends takes too much time and effort, and for what?” I sat on the edge of his bed, understanding how it might seem simpler to go at life solo. “Friendship has unique rewards,” I told him. “They can be unpredictable. For instance....” I couldn’t help but pause to smile crookedly at an old memory that was dear to my heart. Then I shared with my son an unforgettable incident from my younger years. “True story. When I was about your age, I decided to try out for a school play. Tryouts were to begin after the last class of the day, but first I had to run home to grab a couple props for the monologue I planned to perform during tryouts. Silly me, I had left them at the house that morning. Luckily, I only lived across a long expanse of grassy field that separated the school from the nearest neighborhood. Unluckily, it was raining and I didn’t have an umbrella. “Determined to get what I needed, I raced home, grabbed my props, and tore back across the field while my friend waited under the dry protection of the school’s wooden eaves. She watched me run in the rain, gesturing for me to go faster while calling out to hurry up or we would be late. “The rain was pouring by that time which was added reason for me to move fast. I didn’t want to look like a wet rat on stage in front of dozens of fellow students. Don’t ask me why I didn’t grab an umbrella from home—teenage pride or lack of focus, I’m not sure—but the increasing rain combined with the hollering from my friend as well as my anxious nerves about trying out for the play had me running far too fast in shoes that lacked any tread. “About a yard from the sidewalk where the grass was worn from foot traffic and consequently muddied from the downpour of rain, I slipped and fell on my hind end. Me, my props, and my dignity slid through the mud and lay there, coated. My things were dripping with mud. I was covered in it. I felt my heart plunge, and I wanted to cry. I probably would have if it hadn’t been for the wonderful thing that happened right then. My crazy friend ran over and plopped herself down in the mud beside me. She wiggled in it, making herself as much a mess as I was. Then she took my slimy hand in hers and pulled us both to our feet. We tried out for the play looking like a couple of swine escaped from a pigsty, laughing the whole time. I never did cry, thanks to my friend. “So yes, my dear son, friendship has its unique rewards—priceless ones.

The New Dog I. “I’m intensely afraid of almost everything. Grocery bags, potted poinsettias, bunches of uprooted weeds wilting on a hot sidewalk, clothes hangers, deflated rubber balls, being looked in the eye, crutches, an overcoat tossed across the back of a chair (everybody knows empty overcoats house ghosts), children, doorways, music, human hands and the newspaper rustling as my owner, in striped pajamas, drinks coffee and turns its pages. He wants to find out where there’ll be war in the mid-east this week. Afraid even of eating, if someone burps or clinks a glass with a fork, or if my owner turns the kitchen faucet on to wash his hands during my meal I go rigid with fear, my legs buckle, then I slink from the room. I pee copiously if my food bowl is placed on the floor before the other dogs’. I have to be served last or the natural order of things - in which every moment I am about to be sacrificed - (have my heart ripped from my chest by the priest wielding his stone knife or get run out of the pack by snarling, snapping alphas) - the most sacred hierarchy, that fated arrangement, the glue of the universe, will unstick. The evolution will never itself, and life as we know it will subside entirely, until only the simplest animal form remain - jellyfish headless globs of cells, with only microscopic whips for legs and tails. Great swirling arms of gas will arm wrestle for eons to win cosmic dominance. Starless, undifferentiated chaos will reign. II. I alone of little escaped a hell of beating, neglect, and snuffling dumpsters for sustenance before this gullible man adopted me. Now my new owner would like me to walk nicely by his side on a leash (without cowering or pulling) and to lie down on a towel when he asks, regardless of whether he has a piece of bologna in his pocket or not. I’m growing fond of that optimistic young man in spite of myself. If only he would heed my warnings I’d pour out my thoughts to him: When panic strikes you like a squall wind and disaster falls on you like a gale, when you are hunted and scorned, wisdom shouts aloud in the streets: What is consciousness? What is sensation? What is mind? What is pain? What about the sorrows of unwatered houseplants? What indoor cloudburst will slake their thirst? What of my littler brothers and sisters, dead at the hands of dirty two legged brutes? Who’s the ghost in the universe behind its existence, necessary to everything that happens? Is it the pajama-clad man offering a strip of bacon in his frightening hand (who’ll take me to the park to play ball if he ever gets dressed)? Is it his quiet, wet-eyed, egg-frying wife? Dear Lord, Is it me?

He lifted his hat as he approached. “Miss Carter.” I dearly wanted to stop to talk to him, but I knew I could not. Must not. And so I kept my eyes trained on the sidewalk before me as I passed. “Miss Carter?” I kept walking. Surely he would understand. But he did not. “Clara?” He had said it so loudly that I feared we would attract attention. And so I stopped. He’d taken off his hat. “What—why—?” Standing rigid, eyes still trained on the sidewalk in front of me, I leaned slightly in his direction. And when I spoke, it was in whispered words. “I am trying to cut you.” “Cut me?” I nodded once and prepared to move on. “But . . . wait . . . what does that mean?” “I am trying to snub you.” “Oh. I see.” But it was quite clear that he didn’t. “So you must not speak to me anymore.” “Why not?” I raised my head and turned toward him. “Because I just rebuffed you. I pretended to ignore you. Really, Harry, you ought to be quite humiliated! And I did it here on the sidewalk in front of everyone.” “Why would you do that?” “Stop speaking to me!” There. Now maybe he would understand. “If you insist. But . . . how long is this cutting to last? It sounds quite painful.” We were starting to gather no little attention. Aunt was right. Better to end it here and now. I couldn’t have him anyway. “It lasts forever. You must remember that I’ve been unspeakably rude to you.” “Ah. Yes. Unspeakably rude. I’m beginning to understand. In any event, then—” “You really must stop speaking.” My voice was unaccountably beginning to rise quite beyond the range of our two sets of ears. “You mean to say forever? We can’t even—” “Now. You must stop speaking now.” “You would not want to know if, say, a small insect had become entangled in your hair?” I put a hand up to check. “Why? Has one?” “No. But in that case, you would wish for me to speak.” “Of course I would wish for you to speak. Has one?” “No.” “Really, Harry, tell me!” “You ask me not to speak to you and then you order me to speak to you? I confess I can’t keep up with all of this social nonsense.” He was laughing at me. I could see his eyes twinkling. I glared at him for one long moment and then . . . I burst into laughter too. He joined me. And when finally we could speak again, he set his hat atop his head and tipped the brim toward me. “Good day, Miss Carter.” I nodded. “Good day, Mr. De Vries.

I do believe she’s rather annoyed with us,” Miss Longfellow said before she brightened. “But she didn’t say she was washing her hands of us, so all hope hasn’t been lost just yet.” She caught his eye. “Would you be a dear and fetch my bag for me? The one I dropped when you knocked me over. It’s lying there all forlorn on the sidewalk.” Unable to remember the last time someone had call him a dear, and asked him to fetch something, Everett’s lips curled into a grin, and he ambled over to the bag and bent down to pick it up. Grabbing hold of the worn handle, he straightened . . . but wobbled when the weight of the bag took him by surprise. “What in the world do you have in here?” “Essentials.” “What type of essentials could possibly weigh this much?” “Well, if you must know, since I was intending on spending the next nine weeks employed by the Cutler family before I got unfairly dismissed, I had to pack enough reading material to see me through that extended period of time. In that bag rests a few of my favorite dictionaries, one thesaurus, my Bible, numerous works by Shakespeare, although I’m not exactly enjoying his writing, and two books by the incomparable Jane Austen.” She smiled. “Those I enjoy tremendously, but besides my treasured books, I also have a few changes of clothing, an extra pair of shoes, and, well, I won’t go into further details, since what’s left to mention will most likely embarrass us both.” Hefting

A young woman who worked as a prostitute was very careful to keep this a secret from her grandmother. One day, the police raided a brothel and rounded up the working girls, including the young woman. The prostitutes were instructed to line up single-file on the sidewalk. Well, who should be walking through the neighborhood just then but little old Grandma. The young woman was frantic—and sure enough, Grandma noticed her and asked curiously, “What are you lining up for, dear?” Thinking quickly, the young woman told her that some people were passing out free oranges and that she was lining up for some. Mmm, sounds lovely,” said Grandma. “I think I’ll get some myself.” And with that, she made her way to the back of the line. A police officer was working his way down the line, questioning each girl. When he got to Grandma, he was bewildered. “But you’re so old, how do you do it?” “Oh, it’s quite easy, sonny, I just remove my dentures and suck ‘em dry!

The illusions again! thought Anemone. It's all a mirage, is it?... Well, fine! I'm sick of water anyway, sick to death of water. I'd rather suck on this mirage, I'd rather eat sand till I'm spitting blood than drink another drop of smelly water. The whole city stinks of age and stagnation and boredom, and it makes Sachiko as sick as it does me; but she goes on listening to the same old songs, trying to keep from dying of boredom, while I'd rather puke it all out, puke up a great cloud of boredom and let it rain down all over Tokyo, rain till your lungs rot in your chest, till the streets crack and wash away and rivers of puke run between the buildings ... puke going higher and higher, the air so thick it chokes you, and mangroves sprouting from the cracks in the sidewalks... the old trees washed up by the roots, rotting in little pools to become nests for poisonous bugs, horny bugs that hatch out in swarms to creep all over you, Sachiko, like things in the worst nightmares you ever thought up in your orgies of booze and cum, to crawl over you and lay their eggs right on your skin, hatching their squirmy little babies from your rotting body. Sachiko, dear, this room is already a nursery for the creeping and crawling, and you're a rotting pusbag for them to feed on...

Coldmoon saw the early-morning glow of a café spilling onto the sidewalk and swerved toward it, not even bothering to ask his partner’s opinion. It was 6am and the café had apparently just opened. “My dear Coldmoon—“ began Pendergast. “If I don’t get some coffee,” said Coldmoon loudly, “I’m going to die.” “Very well,” said Pendergast. “I wouldn’t want another corpse on my hands.

You’re coming with me to the gym later, right?” Max asked as we ambled down the sidewalk, braced against the wind with our hands shoved in our coat pockets. “Mari sent me video of your badassery at Holywell Fight Night, and I’m pretty sure Dad’s been running choice clips on the gym TVs all week. You’re now a legend.” “Please, I was already a legend.

Curiosity and imaginative power: these two things may give us partial immunity to fanaticism. ... [T]he fanatic is uncomfortable imagining the details of the act he eagerly volunteers to perform. He is comfortable with the slogan, as long as the slogan doesn't translate into shouts, pleas, dying gurgles, puddles of blood, brains spilled out on the sidewalk. It is true that there are sadists in the world who would actually be excited by close-up pictures of abuse and dismemberment, but most fanatics are not driven by sadism but by lofty ideals, a longing for redemption and a desire to mend the world, which necessitate 'getting rid of the bad ones.

But, oh, how marvelous it was to come home to dear shabby Cambridge, to uneven brick sidewalks, to untrimmed gardens, to lawns covered with leaves, to young people walking hand in hand in absurd clothing, to dear Judy and the pussies! We are all a little old and worn, but we are happy. And Nelson, when I drove up under a pale bright sky, looked like Heaven. I saw it freshly, saw the beauty of wooden clapboard painted white, of old brick, of my own battered and dying maples, as a shining marvel, a treasure that lifts the mind and the heart and brings everyone who sees it back to what quality is.