Greyhound Bus Quotes

THERE ARE LOW points, and there are low points. This-rattling down an endless stretch of interstate in a Greyhound bus toward the middle of farm-country-nowhere a week after barely graduating high school-was my low point.

Does God hang out in Greyhound bus stations? I’d like to find him. I’d like to make him cry.

Life was just like this, sometimes. You think you’re going to sail off into the sunset with Prince Charming, and instead you end up listening to a stranger getting his dick sucked on a Greyhound bus.

My feet walked me down the aisle of the Greyhound bus, all the way to the back. My butt sat me in a seat. My butt's accomplished a lot since then. My butt's a movie star.

I closed the door forever on idealism and the essential goodness of human nature, and I walked to the Greyhound bus station by the same path that I had taken on my arrival.

If you want to feel like your life isn't too bad, take a Greyhound bus, Aleah. We should all take Greyhound buses.

Don't get me wrong. Sacramento is a lovely place, particularly for those with a fondness for methamphetamines. For the meth-addled, Sacramento had conveniently placed a Greyhound bus station just yards from the statehouse where Austria's finest was sworn in as governor of the great state of California.

Ter refused to ride buses. The people depressed him, sitting there. He liked Greyhound stations though. We used to go to the ones in San Francisco and Oakland. Mostly Oakland, on San Pablo Avenue. Once he told me he loved me because I was like San Pablo Avenue. He was like the Berkeley dump. I wish there was a bus to the dump. We went there when we got homesick for New Mexico. It is stark and windy and gulls soar like nighthawks in the desert. You can see the sky all around you and above you. Garbage trucks thunder through dust-billowing roads. Gray dinosaurs.

The freedoms that we have were purchased not just by those in uniform—and they definitely were—but also by those who took their lives into their hands, riding those Greyhound buses—the Freedom Riders, in the deep south, in the 1960s, who knew full well that they would be arrested, and they were, serving time, in the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Rosa Parks, getting from the back of the bus to the front of the bus. Peaceful, nonviolent protest.

inspiration. five minutes in the back of a greyhound bus; the world passing by. a gateway to freedom. the american dream. from "the american dream

To distract himself he started making a mental list of all the ways he could leave Chapel Bluff. He could go by train. Plane. Motorcycle. Last night Beverly had invited all three of them - him, Ryan, and Tyler - to stay for dinner. Matt had refused. Ryan had likewise refused because his wife had dinner waiting for him at home. Tyler had leapt at the chance. Matt had been the one who'd decided to put distance between himself, Kate, and Beverley. Even so, it rankled that Tyler had slipped right into his empty spot at the dinner table. That Kate had found someone so much more charming than him to talk to. That Kate seemed so delighted to turn her back on him. He could leave by four-wheeler. Mountain bike. Skateboard. "You're a design genius, young lady." Tyler said to Kate. "That's a perfect place for that sideboard." "Why thank you," Kate replied. Matt ground his teeth and imagined leaving by Greyhound bus. He'd even have settled for a horse. Hot air balloon. Donkey cart.

I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost, the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote ten thousand words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco's dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait into a grayed and obscurely sinister light.

People disappear every day. The man standing in line at Starbucks, buying his last cup of coffee before he gets in his car and drives into a new life, leaving behind family who will always wonder what happened. Or the woman sitting in the lat row of a Greyhound bus, staring out the window as the wind blows strands of hair across her face, wiping away a history to heavy to carry. You might be shoulder to shoulder with someone living their last moments as themselves and never know it.

Three days later on October 29, 1959, the Pontiac registered in the name of Niles Tignor would be discovered, gas tank near-empty, keys on the floorboards beneath the front seat, in a parking lot close by the Greyhound bus station in Rome, New York.

According to the L.A. news, the explosion at the Santa Monica beach had been caused when a crazy kidnapper fired a shotgun at a police car. He accidentally hit a gas main that had ruptured during the earthquake. This crazy kidnapper (a.k.a. Ares) was the same man who had abducted me and two other adolescents in New York and brought us across country on a ten-day odyssey of terror. Poor little Percy Jackson wasn’t an international criminal after all. He’d caused a commotion on that Greyhound bus in New Jersey trying to get away from his captor (and afterward, witnesses would even swear they had seen the leather-clad man on the bus—“Why didn’t I remember him before?”). The crazy man had caused the explosion in the St. Louis Arch. After all, no kid could’ve done that. A concerned waitress in Denver had seen the man threatening his abductees outside her diner, gotten a friend to take a photo, and notified the police. Finally, brave Percy Jackson (I was beginning to like this kid) had stolen a gun from his captor in Los Angeles and battled him shotgun-to-rifle on the beach. Police had arrived just in time. But in the spectacular explosion, five police cars had been destroyed and the captor had fled. No fatalities had occurred. Percy Jackson and his two friends were safely in police custody.

Her baby wouldn’t stop crying. She’d started fussing at the last station, when the Greyhound bus out of Bangor stopped in Portland to pick up more passengers. Now, at a little after 1 A.M., they were almost to the Boston terminal, and the two-plus hours of trying to soothe her infant daughter were, as her friends back in school would say, getting on her last nerve.

Fuck hope and all the tiny little towns, one-horse towns, the one-stoplight towns, three-bars country-music jukebox-magic parquet-towns, pressure-cooker pot-roast frozen-peas bad-coffee married-heterosexual towns, crying-kids-in-the-Oldsmobile-beat-your-kid-in the-Thriftway-aisles towns, one-bank one-service-station Greyhound-Bus-stop-at-the-Pepsi-Cafe towns, two-television towns, Miracle Mile towns, Viv's Double Wide Beauty Salon towns, schizophrenic-mother towns, buy-yourself-a-handgun towns, sister-suicide towns, only-Injun's-a-dead-Injun towns, Catholic-Protestant-Mormon-Baptist religious-right five-churches Republican-trickle-down-to-poverty family-values sexual-abuse pro-life creation-theory NRA towns, nervous-mother rodeo-clown-father those little-town-blues towns.

Woodard was riding at the back of a Greyhound bus, because that is where Black people traveling through the South sat in 1946, no matter what they had done for their country. He proudly wore his green army uniform. Three stripes on each arm showed his rank. He had four medals pinned on his chest. There was a Good Conduct Medal, an American Campaign Medal, a World War II Victory Medal, and a battle star Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal. He was awarded the last one for bravery.

Things seemed to be falling apart, and the Church was changing the rituals and practices that the boy waiting to board the bus thought were immutable. In fact, when I first stepped onto the Greyhound bus bound for Cincinnati, via Amarillo, St. Louis, and Indianapolis, I believed my own life and the life of the world was experiencing a spiritual rebirth signaled by the popularity of national figures like TV personality Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, and social activists like Catholic Worker founder, Dorothy Day.

You did not leave Crazytown for Boo-hooville. Boo-hooville is a layover. It is a temporary stop. It is the dismal Greyhound bus station in the first leg of your trip to Kauai. It is a place you must visit on your way to peace and calm. It is a rough stone that you will use to scrape away the old skin so that you can be made new again. And yes, that scraping hurts. And yes, you look terrible while it’s happening. Everything is dropping off, wrinkling, sagging, and flaking; it’s dull-colored. But underneath? On the other side of that? It’s beautiful.

He rolled and thrashed in his bed, waiting for the dancing blue shadows to come in his window, waiting for the heavy knock on his door, waiting for some bodiless, Kafkaesque voice to call: Okay, open up in there! And when he finally fell asleep he did it without knowing it, because thought continued without a break, shifting from conscious rumination to the skewed world of dreams with hardly a break, like a car going from drive to low. Even in his dreams he thought he was awake, and in his dreams he committed suicide over and over: burned himself; bludgeoned himself by standing under an anvil and pulling a rope; hanged himself; blew out the stove’s pilot lights and then turned on the oven and all four burners; shot himself; defenestrated himself; stepped in front of a moving Greyhound bus; swallowed pills; swallowed Vanish toilet bowl disinfectant; stuck a can of Glade Pine Fresh aerosol in his mouth, pushed the button, and inhaled until his head floated off into the sky like a child’s balloon; committed hara-kiri while kneeling in a confessional at St. Dom’s, confessing his self-murder to a dumbfounded young priest even as his guts accordioned out onto the bench like beef stew, performing an act of contrition in a fading, bemused voice as he lay in his blood and the steaming sausages of his intestines. But most vividly, over and over, he saw himself behind the wheel of the LTD, racing the engine a little in the closed garage, taking deep breaths and leafing through a copy of National Geographic, examining pictures of life in Tahiti and Aukland and the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, turning the pages ever more slowly, until the sound of the engine faded to a faraway sweet hum and the green waters of the South Pacific inundated him in rocking warmth and took him down to a silver fathom.

Relationships are physics. Time transforms things- it has to, because the change from me to we means clearing away the fortifications you'r put up around your old personality. Living with Susannah made me feel as if I started riding Einstein's famous theoretical bus. Here's my understanding of that difficult idea, nutshelled: if you're riding a magic Greyhound, equipped for light-speed travel, you'll actually live though less time than will any pedestrians whom the bus passes by. So, for a neighbor on the street with a stopwatch, the superfast bus will take two hours to travel from Point A to Point B. But where you're on that Greyhound, and looking at the wipe of the world out those rhomboidial coach windows, the same trip will take just under twenty-four minutes. Your neighbor, stopwatch under thumb, will have aged eighty-six percent more than you have. It's hard to fathom. But I think it's exactly what adult relationships do to us: on the outside, years pass, lives change. But inside, it's just a day that repeats. You and your partner age at the same clip; it seems not time has gone by. Only when you look up from your relationship- when you step off the bus, feel the ground under your shoes- do you sense the sly, soft absurdity of romance physics.

JAY: Fascism in Germany wasn’t a coup; it was a many-year process. I’m not suggesting we’re living in an equivalent period, but there are lessons to be learned. VIDAL: But it is equivalent. I mean, don’t be shy of saying that. The response to the Reichstag fire is precisely that to 9/11, which was invoked by this administration’s people. “And if we don’t fight them over there, we got to fight ’em here.” This little fool. How are they going to get here? Greyhound bus? I mean, he is so stupid himself that he assumes everybody else is equally stupid. If he had been really elected, I would say everybody else was stupid, but he wasn’t.

Woodard was riding at the back of a Greyhound bus, because that is where Black people traveling through the South sat in 1946, no matter what they had done for their country. He proudly wore his green army uniform. Three stripes on each arm showed his rank. He had four medals pinned on his chest. There was a Good Conduct Medal, an American Campaign Medal, a World War II Victory Medal, and a battle star Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal. He was awarded the last one for bravery. When the bus arrived at a rest stop in a South Carolina town now known as Batesburg-Leesville, Police Chief Lynwood Shull and his officers dragged Woodard off the bus. The bus driver hadn’t liked the way Woodard asked to use the restroom fifty-four miles back, outside of Augusta. So, when the bus got to the town, the driver called the police, even though he and Woodard hadn’t shared two words since that stop. The police demanded to see Woodard’s discharge papers. Then the cops forced him into an alley, where they beat him savagely. For good measure, the police chief used his baton to gouge Woodard’s eye sockets until both eyeballs ruptured beyond repair. Woodard was blind from that day forward. He was twenty-seven. And remember, all this happened while he was wearing the very uniform that identified his service to his country

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. After serving four years in the army in World War II, where he had earned a battle star, he had received an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard asked the white driver if he could go to the restroom and a brief argument ensued. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just four and a half hours after the soldier’s military discharge. At twenty-six, Woodard would never see again.83 There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence that had been deployed continuously against Black Americans for decades since the end of Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the racially egalitarian spirit of post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. After serving four years in the army in World War II, where he had earned a battle star, he had received an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard asked the white driver if he could go to the restroom and a brief argument ensued. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just four and a half hours after the soldier’s military discharge. At twenty-six, Woodard would never see again.83 There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence that had been deployed continuously against Black Americans for decades since the end of Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the racially egalitarian spirit of post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from mainstream American life—a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.84

i'm not quite sure how many different people i've kissed since our lips last touched in that new hampshire greyhound bus station. i'm not sure how many separate hands i have held since i last wrapped my fingers between yours to get you over that new york city bridge. i'm not sure how many new beds i've climbed out of, how many lies i've told, how many hearts i've broken. all i know is i haven't said i love you to anyone since i last said it to you, face to face, at that airport when i finally realized, we were over.

A traveling magician sold it to me when I was sixteen. He swore to me that a single cut was enough to end a life." She says it flatly, matter-of-factly, but her eyes have gone hollow and her face is waxy again and suddenly I don't feel jokey at all. Suddenly I wonder why a princess would sleep with a poison blade beneath her bed, why she would purchase it in the first place. I picture myself at sixteen, a scarecrow of a girl stuffed with hormones and hunger instead of straw, so sick of dying I would do anything to live. I ran very different calculations in those days, comparing the Greyhound bus schedule to the number of hours before my parents would report me missing, multiplying hoarded pills by the number of days I would have on the run. I figured I could make it to Chicago before the cops were even looking for me, and from there I could go—anywhere. Do anything.

I remember Greyhound busses at night. I remember wondering what the bus driver is thinking about. I remember empty towns. Green tinted windows. And neon signs just as they go off.

To get to the west coast, I hopped a cargo train to Seattle from almost the other side of the country. I was homeless there for a week. Then I took a Greyhound bus to San Francisco and slept outside in Golden Gate Park for another week. My body was sore, and being homeless in two cities was taxing on my spirit as well. Now I was in LA. Nowhere to go and nothing to do.

I'm not your destiny, or the Devil either!' I said. 'Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that's all the glory you deserve!' I said. 'That's all that any man at war with pure evil deserves.

Thus many of the new revisers of hell contend that it is only remedial. In effect, you take a really nasty purgatorial bus ride, like Greyhound with a better destination. I’m sure it’s bumpy, and crowded with people who should never take off their shoes but do, and Keanu Reeves is driving and screaming about not being able to go slower than 50 mph or the bus will explode. But this particular hypothetical hell does have “good news”—once you see the error of your ways, there is an exit. My guess is that you pull the cord as an act of repentance, the bell rings, and as you hop off at the next stop Keanu says he was just kidding about the bus blowing up and hands you a transfer pass allowing you to jump on an express bus to the good and happy place.

know whether to blush or get a ticket for a Greyhound bus and high tail it out of town. Jacqueline had clearly taken their casual tryst as something more important than

I climbed aboard a Greyhound bus and rode it to New York without telling anyone, without so much as a goodbye. What was I thinking? I wasn’t. I was young and stupid and broken. I knew from watching movies that broken people hopped on buses and disappeared. New York seemed far away, geographically, mentally.

On a Greyhound bus traveling, outside the window, only countryside and inside, only impatience, and on the shoulder.....

Richard said he wouldn’t talk about anything but the convictions. Carrillo asked if it would be all right if they taped what he said. He said no. They then began asking him about the crimes and how he did them. Richard gave them, the detectives later said—which Richard vehemently denies—the details of how he worked, lived, and avoided capture for so long. The detectives say he told them he capered in stolen cars, which he sometimes left in the parking lot of the Greyhound Bus Terminal. He always stashed any weapon he had in the terminal lockers until he realized the car might be staked out. At that point he began driving the cars around the block a few times before he retrieved his weapons. According to the detectives, they began talking about the actual murders, beginning with Vincow. Richard told them what he knew. They weren’t sure if he was bragging and making things up, but he seemed sincere, they thought. For the next week, as Richard ate sweets, he told the two detectives the details of what he said had taken place. Both detectives enjoyed talking to him. “He had a likable side to him that was easy to warm to,” Carrillo later said. Their meetings were brought to a halt on November 16, when Richard was taken to San Quentin. The last time Salerno and Carrillo saw him, he asked them if they were going to come to his execution. Carrillo said he wasn’t sure... didn’t think so. “You bet I’m coming,” Salerno said, dead serious, looking Richard right in the eye.

On the morning of Friday, August 30, 1985, Richard Ramirez stepped onto a Greyhound bus to Tucson, Arizona. He wanted to visit his brother, Robert, who was now living in Tucson with his wife Samantha and their daughter, two-year-old Betty. Richard knew nothing of his being linked to the Night Stalker crimes.

Ruben had started using heroin in El Paso, and he took his habit with him to Los Angeles. To support his addiction, he worked odd jobs, stole cars, and burglarized homes. Ruben was tall, thin, and lanky, and he had the fluid grace of the natural athlete. With stealth, rarely seen or heard, he got in and out of peoples’ homes. When Ruben was twenty, he and his wife, an El Paso woman named Suzanna, jumped on a Greyhound Bus and took the sixteen-hour ride to the Los Angeles Greyhound Bus Terminal. In 1972, as now, there was much crime and the selling of drugs and sex around the terminal. Julian and Suzanna wanted to get away from the downtown area, and they took an apartment in Watts, where it was even cheaper to live than downtown L.A.

Richard had a plan to make some quick money: he could buy pot in El Paso for next to nothing and sell it in Los Angeles for considerably more. Without telling anyone, Richard left El Paso for good on a dirty, battered Greyhound bus. He’d just turned eighteen. Richard listened to heavy metal music over earphones and slept when possible.

In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Poor little Percy Jackson wasn’t an international criminal after all. He’d caused a commotion on that Greyhound bus in New Jersey trying to get away from his captor (and afterward, witnesses would even swear they had seen the leather-clad man on the bus—“Why didn’t I remember him before?”). The crazy man had caused the explosion in the St. Louis Arch. After all, no kid could’ve done that. A concerned waitress in Denver had seen the man threatening his abductees outside her diner, gotten a friend to take a photo, and notified the police. Finally, brave Percy Jackson (I was beginning to like this kid) had stolen a gun from his captor in Los Angeles and battled him shotgun-to-rifle on the beach. Police had arrived just in time. But in the spectacular explosion, five police cars had been destroyed and the captor had fled. No fatalities had occurred. Percy Jackson and his two friends were safely in police custody.

Todd asked when he was typing up my flyer. And I told him I was sick of the president talking down to me. “Like I’m some kind of a… some kind of a…” “Uninformed idiot?” he said. And I told him that was it exactly. “I’m tired of being talked to like I’m an uninformed idiot. I think a lot of Americans are, but we’ll see who’s the idiot when I join that historic march on Washington!” Todd agreed 100 percent, and then he took me to the Greyhound station, where I got on the bus for Seattle.

America" “Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together I’ve got some real estate here in my bag” So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner’s pies And walked off to look for America “Kathy,” I said, as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh “Michigan seems like a dream to me now It took me four days to hitch-hike from Saginaw I’ve come to look for America” Laughing on the bus Playing games with the faces She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy I said, “Be careful, his bow tie is really a camera” “Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat” “We smoked the last one an hour ago” So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine And the moon rose over an open field “Kathy, I’m lost,” I said, thought I knew she was sleeping. “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why” Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike They’ve all come to look for America All come to look for America All come to look for America Bookends (1968)

Look at you! Came to kill people with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that's all the glory you deserve!" I said. "That's all that any man at war with pure evil deserves. "There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. "It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.

God comes for the top dog, the dirty dog and the under dog. He comes for the in-laws and the outlaws. He meets us on the front row, skid row or death row. He pursues us on Air Force One or the Greyhound bus. All our good isn't good enough to earn His grace. All our bad isn't bad enough to discourage it.

At that same moment Jack Reacher was seventy miles away, in a Greyhound bus, on the interstate highway. He was on the left side of the vehicle, toward the rear, in the window seat over the axle. There was no one next to him. Altogether there were twenty-nine other passengers. The usual mixture. Nothing special. Except for one particular situation, which was mildly interesting. Across the aisle and one row in front was a guy asleep with his head hanging down. He had gray hair overdue for a trim, and loose gray skin, as if he had lost a lot of weight. He could have been seventy years old. He was wearing a short blue zip jacket. Some kind of heavy cotton. Maybe waterproof. The butt end of a fat envelope was sticking out of the pocket. It

Greyhound bus

The bus rumbled and loomed above me like an ocean liner as it idled beside the small Greyhound bus depot next to the Elite Laundry where Mother worked. With door open and the driver standing beside it checking tickets, the bus seemed to me then like Alice's "Looking Glass," which, once I passed through it, would open a whole new world to me—a world so fantastic and removed from Gallup, New Mexico, that I would be transformed into one of the saints or heroes of the books that brought me to this moment of departure. It was the end of August, 1951. I was fourteen years old—a boy about to leave home for a Franciscan seminary 1500 miles away in Cincinnati, Ohio.

When I look back now, after nearly fifty years, at the young boy riding the Greyhound bus from Gallup to Cincinnati, I see how individualistic my pilgrimage was then. I was going to the seminary; I was going to be a missionary and saint. I was aware of and interested in Pete and other people on the bus, in my teachers and fellow seminarians, and later in my confreres in the novitiate and clericate; but it was only gradually, through a long period of humbling spiritual aridity, that the I lost its self-preoccupation and moved toward an I-thou that led to a we. I gradually began to see that all of us on the bus, we, were on the same journey. We were one body on that bus, and at the seminary, so that by the time of ordination, we had replaced I as my dominant vision; we were all on the same pilgrimage.

You may bury my body, down by the highway side Babe, I don’t care where you bury my body when I’m dead and gone You may bury my body, ooooo, down by the highway side So my old evil spirit Can get a Greyhound bus, and ride.