Philly City Quotes

Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega jackpot" Hiro Protagonist - Snow Crash

a city called Philly can’t let any of its infrastructure go unabbreviated

There was a black marine called Philly Dog who'd been a gang lord in Philadelphia and who was looking forward to some street fighting after six months in the jungle, he could so the kickers what he could do with some city ground. (In Hue he turned out to be incredibly valuable. I saw him pouring out about a hundred rounds of .30-caliber fire into a breach in the wall, laughing, 'You got to bring some to get some'; he seemed to be about the only man in Delta Company who hadn't been hurt yet.)

No, this was Philly. Drunks here boo Santa and get in more trouble than a dog with an Easter basket, and like the dog, they usually end up either sick or dead. Ah yes, another lovely eve in the big city.

He'd gotten off the plane in Philly with his mind on one thing and one thing only: Handlin' his business then blazin' the fuck out.

Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega-jackpot. It's got everything that a dimwitted pathological gambler would identify with luxury: gold-plated fixtures, lots of injection-molded pseudomarble, velvet drapes, and a butler.

Subject: Some boat Alex, I know Fox Mulder. My mom watched The X-Files. She says it was because she liked the creepy store lines. I think she liked David Duchovny. She tried Californication, but I don't think her heart was in it. I think she was just sticking it to my grandmother, who has decided it's the work of the devil. She says that about most current music,too, but God help anyone who gets between her and American Idol. The fuzzy whale was very nice, it a little hard to identify. The profile of the guy between you and the whale in the third pic was very familiar, if a little fuzzy. I won't ask. No,no. I have to ask. I won't ask. My mother loves his wife's suits. I Googled. There are sharks off the coast of the Vineyard. Great big white ones. I believe you about the turtle. Did I mention that there are sharks there? I go to Surf City for a week every summer with my cousins. I eat too much ice cream. I play miniature golf-badly. I don't complain about sand in my hot dog buns or sheets. I even spend enough time on the beach to get sand in more uncomfortable places. I do not swim. I mean, I could if I wanted to but I figure that if we were meant to share the water with sharks, we would have a few extra rows of teeth, too. I'll save you some cannoli. -Ella Subject: Shh Fiorella, Yes,Fiorella. I looked it up. It means Flower. Which, when paired with MArino, means Flower of the Sea. What shark would dare to touch you? I won't touch the uncomfortable sand mention, hard as it is to resist. I also will not think of you in a bikini (Note to self: Do not think of Ella in a bikini under any circumstanes. Note from self: Are you f-ing kidding me?). Okay. Two pieces of info for you. One: Our host has an excellent wine cellar and my mother is European. Meaning she doesn't begrudge me the occasional glass. Or four. Two: Our hostess says to thank yur mother very much. Most people say nasty things about her suits. Three: We have a house kinda near Surf City. Maybe I'll be there when your there. You'd better burn this after reading. -Alexai Subect: Happy Thanksgiving Alexei, Consider it burned. Don't worry. I'm not showing your e-mails to anybody. Matter of national security, of course. Well,I got to sit at the adult table. In between my great-great-aunt Jo, who is ninety-three and deaf, and her daughter, JoJo, who had to repeat everyone's conversations across me. Loudly. The food was great,even my uncle Ricky's cranberry lasagna. In fact, it would have been a perfectly good TG if the Eagles han't been playing the Jets.My cousin Joey (other side of the family) lives in Hoboken. His sister married a Philly guy. It started out as a lively across-the-table debate: Jets v. Iggles. It ended up with Joey flinging himself across the table at his brother-in-law and my grandmother saying loud prayers to Saint Bridget. At least I think it was Saint Bridget. Hard to tell. She was speaking Italian. She caught me trying to freeze a half-dozen cannoli. She yelled at me. Apparently, the shells get really soggy when they defrost. I guess you'll have to come have a fresh one when you get back. -F/E

From Walt: The Grapes of Wrath, Les Misérables, To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby-Dick, The Ox-Bow Incident, A Tale of Two Cities, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Three Musketeers, Don Quixote (where your nickname came from), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and anything by Anton Chekhov. From Henry: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Cheyenne Autumn, War and Peace, The Things They Carried, Catch-22, The Sun Also Rises, The Blessing Way, Beyond Good and Evil, The Teachings of Don Juan, Heart of Darkness, The Human Comedy, The Art of War. From Vic: Justine, Concrete Charlie: The Story of Philadelphia Football Legend Chuck Bednarik, Medea (you’ll love it; it’s got a great ending), The Kama Sutra, Henry and June, The Onion Field, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Zorba the Greek, Madame Bovary, Richie Ashburn’s Phillies Trivia (fuck you, it’s a great book). From Ruby: The Holy Bible (New Testament), The Pilgrim’s Progress, Inferno, Paradise Lost, My Ántonia, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, Poems of Emily Dickinson, My Friend Flicka, Our Town. From Dorothy: The Gastronomical Me, The French Chef Cookbook (you don’t eat, you don’t read), Last Suppers: Famous Final Meals From Death Row, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Something Fresh, The Sound and the Fury, The Maltese Falcon, Pride and Prejudice, Brides-head Revisited. From Lucian: Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Band of Brothers, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Virginian, The Basque History of the World (so you can learn about your heritage you illiterate bastard), Hondo, Sackett, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Bobby Fischer: My 60 Memorable Games, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Quartered Safe Out Here. From Ferg: Riders of the Purple Sage, Kiss Me Deadly, Lonesome Dove, White Fang, A River Runs Through It (I saw the movie, but I heard the book was good, too), Kip Carey’s Official Wyoming Fishing Guide (sorry, kid, I couldn’t come up with ten but this ought to do).

Roger snapped on the large, battery-powered radio. He rolled the dial around, but all he got was static. Finally, he heard a signal, and he tuned it in. A badly modulated voice droned through the interference. It sounded as if it were a war correspondent sending a signal from very far away. Steve clicked off the TV set so that they would better be able to hear the announcer: “. . . Reports that communications with Detroit have been knocked out along with Atlanta, Boston and certain sections of Philadelphia and New York City . . .” “Philly . . .” Roger said almost to himself. “I know WGON is out by now,” Steve said with animation. “It was a madhouse back there . . . people are crazy . . . if they’d just organize. It’s total confusion. I don’t believe it’s gotten this bad. I don’t believe they can’t handle it.” He looked around the room proudly. “Look at us. Look at what we were able to do today.” A few feet away, still in a slumped position by the pyramid of cartons, Peter’s eyes blinked open. He had been listening to what he wanted to hear, and now this statement by the kid really made him take notice. His eyes moved slightly to the side so that he could watch Stephen. The young man was gesturing wildly with his hands, going on and on about their exploits as a team. The other two didn’t realize Peter was awake. Roger nodded his head, but it didn’t seem as if he were really listening to Steve’s ramblings. “We knocked the shit out of ’em, and they never touched us,” Steve exclaimed. “Not really,” he said in a quieter tone. The rumbling voice erupted from the other side of the room. “They touched us good, Flyboy. We’re lucky to get out with our asses. You don’t forget that!

10.Building luxury homes at an affordable price for every buyer may seem like an impossible task, but there is one company in the Philadelphia area that has made this their mission. Streamline Philly has been providing homes at a price that fits any budget for the past fourteen years, and they have grown to be the largest residential developer in the city.

told him I’d grown up “near Philly,” when in fact I had grown up in an eighteenth-century farmhouse on fifteen acres of rolling rural hills in Chester County, thirty miles from the city.

San Francisco or Minneapolis,” Reacher said. “Think about it. Other possibilities would be Boston, New York, Philly, Cleveland, Richmond in Virginia, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City in Missouri, or Dallas in Texas.

Eat whatever food is local to that city because it is your duty to do so. If you’re in Philly, you eat a cheesesteak; if you’re in Brooklyn, a cheesecake. If you’re in Cincinnati, Skyline Chili;

Suddenly—so suddenly it scared him—there was light ahead, around a corner. Not the light of a rainy evening in the city, but paler, less certain. They rounded the corner. He noticed the flashlight bulb starting to flicker; lost the alligator momentarily. Then turned the corner and found a wide space like the nave of a church, an arched roof overhead, a phosphorescent light coming off walls whose exact arrangement was indistinct. “Wha,” he said out loud. Backwash from the river? Sea water shines in the dark sometimes; in the wake of a ship you see the same uncomfortable radiance. But not here. The alligator had turned to face him. It was a clear, easy shot. He waited. He was waiting for something to happen. Something otherworldly, of course. He was sentimental and superstitious. Surely the alligator would receive the gift of tongues, the body of Father Fairing be resurrected, the sexy V. tempt him away from murder. He felt about to levitate and at a loss to say where, really, he was. In a bonecellar, a sepulchre. “Ah, schlemihl,” he whispered into the phosphorescence. Accident prone, schlimazzel. The gun would blow up in his hands. The alligator’s heart would tick on, his own would burst, mainspring and escapement rust in this shindeep sewage, in this unholy light. “Can I let you just go?” Bung the foreman knew he was after a sure thing. It was down on the clipboard. And then he saw the alligator couldn’t go any further. Had settled down on its haunches to wait, knowing damn well it was going to be blasted. In Independence Hall in Philly, when the floor was rebuilt, they left part of the original, a foot square, to show the tourists. “Maybe,” the guide would tell you, “Benjamin Franklin stood right there, or even George Washington.” Profane on an eighth-grade class trip had been suitably impressed. He got that feeling now. Here in this room an old man had killed and boiled a catechumen, had committed sodomy with a rat, had discussed a rodent nunhood with V., a future saint—depending which story you listened to. “I’m sorry,” he told the alligator. He was always saying he was sorry. It was a schlemihl’s stock line. He raised the repeater to his shoulder, flicked off the safety. “Sorry,” he said again. Father Fairing talked to rats. Profane talked to alligators. He fired. The alligator jerked, did a backflip, thrashed briefly, was still. Blood began to seep out amoebalike to form shifting patterns with the weak glow of the water. Abruptly, the flashlight went out.

From the outside, you might see my life as mundane: ‘Jane, you’re just running the Mural Arts Program and you’ve been doing that forever.’ I would say, ‘No, listen, today I went to a maximum security prison. I was in North Philly. I went to church. I was in a boardroom. I met with a deputy commissioner. I met with a city council person. I worked at an artists’ residency program. I saw kids graduating.’ ” Then Jane used a painter’s analogy: “I’m like an artist who looks at the sky every morning and sees a variety of really brilliant colors where other people would just see blue or gray. I’m seeing in the course of a single day this tremendous complexity and nuance. I see something that is ever evolving and rich.

Passyunk Avenue (pronounced pashunk by the locals) cuts a rude swath across an otherwise orderly grid of streets in South Philadelphia. Except for Passyunk (and Moyamensing) Avenue, the neighborhood is composed of a uniform matrix of numbered and named streets—one big street followed by two little streets. Viewed on a map, they form ninety-degree angles and predictable intersections. Passyunk Avenue, or simply Passyunk, is the great disruptor of this comforting geometry. Irregular and meandering, its slashing path intersects with the more obedient byways. Together they form a unique gridwork of inconvenient crossings and odd angles. The cumulative result is one of strangely shaped buildings. Their pointy corners puncture curious cells of dead space—the spaces between. While born of necessity, the resulting architecture created by these acute angles also manages to be strangely beautiful, an exotic visage in a sea of pretty faces. If you’ve ever seen the famous photo of Sophia Loren giving the side-eye to Jayne Mansfield, that’s Passyunk—South Philly’s middle finger to white bread Center City.

Atlantic City" Well, they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night And they blew up his house, too Down on the boardwalk, they're getting ready for a fight Gonna see what them racket boys can do Now there's trouble busing in from out of state And the D.A. can't get no relief Gonna be a rumble out on the promenade And the gambling commission's hanging on by the skin of its teeth Well, now, everything dies, baby, that's a fact But maybe everything that dies someday comes back Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty And meet me tonight in Atlantic City Well, I got a job and tried to put my money away But I got debts that no honest man can pay So I drew what I had from the Central Trust And I bought us two tickets on that Coast City bus Well, now, everything dies, baby, that's a fact But maybe everything that dies someday comes back Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty And meet me tonight in Atlantic City Now, our luck may have died, and our love may be cold But with you, forever, I'll stay We're going out where the sand's turning to gold So put on your stockings, baby, 'cause the night's getting cold And everything dies, baby, that's a fact But maybe everything that dies someday comes back Now I been looking for a job, but it's hard to find Down here, it's just winners and losers and "Don't get caught on the wrong side of that line" Well, I'm tired of coming out on the losing end So, honey, last night, I met this guy, and I'm gonna do a little favor for him Well, now, everything dies, baby, that's a fact But maybe everything that dies someday comes back Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty And meet me tonight in Atlantic City Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska (1982)

Philly would claim the greatest number of flu deaths of any city in the nation, 13,000 in all. Nor could we have imagined as we bumped along those Pennsylvania roads that this month of October 1918 would be the deadliest month in the history of the United States, with 195,000 people dying of flu.

HOME AWAY FROM HOME: PHILADELPHIA The City of Brotherly Love. Except a lot of people are mean. Not really mean, it’s just a city with people who take no shit and don’t suffer fools. I felt at home in Philly immediately. I stayed in Manayunk, a super-hilly neighborhood. Sketchy as all hell driving in the wintertime. I think of the arena, Flyers games, Dev’s Grandma’s Italian stuffing, dive bars that look like somebody’s house. I never had a dog in the fight about which place delivered the best cheesesteak. … Those conversations between proud Philadelphians can get tense. I thought they were all pretty good, but, boy, did I fall in love with Wawa.

We need to start over, to admit that somehow the forces of history and race, economic theory and human weakness have conspired to create a new and peculiar universe in our largest cities. Our rules and imperatives don't work down here. We've got to leave behind the useless baggage of a society and culture that still maintains the luxury of reasonable judgments. Against all the sanction we can muster, this new world is surviving, expanding, consuming everything in its path. To insist that it should be otherwise on the merits of some external morality is to provoke a futile debate. In West Baltimore or East New York, in North Philly or South Chicago, they're not listening anymore, so how can our best arguments matter?

They sat quietly for a few minutes. Finally, Alex said, “So Ben, right now I like baseball because I just caught one. Why do you like baseball so much?” “I don’t like baseball. I love baseball.” “That’s pretty obvious, but why?” Ben looked at his brother and shook his head thoughtfully. “It’s different than any other sport. It’s like life. The only way you can appreciate it is slowly. The drama of the game builds as each inning goes by. Sure, it’s great seeing your team hit a home run in the first inning, but it’s even better to see one in the ninth inning, especially when your team is down and you win because of it. The entire season is like that too, the same kind of pace from game one until the World Series. It’s not about any individual play, although that’s important. It’s not the home run itself. It’s the drama that precedes the home run, maybe a whole game that’s turned around and changed by it. You can’t appreciate baseball if all you watch are the highlight reels or all you see is one inning or one play. I’m not the first to say this, but baseball is life.” Alex smiled at his brother. “Look, I play basketball and I’ve played it my whole life, but frankly, when you watch a professional game, in my opinion the defense is almost nonexistent and the only thing good about it is the last couple of minutes,” Ben said. “You don’t get that in baseball. The drama of baseball is in every moment of the game, it builds until the last out. Baseball is all about the whole game.” “What about football?” asked Alex. “That has drama. The game is played over sixty minutes. I find it a whole lot more exciting than baseball.” “It’s not the same thing. It has many of the same elements when you look at the basics of it. They both have athleticism, strategy, and tactics, but it’s different. I’ll bet you find it exciting because of its ferocity. The violence is what turns me off about football. Don’t get me wrong, you still have to be able to think to play the game, but at the end of the day football is about violence—linemen trying to kill each other, the defensive guys trying to kill the quarterback, the receiver. The violence overshadows the thinking. I’ve seen games where the fans actually cheered when a visiting player was injured.” “Yeah, welcome to Philly.” Alex smiled. “Fair enough, but I bet it’s the same in any city,” Ben said. “Baseball isn’t about violence. Look, I know it has violence. God must love the catchers. I don’t know how they survive a two-hundred-pound base runner sliding into home, cleats first, and many second basemen have been hurt trying to put a man out at second. But that’s not what the game is about. It’s just a part of it, like life. “If I had to summarize the difference between baseball and football, football is about war; baseball is about life. In football you have two armies clashing, over and over again. They keep at it until one side overwhelms the other. Baseball is different. It’s about going out and working hard and having little victories and defeats along the way and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Hopefully you win, but even if you don’t you keep coming back every day. It’s like when you drive a truck, cut hair, sell buttons and zippers, or do advertising. It’s the same thing for all of us. It’s day-in and day-out work, and you hope at the end of the year you’ve won more than you’ve lost. If I want violence all I have to do is open the paper and read about Korea, or close my eyes and think about Okinawa. I get inspired by baseball to come back every day and try harder and if I work as hard as I can, and have a little luck, I get rewarded for it.

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