Railroad Track Love Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Railroad Track Love. Here they are! All 23 of them:

It is still news to her that passion could steer her wrong though she went down, a thousand times strung out across railroad tracks, off bridges under cars, or stiff glass bottle still in hand, hair soft on greasy pillows, still it is news she cannot follow love (his burning footsteps in blue crystal snow) & still come out all right.
Diane di Prima
I had read it some time ago but was so completely immersed that I retained nothing. This has been an intermittent, lifelong enigma. Through early adolescence I sat and read for hours in a small grove of weed trees near the railroad track in Germantown. Like Gumby I would enter a book wholeheartedly and sometimes venture so deeply it was as if I were living within it. I finished many books in such a manner there, closing the covers ecstatically yet having no memory of the content by the time I returned home. This disturbed me but I kept this strange affliction to myself. I look at the covers of such books and their contents remain a mystery that I cannot bring myself to solve. Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.
Patti Smith (M Train)
Despair Who is he? A railroad track toward hell? Breaking like a stick of furniture? The hope that suddenly overflows the cesspool? The love that goes down the drain like spit? The love that said forever, forever and then runs you over like a truck? Are you a prayer that floats into a radio advertisement? Despair, I don't like you very well. You don't suit my clothes or my cigarettes. Why do you locate here as large as a tank, aiming at one half of a lifetime? Couldn't you just go float into a tree instead of locating here at my roots, forcing me out of the life I've led when it's been my belly so long? All right! I'll take you along on the trip where for so many years my arms have been speechless
Anne Sexton
The broken are not always gathered together,of course, and not all mysteries of the flesh are solved. We speak of "senseless tragedies" but really: Is there any other kind? Mothers and wives disappear without a trace. Childeren are killed. Madamen ravage the world, leaving wounds immeasurably deep, and endlessy mourned. loved ones whose presence once filled us move into the distance; our eyes follow them as long as possible as they recede from view. Maybe we chase them clumsily, across railroad tracks and trafficked streets; Over roads new printed with their foot steps,the dust still whirling in the wake of them; through impossibly big cities people with strangers whose faces and bodies carry fragments of their faces and bodies, whose laughter, steadiness, pluck, stuberness remind us of the beloved we seek. Maybe we stay put, left behind, and look for them in our dreams. But we never stop looking, not even after those we love become part of the unreachable horizon. we can never stop carrying the heavy weight of love on this pilgimage; we can only transfigure what we carry. We can only shatter it and send it whirling into the world so that it can take shape in some new way.
Stephanie Kallos (Broken for You)
I was part of your train but my railroad car was disconnected and switched at the track, and now my friends and I are on a separate journey learning how not to rock the lifeboat, sending out a patient S.O.S to you for help. I reach out with love, possibly one of a dying breed, the old survival of the fittest theory, or perhaps I am throwing you a lifeline from my Rectangular Bubble.
Ann Lloyd (Vodka On My Wheaties)
Do you have change for a dollar? Geryon heard Geryon say. No. Herakles stared straight at Geryon. But I'll give you a quarter for free. Why would you do that? I believe in being gracious. Some hours later they were down at the railroad tracks standing close together by the switch lights. The huge night moved overhead scattering drops of itself. You're cold, said Herakles suddenly, your hands are cold. Here. He put Geryon's hands inside his shirt.
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
Doubtless there are people who continue to consider love above dollars and cents. Particularly is this true or that class whom economic necessity has forced to become self-supporting. The tremendous change in woman's position, wrought by that might factor, is indeed phenomenal when we reflect that it is but a short time since she has entered the industrial arena. Six million women wage workers; six million women, who have equal rights with men to be exploited, to be robbed, to go on strike; aye, to starve even. Anything more, my lord? Yes, six million wage workers in every walk of life, from the highest brain work to the mines and railroad tracks; yes, even detectives and policemen. Surely the emancipation is complete.
Emma Goldman (Marriage and Love [Illustrated edition])
Commandments are the railroad tracks on which the life empowered by the love of God poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit runs. Love empowers the engine; law guides the direction. They are mutually interdependent. The notion that love can operate apart from law is a figment of the imagination. It is not only bad theology; it is poor psychology. It has to borrow from law to give eyes to love.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
DAY 1   Scripture Meditation:   Proverbs 18:21 - "Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof."   Thought for today:   Your words can kill or give life. And there are consequences for both. Today make an effort to speak words that give life and hope for a new beginning to a coworker, friend or family member.   Inspirational Quote:   "A helping word to one in trouble is often like a switch on a railroad track an inch between wreck and smooth, rolling prosperity." -Henry Ward Beecher
Lynn R. Davis (Deliver Me From Negative Self Talk)
You look like carp today.” Ashley’s eyes didn’t lift from her chart as she volunteered her opinion. “You mean crap?” I felt like crap. I was tired. My head and my heart hurt. And I was pretty sure my female reproductive system hated Alex. “No. Carp. The fish. You’re all frowny and buggy-eyed, tired and frightened.” Her blue eyes lifted, scanned my face. “And you need to pluck your eyebrows.” “Do carp have eyebrows?” “They have little weird feeler mustaches, like catfish. I suspect they tie other fish to little fishy railroad tracks.
Penny Reid (Love Hacked (Knitting in the City, #3))
hands and transported by animal effort, eight dollars, ten dollars, sixteen dollars a ton. They were piled beside the railroad tracks as each section was built farther west. Hills of bones, mountains of blind skulls, loaded onto railroad cars and shipped back east to process sugar. So it was, every teaspoon of sugar that was stirred into a cup or baked into a pudding was haunted by the slave trade and the slaughter of the buffalo. Just as now, into every teaspoon, is mixed the pragmatic nihilism of industrial sugar farming and the death of our place on earth. This is the sweetness that pricks people’s senses and sparkles in a birthday cake and glitters on the tongue. Price guaranteed, delicious, a craving strong as love.
Louise Erdrich (The Mighty Red)
Everything the Kiowas had came from the buffalo.… Most of all, the buffalo was part of the Kiowa religion. A white buffalo calf must be sacrificed in the Sun Dance. The priests used parts of the buffalo to make their prayers when they healed people or when they sang to the powers above. So, when the white men wanted to build railroads, or when they wanted to farm or raise cattle, the buffalo still protected the Kiowas. They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens. They chased the cattle off the ranges. The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them. There was war between the buffalo and the white men. The white men built forts in the Kiowa country, and the woolly-headed buffalo soldiers shot the buffalo as fast as they could, but the buffalo kept coming on, coming on, even into the post cemetery at Fort Sill. Soldiers were not enough to hold them back. Then the white men hired hunters to do nothing but kill the buffalo. Up and down the plains those men ranged, shooting sometimes as many as a hundred buffalo a day. Behind them came the skinners with their wagons. They piled the hides and bones into the wagons until they were full, and then took their loads to the new railroad stations that were being built, to be shipped east to the market. Sometimes there would be a pile of bones as high as a man, stretching a mile along the railroad track. The buffalo saw that their day was over. They could protect their people no longer.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History, #3))
I sat at my table, had my brown toast with olive oil, and opened Camus’s The First Man. I had read it some time ago but was so completely immersed that I retained nothing. This has been an intermittent, lifelong enigma. Through early adolescence I sat and read for hours in a small grove of weed trees near the railroad track in Germantown. Like Gumby I would enter a book wholeheartedly and sometimes venture so deeply it was as if I were living within it. I finished many books in such a manner there, closing the covers ecstatically yet having no memory of the content by the time I returned home. This disturbed me but I kept this strange affliction to myself. I look at the covers of such books and their contents remain a mystery that I cannot bring myself to solve. Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.
Patti Smith (M Train)
William Stead recognized the power of the fair immediately. The vision of the White City and its profound contrast to the Black City drove him to write If Christ Came to Chicago, a book often credited with launching the City Beautiful movement, which sought to elevate American cities to the level of the great cities of Europe. Like Stead, civic authorities throughout the world saw the fair as a model of what to strive for. They asked Burnham to apply the same citywide thinking that had gone into the White City to their own cities. He became a pioneer in modern urban planning. He created citywide plans for Cleveland, San Francisco, and Manila and led the turn-of-the-century effort to resuscitate and expand L’Enfant’s vision of Washington, D.C. In each case he worked without a fee. While helping design the new Washington plan, Burnham persuaded the head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Alexander Cassatt, to remove his freight tracks and depot from the center of the federal mall, thus creating the unobstructed green that extends today from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. Other cities came to Daniel Burnham for citywide plans, among them Fort Worth, Atlantic City, and St. Louis, but he turned them down to concentrate on his last plan, for the city of Chicago. Over the years many aspects of his Chicago plan were adopted, among them the creation of the city’s lovely ribbon of lakefront parks and Michigan Avenue’s “Miracle Mile.” One portion of the lakefront, named Burnham Park in his honor, contains Soldier Field and the Field Museum, which he designed. The park runs south in a narrow green border along the lakeshore all the way to Jackson Park, where the fair’s Palace of Fine Arts, transformed into a permanent structure, now houses the Museum of Science and Industry. It looks out over the lagoons and the Wooded Island, now a wild and tangled place that perhaps would make Olmsted smile—though no doubt he would find features to criticize.
Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City)
Nothing—and I mean really, absolutely nothing—is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside. Nowhere in the world is there a landscape that has been more intensively utilized—more mined, farmed, quarried, covered with cities and clanging factories, threaded with motorways and railroad tracks—and yet remains so comprehensively and reliably lovely over most of its extent. It is the happiest accident in history. In terms of natural wonders, you know, Britain is a pretty unspectacular place. It has no alpine peaks or broad rift valleys, no mighty gorges or thundering cataracts. It is built to really quite a modest scale. And yet with a few unassuming natural endowments, a great deal of time, and an unfailing instinct for improvement, the makers of Britain created the most superlatively park-like landscapes, the most orderly cities, the handsomest provincial towns, the jauntiest seaside resorts, the stateliest homes, the most dreamily-spired, cathedral-rich, castle-strewn, abbey-bedecked, folly-scattered, green-wooded, winding-laned, sheep-dotted, plumply-hedgerowed, well-tended, sublimely decorated 88,386 square miles the world has ever known—almost none of it undertaken with aesthetics
Bill Bryson (The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island)
The Peace that So Lovingly Descends” “You” have transformed into “my loss.” The nettles in your vanished hair Restore the absolute truth Of warring animals without a haven. I know, I’m as pathetic as a railroad Without tracks. In June, I eat The lonesome berries from the branches. What can I say, except the forecast Never changes. I sleep without you, And the letters that you sent Are now faded into failed lessons Of an animal that’s found a home. This.
Noelle Kocot (Sunny Wednesday)
You’re not still shackled to that piece of railroad track I set up, are you?” “While I would love to be able to say no, that hairpin I told you I was certain I would be able to free myself with . . . didn’t exactly work out as planned.” “But I must have shackled you to that railroad tie hours ago,” Bram said weakly. “Oh, you did, but it’s been fine down here on the floor. It’s not overly cold, just a bit chilly.” “Why didn’t you tell me you couldn’t get free?” “And interrupt what will probably be your best work to date?” Stanley let out a grunt. “Not likely. And that’s exactly how you’ll need to explain your less than chivalrous behavior of the past two days to Miss Plum. She’s an industrious soul, she’ll understand that, and it’ll go far in soothing her indignation over your leaving her to deal with the repercussions of what Miss Dunlap did after you, she, and Miss Cooper parted ways.” Bram
Jen Turano (Playing the Part (A Class of Their Own, #3))
The slave driver reported him to the overseer, who ordered a hundred lashes for Smith. When the driver brought Smith to the cotton gin house for his beating, he demanded to know why the man prayed. He even offered to stop beating Smith if he would promise not to pray again. Smith refused the man’s offer and took his whipping. The next night he ran away, but the tracking dogs quickly found him, and the search party dragged him back to the plantation. He
Betty DeRamus (Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories from the Underground Railroad)
None of it made any sense to her - the deceit, the betrayal, the sheer chutzpah of it. Like something from a movie. Who in real life acted this way? But then she remembered this had happened in India, and India was not real life. The most heartbreaking, most desperate, most bizarre stories she had ever heard all came from India. Every story was epic; every emotion was exaggerated; every action was melodramatic. Desperate love, mad obsessions, outbursts of rage, bizarre self sacrifice, self immolation. Young women eat rat poison, jumping off buildings, or burning themselves alive. Young men throwing themselves onto railroad tracks in the path of oncoming trains. And all this self destruction over issues that in the West would be solved by a simple elopement or estrangement from one's parents or a move to a different city.
Thrity Umrigar (The Story Hour)
When Julian’s citizenship papers were approved, for the good of his sons, for their education, and to give Mercedes what she wanted, he quit the Juarez police department. The Ramirezes moved back to El Paso in the spring of 1954. They rented a small apartment in the Second Ward, at Seventh and Canal. El Paso was a much cleaner, safer place than Juarez, and Julian knew he’d made the right decision to leave Mexico. Julian found a job with the Santa Fe railroad, laying track. The wages and benefits were good, but it meant he had to be away from his family, and it would be backbreaking work. Julian loved the outdoors and would make the best of the situation. His sons would be raised in the Land of the Free.
Philip Carlo (The Night Stalker: The Disturbing Life and Chilling Crimes of Richard Ramirez)
The American church proclaimed that faith was a self-alignment with right doctrine, a confession that switched the eternal railroad track from hell to heaven but made no alterations in the journey here on earth—except to spread the truth of the God who was not interested in the pains of this world, only the number of souls that would make it to the next.
Emmy Kegler (One Coin Found: How God's Love Stretches to the Margins)
(Home) ‘This land is beautiful, but the people are horrible.’ The people took this beautiful land and raped it, and put up a bunch of ugly boxes, however, my home is in the Victorian-style and it is old and has a handcrafted personality. There is an ancient oak tree outside my window, sometimes I step out my window then onto the roof of the porch, and sit in the tree branch that hangs over, and watches all the stars as they appear to turn on and off. Yes, I have wished upon a shooting star, that things will change, and that the towers will be no more. Looking straight ahead, I can see all the lights that go on the horizon, some days the sunsets are blazing before the lights turn on. Then there are some days that the window is shut because it is cold windy while everything is chilled with the color of blue. (Frame of mind) My mood can change just like this and that it seems. Yes, just like all the summer turns into winter, and the winters turn into spring, and all of these thoughts running in my mind fall like the leaves through my brain, and they most likely do not mean a thing. I guess you could blame it on my ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, bipolar disorder, or OCD. I do not have any of these… I do not have anything wrong with me. But, if you are like one of the sisters or someone from my school, you would say my mood changes are because of my- STD’s, HIV, or being as they say GAY or BI, and LEZ-BO. They have also said, I am a pedophile and a child stocker, and I get moody if I do not get some from them. That is why I am so sober at times, or so they say. Whatever…! They also have said that I am a schizophrenic- psycho and that I could not even buy love. I would not try that anyways. I think that having money does not give you happiness; I am okay being a humble farm- girl, the guy that finds me… needs to be happy with that also. I am sure there are more things they say. However, those are just some of them that I can dredge up as of now, off the top of my head. They have murdered me and my life, in so many ways. So now, do you wonder as to why I am afraid of talking to people or even looking at them? You know you and they can try to destroy me, and my life. However, I do not have any of those listed either; none of these random arrangements of letters defines me as the person I truly am. (Sight) Looking out the windows, I can see the golden hayfields of ecstasy, I see the windmills that twist and tumble. I can see the abandoned railroad track that lies not far from my home. I can hear the cries of the swing as the wind gusts in spurts. But yet I am still in my room, but that is just okay with me. Because I know that there will someday soon be someone there for me. (Household) My room is a land of peace and tranquility without all the gloom, with a bed and a canopy overhead but still, I am not truly happy? There is nothing- like the sounds of the crickets speaking up often in the cool August night breeze. It is relaxing to me, however; it is a reminder to me of how the last glimmers of summer are ending. Besides the sounds slowly fade away, yes- I can hear this music from my bedroom window. It is just like in the spring the birds sing in the morning and leave in the cool gusts to come. It is just like the hummingbirds that flutter by, and then before I know it, all has changed; so, it seems by the time I walk out my bedroom door, to start my day. ‘Life goes in cycles of tunes it seems, and nature is its synchronization in its symphony you just have to listen.
Marcel Ray Duriez (Nevaeh The Lusting Sapphire Blue Eyes)
The broken are not always gathered together, of course, and not all mysteries of the flesh are solved. We speak of “senseless tragedies,” but really: Is there any other kind? Mothers and wives disappear without a trace. Children are killed. Madmen ravage the world, leaving wounds immeasurably deep, and endlessly mourned. Loved ones whose presence once filled us move into the distance; our eyes follow them as long as possible as they recede from view. Maybe we chase them—clumsily, across railroad tracks and trafficked streets; over roads new-printed with their footsteps, the dust still whirling in the wake of them; through impossibly big cities peopled with strangers whose faces and bodies carry fragments of their faces and bodies, whose laughter, steadiness, pluck, stubbornness remind us of the beloved we seek. Maybe we stay put, left behind, and look for them in our dreams. But we never stop looking, not even after those we love become part of the unreachable horizon. We can never stop carrying the heavy weight of love on this pilgrimage; we can only transfigure what we carry. We can only shatter it and send it whirling into the world so that it can take shape in some new way.
Stephanie Kallos (Broken for You)