Railway Platform Quotes

Moving closer to the edge, I peered down. The water was glassy green, extraordinarily clear. I experienced the feeling I sometimes get when I'm on a bridge or a railway platform. Rationally, you know that you've no intention of stepping off the bridge or the platform - or this ice floe - but you're aware that you could, and that the only thing stopping you is your will.

I contemplated her, I was remembering her in this present, I had her beside me from last moment to last moment. When you are in love you are always on a railway platform.

It was a sombre snowy afternoon, and the gas-lamps were lit in the big reverberating station. As he paced the platform, waiting for the Washington express, he remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York. They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian Nights marvels.

He shakes his head. He was a man on a railway platform. There was no story. Except, there is. There always fucking is.

Mr. and Mrs. Brown first met Paddington on a railway platform. In fact, that was how he came to have such an unusual name for a bear, for Paddington was the name of the station.

At eighteen, she already looks like a woman of sorrows and as her breaths start becoming shorter, tired of looking over her shoulder, she only wants to get away from this city where no one can fathom her love- boundless and profane and real, like her skin and her lips and the insides of her thighs. She knows she can smile, smell like the others. Her skin would bleed too if pricked and yet this reality does not belong to the ones sleeping on the platform floor; this reality is hers and her alone. Thus when she puts the mirror back, she rummages in her handbag, searching for that thing called identity: some of it lost somewhere in the railway colony she had just left behind, some in Sudhanshu’s left jacket pocket, the rest of it scattered here around broken teacups on railings, totally aberrant and arbitrary.

Who does not know what it is like to go with a friend to a railway station and then to watch the train take them away? As you walk along the platform back into the city, the person who has just gone is often more there, more totally there, than when you embraced them before they climbed into the train. When we embrace to say goodbye, maybe we do it for this reason—to take into our arms what we want to keep when they’ve gone.

At that moment I saw you at the end of the platform. You were wearing trousers. On the long platform beside the stranded train, in the vast white diffused late-afternoon light of the rift valley, you looked very small. With your appearance everything changed. Everything from the passage under the railway tracks to the sun setting, from the Arabic numerals on the board which announced the times of the trains, to the gulls perched on a roof, from the invisible stars to the taste of coffee on my palate. The world of circumstance and contingency, into which, long before, I had been born, became like a room. I was home.

But when I thought my mind was altogether taken up with other things, as I stood on a railway station platform, waited by a car, entered or left a house, walked up or down a driveway, went out into the cold, went back in out of the cold, I would suddenly remember the sweet smell of his skin, and I would miss his open arms, how perfectly still he was when he opened his arms to me, as though all his attention was on me and on taking me into his arms, whereas with another man before him, and then another, there had been no room for me, they were all hard surface, they were always moving too quickly, rushing here and there, usually away from me, or past me, intent on their own business, only now and then straight toward me, when I, too, became their business. He paid attention, he watched, he listened, he thought about me when he was not with me, nothing was lost on him, nothing of me as he perceived me. Even in his sleep, he was attentive, and woke up enough to tell me he loved me, whereas other men, intent on the business of sleeping, would be disturbed and hiss at me: “Stop moving!

Johnstone railway station was small, neat and tidy, quite attractive. On the platforms, I noticed that the signs also had the name in Gaelic – ‘Baile Iain’, literally ‘John’s town’. It is a recent wheeze by the triumphant, all-conquering Scottish National Party to add the Gaelic name to every station in the whole of Scotland, despite the fact that most of these places never had a Gaelic name or people who ever spoke Gaelic.

After that came a moment which is hard to describe, for the children seemed to be seeing three things at once. One was the mouth of a cave opening into the glaring green and blue of an island in the Pacific, where all the Telmarines would find themselves the moment they were through the Door. The second was a glade in Narnia, the faces of Dwarfs and Beasts, the deep eyes of Aslan, and the white patches on the Badger’s cheeks. But the third (which rapidly swallowed up the other two) was the gray, gravelly surface of a platform in a country station, and a seat with luggage round it, where they were all sitting as if they had never moved from it--a little flat and dreary for a moment after all they had been through, but also, unexpectedly, nice in its own way, what with the familiar railway smell and the English sky and the summer term before them. “Well!” said Peter. “We have had a time.” “Bother!” said Edmund. “I’ve left my new torch in Narnia.

anyone before! Excited about his trip to Bombay, Ramkrishna trotted alongside his mama to the railway station. He patted the bundle of his life’s savings tied at his waist and felt secure. Soon they were inside a moving train. The train gathered speed and after a few hours stopped at a junction where they alighted to take another connection. They were waiting at a platform for the next train that would take them to their destination when an old man, bent over double, approached them.

The cart slowed as they came to a place so dark and quiet that it seemed as if they had entered some remote forest. Peeking beneath the hem of the cart's canvas covering, Garrett saw towering gates covered with ivy, and ghostly sculptures of angels, and solemn figures of men, women, and children with their arms crossed in resignation upon their breasts. Graveyard sculptures. A stab of horror went through her, and she crawled to the front of the cart to where West Ravenel was sitting with the driver. "Where the devil are you taking us, Mr. Ravenel?" He glanced at her over his shoulder, his brows raised. "I told you before- a private railway station." "It looks like a cemetery." "It's a cemetery station," he admitted. "With a dedicated line that runs funeral trains out to the burial grounds. It also happens to connect to the main lines and branches of the London Ironstone Railroad, owned by our mutual friend Tom Severin." "You told Mr. Severin about all this? Dear God. Can we trust him?" West grimaced slightly. "One never wants to be in the position of having to trust Severin," he admitted. "But he's the only one who could obtain clearances for a special train so quickly." They approached a massive brick and stone building housing a railway platform. A ponderous stone sign adorned the top of the carriage entrance: Silent Gardens. Just below it, the shape of an open book emblazoned with words had been carved in the stone. Ad Meliora. "Toward better things," Garrett translated beneath her breath.

You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say “space is annihilated”, but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of “Near” and “Far”. “Near” is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the air-ship will take me quickly. “Far” is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet; the vomitory is “far”, though I could be there in thirty-eight seconds by summoning the train. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong. ...Man is the measure.

I was exhausted and had to rely on Herr Schreiner to help me and knew in my soul that God had sent him to my aid. As tired as I was, I couldn’t have handled my luggage alone. Finally another train did pull into the station but in stark contrast to the empty platform we were standing on, the train was completely full of people. Although he wasn’t that big of a man, Herr Schreiner pushed my suitcases up the two steps into the railway car, and I climbed up behind them. As the train left the station, he hung onto the two entrance handles right behind me and I pushed for space, trying to make enough room for him to get into the carriage. With every surge of the train I expected him to lose his grip but with what I am certain was superhuman strength, he hung on as the train picked up speed. Several of the people made snide remarks but I turned a deaf ear to this and pushed as hard as I could, so that he could also get in. With the help of another man pulling on his coat, Herr Schreiner finally managed to squeeze in far enough so that we could close the door behind him. Once safely on the train, someone from his school in Mannheim recognized him. Herr Schreiner had been a very popular, much admired school principal and seeing how tired and bedraggled we now looked, the passenger offered us his window seats and helped to make room so that we could store our suitcases in the luggage rack above our heads. The train didn’t make any more stops and continued east crossing the Rhine River Bridge, which miraculously was still there. I couldn’t believe that everything had come together as well as it had, and that I was on my way back to Überlingen and my children.

The railway journey to London was accomplished in a miraculous two hours, at least four times faster than it would have been had they gone by coach. That turned out to be fortunate, as it soon became apparent that the Ravenel family did not travel well. Pandora and Cassandra were both overcome with excitement, never having set foot on a train before. They chattered and exclaimed, darting across the station platform like feeding pigeons, begging West to purchase railway editions of popular novels--only a shilling apiece--and sandwiches packaged in cunning little paper boxes, and handkerchiefs printed with pastoral scenes. Loaded with souvenirs, they boarded the family’s first-class railway carriage and insisted on trying every seat before choosing the ones they preferred. Helen had insisted on bringing one of her potted orchids, its long, fragile stem having been stabilized with a stick and a bit of ribbon. The orchid was a rare and sensitive species of Blue Vanda. Despite its dislike of being moved, she believed it would be better off in London with her. She carried the orchid in her lap the entire way, her absorbed gaze focused on the passing landscape. Soon after the train had left the station, Cassandra made herself queasy by trying to read one of the railway novels. She closed the book and settled in her seat with her eyes closed, moaning occasionally as the train swayed. Pandora, by contrast, couldn’t stay seated for more than a few minutes at a time, jumping up to test the feeling of standing in a moving locomotive, and attempting to view the scenery from different windows. But the worst traveler by far was Clara, the lady’s maid, whose fear of the train’s speed proved resistant to all attempts at soothing. Every small jolt or lurch of the carriage drew a fearful cry from her until Devon had given her a small glass of brandy to settle her nerves.

Once, a woman attending a nonresidential metta weekend in New York City was on her way back to the retreat site on Saturday morning when a man approached her on the railway platform and asked a question about the train schedule. Even though she was holding a schedule in her hand, her thought was, “He looks really weird! I’d better get rid of him.” Her initial claim to have no knowledge of the trains was belied by her clearly visible schedule. She tried a few ploys to have him go away, to no avail. Finally, she randomly pointed to someone else on the platform and said, “You should go ask him.” The stranger looked at her uneasily and said, “Oh no! I couldn’t ask him—he looks really weird!

Keeping her mind off the basement as well, she wondered exactly when coffee had gone walkabout in France. When she’d first been here, drinking coffee hadn’t been a pedestrian activity. One either sat to do it, in cafés or restaurants, or stood, at bars or on railway platforms, and drank from sturdy vessels, china or glass, themselves made in France. Had Starbucks brought the takeaway cup? she wondered. She doubted it. They hadn’t really had the time. More likely McDonald’s.

Companies like Pets.com made the mistake of choosing a linear business model in the age of the platform. What is a linear business model? It’s the model that has dominated in various forms since the Industrial Revolution, when new technologies like steam power and railways gave rise to the large, vertically integrated organization.

A year later, there is another miscarriage, another lost boy, and then an operation, and Rachel is in a muddle. Another missed carriage, she hears, conjuring a vision of Mama in a typical dash from the house, hurrying for trains to other cities where she will conduct music and choirs. Rachel sees Katya on a railway platform, suitcase and baton box in hand, but Mama is too late, the train hurtles by, screaming through the arches, a great train of missed carriages. Rachel's night-time wish is granted then, that though Katya has left her once again, she must return home as quickly. She has missed her carriage. 'Mama,' Rachel whispers into the night bedroom air, 'Mama, hurry home!

The Worst of all Loves - Douglas Dunn Where do they go, the faces, the people seen In glances and longed for, who smile back Wondering where the next kiss is coming from? They are seen suddenly, from the top decks of buses On railway platforms, at the tea machine When the sleep of travelling makes us look for them. A whiff of perfume, an eye, a hat, a shoe, Bring back vague memories of names, Thingummy, that bloke, what's-her-name. What great things have I lost, that faces in a crowd Should make me look at them for one I know? What are faces that they must be looked for? But there's one face, seen only once, A fragment of a crowd. I know enough of her. That face makes me dissatisfied with myself. Those we secretly love, who never know of us, What happens to them? Only this is known. They will never meet us suddenly in pleasant rooms.

had been ripped from her father’s Torah, but also from Torat Ha-Adam, the Nachmanides volume. Both had been utterly destroyed. Intact on the floor, unmolested, she found Historia Calamitatum, the only book not in the divine language from which the entire cosmos was created. Holding the Historia and the valise, she began to leave the room, but her composure failed and she broke into a run, tore down the two remaining flights of stairs and out into the U-shaped courtyard. What she saw stopped her. The nearest part of the quadrangle was vacant, but at its far end a throng of inmates was clustered inside the recently erected funnel of barbed wire. The limit of the courtyard was defined by the platform at the terminal point of the railway track. Rachel ran toward the crowd of prisoners, but as she approached, she saw smaller knots of soldiers, and stopped. To one side, they wore the brown uniforms of the Gendarmerie, and to the other, the gray-green of

Ballymartle was another crossroads village. In the drizzle, it looked to me like a miserable place, but it had one thing that lifted my spirits: it had a railway station. We found a bench in a dilapidated shelter and sat down to wait for a train. Sunlight filtered through the drizzle and flooded the scene. Stretching as far as we could see on all sides were pale birch trees glistening, misshapen and tall, like thin, grey giants frozen in a hundred-year argument. For the first time since we landed on the beach, I began to relax. I closed my eyes. A voice called out after a while, and I opened my eyes. A man stood in a field beyond the opposite platform. I waved to him. “When’s the next train?” The man lifted his cap and scratched his head. “You could be in for a bit of a wait. The last one went through here ten years ago.

However, the poignant truth that eventually reveals itself is that the remarkable individual you met at a crucial juncture of life, the one who set your heart ablaze, was no different from any other stranger you might have encountered on a bustling railway platform. He too, was waiting for a train, but a train that followed a different track. It would be unfair to expect him to forsake his journey to accompany you, just as it would be unwise for you to halt your journey in pursuit of him. Let him go his way, gracefully.

She got off the train, and John-Paul lifted a hand and smiled. Janie waved back, and as she walked down the railway platform toward him, it came to her with a tiny, bitter shock of self-revelation that it wasn’t that she liked Connor more than John-Paul, it was that she liked John-Paul far too much. It was a strain being with someone so good-looking and smart and funny and nice. She was dazzled by John-Paul. Connor was dazzled by her. And it was more fun doing the dazzling. Girls were meant to do the dazzling. John-Paul’s interest

I have no doubt that she is sincerely desirous of seeing all the evils of suffering humanity remedied, and that she thinks this might easily be done, if Government would only undertake it. But, alas! that poor unfortunate personage, like Figaro, knows not to whom to listen, nor where to turn. The hundred thousand mouths of the press and of the platform cry out all at once:-- "Organize labour and workmen. "Do away with egotism. "Repress insolence and the tyranny of capital. "Make experiments upon manure and eggs. "Cover the country with railways. "Irrigate the plains. "Plant the hills. "Make model farms. "Found social workshops. "Colonize Algeria. "Suckle children. "Instruct the youth. "Assist the aged. "Send the inhabitants of towns into the country. "Equalize the profits of all trades. "Lend money without interest to all who wish to borrow." "Emancipate Italy, Poland, and Hungary." "Rear and perfect the saddle-horse." "Encourage the arts, and provide us with musicians and dancers." "Restrict commerce, and at the same time create a merchant navy." "Discover truth, and put a grain of reason into our heads. The mission of Government is to enlighten, to develop, to extend, to fortify, to spiritualize, and to sanctify the soul of the people." "Do have a little patience, gentlemen," says Government in a beseeching tone. "I will do what I can to satisfy you, but for this I must have resources. I have been preparing plans for five or six taxes, which are quite new, and not at all oppressive. You will see how willingly people will pay them." Then comes a great exclamation:--"No! indeed! where is the merit of doing a thing with resources? Why, it does not deserve the name of a Government! So far from loading us with fresh taxes, we would have you withdraw the old ones. You ought to suppress "The salt tax, "The tax on liquors, "The tax on letters, "Custom-house duties, "Patents." In

Fundamentals of Esperanto The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one sitting. Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj & the accusative, -on Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative friend & friends. Ma amiko is my friend. A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA, has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old Testament & A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto. Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space on board the Voyager spacecraft. - Esperanto is an artificial language constructed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, a polish oculist. following a somewhat difficult period in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the railway platform just outside Warsaw where I had missed my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit & dark glasses pushed a cart piled high with ripped & weathered volumes— sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing musical scores & outdated physics textbooks, old copies of Life, new smut, an atlas translated, a grammar, The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics, a guide to the rivers & mountains, thesauri, inscrutable musical scores & mimeographed physics books, defective stories, obsolete sex manuals— one of which caught my notice (Dr. Esperanto since I had time, I traded my used Leaves of Grass for a copy. I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough. There’s a man from Quebec in my head, a friend to the purple martins. Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows. All purple martins are dying or dead. Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest these creatures feel the same levels of doubt & bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity. While driving home from the brewery one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program about purple martins & the next day he set out to build them a house in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything, let alone a house, not to mention a home for somebody else. Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting. Never piped sugar water through colored tubes to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded with strong, tired hands. Never dismantled the entire affair & put it back together again. Still no swallows. I never installed the big light that stays on through the night to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights, never rested on Sunday with a beer on the deck surveying what I had done & what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers. I have never collapsed in abandon. Never prayed. But enough about the purple martins. Every line of the work is a first & a last line & this is the spring of its action. Of course, there’s a journey & inside that journey, an implicit voyage through the underworld. There’s a bridge made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers; a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors; a digression on shadows; That’s how we finally learn who the hero was all along. Weary & old, he sits on a rock & watches his friends fly by one by one out of the song, then turns back to the journey they all began long ago, keeping the river to his right.

advise,’ he told her. ‘Remember, they want your company . . . and I believe there’s work enough for dozens on most cattle stations.’ Right now, however, the young seaman who had carried her trunk down the gangway was saying that he was prepared to carry it all the way to the railway station if she was willing to pay him a few bob. ‘I mean to buy a present for me girlfriend,’ he explained. ‘But I spent up at the last port, so any money I can earn is welcome.’ They reached the railway station and found the train for Queensland already waiting by the platform. So whilst Debbie bought her ticket, the young seaman stood guard over her trunk, then bade her a hasty goodbye and set off for what he described as ‘a poke around the shops’. It was a pity in a way, Debbie thought, as she climbed aboard the train, that she had decided not to get a job right here in Sydney, and then to make her way up to Queensland by slow degrees, because she would have seen more of the country that way. But the young officer had been right. No one would want to employ a waitress, or a shop assistant, or a barmaid for a matter of days, so she would have had to work perhaps for several weeks before moving on. That would have prolonged the journey ridiculously, and besides, the train fare was not yet beyond her means. In any case, the truth

The instant that Devon stepped off the train at Alton Station, he was confronted by the sight of his brother in a dusty coat and mud-crusted breeches and boots. There was a wild look in West’s eyes. “West?” Devon asked in startled concern. “What the devil--” “Did you sign the lease?” West interrupted, reaching out as if to seize his lapels, then appearing to think better of it. He was twitching with impatience, bouncing on his heels like a restless schoolboy. “The London Ironstone lease. Did you sign it?” “Yesterday.” West let out a curse that attracted a slew of censorious gazes from the crowd on the platform. “What of the mineral rights?” “The mineral rights on the land we’re leasing to the railway?” Devon clarified. “Yes, did you give them to Severin? Any of them?” “I kept all of them.” West stared at him without blinking. “You’re absolutely sure?” “Of course I am. Severin badgered me about the mineral rights for three days. The longer we debated, the more exasperated I became, until I said I’d see him in hell before I let him have so much as a clod of manure from Eversby Priory. I walked out, but just as I reached the street, he shouted from the fifth-floor window that he gave in and I should come back.” West leaped forward as if he were about to embrace him, then checked the movement. He shook Devon’s hand violently and proceeded to thump his back with painful vigor. “By God, I love you, you pigheaded bastard!” “What the devil is wrong with you?” Devon demanded. “I’ll show you. Let’s go.” “I have to wait for Sutton. He’s in one of the back carriages.” “We don’t need Sutton.” “He can’t walk to Eversby from Alton,” Devon said, his annoyance fading into laughter. “Damn it, West, you’re jumping about as if someone shoved a hornet’s nest up your--” “There he is,” West exclaimed, gesturing to the valet, motioning for him to hurry.

The London Ironstone lease. Did you sign it?” “Yesterday.” West let out a curse that attracted a slew of censorious gazes from the crowd on the platform. “What of the mineral rights?” “The mineral rights on the land we’re leasing to the railway?” Devon clarified. “Yes, did you give them to Severin? Any of them?” “I kept all of them.” West stared at him without blinking. “You’re absolutely sure?” “Of course I am. Severin badgered me about the mineral rights for three days. The longer we debated, the more exasperated I became, until I said I’d see him in hell before I let him have so much as a clod of manure from Eversby Priory.