Skyline Drive Quotes

For me, it feels like driving from truth into a lie, from adulthood to childhoold. I watch the land of pavement and glass and metal turn into an empty field. The snow is falling softly now, and I can faintly see the city's skyline up ahead, the buildings just a shade darker than the clouds.

I breathed in the night air that was or was not laced with anachronistic blossoms and felt the small thrill I always felt to a lesser or greater degree when I looked at Manhattan’s skyline and the innumerable illuminated windows and the liquid sapphire and ruby of traffic on the FDR Drive and the present absence of the towers.

God's gift to the world are the Trees, Sun, and Mountains

In LA, you can’t do anything unless you drive. Now I can’t do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn’t possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop your ash or pick your nose, then it’s an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there’s a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug. So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown skyline carries a smear of God’s green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF-BOOZE – NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON’T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don’t walk. Stay inside. Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk. Run!

California, land of my dreams and my longing. You've seen me in New York and you know what I'm like there but in L.A., man, I tell you, I'm even more of a high-achiever - all fizz and push, a fixer, a bustler, a real new-dealer. Last December for a whole week my thirty-minute short Dean Street was being shown daily at the Pantheon of Celestial Arts. In squeaky-clean restaurants, round smoggy poolsides, in jungly jacuzzis I made my deals. Business went well and it all looked possible. It was in the pleasure area, as usual, that I found I had a problem. In L.A., you can't do anything unless you drive. Now I can't do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn't possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop your ash or pick your nose, then it's an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there's a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug. So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown skyline carries a smear of God's green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF-BOOZE-NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON'T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don't walk. Stay inside. Don't walk. Drive. Don't walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren't even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive.

I started reviewing the day’s events:  destroyed my uncle.  Check.  Saved my Mom and Dad.  Check.  Delivered ancient artifact of unknown power to a crazy Chinese guy.  Check.  Dinner with the family?  I looked over the rim at the Los Angeles skyline as my stomach growled. Seemed like the perfect time to drive off a cliff. And I gunned it.

It was the end of March and, even though the weather hadn't warmed noticeably at this elevation, the winter buds had begun to swell on the oaks, giving them the quality of knots in fine lace against the gray overcast.

We were planning a weekend trip to the Shenandoah Valley to see the fall colors from the Skyline Drive.

As the smoke rose from the car toward the skyline, I couldn’t help thinking that, at any moment, everything we had would be consumed by flames.

He also inherited my mother’s talent for selflessness. He gave his seat to a surly Candor man on the bus without a second thought. The Candor man wears a black suit with a white tie—Candor standard uniform. Their faction values honesty and sees the truth as black and white, so that is what they wear. The gaps between the buildings narrow and the roads are smoother as we near the heart of the city. The building that was once called the Sears Tower—we call it the Hub—emerges from the fog, a black pillar in the skyline. The bus passes under the elevated tracks. I have never been on a train, though they never stop running and there are tracks everywhere. Only the Dauntless ride them. Five years ago, volunteer construction workers from Abnegation repaved some of the roads. They started in the middle of the city and worked their way outward until they ran out of materials. The roads where I live are still cracked and patchy, and it’s not safe to drive on them. We don’t have a car anyway. Caleb’s expression is placid as the bus sways and jolts on the road.

Gabrielle’s car climbed up Skyline Drive into the Ramapo Mountains. The road was only forty-five minutes from Manhattan, but it might as well have been in another world. There were legends about the tribes who still lived in this area. Some called them the Ramapough Mountain Indians or the Lenape Nation or the Lunaape Delaware Nation. Some believed the people were Native American. Others claimed that they dated back to Dutch settlers. Still others thought they were Hessian soldiers who fought for the British during the American Revolution or were freed slaves who found a home in the barren woods in northern New Jersey. Many, too many, had dubbed them, perhaps derogatorily, the Jackson Whites. The origin of that name also remained a mystery but probably had something to do with their multiracial appearance. As

Everyone else is running for cover, ducking under jackets and being brought to heel by runaway umbrellas blowing violently inside-out, but for some reason I don't want to move from my spot, even though I'm more than a little scared. Maybe it's my view, the elegant chaos of the New York skyline stretched out before me, buildings stacked on top of one another, holding millions of stories, any one of which could soon be mine. Maybe it's the way the driving rain feels on my skin, cool and strong, commanding the attention of all my senses and making me feel hyper-alive. Or maybe it's the winds that lift my hair off my shoulders and stream it behind me like a flock of blackbirds, rushing in my ears and filling my lungs with an energy that seems unstoppable. All I know is that I'm standing in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, a lone girl in a long skirt watching a storm roll in with her eyes fully open for the first time, And I'm not sure if it's God, or fate, or just air masses colliding over water, but I will say this: It feels, finally, like flying.