Subway Ride Quotes

I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going.

First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches. May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty. When the Crystal Meth is offered, May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half And stick with Beer. Guide her, protect her When crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age. Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels. What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit. May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers. Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For childhood is short – a Tiger Flower blooming Magenta for one day – And adulthood is long and dry-humping in cars will wait. O Lord, break the Internet forever, That she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers And the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed. And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it. And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, that I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back. “My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.

The next morning-at least, I assumed it was morning, since we were all waking up- I felt like one of those twelve dancing princesses, who danced all night, wore holes in their shoes, and had to sleep it off the next day. Except, oh yeah: a)I'm not a princess; b)sleeping in a subway tunnel and having another brain attack aren't that much like dancing all night; and c) my combat boots were still in good shape. Other than that, it was exactly the same.

Wall Street is the only place that people drive to in a Rolls Royce to take advice from people who ride the subway.

But most of all, I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they are going. Sometimes I even go to Fun parks and ride in the jet cars when they race on the edge of town at midnight and the police don't care as long as they're insured. As long as everyone has ten thousand insurance everyone's happy. Sometimes I sneak around and listen in subways. Or I listen at soda fountains, and do you know what? People don't talk about anything.

And wasn't it terrible, how much he looked forward to those moments, so much so that sometimes even a ride by himself on the subway was the best part of the day? Wasn't it terrible that after all the work one put into finding a person to spend one's life with, after making a family with that person, even in spite of missing that person...that solitude was what one relished the most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane?

Darlington liked to say that dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.

TAKE THE TIME to talk to the elderly lady next door, to read a book, to walk to work instead of riding the subway when it’s a beautiful day. Take the time to escape for a weekend with friends. Take the time to listen and to get to know yourself. Take the time to change, to grow, to rest. Take the time to say yes, take the time to say no. Take the time to be quiet. Take the time to look after your body, to eat well. Take the time to ask yourself who you are and what you want.

New York has a thousand universes in it that don't always connect but we do all walk the same streets, hear the same sirens, ride the same subways, see the same headlines in the Post, read the same writings on the walls. That shared landscape gets inside of all of us and, in some small way, unites us, makes us think we know each other even when we don't.

But most of all, I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they are going.

The walk back to the subway and the subsequent ride to my apartment in Queens is long, providing me with too much time to ask myself exactly what the fuck I'm getting myself into. Nell is bad news. She’s got major damage, a baggage train a mile long. And so do I.

Isn’t it something,” Hettie said softly, “what ol’ New York really is? We come here to be free and find life’s worse here than back home. The white folks here just color it different. They don’t mind you sitting next to ’em on the subway, or riding the bus in the front seat, but if you asks for the same pay, or wants to live next door, or get so beat down you don’t wanna stand up and sing about how great America is, they’ll bust down on you so hard pus’ll come out your ears.

These were the moments when I was most tested, when comfort was an option. Not when I was sleeping in the hallway, not when I had to exit my friends’ apartments forcibly at odd hours, and not even when I had to ride the subway all night long and sleep there. Instead, lying around in my friends’ apartments when I had the option to sleep was the most difficult of all these situations for me. This was because, without being forced outdoors, I somehow had to find a reason to choose school, a reason from inside myself.

Not many songs can fend off evil. But the right song with the right voice can be a weapon; anyone who's listened to music through headphones while riding the subway or plowing angrily through a rush-hour sidewalk knows how it can and separate you from them, allows you to say to the teeming masses that you are this and they are that.

I was born in a village in the northeast, and it wasn’t until I was quite big that I saw my first train. I climbed up and down the station bridge, quite unaware that its function was to permit people to cross from one track to another. I was convinced that the bridge had been provided to lend an exotic touch and to make the station premises a place of pleasant diversity, like some foreign playground. I remained under this delusion for quite a long time, and it was for me a very refined amusement indeed to climb up and down the bridge. I thought that it was one of the most elegant services provided by the railways. When later I discovered that the bridge was nothing more than a utilitarian device, I lost all interest in it. Again, when as a child I saw photographs of subway trains in picture books, it never occurred to me that they had been invented out of practical necessity; I could only suppose that riding underground instead of on the surface must be a novel and delightful pastime. I have been sickly ever since I was a child and have frequently been confined to bed. How often as I lay there I used to think what uninspired decorations sheets and pillow cases make. It wasn’t until I was about twenty that I realized that they actually served a practical purpose, and this revelation of human dullness stirred dark depression in me.

If riding the bus or the subway doesn't incentivize you to improve your station in life, nothing will.

Thank you for inviting me here today " I said my voice sounding nothing like me. "I'm here to testify about things I've seen and experienced myself. I'm here because the human race has become more powerful than ever. We've gone to the moon. Our crops resist diseases and pests. We can stop and restart a human heart. And we've harvested vast amounts of energy for everything from night-lights to enormous super-jets. We've even created new kinds of people, like me. "But everything mankind" - I frowned - "personkind has accomplished has had a price. One that we're all gonna have to pay." I heard coughing and shifting in the audience. I looked down at my notes and all the little black words blurred together on the page. I just could not get through this. I put the speech down picked up the microphone and came out from behind the podium. "Look " I said. "There's a lot of official stuff I could quote and put up on the screen with PowerPoint. But what you need to know what the world needs to know is that we're really destroying the earth in a bigger and more catastrophic was than anyone has ever imagined. "I mean I've seen a lot of the world the only world we have. There are so many awesome beautiful tings in it. Waterfalls and mountains thermal pools surrounded by sand like white sugar. Field and field of wildflowers. Places where the ocean crashes up against a mountainside like it's done for hundreds of thousands of years. "I've also seen concrete cities with hardly any green. And rivers whose pretty rainbow surfaces came from an oil leak upstream. Animals are becoming extinct right now in my lifetime. Just recently I went through one of the worst hurricanes ever recorded. It was a whole lot worse because of huge worldwide climatic changes caused by... us. We the people." .... "A more perfect union While huge corporations do whatever they want to whoever they want and other people live in subway tunnels Where's the justice of that Kids right here in America go to be hungry every night while other people get four-hundred-dollar haircuts. Promote the general welfare Where's the General welfare in strip-mining toxic pesticides industrial solvents being dumped into rivers killing everything Domestic Tranquility Ever sleep in a forest that's being clear-cut You'd be hearing chain saws in your head for weeks. The blessings of liberty Yes. I'm using one of the blessings of liberty right now my freedom of speech to tell you guys who make the laws that the very ground you stand on the house you live in the children you tuck in at night are all in immediate catastrophic danger.

This was my James Bond moment. Except, rather than racing a sports car along a cliffside road overlooking the Mediterranean, we were crammed onto the subway riding the Red Line toward Metro Center Station.

But most of all,” she said, “I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they’re going.

Brody let out a humorless laugh. “You should see the looks you get riding the subway at two a.m. with an eighteen-year-old you just pulled out of a crack house and a seventy-year-old woman in a bathrobe and curlers.

The classroom is a special place. It’s one of the few times a group of different people have to be in the same room. Outside, it’s only strangers in subway rides for a few minutes. It’s rare. We never really know people again.

How many years had her life been only her small, dingy apartment, endless subway rides, and the cramped offices of Classic? Everything on Fifth Avenue was three times brighter and louder, as if someone had turned up a dial on every surface.

I hated being around people, couldn’t pay attention to what anyone was saying, couldn’t talk to clients, couldn’t tag my pieces, couldn’t ride the subway, human activity seemed pointless, incomprehensible, some blackly swarming ant hill in the wilderness, there was not a squeak of light anywhere I looked, the antidepressants I’d been dutifully swallowing for eight weeks hadn’t helped a bit, nor had the ones before that (but then, I’d tried them all; apparently I was among the twenty unfortunates who didn’t get the daisy fields and the butterflies but the Sever Headaches and the Suicidal Thoughts); and though the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying the bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came, things always went black before I could orient myself and there I was again with ink poured in my eyes, guttering around in the dark.

The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren’t emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or a subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode—

Ride hailing does not necessarily mean few total miles driven. On the contrary, it can well mean increased mileage driven, as the accessibility and convenience stimulate more usage of vehicles—fewer people taking the bus or the subway and more people in individual cars, albeit driven by someone else.

Black Mona Lisa My umi's face is the most beautiful in the world Skin like sleeping in on snow days beneath thick blankets black Smile like an eighty-degree summer day in April bright Eyes like long subway rides looking out windows watching nothing and everything go by in the dark and letting my thoughts swim deep

Riding the subway home felt like floating in a bubble. It was a small, encouraging sample of the freedom that existed when I was left to my own wits in New York City. I knew from that experience that if I could get away, I could give myself what really mattered, and I wouldn’t need anyone’s help. From that day forward I knew I could take care of myself.

Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls-Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.

I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they’re going.

dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.

It was all I could do not to fall on my knees and weep like the bastard she always said I was, and I was a breath away from begging her to run away with me. I can’t believe I’m admitting this on tape—I was standing at that table, she hit me with that look of hers, and I swear to God all I wanted to do was grab her hand, press it into my heart and say, “Let’s get the hell out of here.” I was even willing to ride the 6 all the way to Houston Street. No kidding, I was going to take the subway to prove my love. And if she said no, I was going to kidnap her until she agreed to stay.

you were last seen walking through a field of pianos. no. a museum of mouths. in the kitchen of a bustling restaurant, cracking eggs and releasing doves. no. eating glow worms and waltzing past my bedroom. last seen riding the subway, literally, straddling its metal back, clutching electrical cables as reins. you were wearing a dress made out of envelopes and stamps, this was how you travelled. i was the mannequin in the storefront window you could have sworn moved. the library card in the book you were reading until that dog trotted up and licked your face. the cookie with two fortunes. the one jamming herself through the paper shredder, afraid to talk to you. the beggar, hat outstretched bumming for more minutes. the phone number on the bathroom stall with no agenda other than a good time. the good time is a picnic on water, or a movie theatre that only plays your childhood home videos and no one hushes when you talk through them. when they play my videos i throw milk duds at the screen during the scenes i watch myself letting you go – lost to the other side of an elevator – your face switching to someone else’s with the swish of a geisha’s fan. my father could have been a travelling salesman. i could have been born on any doorstep. there are 2,469,501 cities in this world, and a lot of doorsteps. meet me on the boardwalk. i’ll be sure to wear my eyes. do not forget your face. i could never.

I settled down to long sweet sleeps, day-long meditations in the house, writing, and long walks around beloved old Manhattan a half hour subway ride away. I roamed the streets, the bridges, Times Square, cafeterias, the waterfront, I looked up all my poet beatnik friends and roamed with them, I had love affairs with girls in the Village, I did everything with that great mad joy you get when you return to New York City.

She could not picture it. Herself riding on the subway or streetcar, caring for new horses, talking to new people, living among hordes of people every day who were not Clark. A life, a place, chosen for that specific reason––that it would not contain Clark. The strange and terrible thing coming clear to her about that world of the future, as she now pictured it, was that she would not exist there. She would only walk around, and open her mouth and speak, and do this and do that. She would not really be there. And what was strange about it was that she was doing all this, she was riding on this bus in the hope of recovering herself. As Mrs. Jamieson might say––and as she herself might with satisfaction have said––taking charge of her own life. With nobody glowering over her, nobody's mood infecting her with misery. But what would she care about? How would she know that she was alive? While she was running away from him––now––Clark still kept his place in her life. But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place? What else––who else––could ever be so vivid a challenge?

Now the evening's at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there's a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane - before the reverse tide starts to set in. The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Danny's and Lindy's - yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go - and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from - and that's home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: 'New York, New York, it's a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery's down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground. Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it's a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart; and as Johnny Carson's face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. There's a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again. Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. It's an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch; from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it's ever going to get. This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. The blue hours; when guys' nerves get tauter and women's fears get greater. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. And as the windows on the 'Late Show' title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, There's a life that's happening here. ("New York Blues")

But most of all," she said, "I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going. Sometimes I even go to the Fun Parks and ride in the jet cars when they race on the edge of town at midnight and the police don't care as long as they're insured. As long as everyone has ten thousand insurance everyone's happy. Sometimes I sneak around and listen in subways. Or I listen at soda fountains, and do you know what?" "What?" "People don't talk about anything." "Oh, they must!" "No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming-pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else. And most of the time in the cafes they have the jokeboxes on and the same jokes most of the time, or the musical wall lit and all the coloured patterns running up and down, but it's only colour and all abstract. And at the museums, have you ever been? All abstract. That's all there is now.

On the subway ride uptown, I swayed back and forth across from a group of schoolgirls crowded around a single phone, laughing and pointing at whatever was unfolding on the screen. I could already see them fitting into their roles within the group—the smart one, the pretty one, the nervous one. Maybe that was why I had never managed to find a wide group of friends: none of the roles fit. And now that I was older, I wasn’t plastic enough to mold myself into someone else. New York had taught me that I no longer cared if I fit; I preferred to stand out.

If you think i'm letting little red riding hood go into the big bad woods of the east village by herself, you're nuts.'He took hold of my arm and swung me around. 'For one thing, I still owe you eternal servitude for saving my life, remember? And for another, the subway station's that way, stupid.Let's go.

It was strange to read about the people he knew in New York, Ed and Lorraine, the newt-brained girl who had tried to stow herself away in his cabin the day he sailed from New York. It was strange and not at all attractive. What a dismal life they led, creeping around New York, in and out of subways, standing in some dingy bar on Third Avenue for their entertainment,watching television, or even if they had enough money for a Madison Avenue bar or a good restaurant now and then, how dull it all was compared to the worst little trattoria in Venice with its tables of green salads, trays of wonderful cheeses, and its friendly waiters bringing you the best wine in the world! ‘I certainly do envy you sitting there in Venice in an old palazzo!’ Bob wrote. ‘Do you take a lot of gondola rides? How are the girls? Are you getting so cultured you won’t speak to any of us when you come back? How long are you staying, anyway ?

You needn’t think I’m crazy, Eliot—plenty of others have queerer prejudices than this. Why don’t you laugh at Oliver’s grandfather, who won’t ride in a motor? If I don’t like that damned subway, it’s my own business; and we got here more quickly anyhow in the taxi. We’d have had to walk up the hill from Park Street if we’d taken the car.

Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled and other known and unknown there, long sweet summer evening on the tarred roof: leaned back your head to the nightvault swarming with stars the Pleiades broken loose, not seven but thousands every known constellation flinging out fiery threads and you could distinguish all -cobwebs, tendrils, anatomies of stars coherently hammocked, blueblack avenues between… It was New York, the dream-site the lost city the city of dreadful light…we went striding the avenues in our fiery hair in our bodies young and ordinary riding the subways reading or pressed against other bodies feeling in them the maps of Brooklyn Queens Manhattan…

Run. Eat. Drink. Eat more. Don't throw up. Instead, take a piss. Then take a crap. Wipe your butt. Make a phone call. Open a door. Rid your bik. Ride in a car. Ride in a subway. Talk. Talk to people. Read. Read maps. Make maps. Make art. Talk about your art. Sell your art. Take a test. Get into a school. Celebrate. HAve a party. Write a thank-you note to someone. Hug your mom. Kiss your dad. Kiss your little sister. Make out with Noelle. Make out with her more. Touch her. HOld her hand. Take her out somewhere. Meet her friends. Run down a street with her. Take her on a picnic. Eat with her. See a movie with her. See a move with Aaron. Heck, see a movie with Nia, once you're cool with her. Get cool with more people.. Drink coffee in little coffee-drinking places. Tell people your story. Volunteer. Go back to Six North. Walk in as a volunteer and say hi to everyone who waited on you as a patient. Help people. Help people like Bobby. Get people books and music that they want when they're in there. Help people like Muqtada. Show them how to draw. Draw more. Try drawing a landscape. Try drawing a person. Try drawing a naked person. Try drawing Noelle naked. Travel. Fly. Swim. Meet. Love. Dance. Win. Smile. Laugh. Hold. Walk. Skip. Okay, it's gay, whatever, skip. Ski. Sled. Play basketball. Jog. Run. Run. Run. Run home. Run home and enjoy. Enjoy. Take these verbs and enjoy them. They're yours, Craig. You deserved them because you chose them. You could have left the all behind but you chose to stay here. So now live for real, Craig. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live.

What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus. This, too, contradicts some of the most ingrained assumptions we hold about ourselves and each other. We like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner-directed, that who we are and how we act is something permanently set by our genes and our temperament. But if you add up the examples of Salesmen and Connectors, of Paul Revere's ride and Blue's Clues, and the Rule of 150 and the New York subway cleanup and the Fundamental Attribution Error, they amount to a very different conclusion about what it means to be human. We are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us. Taking the graffiti off the walls of New York's subways turned New Yorkers into better citizens. Telling seminarians to hurry turned them into bad citizens. The suicide of a charismatic young Micronesian set off an epidemic of suicides that lasted for a decade. Putting a little gold box in the corner of a Columbia Record Club advertisement suddenly made record buying by mail seem irresistible. To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest details of everyday life. That's why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.

One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever, and the chills—maybe even the cough—precede the major discharge of virus toward other people. Even among some of the superspreaders, in 2003, this seems to have been true. That order of events allowed many SARS cases to be recognized, hospitalized, and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren’t emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or a subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode—not just lucky but salvational.

And to the extent that it can train viewers to laugh at characters’ unending put-downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and the ultimate art-form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naïveté. The well-trained viewer becomes even more allergic to people. Lonelier. Joe B.’s exhaustive TV-training in how to worry about how he might come across, seem to watching eyes, makes genuine human encounters even scarier. But televisual irony has the solution: further viewing begins to seem almost like required research, lessons in the blank, bored, too-wise expression that Joe must learn how to wear for tomorrow’s excruciating ride on the brightly lit subway, where crowds of blank, bored-looking people have little to look at but each other.

But it’s a class-divided society. It’s a rich cultural environment, full of galleries and incredible restaurants and museums and shows. But unless you’re wealthy, the city requires sacrifice to enjoy those things. Unless you are rich, you struggle every day. You grind. You ride the subway for two hours just to work at Starbucks. But there’s also nowhere else to be for professional networking. You can access the movers and shakers. You can be a mover and a shaker if you work hard enough. Just plug yourself into the scene, whatever your scene is. But what ends up happening— or what ended up happening to me— is an unplugging form family life, an unplugging from the things that make you feel whole and rooted. While living in New York, I eventually came to realize that for every good thing about the city, there was also a dark side. We go to New York to make our careers, but we end up stepping over homeless people on the sidewalk on our way to work. Successful New Yorkers can ignore those dark sides, but I could not.

Sometimes when I think about entities—like in “separate entities”—it gets mighty grim. I start thinking, and I nearly go to pieces. …For instance, say you’re riding on the subway. And there are dozens of people in the car. Mere “passengers” you’d have to call them, as a rule. “Passengers” being conveyed from Aoyama 1-chome to Akasakamitsuke. Sometimes, though, it’ll strike you, that each and every one of those passengers is a distinct individual entity. Like, what does this one do? Or why on earth do you suppose that one’s riding the Ginza Line? Or whatever. By then it’s too late. You let it get to you and you’re a goner.

And I've been counting and recounting all the finite experiences that it never seemed to matter at all: riding on a subway, getting sand in my shoes at the beach, being woken up by the sound of a neighbor's barking dog. Because do you ever look at your life and say, hey, how many more times will I ever pack a suitcase for a trip, or write my name with a mechanical pencil, or use a tape measure? Every experience we have, everything is finite. That’s what it is to be human - because everything we do, or don't do but think about doing, is strained through our awareness of limits. Maybe there was some comfort, some beauty, in being a cog where the infinite was feasible.

Hoping to settle the wheelchair matter once and for all, Graham dragged his chief of construction, his chief of architecture, and a film crew out to Dulles Airport, whose escalators were approximately the same width as those planned for Metro. There he produced a variety of braces and crutches. As the cameras rolled, Graham rode up and down the escalators using one aid after another, climaxing by riding both directions in a wheelchair, facing up each time. Graham clearly believed he had proved beyond doubt that 'it is entirely possible, easily and safely, for wheelchair travelers to use escalators.' His aides watched in disbelief; a fit and fearless major general in his fifties hardly represented the disabled population, whatever braces he strapped to his legs. All he had proved, concluded the WMATA architect Sprague Thresher, was that 'if everybody who had to use a wheelchair was Jack Graham, we wouldn't need elevators.

Hell and Heaven are states of being, not destinations. They are worlds we carry within. Don't expect to find angels and demons -- not in the way you've envisioned them. As God is called Allah, so Man is called Monster. Don't be fooled by titles. Call a skunk a rose and it will continue to reek. Hydras do not crawl out from between the weatherworn pages of fairytale anthologies. On the contrary, they ride the subway and order food at the local drive-through and enjoy stolen kisses at the cinema. Only one head is visible to the naked eye. They tend to avoid reflective surfaces. Each head is a sin: each belch of fire is a sin put to action. But you should know that the shadows differ. There may be seven heads, or three, or one. Those with one head are particularly tricky. Who's to say if they're human or hydra? You'd have to kiss them, bite them. You would know them by their mouth. The name of their sin is tattooed on the inside of their bottom lip, so they can lick and taste its sweetness.

The televisor is ‘real.’ It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense!’ ” “Only the ‘family’ is ‘people.’ ” “I beg pardon?” “My wife says books aren’t ‘real.’ ” “Thank God for that. You can shut them, say, ‘Hold on a moment.’ You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV parlor? It grows you any shape it wishes! It is an environment as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth. Books can be beaten down with reason. But with all my knowledge and skepticism, I have never been able to argue with a one-hundred-piece symphony orchestra, full color, three dimensions, and being in and part of those incredible parlors. As you see, my parlor is nothing but four plaster walls. And here.” He held out two small rubber plugs. “For my ears when I ride the subway jets.

This vivid ten-second image would come to him without warning and without consideration of either time or place. He could be riding on the subway or writing formulas on the blackboard or having a meal or (as now) sitting and talking to someone across a table, and it would envelop him like a soundless tsunami. By the time he noticed, it would be directly in front of him, and his arms and legs would be paralyzed. The flow of time stopped. The air grew thin, and he had trouble breathing. He lost all connection with the people and things around him. The tsunami’s liquid wall swallowed him whole. And though it felt to him as if the world were being closed off in darkness, he experienced no loss of awareness. It was just a sense of having been switched to a new track. Parts of his mind were, if anything, sharpened by the change. He felt no terror, but he could not keep his eyes open. His eyelids were clamped shut. Sounds grew distant, and the familiar image was projected onto the screen of his consciousness again and again. Sweat gushed from every part of his body and the armpits of his undershirt grew damp. He trembled all over, and his heartbeat grew faster and louder.

Sometimes while I ride the subway I try to look at each person and imagine what they look like to someone who is totally in love with them. I think everyone has had someone look at them that way, whether it was a lover, or a parent, or a friend, whether they know it or not. It's a wonderful thing, to look at someone to whom I would never be attracted and think about what looking at them feels like to someone who is devouring every part of their image, who has invisible strings that are connected to this person tied to every part of their body. I think this fun pastime is a way of cultivating compassion. It feels good to think about people that way, and to use that part of my mind that I think is traditionally reserved for a tiny portion of people I'll meet in my life to appreciate the general public. I wish I thought about people like this more often. I think it's the opposite of what our culture teaches us to do. We prefer to pick people apart to find their flaws. Cultivating these feelings of love or appreciation for random people, and even for people I don't like, makes me a more forgiving and appreciative person toward myself and people I love. Also, it's just a really excellent pastime.

The Mother’s Prayer for Its Daughter First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither the Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches. May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty. When the Crystal Meth is offered, May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half And stick with Beer. Guide her, protect her When crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age. Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels. What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit. May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers. Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For Childhood is short—a Tiger Flower blooming Magenta for one day— And Adulthood is long and Dry-Humping in Cars will wait. O Lord, break the Internet forever, That she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers And the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed. And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it. And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, That I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back. “My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes. Amen

Mullaney often took the subway to visit the client. His ride sometimes coincided with the end of the school day;

I've looked for salvation in love, friends, work, theater, filmmaking, writing, books and myself. It is a struggle. I've been saved in little and big ways. I wish my mother would find happiness while I'm here to see it. Waiting is what I fear. That's what I realized on a subway ride from a visit to my mom and aunt. I'm not scared of ending up like my aunt as much as I'm scared of spending my whole life existing in that passive position. Every time they ask me about marriage,I feel my own answer to myself: If I'm not waiting, I have to find the courage to make something happen.

Sometimes, down in the subway, a train Maxine's riding on will slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in the darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of the other train move slowly past, the lighted panels appear one by one, like a series of fortune-telling cards being deal and slid in front of her. The Scholar, The Unhoused, The Warrior Thief, The Haunted Woman... After a while Maxine has come to understand that the faces framed in these panels are precisely those out of all the city millions she must in the hour be paying most attention to, in particular those whose eyes actually meet her own - they are the day's messengers from whatever the Beyond has for a Third World, where the days are assembled one by one under non-union conditions. Each messenger carrying the props required for their character, shopping bags, books, musical instruments, arrived here out of darkness, bound again into darkness, with only a minute to deliver the intelligence Maxine needs. At some point naturally she begins to wonder if she might not be performing the same role for some face looking back out another window at her.

Now, why was diagonal cutting better than cutting straight across? Because the corner of a triangularly cut slice gave you an ideal first bite. In the case of rectangular toast, you had to angle the shape into your mouth, as you angle a big dresser through a hall doorway: you had to catch one corner of your mouth with one corner of the toast and then carefully turn the toast, drawing the mouth open with it so that its other edge could clear; only then did you chomp down. Also, with a diagonal slice, most of the tapered bite was situated right up near the front of your mouth, where you wanted it to be as you began to chew; with the rectangular slice, a burdensome fraction was riding out of control high on the dome of the tongue. One subway stop before mine, I concluded that there had been logic behind the progress away from the parallel and toward the diagonal cut, and that the convention was not, as it might first have appeared, merely an affection of short-order cooks.

And wasn't it terrible, how much he looked forward to those moments, so much so that sometimes even a ride by himself on the subway was the best part of the day? Wasn't it terrible that after all the work one put into finding a person to spend one's life with, after making a family with that person, even in spite of missing that person, as Amit missed Megan night after night, that solitude was what one relished most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane?

On the subway… I dug a man digging on me But the dude was hung up in a mass of confusion As to who I was He thought he was trying to see But you see, but you see Me knowing me Black, proud, and determined to be free Could plainly see my enemy Yes, yes Yes, I know him! I once slaved for him body and soul And made him a pile of black gold Off the sweat of my labor he stole But his game, his game is old! We broke in the mental hole Things must change There's no limit to our range He can never understand The new black man Lest alone see us everyday Riding the subway... 8th Ave, 7th Ave, 6th Ave, I-N-D, B-M-Z, I-R-T He still hasn't dug me! He stares endlessly Blinking Blink Blink Blink Blink He's on the brink About to sink I ask you Shall I save him? Can he be saved? NO! Next stop, 125th street... "On The Subway" by the Last Poets

Just because we talk slow doesn't mean we think slow, others point out. On the East Coast they seem to think there's something funny about riding around in a pickup truck. Well in the Deep South, we don't think it's all that natural to hurdle through the dark in a crowded subway.

Mom said fourteen wasn’t old enough to ride the subway alone.

Among the reasons he and others have cited for the blindness of the affluent is the fact that they are less and less likely to share spaces and services with the poor. As public schools and other public services deteriorate, those who can afford to do so send their children to private schools and spend their off-hours in private spaces—health clubs, for example, instead of the local park. They don’t ride on public buses and subways. They withdraw from mixed neighborhoods into distant suburbs, gated communities, or guarded apartment towers; they shop in stores that, in line with the prevailing “market segmentation,” are designed to appeal to the affluent alone.

I want to disrupt what's thought of as the default public radio voice. I want to challenge listeners as they ride the subway, jog on their treadmills, and drive on their commute. Even if the sounds and words we create might require greater concentration and attention, I believe our stories are worth the effort.

Aykroyd was happy to let Belushi take the public heat: John loved it; Danny hated it. Danny had a talent for projecting an aura of anonymity that deflected the glances of passers-by, and as a result he was the only cast member who continued regularly to ride the subways and walk the streets unrecognized at the height of his fame. He kept a shield around himself that was all but impenetrable. When a production assistant put his address and phone number on a staff list once, he angrily confronted her and forced her to redo it, leaving his whereabouts blank. He alone among the performers never let publicist Les Slater interview him for an official NBC bio. He’d promise to do it but would always beg off, saying he was too busy. He was articulate with the press, but he talked to reporters only a few times in the four years he spent on Saturday Night.

For Trillin, the bicycle easily beat the alternatives. Millions rode the subways, “most of them,” he quipped, “quivering from anger at the experience.” The buses, and the calculus involved in figuring out where they stopped, where they were headed, and which numbers corresponded to which routes, were an “uncrackable code.” Taxis needed to be found and hailed, were increasingly expensive, and worst of all, were driven by editorializing cabbies. “I ride my Moulton. While I’m on it, nobody yammers at me about how that movie star Lindsay is giving away everything to the blacks,” Trillin wrote. “Some people look at me and smile, and some bus drivers try to run over me, but I can handle that sort of thing. People who ride bikes in New York tend to be particularly independent.”15

In this city of New York, I see children crying from tiredness, which is real, and sometimes from just crabbiness, which is real. But once in a while I see a child crying with the deepest of desperation, and I think it is one of the truest sounds a child can make... I have left the subway car I was riding in so i did not have to hear a child crying that way.

Not through the fast-firing synapses of social media, because I am difficult to find on those channels. I am no one of note, and no one would particularly want to follow me, this stale thirty-nine-year-old woman. I lead a simple life now, riding the subway to my office and my classroom at an unremarkable local college. And then, back in the evenings to my silent apartment.

(There was even a small Metro line in one of them, though it only ran a block and was more like a children’s theme park ride than a subway.)

Wall Street is the only place peple ride in a limo to take advice from people who ride in a subway.

Not only did he see his own thoughts as objects rising and falling, but he could see the thoughts of others too, which disturbed him. He vowed to no longer ride on crowded subway cars, where the greatest concentration of negative, hateful and suicidal thoughts are to be found.

This mechanism worked great when we needed to escape saber-toothed tigers thousands of years ago, but it’s considerably less helpful when it’s triggered while stuck in traffic or riding on the subway.

I got a cab to Camp Rogers with two other Ranger hopefuls. It was amusing to watch the other soldiers’ faces when the cab pulled up with me already in it. The two young men initially waved off the driver, insisting they were headed to Ranger School and couldn’t be delayed by my destination. The cabby happily informed them, “She’s going to Ranger School as well!” For a second, the two just stood there, looking at a strange woman eating a Subway sandwich in their ride to Ranger School. Cognitive dissonance at its finest.

The world is a place where, when push comes to shove, nearly everyone shoves. This maxim can easily be put to the test by riding a crowded subway train during the height of the morning rush hour.

It's not rush hour but the subway is still full, horizontal sardines packed together from Penn Station onwards, and I wonder whether anyone on board can tell that I have no destination. Here for the ride.

Get ready for the shortest subway ride in the world,” Senator Rachel Webster joked as the doors slid open and they stepped on board.

The truth was she had never had one--not with anyone, not even with herself. Maybe she was a late bloomer, but she had never tried when she was young. She lost her virginity before she had really gotten to know her own body. She had tried to touch herself a few times after the seizure incident, but she had mostly felt uncomfortable and numb down there, SO she had quickly given up. Sex since had been about validation and power for her, rarely physical pleasure. She felt no closer to having an orgasm with a man inside her than she did riding the subway. Her body, she had decided, was defective. She couldn't even drink alcohol like a normal person, let alone come like one. All her body knew how to do well was betray her.

I help her into the cab with a hand at the small of her back and slide in behind her. She rattles off an address, but I can’t see her lips in the darkness. Her few miles feel like twenty, and I watch the cab rate go up and up and up. I am not sure how much money I have in my wallet. Shit. This is bad. “Next time, let’s take the subway,” I toss out. I scrub a hand down my face. “Not at this time of the night,” she scoffs. “I’d keep you safe.” I tip her chin up. “The Emily who left here was fearless. What happened?” “The Emily that left here was dirt poor. I didn’t have any choice but to ride the subway at all hours of the night. Now I don’t have to.

Today, it’s not even about trying to figure out what to say, but it’s about responding to the needs of people—no matter what those needs might be. Even if it’s just to be entertained for a few minutes while waiting in a line, riding the subway or sitting in a lobby.

He was gone. Two months now. Disappeared like last night’s dream, taking all the dopey fun and leaving the bereft confusion. Reducing Jav to pathetic walk-bys that invariably ended in disappointment and a bummed-out subway ride home. An abandoned toy lamenting, Don’t you love me anymore?

She's beautiful. She's the only woman - I've told you this, right? -Naturelle is the only woman I fantasize about after sleeping with her. I still do. Sometimes I'm riding the subway and all I can think about is getting home and getting her naked. p125

The city’s garment industry thrived on cheap immigrant labor and inexpensive transit services. But the combination of rapidly increasing ridership and insufficient funding for the subways created a problem that raised the ire of numerous civic groups in the mid-1920s. A leader of the Metropolitan Housewives’ League pointed out “the inhuman, indecent, and dangerous crowding and jamming of passengers, the unclean trains and platforms, and especially the conditions of the public waiting and toilet rooms which are filthy, unsanitary and disease breeding.” Likewise, the City Club of New York told city officials, “We do not get a civilized ride for a nickel today. We get instead a chance to hang on, like a chimpanzee, to a flying ring suspended from the roof of the car while we are crushed to the point of indecency by our fellow sufferers.

Two eleven-year-olds riding the subway alone?

The 1991-92 trial of Hulon Mitchell, leader of the black, Miami-based Yahweh sect, brought to light what may be some of the most shocking antiwhite murders ever committed in the United States—but they remained mainly local news. Mr. Mitchell’s cult was based on a theory of the white man as devil, which he spread in various ways. One was to show cult members—men, women, and children alike—the vilest possible pornographic videos of white women having sex with animals or black men. He would call the woman “Miss Ann” and claim that her degradation proved she was a she-devil. He also gave a regular course in hatred of whites, which came to be known as the Killing Class. “How many of you would bring back a white head?” he would ask, and everyone would raise his hand. He would then shout, “One day, Yahweh is going to kill the white devil off the planet. We’re going to catch him and we’re going to kill him wherever we find him. All over America, white heads are going to roll!”311 A number of Yahweh sect members were ordered by Mr. Mitchell to seek out and kill white devils—and they did as they were told. Robert Rozier, a former Yahweh sect member and onetime professional football player, testified in January 1992 that he killed three “white devils” on instructions from Mr. Mitchell. It made no difference whom he killed as long as his victims were white. The first two “white devils” were Mr. Rozier’s roommates. However, Mr. Mitchell would not acknowledge these killings because Mr. Rozier failed to bring back the heads as proof. When it was pointed out that it was awkward to be seen walking about Miami with a human head, Mr. Mitchell relaxed the requirements and said he would be satisfied with an ear. Mr. Rozier took to riding the subways with a twelve-inch sword, looking for “white devils” to kill. When he finally got his man, he brought back an ear as a trophy. All told, members of the sect appear to have killed at least seven different “white devils,” beginning in 1986, and ears or fingers were usually brought in as proof of a mission accomplished. Sect members also killed several blacks, but they were apostates and other sworn enemies. The sect killed white people out of pure racial hatred.

Keep your eyes clean and your ears quiet and your mind serene. Breathe God’s air. Work, if you can, under His sky. But if you have to live in a city and work among machines and ride in the subways and eat in a place where the radio makes you deaf with spurious news and where the food destroys your life and the sentiments of those around you poison your heart with boredom, do not be impatient, but accept it as the love of God and as a seed of solitude planted in your soul. If you are appalled by those things, you will keep your appetite for the healing silence of recollection. But meanwhile—keep your sense of compassion for the men who have forgotten the very concept of solitude. You, at least, know that it exists, and that it is the source of peace and joy. You can still hope for such joy. They do not even hope for it any more.

We were entering New York City now, via some highway that cut across the Bronx. Unfamiliar territory for me. I am a Manhattan boy; I know only the subways. Can’t even drive a car. Highways, autos, gas stations, tollbooths—artifacts out of a civilization with which I’ve had only the most peripheral contact. In high school, watching the kids from the suburbs pouring into the city on weekend dates, all of them driving, with golden-haired shikses next to them on the seat: not my world, not my world at all. Yet they were only sixteen, seventeen years old, the same as I. They seemed like demigods to me. They cruised the Strip from nine o’clock to half past one, then drove back to Larchmont, to Lawrence, to Upper Montclair, parking on some tranquil leafy street, scrambling with their dates into the back seat, white thighs flashing in the moonlight, the panties coming down, the zipper opening, the quick thrust, the grunts and groans. Whereas I was riding the subways, West Side I.R.T. That makes a difference in your sexual development. You can’t ball a girl in the subway. What about doing it standing up in an elevator, rising to the fifteenth floor on Riverside Drive? What about making it on the tarry roof of an apartment house, 250 feet above West End Avenue, bulling your way to climax while pigeons strut around you, criticizing your technique and clucking about the pimple on your ass? It’s another kind of life, growing up in Manhattan. Full of shortcomings and inconve-niences that wreck your adolescence. Whereas the lanky lads with the cars can frolic in four-wheeled motels. Of course, we who put up with the urban drawbacks develop compensating complexities. We have richer, more interesting souls, force-fed by adversity. I always separate the drivers from the nondrivers in drawing up my categories of people. The Olivers and the Timothys on the one hand, the Elis on the other. By rights Ned belongs with me, among the nondrivers, the thinkers, the bookish introverted tormented deprived subway riders. But he has a driver’s license. Yet one more example of his perverted nature.

The permanence of my impermanence. I stand in possession of it. I stand before him at the entrance to a subway station, in possession of nothing but myself. Myself is everything, I want to tell him. But to him it is nothing, because that's how he feels about himself right now. He is alone, and so he is nothing. How do I explain to him that what applies to him does not apply to me? His context is not my context. How do you blow up the bus you've been forced to ride your entire life? It wasn't your fault there were no other means of transportation available.

But other scenes pay off, including a heart-clutching moment when an infected Felix, riding the subway, spots a man who is sicker than he is: skeletal, coated in lesions, a vision flashing in and out as lights flicker. The movie is at its best when it’s capturing this horror-film quality of the period, the physical vulnerability that the poet Thom Gunn wrote about so beautifully in his poem “The Man with Night Sweats”: the fruitless wish that “hands were enough / to hold an avalanche off.

But most of all," she said, "I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going. Sometimes I even go to the Fun Parks and ride in the jet cars when they race on the edge of town at midnight and the police don't care as long as they're insured. As long as everyone has ten thousand insurance everyone's happy. Sometimes I sneak around and listen in subways. Or I listen at soda fountains, and do you know what?" "What?" "People don't talk about anything." "Oh, they must!" "No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming-pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else. And most of the time in the cafes they have the jokeboxes on and the same jokes most of the time, or the musical wall lit and all the coloured patterns running up and down, but it's only colour and all abstract. And at the museums, have you ever been? All abstract. That's all there is now.

This is the part that's going to be hard to explain: How can I tell you why two people who were afraid of everything—other people, open places, noise, confusion, life itself—wound up riding the subways alone under Manhattan late at night? Okay, it's like this: When everything is unfamiliar and scary, your heart pounds just getting change from the grocery cashier. That feels like enough to kill you right there. So the danger of the subways at night can't be much worse. All danger begins to fall into the same category. You have no way to sink any deeper into fear. Besides,

Looking back, I see all those subway rides, all that motion, as an attempt to gather lemon drops. My twisted logic went like this: I didn’t have any lemon drops, and therefore felt exhausted and depleted and constantly battled migraines, because I wasn’t doing enough. The answer, therefore, was simple: Do more, faster.

I think about what makes us lonely on a recent subway ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan. As the train hurtles over the Manhattan Bridge, the subway car is silent, save for the muffled beats of a pop song. A woman up front is reading a book, and a few commuters are dozing. The rest of us are glued to our devices: heads bent, earbuds in, fingers scrolling. The trains sputters and then stops completely mid-bridge; plugged into our own curated digital landscapes, no one looks up. What was once a period of contemplation, boredom, small talk, confrontations, maybe even some light flirting, has been replaced by screens. In addition to filling the blank spaces in our day, our phones double as a crutch to “lean on when we are socially anxious or uncomfortable,” says Julia Bainbridge, a freelance writer and editor, who, in 2016, launched The Lonely Hour, a podcast dedicated to exploring the condition. The world is unpredictable, but our screens provide a convenient buffer against the possibility of spontaneous human interaction.

We was just kids, we did kid stuff. And we didn’t have things to do like people in the city. We couldn’t catch the bus to the beach or the movies or hang out in big shopping malls. We had to ride everywhere or shanks it. Go for a milkshake at the roadhouse, check out the tip. Because there was no KFC or Subway. We’d walk along the highway looking for eagle feathers.

were predominately limited to a gas station and unfruitful real estate investments. Unfortunately none of his personal financial ventures during this early period of his marriage were successful. However, It was during this time that Buffet began teaching night courses at the University of Omaha, a feat that would not have been possible for the naturally shy and humble Buffett if it were not for a public speaking course he took at Dale Carnegie University, a degree that Buffett still credits as being the most beneficial to his professional life. “Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls-Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.

There is a subway; it’s like an illuminated coffin on skis — under the ground and musty, and one is squashed. That is what I ride on. It’s interesting and it travels fast.

...dignity demands that we, as rational apes, reject delusions, including comforting delusions, in favor of the truth. And it is a comforting delusion to think that every time a beautiful woman sits down across from you on the subway, destiny is trying to bring you happiness. Destiny does not manifest itself in the form of chance encounters with beautiful women. Destiny manifests itself, always, the the form of hobbyhorses, pet phrases, pet cats, nose-picking, and credit card debt. In other words, your destiny has been riding across from you on the subway for much, much longer than you can ever imagine. Beautiful strangers do not each represent a new form of happiness. Beautiful strangers are like everybody else--dull, demanding, violent, and malodorous. So when a beautiful woman sits across the aisle, dignity condemns action and demands silence. Because--when you fail to say hello to a beautiful stranger on the subway, you have triumphantly avoided yet another form of --human misery.

chief was an exception. He was a career prosecutor. He’d taken the subway to law school and now was riding the rails toward Main Justice. A hard case who trusted nobody. In that respect, we were alike. “Fucking you would be fucking myself,” I said. He eyeballed me, parsing my obscenities. I understood his concern. Was I expressing a shared worry . . . or mocking him? “We’re in this together,” I said. “I want this to happen as much as you do.” “I bet you do.

The experience of riding in a subway or elevator calls to mind Bertrand Russell's remark that much of modern anxiety stems from the time we spend in unnatural proximity to strangers without the preliminary sniffing that is instinctive in animals, including us.