Subway Station Quotes

Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.

And I told him, I said: "One day you're going to miss the subway because it's not going to come. One of these days, it's going to break down and it's not going to come around and everyone else will just wait for the next one or will take the bus, or walk, or run to the next station: they will go on with their lives. And you're not going to be able to go on with your life! You'll be standing there, in the subway station, staring at the tube. Why? Because you think that everything has to happen perfectly and on time and when you think it's going to happen! Well guess what! That's not how things happen! And you'll be the only one who's not going to be able to go on with life, just because your subway broke down. So you know what, you've got to let go, you've got to know that things don't happen the way you think they're going to happen, but that's okay, because there's always the bus, there's always the next station...you can always take a cab.

Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind. It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself. In reality, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.

Wonderful, Annabeth thought. Her own mother, the most levelheaded Olympian, was reduced to a raving, vicious scatterbrain in a subway station. And, of all the gods who might help them, the only ones not affected by the Greek-Roman schism seemed to be Aphrodite, Nemesis and Dionysus. Love, revenge, wine. Very helpful.

I envy the music lovers hear. I see them walking hand in hand, standing close to each other in a queue at a theater or subway station, heads touching while they sit on a park bench, and I ache to hear the song that plays between them: The stirring chords of romance's first bloom, the stately airs that whisper between a couple long in love. You can see it in the way they look at each other... you can almost hear it. Almost, but not quite, because the music belongs to them and all you can have of it is a vague echo that rises up from the bittersweet murmur and shuffle of your own memories.

If only life were more on the scale of Orlando Bloom taking down the giant Oliphaunt in The Return of the King rather than the usual, tedious mall-crawl with the Abercrombie crowd! We often wish the daily grind held a greater resemblance to all those fantasy worlds we’ve come to love, don’t we? In our more desperate moments, we’re tempted to walk smack into pillars at subway stations, just to see if we end up at Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. And which of us, at some point in our not-so-distant childhood (yes, let’s be honest!), hasn’t pushed aside the coats in a closet, hoping to find an entrance to another world?

Anyone who has ridden the subway twice a day to earn their bread knows how it goes: When you board, you exhibit the same persona you use with your colleagues and acquaintances. You've carried it through the turnstile and past the sliding doors, so that your fellow passengers can tell who you are - cocky or cautious, amorous or indifferent, loaded or on the dole. But you find yourself a seat and the train gets under way; it comes to one station and then another; people get off and others get on. And under the influence of the cradlelike rocking of the train, your carefully crafted persona begins to slip away. The super-ego dissolves as your mind begins to wander aimlessly over your cares and your dreams; or better yet, it drifts into ambient hypnosis, where even cares and dreams recede and the peaceful silence of the cosmos pervades.

We've done so much together, wherever I go and whatever I see, I think of you. Newborn babies; the pattern on the plate that you can see under a paper-thin slice of sashimi; fireworks in August. The moon hidden behind the clouds over the ocean at night. When I'm sitting down someplace, inadvertently stepping on someone's toes, and have to apologize. And when someone picks up something I've dropped, and I thank him. When I see an elderly man tottering along,and wonder how much longer he has to live. Dogs and cats peeking out from alleyways. A beautiful view from a tall building. The warm blast of air you feel when you go down into a subway station. The phone ringing in the middle of the night. Even when I have crushes on other men, I always see you in the curve of their eyebrows." "Yet I must remain calm, detached. It's a little like trying to ignore a plate of delicious food when you're really hungry. When it beckons you, there's no problem with enjoying the aroma and appreciating it with your eyes, but at some point you have to separate yourself and realize, like a professional waiter does, that it's not your own. It's my job to ignore those plates heaped with delicious morsels and just carry them where they need to go.

Let these men sing out their songs, they've been walking all day long, all their fortune's spent and gone... silver dollar in the subway station; quarters for the papers for the jobs.

I didn't understand the war. It was new, and they all said it would be there for a long time, but where it was, exactly, was one of the things I didn't understand. It seemed to be out-of-doors, and that was why we had the blackout curtains, so that we didn't have to look at it at night–or it didn't have to look at us, perhaps. Yet on some nights we sat on the balcony and watched searchlights play across the dark sky, and that had to do with the war, too. So the war was in the sky, somehow. And it was there in the daytime, though I was not sure where. It was why sometimes, during school, whistles blew, and we had to run to the subway station.

Anyway, I think Florence and I noticed each other before the local train screeched to a halt at the 110th Street station, because as I boarded it felt as though we were supposed to step into the same car, and hold onto the same moist metal bar. My wishful hunch now seems confirmed by the way she's reading her Time magazine article next to me.

It seems to me there are things we should have talked about. Like, what happens if you think you've found the love of your life, but you notice, whenever you go into the city together, that he walks ahead of you in the subway station, and doesn't look behind for you until after he's gotten on the subway? And what if you find yourself wishing you did not have to tell him to wait for you? What if being with him starts to mean having to say those things..."Honey, what for me?" And you start to resent him making you do that in order to keep him walking by your side?

Every now and then I picture a subway train at night packed with people I used to know and random people whom I will meet by chance in some distant future. Most of the people I knew a long time ago now live their lives without me, and those whom I will meet by chance one day do not know me now. They walk by apathetically, their faces gloomy beneath the dim lights of the city hall subway station, jostling my shoulders as they pass.

It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me, and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm, and so I told him I’d have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.

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.

Bugis Street, once famous for its transvestite prostitutes - the sort of place where one could have imagined Noel Coward, ripped on opium, cocaine and the local tailoring, just off his rickshaw for a night of high buggery - had, when it proved difficult to suppress, a subway station dropped on top of it.

Now the situation is different, I admit: I have a wristwatch, I compare the angle of its hands with the angle of all the hands I see; I have an engagement book where the hours of my business appointments are marked down; I have a chequebook on whose stubs I add and subtract numbers. At Penn Station I get off the train, I take the subway, I stand and grasp the strap with one hand to keep my balance while I hold the newspaper up in the other, folded so I can glance over the figures of the stock market quotations: I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there's an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpretation of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles.

In 1979 the New York Times reported that in many {New York Subway} stations, the signs are so confusing that one is tempted to wish they were not there at all - a wish that is, in fact, granted in numerous stations and on all too many of the subway cars themselves.

So Kiku has figured out a way to be alone in the city. All you have to do is stand at the end of the subway platform and scream as the train comes into the station.

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

I loved the abandoned subway stations, rushing past the darkened platforms, the sprawl of graffiti like old letters. Letters left by ghosts.

The other day, I had a thought about something, and as is now my reflex, I reached for my phone to tweet it. And I don’t know what stopped me—maybe I was heading down into a subway station or something—but for some reason, I stopped. I thought: this thought will have to stay inside my head, unexpressed. A feeling of calm washed over me. It was the first time I’d done that since late 2006.

She wasn’t broken. She was made up of a thousand tiny little cracks. She was always trying to keep herself glued together. But it was hard, she felt too much. No matter what she did, her emotions seeped through, sometimes in drips, other times in floods, She felt everything, the heaviness of the clouds right before rain, the rush of the subway cars as they left the station, the feeling of goodbye as she watched someone walk away, wondering if it was the last time she would see them, the feeling of a kiss lingering on her cheek for hours. She felt the loneliness of the sun as it hung in the sky, shedding light on the day, without companion. And she longed to give as much as the sun. If she could brighten someone’s day, bestow warmth were there was cold, make someone smile, give someone hope, then for a minute, an hour, maybe even a day, the cracks would fill with love and the pain would become only a voice, reminding her that her pain was important. She knew how fragile life was, how hard, and how precious. She wanted to feel it all.

There were marches, of course, a lot of women and some men. But they were smaller than you might have thought. I guess people were scared. And when it was known that the police, or the army, or whoever they were, would open fire almost as soon as any of the marches even started, the marches stopped. A few things were blown up, post offices, subway stations. But you couldn't even be sure who was doing it. It could have been the army, to justify the computer searches and the other ones, the door-to-doors.

And when it was known that the police, or the army, or whoever they were, would open fire almost as soon as any of the marches even started, the marches stopped. A few things were blown up, post offices, subway stations. But you couldn’t even be sure who was doing it.

So if I tell you I want to re-do our senior year in one day…to go ice-skating at Rockefeller Center and let you get to second base like two teenagers…” I erased the gap between us, kissing a sliver of his exposed neck, and his breath stilled. “And go eat at P.J. Clarke’s and move to third base in the bathroom…” I rasped the words against his hot flesh and dragged my eyes up to meet his stormy ones. “And end the day at a Broadway show where I’d do something very inappropriate under your seat…” We melted into each other, and sure enough, I felt the swelling in his slacks getting bigger against my stomach. “You’d say…no?” His face was the funniest thing on earth as it moved from surprised to eager, then finally to turned on. “Fuck,” he muttered, pressing his hard cock against me. From the outside, it must’ve looked like we were sharing the dirtiest hug ever. “I’m about to go ice-skating for a hand job, and I’m not even sixteen anymore.” “You’re totally going on a day date,” I joked. He rolled his eyes but followed me back outside and into the nearest subway station, buttoning his pea coat to cover the massive bulge between his legs. “Lead the way.

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.

Do I exist in the same physical space as other people? Can I really seek joy and pleasure together with them? Why does the path become narrower the further I walk down it? Why is every place I go to a cliff? Self-pity pins me down like a boulder, and I struggle with it until I arrive at the subway station.

THE CITY WAS ASLEEP. New York, the nervous, keyed-up city, was almost at rest two hours past midnight. Watching the sleeping stone under the quiet sky, the mind might know that there were still people laughing in night clubs, trucks and taxis still speeding through streets and avenues, swift subways underground still thundering into lighted stations.

America is a leap of the imagination. From its beginning, people had only a persistent idea of what a good country should be. The idea involved freedom, equality, justice, and the pursuit of happiness; nowadays most of us probably could not describe it a lot more clearly than that. The truth is, it always has been a bit of a guess. No one has ever known for sure whether a country based on such an idea is really possible, but again and again, we have leaped toward the idea and hoped. What SuAnne Big Crow demonstrated in the Lead high school gym is that making the leap is the whole point. The idea does not truly live unless it is expressed by an act; the country does not live unless we make the leap from our tribe or focus group or gated community or demographic, and land on the shaky platform of that idea of a good country which all kinds of different people share. This leap is made in public, and it's made for free. It's not a product or a service that anyone will pay you for. You do it for reasons unexplainable by economics--for ambition, out of conviction, for the heck of it, in playfulness, for love. It's done in public spaces, face-to-face, where anyone is free to go. It's not done on television, on the Internet, or over the telephone; our electronic systems can only tell us if the leap made elsewhere has succeeded or failed. The places you'll see it are high school gyms, city sidewalks, the subway, bus stations, public parks, parking lots, and wherever people gather during natural disasters. In those places and others like them, the leaps that continue to invent and knit the country continue to be made. When the leap fails, it looks like the L.A. riots, or Sherman's March through Georgia. When it succeeds, it looks like the New York City Bicentennial Celebration in July 1976 or the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963. On that scale, whether it succeeds or fails, it's always something to see. The leap requires physical presence and physical risk. But the payoff--in terms of dreams realized, of understanding, of people getting along--can be so glorious as to make the risk seem minuscule.

One Saturday, he had gone to take the subway to Pennsylvania Station en route for the Soviet week-end rest camp at Glen Cove, the former Morgan estate on Long Island.

Since interviewing Mr Toyoda, every time I’m on the subway I look very carefully at all the station attendants. They really do have a tough job.

The subways, to my eyes, are a godsend: efficient, they get me where I want to go pretty quickly, they provide entertainment, sometimes via musicians who perform at station platforms, sometimes through the singing panhandlers who traipse through the cars, and most important, they are a stay against solipsism, proof positive that I am not alone in the universe.

In the train station, people were drinking coffee and reading newspapers. I felt glad to see that life was going on—actual life, where people were working and staying awake and trying to accomplish things, which was the point of coffee. There was a poem with that mood by Pasternak: “Don’t sleep, don’t sleep, artist.” It sounded better in Russian, because the word for “artist” had three syllables, it was an amphibrach, like “spaghetti,” or “appendix.” Don’t sleep, don’t sleep, gorilla, I thought as I went down the elevator to the subway platform.

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.

In the subway the trains move so swiftly you can never catch your breath. Outside the grimy window that’s a reflecting surface like a mirror mostly there are the rushing tunnel walls, that slow as the train slows for a station, and the doors open with a pneumatic hiss like the sigh of a great ugly beast, and passengers lurch off, and new passengers lurch on, and I lift my eyes hopeful and yearning Who will be my destiny? Which one of you?

I was thinking earlier that to know this city you must first become penniless, because pennilessness (real pennilessness, I mean not having $2 for the subway) forces you to walk everywhere and you see the city best on foot.

I hit my favorite caffeine supplier near the subway station and get myself a big, fat triple-shotter. I need coffee like air this morning. Even with the muscle relaxants and alcohol, I didn’t sleep well. I kept having dreams that Max was in bed with me, all hard and warm and smelling like a spring orchard, touching me like I was precious and making me feel like I could do anything as long as he was by my side. It was the closest thing to a nightmare I’ve had in years.

At the subway station you wait fifteen minutes on the platform for a train. Finally a local, enervated by graffiti, shuffles into the station. You get a seat and hoist a copy of the New York Post. The Post is the most shameful of your several addictions. You hate to support this kind of trash with your thirty cents, but you are a secret fan of Killer Bees, Hero Cops, Sex Fiends, Lottery Winners, Teenage Terrorists, Liz Taylor, Tough Tots, Sicko Creeps, Living Nightmares, Life on Other Planets, Spontaneous Human Combustion, Miracle Diets and Coma Babies.

On the way to Wall Street this morning, due to gridlock I had to get out of the company car and was walking down Fifth Avenue to find a subway station when I passed what I thought was a Halloween parade, which was disorienting since I was fairly sure this was May. When I stopped on the corner of Sixteenth Street and made a closer inspection it turned out to be something called a "Gay Pride Parade," which made my stomach turn. Homosexuals proudly marched down Fifth Avenue, pink triangles emblazoned on pastel-colored windbreakers, some even holding hands, most singing "Somewhere" out of key and in unison.

On the way to Wall Street this morning, due to gridlock I had to get out of the company car and was walking down Fifth Avenue to find a subway station when I passed what I thought was a Halloween parade, which was disorienting since I was fairly sure this was May. When I stopped on the corner of Sixteenth Street and made a closer inspection it turned out to be something called a "Gay Pride Parade," which made my stomach turn. Homosexuals proudly marched down Fifth Avenue, pink triangles emblazoned on pastel-colored windbreakers, some even holding hands, most singing "Somewhere" out of key and in unison.

On the way to Wall Street this morning, due to gridlock I had to get out of the company car and was walking down Fifth Avenue to find a subway station when I passed what I thought was a Halloween parade, which was disorienting since I was fairly sure this was May. When I stopped on the corner of Sixteenth Street and made a closer inspection it turned out to be something called a "Gay Pride Parade," which made my stomach turn. Homosexuals proudly marched down Fifth Avenue, pink triangles emblazoned on pastel-colored windbreakers, some even holding hands, most singing "Somewhere" out of key and in unison.

The homeless man sitting by the road begging for beer money? Christ made manifest. The grocery clerk standing on her feet all day saying a thousand hellos to a thousand different strangers? Christ made manifest. The nun walking through the subway station, the Buddhist monk catching the city bus, the window washer scrubbing the side of a Manhattan sky rise five hundred feet in the air? Christ made manifest, Christ made manifest, Christ made manifest. The image of God imprinted on every human, everywhere—the shiny stuff of heaven made tangible across the faces of ethnicities and cultures and people groups.

The countless tight squeezes you have been in during the course of your life, the desperate moments when you have felt an urgent, overpowering need to empty your bladder and no toilet is at hand, the times when you have found yourself stuck in traffic, for example, or sitting on a subway stalled between stations, and the pure agony of forcing yourself to hold it in. This is the universal dilemma that no one ever talks about, but everyone has been there at one time or another, everyone has lived through it, and while there is no example of human suffering more comical that that of the bursting bladder, you tend not to laugh about these incidents until after you have managed to relieve yourself—for what person over the age of three would want to wet his pants in public? That is why you will never forget these words, which were the last words spoken to one of your friends by his dying father: “Just remember, Charlie,” he said, “never pass up an opportunity to piss.” And so the wisdom of the ages is handed down from one generation to the next.

Both sisters knew the story well. For the past sixteen years, starting in 1940, someone had been planting pipe bombs around New York City, in subway stations, department stores, theaters, even Grand Central Terminal. The newspapers called the culprit the Big Apple Bomber, and so far, a dozen people had been injured, some seriously. The very first bomb was planted in a toolbox at a Met Power compound on Sixty-Fourth Street, with a note reading Met Power crooks—this is for you. That one hadn’t gone off. But since then, the bomber had expanded his reach and his skill, setting off explosions in well-populated places like the Port Authority and Penn Station, sometimes repeating the same target years later. And now he’d hit the library. Even worse, the madman’s pace was picking up.

Felix Wenceslao Bernardino, raised in La Romana, one of Trujillo’s most sinister agents, his Witchking of Angmar. Was consul in Cuba when the exiled Dominican labor organizer Mauricio Báez was mysteriously murdered on the streets of Havana. Felix was also rumored to have had a hand in the failed assassination of Dominican exile leader Angel Morales (the assassins burst in on his secretary shaving, mistook the lathered man for Morales, and shot him to pieces). In addition, Felix and his sister, Minerva Bernardino (first woman in the world to be an ambassador before the United Nations), were both in New York City when Jesus de Galíndez mysteriously disappeared on his way home at the Columbus Circle subway station. Talk about Have Gun, Will Travel. It was said the power of Trujillo never left him; the fucker died of old age in Santo Domingo, Trujillista to the end, drowning his Haitian workers instead of paying them.

He was nearly to the subway’s escalator when he turned back to see what the crowd had been looking at. Sam could imagine reporting the congestion in the train station, and Marx saying, “Weren’t you even curious what it was? There’s a world of people and things, if you can manage to stop being a misanthrope for a second.” Sam didn’t like Marx thinking of him as a misanthrope, even if he was one, and so, he turned. That was when he espied his old comrade, Sadie Green

I have this dream in which I am standing on the subway platform and the train is delayed. It has taken entirely too long in coming. And I think maybe, just maybe, I should leave the station and look for a taxi. But I am afraid that the moment I leave, the train will come. When people do ask why I haven’t left New York, this is my best answer... what I do know is that I will leave NY with different dreams than this with which I first arrived. Smaller dreams, simpler dreams - an extra set of hands.

ON THE A TRAIN There were no seats to be had on the A train last night, but I had a good grip on the pole at the end of one of the seats and I was reading the beauty column of the Journal-American, which the man next to me was holding up in front of him. All of a sudden I felt a tap on my arm, and I looked down and there was a man beginning to stand up from the seat where he was sitting. "Would you like to sit down?" he said. Well, I said the first thing that came into my head, I was so surprised and pleased to be offered a seat in the subway. "Oh, thank you very much," I said, "but I am getting out at the next station." He sat back and that was that, but I felt all set up and I thought what a nice man he must be and I wondered what his wife was like and I thought how lucky she was to have such a polite husband, and then all of a sudden I realized that I wasn't getting out at the next station at all but the one after that, and I felt perfectly terrible. I decided to get out at the next station anyway, but then I thought, If I get out at the next station and wait around for the next train I'll miss my bus and they only go every hour and that will be silly. So I decided to brazen it out as best I could, and when the train was slowing up at the next station I stared at the man until I caught his eye and then I said, "I just remembered this isn't my station after all." Then I thought he would think I was asking him to stand up and give me his seat, so I said, "But I still don't want to sit down, because I'm getting off at the next station." I showed him by my expression that I thought it was all rather funny, and he smiled, more or less, and nodded, and lifted his hat and put it back on his head again and looked away. He was one of those small, rather glum or sad men who always look off into the distance after they have finished what they are saying, when they speak. I felt quite proud of my strong-mindedness at not getting off the train and missing my bus simply because of the fear of a little embarrassment, but just as the train was shutting its doors I peered out and there it was, 168th Street. "Oh dear!" I said. "That was my station and now I have missed the bus!" I was fit to be fled, and I had spoken quite loudly, and I felt extremely foolish, and I looked down, and the man who had offered me his seat was partly looking at me, and I said, "Now, isn't that silly? That was my station. A Hundred and Sixty-eighth Street is where I'm supposed to get off." I couldn't help laughing, it was all so awful, and he looked away, and the train fidgeted along to the next station, and I got off as quickly as I possibly could and tore over to the downtown platform and got a local to 168th, but of course I had missed my bus by a minute, or maybe two minutes. I felt very much at a loose end wandering around 168th Street, and I finally went into a rudely appointed but friendly bar and had a martini, warm but very soothing, which cost me only fifty cents. While I was sipping it, trying to make it last to exactly the moment that would get me a good place in the bus queue without having to stand too long in the cold, I wondered what I should have done about that man in the subway. After all, if I had taken his seat I probably would have got out at 168th Street, which would have meant that I would hardly have been sitting down before I would have been getting up again, and that would have seemed odd. And rather grasping of me. And he wouldn't have got his seat back, because some other grasping person would have slipped into it ahead of him when I got up. He seemed a retiring sort of man, not pushy at all. I hesitate to think of how he must have regretted offering me his seat. Sometimes it is very hard to know the right thing to do.

The subway was the great leveler—underground, the Wall Street titans stood in the shuddering car and clutched the same poles as the junior IT guys to create a totem of fists, the executive vice presidents in charge of new product marketing pressed thighs with the luckless and the dreamers, who got off at their stations when instructed by the computer’s voice and were replaced by devisers of theoretical financial instruments of unreckoned power, who vacated their seats and were replaced in turn by unemployable homunculi clutching yesterday’s tabloids. They jostled one another, competed for space below as they did above, in a minuet of ruin and triumph. In the subway, down in the dark, no citizen was more significant or more decrepit than another. All were smeared into a common average of existence, the A’s and the C’s tumbling or rising to settle into a ruthless mediocrity. No escape. This was the plane where Mark Spitz lived. They were all him. Middling talents who got by, barnacles on humanity’s hull, survivors who had not yet been extinguished. Perhaps it was only a matter of time.

In one extreme case, WMATA planner William Herman complained that the system's main transfer station was badly named. He argued that '12th and G' was both confusing (several entrances would be on other streets) and too undistinguished for so important a station. Ever reasonable, Graham agreed to let Herman choose a better name. 'I'll let you know,' responded a relieved Herman. 'No,' Graham explained, 'I'll give you twenty seconds.' Stunned, Herman blurted out the first words that came into his head: 'Metro Center.' 'Fine, that's it, go on to the next one,' replied the general. And they did.

It wasn't so different from 1978, and it wasn't any more or less memorable in comparison to 1998. The things that happened in 1988 had also happened in 1978 and would happen again in 1998. The people I met in 1988 were no different from those who bumped shoulders with me in the subway in 1978 and whose apathetic eyes met mine outside of a gas station in the middle of the night in 1998. They were family, and they were the unfamiliar middle class, and they were malnourished soldiers. They were each other's toilets and strangers and cliffs and crows and prisons. They were never anything more than who they were. Third person random.

Pier 5 in Brooklyn was within a short walking distance from the subway station and in the distance the masts and funnel of my new ship could be seen. The S/S African Sun was a C-4 cargo ship built in 1942, for the war effort. Not even 15 years old, the ship looked as good as new. Farrell Lines took good care of their ships and it showed. There was always a lot of activity prior to departure and this time was no exception. We were expected to depart prior to dusk and there were things to do. I got into my working uniform and leaving my sea bag on my bunk headed for the bridge. When I passed the open door of the Captain’s room he summoned me in. “Welcome aboard Mr. Mate. I’ve heard good things about you!” We talked briefly about his expectations. Introducing himself as Captain Brian, he seemed friendly enough and I felt that I got off to a good start. As the ship’s Third Officer, most frequently known as the Third Mate, my first order of business was to place my license into the frame alongside those of the other deck officers. I must admit that doing so gave me a certain feeling of pride and belonging. With only an hour to go before our scheduled departure I called the engine room and gave them permission to jack over the engine; a term used to engage the engine, so as to slowly turn the screw or propeller.

He should have caught up with me inside of fifteen minutes at the outside, if he'd been able to get on the next train after mine. But then there was that station agent to be considered. And Rafe didn't have a solitary coin on him; he'd have to break one of those fifties. I now remembered something that I'd been noticing half my life and that had never meant anything to me until today - a little sign outside each subway change booth, advising the public that the agent wasn't obliged to make change for anything bigger than $1. Never get mixed up in a murder, flashed through my mind insanely, unless you've got plenty of small change. ("Don't Wait Up For Me, Tonight")

The architecture of the thugs also differs from that of normal societies. It can often be recognized by the megalomaniacal style of their public buildings and facilities. The Moscow subway is a faithful copy of the London Underground, except that its stations and corridors are filled with statues of homo sovieticus, a fictitious species that stands (or sits on a tractor), chin up, chest out, belly in, heroically gazing into the distance with a look of grim determination. The Romans had similar tastes. Their public latrines were lavishly decorated with mosaics and marbles. When a particularly elaborately decorated structure at Puteoli was dug up by archaeologists in the last century, they thought at first that they had discovered a temple; but it turned out to be a public latrine.

Inside McClintic Sphere was swinging his ass off. His skin was hard, as if it were part of the skull: every vein and whisker on that head stood out sharp and clear under the green baby spot: you could see the twin lines running down from either side of his lower lip, etched in by the force of his embouchure, looking like extensions of his mustache. He blew a hand-carved ivory alto saxophone with a 4 ½ reed and the sound was like nothing any of them had heard before. The usual divisions prevailed: collegians did not dig, and left after an average of 1 ½ sets. Personnel from other groups, either with a night off or taking a long break from somewhere crosstown or uptown, listened hard, trying to dig. 'I am still thinking,’ they would say if you asked. People at the bar all looked as if they did dig in the sense of understand, approve of, empathize with: but this was probably only because people who prefer to stand at the bar have, universally, an inscrutable look… …The group on the stand had no piano: it was bass, drums, McClintic and a boy he had found in the Ozarks who blew a natural horn in F. The drummer was a group man who avoided pyrotechnics, which may have irritated the college crowd. The bass was small and evil-looking and his eyes were yellow with pinpoints in the center. He talked to his instrument. It was taller than he was and didn’t seem to be listening. Horn and alto together favored sixths and minor fourths and when this happened it was like a knife fight or tug of war: the sound was consonant but as if cross-purposes were in the air. The solos of McClintic Sphere were something else. There were people around, mostly those who wrote for Downbeat magazine or the liners of LP records, who seemed to feel he played disregarding chord changes completely. They talked a great deal about soul and the anti-intellectual and the rising rhythms of African nationalism. It was a new conception, they said, and some of them said: Bird Lives. Since the soul of Charlie Parker had dissolved away into a hostile March wind nearly a year before, a great deal of nonsense had been spoken and written about him. Much more was to come, some is still being written today. He was the greatest alto on the postwar scene and when he left it some curious negative will–a reluctance and refusal to believe in the final, cold fact–possessed the lunatic fringe to scrawl in every subway station, on sidewalks, in pissoirs, the denial: Bird Lives. So that among the people in the V-Note that night were, at a conservative estimate, a dreamy 10 per cent who had not got the word, and saw in McClintic Sphere a kind of reincarnation.

Congress displayed contempt for the city's residents, yet it retained a fondness for buildings and parks. In 1900, the centennial of the federal government's move to Washington, many congressmen expressed frustration that the proud nation did not have a capital to rival London, Paris, and Berlin. The following year, Senator James McMillan of Michigan, chairman of the Senate District Committee, recruited architects Daniel Burnham and Charles McKim, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to propose a park system. The team, thereafter known as the McMillan Commission, emerged with a bold proposal in the City Beautiful tradition, based on the White City of Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition. Their plan reaffirmed L'Enfant's avenues as the best guide for the city's growth and emphasized the majesty of government by calling for symmetrical compositions of horizontal, neoclassical buildings of marble and white granite sitting amid wide lawns and reflecting pools. Eventually, the plan resulted in the remaking of the Mall as an open lawn, the construction of the Lincoln Memorial and Memorial Bridge across the Potomac, and the building of Burnham's Union Station. Commissioned in 1903, when the state of the art in automobiles and airplanes was represented by the curved-dash Olds and the Wright Flyer, the station served as a vast and gorgeous granite monument to rail transportation.

17.2 One evening I was to meet Marilyn up at her mother's apartment for our ritual Friday night dinner. On my way up to the Bronx, when I got off at the 175th Street station, I decided to stop in and see what sort of sexual activity was going on in the subway john there. I'd never gone into that one before, perhaps because I usually came there with Marilyn. I pushed into the yellow-tiled space, with its dim, caged light-bulbs. There was only one guy at the urinal, a tall workman in greens and scuffed orange construction boots-- which had, only in the last year or so, become standard wear for the nation's laborers. I stood a stall away from him, and we glanced at each other. When I smiled, he turned toward me. I reached for his penis. Holding it, I realized something was wrong with it, but, for the moment, couldn't quite figure what. For its thickness and harness it was too short. It ended in a kind of flat stump, like a sawed-off dowel, without the collar or taper of glans, making me think he was uncircumcised. Only there was no cuff of skin. That's when he said, a little hoarsely, "That's what there is. If you want it, it's yours. But that's it." And I realized that, either from medical procedure or something else, the first inch or so had been amputated. He came very fast. I wanted to talk with him afterward, but he zipped up once we were finished and hurried away. I never saw him again, though I looked for him. But the image stayed, unsettlingly, for a while.

Walk down a hallway, end up in a ballroom, double glass doors to a subway station, third exit on the left goes to a hardware store that sells only hammers. No screwdrivers, no chisels, not even any nails—just hammers. You’d be surprised how many problems you can solve with a hammer if you really put your mind to it.

Originally there had been just two projects, which he had codenamed Bluebird and Artichoke; the bird and vegetable were among his favorites. Later had come Naomi, the name of a distant cousin. But soon there were so many projects that he had resorted to simply numbering them. By now the total number of projects stood at over 100 (they would eventually reach 149). MK-Project 94 was to investigate “remote directional control of activities in specific brain centers.” MK-Project 142 was to “study electrical brain stimulation.” In his never-ending search for information that could prove useful for the biological warfare program, Dr. Gottlieb had enlisted the support of the CIA archivists. They had turned up a box of documents which U.S. Army intelligence officers had recovered in Munich in 1945. The box was labeled: “German War Office Experiments 1934-39.” The documents still bore the German classification “Secret.” Among the experiments were those which had tracked air currents through the subway systems of Paris and London. “The tunnels would be prime targets in a future war when Londoners and Parisians sheltered in the tunnels during air raids. Using bacteria which were excellent biological tracers, the tunnels would be transformed into places for mass epidemics.” The memo had been written in July 1934, after the Nazis had come to power. Two months later on a hot summer’s day, according to another document, German agents had sprayed “billions of microbes into the Paris Metro system from cars they had driven past the subway entrances. Exhaust gasses provided a satisfactory disguise for the release of the microbes from tanks linked to the car exhausts.” A third document claimed that “six hours later, at the Place de la République Metro station, a mile and a half from the dispersal point, our agents discovered thousands of colonies of the germs.” In Berlin the findings had been eagerly studied. A memo sent to Herman Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe, from the German War Office read: “It was possible to drop a suitable biological bomb and be highly certain that the bacteria would enter the subway system.” Similar tests in London had been carried out by the Germans with “the same satisfying results.

After a few months with this book, I was standing in Grand Central Station waiting for the subway to take me uptown. I was reading this one page of the book, and I saw in a flash that there can’t be any choosing center. Choices and willing are just as unplanned and spontaneous as any other arising phenomenon. There cannot be a locatable center, here or anywhere else. All such “places” were seen as nothing more than arisings in awareness.

automatically. What are the characteristics of your surroundings, and which of these are significant to you? Are there certain views across some lawns, over some factories, or down a street that you habitually look at? Do they elicit pleasure, revulsion, or depression? Or are you intrigued by more abstract responses, such as color relationships, repetitive patterns, or sequences of overlapping forms? What time of day is it? Or doesn’t that matter? (See fig. 14.) What is your viewpoint? Are you observing your subject from below some high cliffs, or are you standing on an elevated subway platform? Do you see ten miles of verdant farmland, a gas station, or a piece of newspaper caught between trash cans by the curb? How much of the view should you include? Here you have to employ another example of editing. To draw everything indiscriminately may be too complicated or too boring, or both. If you’re in doubt about where to set the limits of your composition, use an empty 35mm slide frame. By moving it around and holding it at varying distances from your eye, you can isolate the section of what you’re looking at that interests you the most.

In genom tunneln av oskrivna regler, framåt till höger, tunnelbana till vänster. Invandrartjejer med hål så man ser rumpskinn pratar högljutt i mobil. Han undrar vad värdfolket tänker. De med lite mera klass som önskar bo på Östermalm men istället hamnar i Solna bär istället svarta kläder med eventuell grå detalj, silverörhängen och aldrig guld. Inte som turkarna. Dyra stora väskor slängda över axeln, senaste modet från årets sista rea. Klack klack klack låter det i väggarna och studsar tillbaka. Rumpor som svänger snabbt genom tunneln, man måste hålla tempot även om man inget har. Storstadsfolket tittar konstigt på en man som går för långsamt. Hemresan närmar sig snabbt men dagen är ännu lång. Mörkret har fallit men sömnen inträder inte än på mycket länge. Det är en välsignelse att vara stressad, tänker han och ser på människorna som skyndar förbi honom. De bildar två väggar på båda sidor av hans kropp. Men människorna runt honom är som av ett annat släkte, han vet det. Han känner det. I cirklar ut med hans kropp tänks tankar som är så långt ifrån hans verklighet trots att de trampar samma mark, sitter på samma säten, går i samma trappor. Timmarna rusar och ögonen flackar. Det tänks andra tankar, annorlunda tankar, runt i en massa av virvlande ord. Andra ord, annorlunda ord och satser och fraser och uttryck, pulserande i cirklar runt hans runda kropp: Köra en lunchsandwich med surdegsbröd på vägen och småspringa med svettpärlor i pannan i pannan till tuben. Torka svett och titta oroligt på sin smartphone. Ta ett telefonsamtal i väntan på grön gubbe, en latte i handen efter en snabblunch med en gammal kursare. Catcha upp, hänga ut, ta en öl en fika en promenad mellan 17:15 och 18:30, dra till SATS på ett pass och sen dimpa ner i tevesoffan jävligt nöjd. Storstadsslammer och stadsbor, den nya människan ställer sig i ledet. Bo i trång etta, gå på dejt med blonderad ekonom, raka pung, noppa unibrow och scrubba med facewashen. Ta en öl på uteserveringen under sommarmånader. Springa till bussen, ta väskan på cykeln och kavla upp byxbenet. Slänga yogamattan över axeln och svära över tågens försening. Traska rastlöst fram och tillbaka över perrongen, trampa sig svettig på cykeln för att man snoozat för länge. Stressen, tänker han där han svänger av mot spärrarna, det är Guds gåva till människan. (Sid. 165-6)

Spending ten days in a subway station search for a four-year-old boy was an experience that will stay with me for the rest of my life. Not merely because of the desperation that gripped me every minute of those ten days, but especially because of my sense of helplessness in the face of a city so huge that it could swallow up anything, anyone, without explanation, as if they had never existed. Amidst the most absolute indifference. Even a little boy that you had seen playing until just a few hours ago.

Carlton Church review – Why Tokyo is populated? How Tokyo became the largest city? Apparently Tokyo Japan has been one of the largest global cities for hundreds of years. One of the primary reasons for its growth is the fact that it has been a political hotspot since they Edo period. Many of the feudal lords of Japan needed to be in Edo for a significant part of the year and this has led to a situation where increasing numbers of the population was attracted to the city. There were many people with some power base throughout Japan but it became increasingly clear that those who have the real power were the ones who were residing in Edo. Eventually Tokyo Japan emerged as both the cultural and the political center for the entire Japan and this only contributed to its rapid growth which made it increasingly popular for all people living in Japan. After World War II substantial rebuilding of the city was necessary and it was especially after the war that extraordinary growth was seen and because major industries came especially to Tokyo and Osaka, these were the cities where the most growth took place. The fact remains that there are fewer opportunities for people who are living far from the cities of Japan and this is why any increasing number of people come to the city. There are many reasons why Japan is acknowledged as the greatest city The Japanese railways is widely acknowledged to be the most sophisticated railway system in the world. There is more than 100 surface routes which is operated by Japan’s railways as well as 13 subway lines and over the years Japanese railway engineers has accomplished some amazing feats which is unequalled in any other part of the world. Most places in the city of Tokyo Japan can be reached by train and a relatively short walk. Very few global cities can make this same boast. Crossing the street especially outside Shibuya station which is one of the busiest crossings on the planet with literally thousands of people crossing at the same time. However, this street crossing symbolizes one of the trademarks of Tokyo Japan and its major tourism attractions. It lies not so much in old buildings but rather in the masses of people who come together for some type of cultural celebration. There is also the religious centers in Japan such as Carlton Church and others. Tokyo Japan has also been chosen as the city that will host the Olympics in 2020 and for many reasons this is considered to be the best possible venue. A technological Metropolitan No other country exports more critical technologies then Japan and therefore it should come as no surprise that the neighborhood electronics store look more like theme parks than electronic stores. At quickly becomes clear when one looks at such a spectacle that the Japanese people are completely infatuated with technology and they make no effort to hide that infatuation. People planning to visit Japan should heed the warnings from travel organizations and also the many complaints which is lodged by travelers who have become victims of fraud. It is important to do extensive research regarding the available options and to read every possible review which is available regarding travel agencies. A safe option will always be to visit the website of Carlton Church and to make use of their services when travelling to and from Japan.

Editors keep pushing deadline strain while people sleep on benches and subway grates; a welter weight boxer dances on the platform at 125th Street station, commuters look unfazed...

father without my mother. He needed her—probably more than I did. I was afraid that without her to anchor him to a normal life he would be just as content to live in boxes or subway stations… to live without me. Wherever

Consumers can now scan the code on the product when they are running low, and it will be ordered and delivered within hours to their home, completely side-lining all the tools and techniques of competing manufacturers who would wish to get the consumer to brand switch. Tesco’s Homeplus in South Korea also launched a campaign that engages shoppers to buy products using QR codes. Homeplus created virtual billboards of their store aisles in subway stations, allowing passengers to shop while they waited by scanning the products’ QR codes – the groceries being delivered when they arrived home. The goal of the campaign was to help Homeplus compete with the number-one retailer, E-MART, without increasing their store numbers. Since the launch, their online sales have increased 130%, making them the top online retailer in South Korea, and a close second offline.

subway stations... passengers who token through life

She emerges from the station directly across from the restaurant. And she's right on time. Like magic, Sonya thinks, briefly saddened to realize that this is what magic means now: not being late, not getting lost on the subway. Whatever happened to the fairy godmothers, to all those bunnies yanked out of hats?

Reframing failure starts with understanding a basic typology of failure types. As I have written in more detail elsewhere, failure archetypes include preventable failures (never good news), complex failures (still not good news), and intelligent failures (not fun, but must be considered good news because of the value they bring).15 Preventable failures are deviations from recommended procedures that produce bad outcomes. If someone fails to don safety glasses in a factory and suffers an eye injury, this is a preventable failure. Complex failures occur in familiar contexts when a confluence of factors come together in a way that may never have occurred before; consider the severe flooding of the Wall Street subway station in New York City during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. With vigilance, complex failures can sometimes, but not always, be avoided. Neither preventable nor complex failures are worthy of celebration.

London is more than its museums and landmarks. It’s a living, breathing, thriving organism...a coral reef of humanity. You can enjoy some of Europe’s best people-watching at Covent Garden, Victoria Station, Piccadilly Circus, or any of the major stops on London’s subway system, known affectionately as the Tube.

James walked me to the subway station, though he’d called for an Uber to take him . . . I wasn’t sure where he lived, actually, but it most certainly wasn’t the Monroe. After Miguel had sung “Oh my darling, Clementine,” I thought I’d end up choking on a chip. James had quickly changed the subject to how Miguel had proposed to Isa—in the middle of the food truck, actually, on a rather rainy spring day three years ago. No customers, just them two, and steak that was going to spoil. I would’ve been charmed by their story if my mind wasn’t still reeling from the conversation before

Even a world-class product, poorly positioned, can fail. In the context of a concert hall, Bell is perceived as producing something that is very valuable. He’s dressed to perform. He’s surrounded by an orchestra on a beautiful stage. The program tells people what awards he has won. Whereas, when he’s playing outside a subway station, everything around him has changed. He’s dressed like a street performer and standing beside a garbage can, playing for tips. His product—the music—hasn’t changed, but in this context, few people recognize its value.

Mostly, I feel a distance from people, like we're in a subway station, and they're on a different platform. I can't cross the tracks to join them, and the noise from the trains is so loud I can barely make out what they're saying.

At railroad and bus stations across the country, which includes subways, checkpoints are set-up as you come into the station. Like the airports, the TSA will screen all travelers, and if necessary, frisk a traveler if TSA finds anything suspicious. Train and bus schedules, like airline schedules, will necessarily be delayed as travelers are screened. Remember, your safety is of paramount importance to your government as we do not want to see our fellow Americans killed by more random acts of terrorism.

If you’re a die-hard “foodie,” hop off the road in DuBois and enjoy a Subway sandwich made at a place that is eighty percent gas station.

Many believe that WMATA planned a station for Georgetown, then withdrew its plans in response to opposition from politically influential residents who feared that the subway would bring undesirables—the poor, the criminal, the nonwhite, and the tacky—to their exclusive neighborhood. In fact, although Georgetown residents did oppose a transit station, their attitude was essentially irrelevant, for a Georgetown station was never seriously considered.

The year I turned thirty a relationship ended. I was very sad but my sadness bored everyone, including me. Having been through such dejection before, I thought I might get out of it quickly. I went on Internet dates but found it difficult to generate sexual desire for strangers. Instead I would run into friends at a party, or in a subway station, men I had thought about before. That fall and winter I had sex with three people, and kissed one or two more. The numbers seemed measured and reasonable to me. All of them were people I had known for some time. I felt happier in the presence of unmediated humans, but sometimes a nonboyfriend brought with him a dark echo, which lived in my phone. It was a longing with no hope of satisfaction, without a clear object. I stared at rippling ellipses on screens. I forensically analyzed social media photographs. I expressed levity with exclamation points, spelled-out laughs, and emoticons. I artificially delayed my responses. There was a great posturing of busyness, of not having noticed your text until just now. It annoyed me that my phone could hold me hostage to its clichés. My goals were serenity and good humor. I went to all the Christmas parties.

the directors of the Tesco food-marketing business in South Korea set a goal to increase market share substantially and needed to find a creative way to do so. They looked at their customers and realized that their lives are so busy that it is actually quite stressful to find time to go to the store. So they decided to bring their store to the shoppers. They completely reframed the shopping experience by taking photos of the food aisles and putting up full-sized images in the subway stations. People can literally shop while they wait for the train, using their smartphones to buy items via photos of the QR codes and paying by credit card. The items are then delivered to them when they get home. This new approach to shopping boosted Tesco’s sales significantly.5

The Framing Effect Context also shapes perception. In a social experiment, world-class violinist Joshua Bell decided to play a free impromptu concert in a Washington, DC subway station.[lxiv] Bell regularly sells out venues such as the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall for hundreds of dollars per ticket, but when placed in the context of the DC subway, his music fell upon deaf ears. Almost nobody knew they were walking past one of the most talented musicians in the world.

I hesitate because I don’t remember — or perhaps I never knew — how two grown women become friends. The elevator doors open and we walk out of the building together. “Well, so nice to meet you!” she says. This is my moment. “You too, have a good night!” I say. Cheerful. I walk at a clip toward the subway station. I am thinking about risk and change and how they’re directly related. When I reach the corner, I throw the flier in a trashcan.

Damn,” he grunts. A grin tugs at the corners of my lips. “Something wrong?” I ask. “I like it when you kiss me, but I don’t like it when you use your kisses to evade my questions,” he says quietly. He squeezes me in a gentle hug. “I wasn’t evading,” I choke out. But I swallow hard trying to get past the lump in my throat. “Yes, you were. And I don’t hate it.” He chuckles softly. “I might even understand it, if you’d let me in. But don’t use my feelings for you as a smoke screen for what’s really going on between us, okay?” He squeezes me again. “What’s going on between us?” I ask, my voice cracking only slightly. “I’m getting to know you,” he says, very matter-of-factly. He tips my face up with the gentlest of touches. “I want to know you,” he says directly. “Everything.” I shake my head. “You wouldn’t like what you find out.” He would hate me. Family is everything to him and I gave mine away. “Try me,” he says. I hold on to his waist—he still has his arm around me—as the subway comes to a stop. He looks down at me for a second too long, long enough for me to see his brow furrow and the little vee form between his eyebrows. “What are you hiding?” he asks. “Everything,” I whisper. But I say it more to remind myself than to tell him anything he doesn’t know. I’m hiding everything. I pull him out the door and into the station, and we race to the top of the steps. “Friday,” he calls when I’m a few steps in front of him. “You have to at least give me a chance.” I pretend like his voice gets caught on the wind, but it doesn’t. It sinks deep inside my heart, and hope blooms. Hope blooms in a place where no light has lived in a really long time. I thought it was difficult being on the subway and having Paul ask me so many questions, but that was nothing compared to the memories that swamp me when we walk into the maternity ward.

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.” There isn’t anything in the least romantic about being called stupid. Really. Especially since I knew there was no way Zach would ever be interested in a red-haired, violin-playing preacher’s daughter when there was the remotest chance he could have gorgeous, physical-therapist-in-training Petra. So

He was bewildered. “I had the wrong day,” he muttered. “I went downtown and realized I got my days mixed up. So I went into Century 21 and bought some socks. Then I got back on the subway and came home, and Alice called from her car and said, ‘Turn on the news.’” He showed me his receipt from the downtown clothing store: he must have taken the last subway to ever leave the World Trade Center station before it was all crushed to rubble and dust.

He did not want empathy with her, but he could help understanding. Blame the government at first, but the government is faceless, far away. It’s the people who walk by you every day and don’t make eye-contact, who call you names and talk about needing to “clean up” the subway stations; they’re right there, and it must be their fault. They’re the ones with lives they don’t deserve; they’re the ones who have stolen your life. They’re the imposters, because under their clothes and makeup, their cellphones and iPods and the hard shell of security, they’re just like you.

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.

that her father died yesterday evening, of a heart attack, playing patience on his bed. They leave for India six days later, six weeks before they’d planned. Alan and Judy, waking the next morning to Ashima’s sobs, then hearing the news from Ashoke, leave a vase filled with flowers by the door. In those six days, there is no time to think of a good name for Gogol. They get an express passport with “Gogol Ganguli” typed across the United States of America seal, Ashoke signing on his son’s behalf. The day before leaving, Ashima puts Gogol in his stroller, puts the sweater she’d knit for her father and the paint-brushes in a shopping bag, and walks to Harvard Square, to the subway station. “Excuse me,” she asks a gentleman on the street, “I must get on the train.” The man helps her carry down the stroller, and Ashima waits on the platform. When the train comes she heads immediately back to Central Square. This time she is wide awake.

sushi every day for more than eighty years, and owns a small sushi restaurant near the Ginza subway station in Tokyo.

I want to be free of cities and sexual entanglements. Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that floats out of the subways and the tunnels. It’s always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers. The entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness.

twenty-two-year-old Malaysia Goodson, a Black mother who, in January 2019, fell while trying to carry her stroller and baby down the subway stairs because there was no working elevator at her station and died (her official cause of death listed cardiac hypertrophy, which can lead to sudden death after physical stress, and hyperthyroidism as factors16).

Just outside the walls of the City, trouble was brewing. They came in boats from a land far across the sea. Many boats crammed with many hopefuls washed up on the shores in the shadow of the great cliffs. Like driftwood. These flotsam people were dazed, broken – perhaps at an extreme – optimistic. Surely there would be salvation within the thick city walls? They appeared in a whisper – like the hissing of the surf. No citizen came to welcome them. No delegates. No photo-ops for ambitious politicians. Instead, only the City’s military – soldiers and officers with faces as hard and blank as the cliff the City teetered upon – were waiting. They were herded in silence. Those without papers were left on the stony beach. There would be tents, bunks, and prefab houses in time. The lucky ones were escorted up the great lifts and transported along the subway system – out of sight. A Downtown station would process them. See this crowd of Driftwood people, Eva. See them huddle together in the dark, the glint of hope in their eyes. The color of their skin, how the women covered their hair, and how the men wore their beards – these were the superficial differences that would mark them so starkly here. The label of ‘other’ already hung around their necks without them even knowing.

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.

For her, one gained freedom less by way of making demands than by quietly affirming oneself. For her, the only obstacles to the affirmation of one's freedom, to pleasure, to inventing one's life were those that one imagined or created for oneself. Saint John's Day, which for me is still the most beautiful and magical day of the year, the mystery of the beginning of summer: every year, on 24 June, I celebrate within myself a holiday as solemn as Christmas or Easter, but much more secret. A great part of her life had been spent rejecting that which the students of Paris and other Western capitals were revolting against in 1968: the civilization of "Take the subway-work all day- and hit the hay", of "the station wagon and the washing machine", of equating possessions with success. Roaming the world to find out of reality resembled what she had imagined. Between the immense heart of Asia and the inexhaustible African womb, Europe has the function of a brain. The Asiatic dream of nonresistance to force, which is no more than an admission of being powerless to appropriate that force.

and she giggled as she walked against the current of bodies in the crosswalk. The subway was right there, but she didn’t want to take it yet—the beauty of New York City was walking, was serendipity and strangers, and it was still her birthday, and so she was just going to keep going. Alice turned and walked up Eighth, past the crummy tourist shops selling magnets and keychains and i ♥ ny T-shirts and foam fingers shaped like the Statue of Liberty. Alice had walked for almost ten blocks when she realized she had a destination. She and Sam and their friends had enjoyed many, many hours in bars as teenagers: they’d spent nights at the Dublin House, on 79th Street; at the Dive Bar, on Amsterdam and 96th Street, with the neon sign shaped like bubbles, though that one was a little too close to home to be safe; and some of the fratty bars farther down Amsterdam, the ones with the buckets of beers for twenty dollars and scratched pool tables. Sometimes they even went to some NYU bars downtown, on MacDougal Street, where they could dash across the street for falafel and then go back to the bar, like it was their office and they were running out for lunch. Their favorite bar, though, was Matryoshka, a Russian-themed bar in the 50th Street 1/9 subway station. Now it was just the 1 train, but back then, there was also the 9. Things were always changing, even when they didn’t feel like it. Alice wondered if no one ever felt as old as they were because it happened so slowly, and you were only ever one day slower and creakier, and the world changed so gradually that by the time cars had evolved from boxy to smooth, or green taxis had joined yellow ones, or MetroCards had replaced tokens, you were used to it. Everyone

he told me i was like a poem, all kinds of feelings bundled into one but i am a song without melody, a screeching noise you don't want to hear i am like an ointment but for the wrong wound; i can't heal you but i would burn i am like that paragraph you delete before sending an okay the last drop of coffee still stuck on your discarded cup i am the rubber band on your wrist, i am lost as soon as you set me down and like the moon on a moonless night i am there but not in your world, not in your eyes, not in your heart. i could have been your comfort shoe, but i broke your feet and you discarded me so now I'm just an occupied space on your shelf you don't use anymore I'm like the stain on the mirror when you're taking pictures; an irritation that stays like the push and shove on the subway station that doesn't make you stop and stare but the one that keeps you moving, completely unaware i'm the stranger on the street that you see yet you don't your eyes pass through me, not in focus, not in the zone i'm not the art kind of beautiful, i'm the beauty that lies there, ignored my existence is poetry, unnoticed, unaware, invisible to your eyes and you just keep moving and i stay, i stay, i stay right there

Cuomo and de Blasio also agreed to cut $3 billion from the capital program and reduce funding for the second phase of the Second Avenue subway from $1.5 billion to $500 million. In October 2015, the MTA board approved a revised capital program. The Second Avenue subway advocates, however, still had some political clout. At a rally on 96th Street, a coalition—including city council members, state legislators, contractors, the Regional Plan Association president, the city comptroller, the Manhattan borough president, environmentalists, and labor unions—urged the MTA to restore the $1 billion that was cut from the project’s second phase. They were afraid the MTA would abandon future phases after it opened the stations at 72nd Street, 86th Street, and 96th Street. Extending the subway to East Harlem had become an issue not only of transportation but of environmental justice, with the funding cut seen as a slap in the face to East Harlem’s predominantly Hispanic community.18 State legislators all across the city understood the need to relieve crowding on the Lexington Avenue line, according to Assemblyman Brennan. He said, “The concept of abandoning the Second Avenue subway, especially for the Manhattan delegation, was not even discussable, not even conceivable.” Even though the mayor had agreed with the governor in private to cut funding for the second phase, de Blasio joined all of Manhattan’s elected officials in criticizing the MTA.19 Behind

In the foreseeable future, New Yorkers are likely to find themselves in familiar territory—waiting for the completion of a new subway line that is too popular to be canceled and too expensive to build. That was the situation when the Second Avenue subway was delayed for several years in 1932. Likewise, in 1944, Fiorello La Guardia told city council members that “the preparation of engineering plans for the construction of the Second Avenue subway has not been interrupted.” In a similar manner, the subway was postponed for further study in 1953. When construction was halted in 1975, Mayor Abe Beame declared, “We cannot abandon the Second Avenue subway; we must, however, defer it.” The following year, when asked whether the line would ever be completed, the MTA chair, David Yunich, responded, ‘‘Well, ‘ever’ is a long time.”57 In 2004, New Yorkers were told that an 8.5-mile Second Avenue subway with sixteen stations would be completed by 2020. Its completion—along with a subway system in a state of good repair—remains decades away.

In 2004, the NYPD arrested twenty-four-year-old Pakistani immigrant Shahawar Matin Siraj for plotting to bomb the Herald Square subway station in Manhattan. Lawyers say Siraj was entrapped by a paid police informant facing drug charges, who spent months hatching the plot and pushing the idea of a bombing. Siraj had “no explosives, no timetable for an attack, and little understanding about explosives.” According to Human Rights Watch, the NYPD’s own records showed that he was unstable and “extremely impressionable due to severe intellectual limitations.” When asked to participate in the plot, Siraj replied that he had to ask his mother first and never actually agreed to participate, according the NYPD’s own assessment. Nevertheless, he was convicted and sentenced to thirty years in prison.

They stopped at a Subway attached to a gas station. When he placed his order for a foot-long meatball marinara with extra cheese and no vegetables, he wondered if the sandwich artist could tell that his mom had died.