Titanic Survivors Quotes

The sounds of people drowning are something that I can not describe to you, and neither can anyone else. Its the most dreadful sound and there is a terrible silence that follows it.

Since I and so many brave survivors have come forward, titans of every industry have toppled. We survivors have gained our power. We survivors are using our voices in record numbers. We cannot let up, and as hard as it is, we must continue to get even louder, to push even harder. We all count. We all matter. Here’s to freedom, yours and mine. Now go breathe fire.

A WOMAN'S HEART is a DEEP OCEAN of SECRETS.

Today, in what Harvey Mansfield calls our "gender-neutral" society," there are no social norms. Eight decades after the Titanic, a German-built ferry en route from Estonia to Sweden sank in the Baltic Sea. Of the 1,051 passengers, only 139 lived to tell the tale. But the distribution of the survivors was very different from that of the Titanic. Women and children first? No female under fifteen or over sixty-five made it. Only 5 percent of all women passengers lived. The bulk of the survivors were young men. Forty-three percent of men aged 20 to 24 made it.

For the pedant, dates are deities, worthy of worship, but for the true social historian, they are minutiae only, a shorthand, convenient reminders and no more. You do not ask a Titanic survivor, ‘Let me see now, just exactly when was that?’ You ask him this: ‘What was it like? How did you feel?’ And that is the job of the social historian: to make the past vibrant for the present; to emotionally involve those of us who were not there. And to make us understand.

I haven't known up 'till now why I do not want to go. But now I do know. [...] Because this is the ship that they say is unsinkable,' she replied, 'and that is flying in the face of the Almighty. That ship will never reach the other side.

I have often perplexed myself over what I saw in Nelle Snyder's aged face at that moment. It was no look of paranoia. It was a look of waiting. Perpetual waiting. That look was to come back to me sixteen years later when I heard Rose's narration at the end of James Cameron's Titanic, with its line about survivors "waiting for an absolution that never came." Yet the waiting I saw in Nelle Snyder's face seemed larger even than a waiting for absolution. It seemed vaster even than Titanic herself. Call it the waiting of the Mother of all Perished Vessels. Or of a Ship of Honeymoon Dreams perchance, with a passenger list spanning all humanity, that once proudly sailed but was lost, aeons ago, and sank to a dark, unreachable abode where nothing whatsoever can be grasped about her except her perplexing power still to haunt us.

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.

And now at last the Earth was dead. The final pitiful survivor had perished. All the teeming billions; the slow aeons; the empires and civilizations of mankind were summed up in this poor twisted form—and how titanically meaningless it had all been! Now indeed had come an end and climax to all the efforts of humanity—how monstrous and incredible a climax in the eyes of those poor complacent fools in the prosperous days! Not ever again would the planet know the thunderous tramping of human millions—or even the crawling of lizards and the buzz of insects, for they, too, had gone. Now was come the reign of sapless branches and endless fields of tough grasses. Earth, like its cold, imperturbable moon, was given over to silence and blackness forever. The stars whirled on; the whole careless plan would continue for infinities unknown. This trivial end of a negligible episode mattered not to distant nebulae or to suns newborn, flourishing, and dying. The race of man, too puny and momentary to have a real function or purpose, was as if it had never existed. To such a conclusion the aeons of its farcically toilsome evolution had led.

The musicians, who were all English, included one pianist, Theodore Ronald Brailey; three cellists, Roger Marie Bricaux, Percy Cornelius Taylor, and John Wesley Woodward; a bassist, John Frederick Preston Clark; and three violinists, John Law Hume, Georges Alexandre Krins, and the bandmaster, Wallace Hartley. They were brought on deck near where the lifeboats were being loaded early on to help keep morale high. As the night went on and the situation became more dire, they continued to play, probably believing it was all they could do to express their own anguish and comfort the increasingly panicked crowd. Many survivors reported hearing them playing until shortly before the sinking.

There's a certain kind of boy who likes to read only about things that have really happened. Like Alex. He read about the Titanic and memorized how many people died (1,523) and the name of the boat that picked up the survivors (RMS Carpathia). He read about ghosts and werewolves, too, sometimes, but only when he was certain he was being presented with facts. (The vulnerability to silver bullets, for example, was made up by modern fiction writers—probably any bullet would do.) In one of the books Alex took out of the library, there was a story about a white flower, the scent of which turned people into wolves. He worried about the flower. It seemed to have no proper name for him to memorize.

It was through the “Red Cross Emergency Relief Committee” that some $130,000 was raised for the specific aid of “Titanic survivors.” The committee’s chairman was Robert W. de Forest.

Can you read them? Mrs Walter Clark, 2155 West Adams Street, Los Angeles, Cal.; Miss E. Bowerman, Thorncliff, St Leonards-on-Sea, England; Mrs Lucien P. Smith, Huntington, W. Va.; Mrs Martin Rothschild, 753 West End Avenue, New York; Mrs Tyrell Cavendish, Driftwood, Monmouth; Mrs Edgar J. Mayer [Meyer], 158 West Eighty-Sixth Street, New York; Mrs Walter Douglas, Deepshaven, Mass.; Mrs J. J. Brown, Denver.

Newark Star, 20 April 1912 To the rare presence of mind of her father, John H. Cribb, who lost his life when the Titanic sank, Miss Lillian M. Cribb, 17 years old, believes she owes her life. Controlling her overtaxed nerves as best she could upon her arrival at the home of her uncle, John W. Welch, at 106 Pennington Street, last night, she recited the incidents attending her rescue aboard the Carpathia.

he was in the employ of Frank Gould on the yacht Helenita, and until last September was butler at the home of E. S. Repello, 841 Madison Venue, New York. It was to the last mentioned place to which he had expected to return on his arrival upon the Titanic.

But as they prayed, each man by that inner light saw an invisible friend walking across the waves. Henceforth, these need no books on apologetics to prove there is a God. This man who has written his story tells us that God heard the prayers of some.

He adopted it. The child became one of just 949 known survivors of the greatest maritime disaster in history, its 7,000 dead far outstripping those of the Titanic, Lusitania, Laconia. Yet, amid global tragedy on the scale of 1945, the horrors of the Wilhelm Gustloff remain known only to some Germans and a few historians.

… yet a little colder, gray sky deepening into haziness as evening fell, making the water look like molten silver as it caught the soft beams of a misty moon. A soothing peace and an ever increasing chill set in that drove one indoors, an excuse for bed and a good book. I slipped out on deck, my nightly custom before retiring, for a few moments alone with my thoughts. It was all so quiet, but how penetratingly cold it had become! Little wisps of mist like tiny fairies wafted gently inboard from the sea and left my face clammy. I shivered. It was indeed a night for bed, warmth and cozy thoughts of home and firesides.

Lawrence Beesley was a 34-year-old science teacher. A Cambridge University graduate, Beesley wrote one of the more considered and authoritative eyewitness accounts of the disaster. The Loss of the SS Titanic, its Story and its Lessons was first published just nine weeks after the disaster. No Titanic collection would be complete without Beesley, and it is for this reason that I have included a major extract. I would like to thank Nicholas Wade, Lawrence Beesley’s grandson, for permission to reproduce this extract. As with many accounts, some of Beesley’s timings are a little off. His estimate of when lifeboat 13 was launched is earlier than the time now accepted.

A larger share of the answer to the question why the Titanic still arouses so much interest, however, may lie in the position that the Titanic held in the world of 1912. The Titanic was not simply a means of conveying people from a place they wished to leave to a place they wanted to be, as is the case with most modern ships. It was a floating symbol of status, almost a materialized article of social faith. Its owners had succeeded admirably in establishing it as a symbol of safety, luxury, exclusiveness, and social privilege. This world was smashed in an evening, indeed, in a matter of hours. The watertight compartments which the owners had puffed so extensively turned out to be worthless. The pride of twentieth-century technology floundered and plunged like the weakest seventeenth-century pink. Millionaires and immigrants from the third-class shared the common experience of death. Death, it was suddenly recognized, could strike down a Rothschild or a Guggenheim as quickly as it could a stoker. All in all, the sinking of the Titanic was a demonstration of man’s fate in microcosm.

The Titanic disaster combined the inevitability of a Greek tragedy with the ominous warning of the medieval morality play. it marked the end of an era, and with the Titanic sank the snugness and smugness of the Edwardian illusion that there were no limits to man’s ingenuity and progress. In place of this hard-lost illusion came the harsh recognition of the onset of the age of insecurity, of which the Titanic offered the first forebodings. The Titanic disaster marks a partition in human history, and for this reason, in addition to its essential drama, it will always arouse interest as a tragedy of historic and epic magnitude.

Whoever reads the account of the cries that came to us afloat on the sea from those sinking in the ice-cold water must remember that they were addressed to him just as much as to those who heard them, and that the duty of seeing that reforms are carried out devolves on every one who knows that such cries were heard in utter helplessness the night the Titanic sank.

It is related that on the night of the disaster, right up to the time of the Titanic’s sinking, while the band grouped outside the gymnasium doors played with such supreme courage in face of the water which rose foot by foot before their eyes, the instructor was on duty inside, with passengers on the bicycles and the rowing-machines, still assisting and encouraging to the last. Along with the bandsmen it is fitting that his name, which I do not think has yet been put on record—it is McCawley —should have a place in the honorable list of those who did their duty faithfully to the ship and the line they served.

establish, among other things, a general fund for survivors from steerage,

The Upside of Disaster “What’s very fortunate, beautiful, wonderful, and also, in a weird way, tragic about modern society, is that crisis has been removed. When you reintroduce a crisis like in the Blitz in London or an earthquake that I wrote about in Avezzano, Italy, early in the 20th century, [things change]. In Avezzano, something like 95% of the population was killed. I’m going from memory, but unbelievable casualty, just like a nuclear strike. . . . People had to rely on each other, so everyone—upper-class people, lower-class people, peasants, and nobility—sort of crouched around the same campfires. One of the survivors said, ‘The earthquake gave us what the law promises but does not, in fact, deliver, which is the equality of all men.

Everyone knows the story of the sinking of the Titanic, which claimed fifteen hundred lives. But almost no one ever mentions a word about the 1948 sinking of the Chinese ferryboat SS Kiangya, which claimed nearly four thousand lives. Or the 1987 sinking of the ferryboat MV Dona Paz, which killed 4,345 people. Or the capsizing of the MV Le Joola, which claimed 1,863 lives off the coast of Gambia in 2002. Perhaps the Titanic sticks out because of its story potential: the famous and wealthy passengers, the firsthand accounts from survivors, and, of course, the eventual blockbuster movie.

The Dark Cloud Is the vengeful and demonic persona that villains love to cultivate Is the quick realization that there are many enemies at the gate Is the sadness of Titanic and how Jack had to die while suffering awaited Rose (Leo and Kate) Is the heaviness of being a survivor of injustice that has too much spiritual weight

Everything that happened that night . . . It was something darker and worse than hell. I can’t get it out of my head. I don’t reckon I ever will.

After I found Titanic in 1985, I could have obtained salvage rights if I’d wanted to, according to international maritime law. But I wasn’t interested in retrieving artifacts. I believed we should respect the passengers and crew who had died there and leave their grave site undisturbed. Survivors, like Eva Hart, agreed. She was seven when the ship sank. “I saw all the horror of its sinking,” she told me. “And I heard, even more dreadful, the cries of drowning people.

What has never been absolutely certain is how many of the eight musicians were involved in this exercise, as they’d previously worked as two separate groups with different repertoires. If they combined, what did the two pianists, Percy Taylor and Theo Brailey, play after they were out on the Boat Deck itself? It seems unlikely that they would have hauled a piano onto the deck of a sinking ship. Others have questioned the ability of the cellists to remain in place once the ship listed beyond a certain degree because cellists need to be firmly seated. The survivors mostly referred to “the band” or “the ship’s orchestra” without enumerating them.

It’s possible that Brailey and Taylor could have continued playing on other instruments once they moved away from the upright piano at the top of the staircase. We know, for example, that Hume had two violins with him and that Brailey was a multi-instrumentalist. The fact that the musicians played for the passengers as the lifeboats were lowered can’t seriously be questioned. There were a handful of survivors who claimed not to have heard them, but the evidence for the music is far too substantial to ignore.

What the band played has always been more a matter of controversy than whether it played at all. This is sometimes presented as an issue raised by modern historians, but it was there from the very beginning in the divergence of the accounts given by Harold Bride to the New York Times and by the survivors on the Carpathia to Carlos Hurd for the Pultizer newspapers. Had the musicians gone down playing a tune known as “Autumn” or the music of “Nearer, My God, to Thee”? The public inquiries in America and England raised the additional issue of whether they had played any religious music at all. Some witnesses claimed that they’d stuck to popular tunes and that hymns would have been inappropriate at such a time of despair.

When survivors specifically mentioned that hymns were played, the consensus was that it was toward the end. It would make sense that the band members played the popular tunes as the lifeboats were loaded and the more reflective pieces once they only had themselves and their destinies to contemplate.

What were they playing? All agree that the band featured light, cheerful music—ragtime, waltzes, and the comic songs that were then so popular in the London music halls. Survivors specifically recalled Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and a pretty English melody called “In the Shadows,” the big London hit of 1911. Colonel Gracie couldn’t remember the name of any tune, but he was sure the beat was lively to the end. Nevertheless, the Carpathia had no sooner reached New York than the story spread that the band went down playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” The idea was so appealing that it instantly became part of the Titanic saga—as imperishable as the enduring love of the Strauses and the courage of the engineers who kept the lights burning to the final plunge. Yet doubts persist. In the first place, the whole point of the band playing was to keep the passengers’ spirits up, and light music seems best suited to that. As Colonel Gracie observed, “If ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ was one of the selections, I assuredly would have noticed it and regarded it as a tactless warning of immediate death, and more likely to create a panic that our special efforts were directed towards avoiding….

everything that was gained by someone in this world was taken from someone else. You couldn’t create energy out of nothing – you couldn’t create wealth out of nothing. Wealth

How those poor souls people crammed themselves into the lifeboats, all classes mixed together I shall never know. I experienced something similar in the Opera House last Tuesday evening, though at least we were dry. Poor Mr Ismay; I hear he weeps at the mere sight of an ice cube

That morning Captain Rostron had considered several places he might land his more than seven hundred unexpected passengers. He’d first considered the Azores so that he could continue to the Mediterranean as scheduled; then Halifax, which was the nearest port. But on seeing the survivors come aboard, many of them in a distressed state and some in need of medical attention, it soon became clear that he should take them directly to New York. Rostron decided to visit Bruce Ismay to discuss the decision with him but the shattered White Star chairman quickly gave his agreement to whatever the captain thought was best. It was Rostron who had earlier prompted a dazed Ismay to send a wireless message notifying the White Star Line’s New York office about the accident. To Philip Franklin, the U.S. vice president of White Star’s parent company, the International Mercantile Marine, Ismay had written: Deeply regret advise you Titanic sank this morning after collision iceberg, resulting serious loss life. Full particulars later. Bruce Ismay.

Captain Rostron paid another visit to Ismay’s room that morning. He had received a wireless message from the Olympic proposing that the Titanic’s passengers be transferred to her. Rostron thought that putting the survivors into boats for a second sea transfer was a very bad idea. Even the sight of a ship that so closely resembled the Titanic might stir up panic among the survivors. Ismay agreed emphatically—the Olympic should stay out of sight. On board the sister liner, however, Frank Millet’s friend Daniel Burnham had been told that they were steaming to the rescue of the Titanic’s passengers, and he was preparing to give up his suite to Frank and Archie Butt. He could use the time on board with Frank to prepare him for the next meeting of the Lincoln Memorial Commission. In a letter waiting for Frank in New York, Burnham had written, “The rats swim back and begin to gnaw at the same old spot the moment the dog’s back is turned,” the “rats” being several congressmen who were still pushing for John Russell Pope’s design over that of Henry Bacon. The letter had concluded, “I leave the thing confidently in your hand.” When a list of the Titanic’s survivors was posted on the Olympic’s notice board the next morning, however, Burnham saw that Millet’s name was not on it. In his diary entry for April 16, the ailing architect recorded the news of the Titanic’s loss and noted that “Frank D. Millet, whom I loved, was aboard of her … and probably [has] gone down.” Burnham himself would die two weeks later, but the classical white temple he had championed for the Lincoln Memorial would prevail—a tribute to the architect’s persistence and that of the friend he loved.

The Olympic’s Marconi operators were relaying all the messages from the Carpathia to stations onshore, due to the Cunard liner’s limited wireless range. Marconi forms had been distributed to the survivors that morning but many of their messages would not be sent for another day or two—if at all. Captain Rostron had instructed that the first priority was to transmit a list of the survivors. The Carpathia’s chief purser and his assistant were busy compiling the names of passengers while Lightoller worked on the list of the surviving crew and engine room staff and a senior steward gathered the names of the cooks and stewards. The grim tally would come to 712 people rescued from a ship that had held 2,209. Over two-thirds of those on board the Titanic had perished.

Norris met another survivor on board who told him that he had been bringing home a prized dog on the Titanic and had gone to the kennels and released all the dogs a half hour before the ship went under. Norris described to him how when he was swimming away from the sinking liner he had spied the black face of a French bulldog in the water.

At breakfast on Friday morning a crowd of curious hotel guests gathered around Arthur Peuchen in the Waldorf-Astoria’s dining room and made him recount his story once again. In the hotel’s largest ballroom, meanwhile, seven U.S. senators were preparing to question J. Bruce Ismay, the first witness to appear before the U.S. Senate investigation. As he began his testimony that morning, Ismay still seemed shaken by the disaster, and his voice was almost a whisper as he expressed his “sincere grief at this deplorable catastrophe” and offered his full cooperation to the inquiry. Yet his answers were guarded and often prefaced with “I presume” or “I believe” and concluded by “More than that I cannot say”—giving his testimony an air of evasiveness. His claims that he was simply a passenger like any other and that the Titanic was not pushed to its maximum speed were greeted with skepticism by the senators and with open hostility by the press. The Hearst newspapers famously dubbed him J. “Brute” Ismay and ran his photograph framed by those of Titanic widows. Edith Rosenbaum was among the few survivors who thought that the White Star chairman was being made a scapegoat and made a point of telling reporters that it was Ismay who had put her into a lifeboat.

Margaret Brown was already miffed that she had not been asked to testify before the Senate inquiry given her prominence on the Survivors’ Committee and the acclaim she was enjoying as a heroine of the Titanic. And as a supporter of women’s suffrage, Margaret was not shy about using her newfound fame to wade into the debate over gender equality swirling around the disaster. (One newspaper poet noted how the cry of “Votes for women” had become “Boats for women/When the brave/Were come to die.”) Margaret Brown stated in an interview that while “ ‘Women first’ is a principle as deep-rooted in man’s being as the sea … to me it is all wrong. Women demand equal rights on land—why not on sea?

While the Duff Gordons drank champagne at the Ritz that Thursday night, Margaret Brown was still on the Carpathia, helping out with the steerage passengers. Immigration and health officials had come on board to spare the Titanic’s third-class survivors the customary hiatus at Ellis Island, but it was after eleven o’clock before the first of them began to leave the ship. Still wearing the black velvet suit she had donned after the collision, “Queen Margaret,” as some in first class had dubbed her, worked to organize the disembarkation of the steerage women and help with their travel arrangements. The Countess of Rothes was doing likewise, and one passenger of particular concern for her was Rhoda Abbott, who was unable to walk due to her ordeal in Collapsible A. Although Rhoda assured the countess and Margaret Brown that she would be looked after by the Salvation Army, she was transferred by ambulance to New York Hospital at Noëlle’s expense and later to a hotel room that Mrs. Brown arranged for her. The small, slim countess eventually walked down the gangway and into the arms of her husband Norman, the Earl of Rothes, and before long, she, too, was in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton. But Margaret Brown remained on the ship, where she improvised beds in the lounge for the remaining steerage women and spent the night with them. The next day her brother, who had come from Denver to greet her, came on board and told Margaret that her ailing grandson—the reason she had come home on the Titanic—was recovering well. This encouraged her to stay in New York, where she set up headquarters for the Titanic Survivors’ Committee in her suite at the Ritz-Carlton.

On the same day that Marcelle Navratil arrived in New York, a brand-new movie entitled Saved from the Titanic was announced on the marquees of the city’s nickelodeons. The ten-minute silent film had been made in three weeks at Éclair’s studios in New Jersey and starred a real-life survivor of the shipwreck, Miss Dorothy Gibson, wearing the same white silk dress and black pumps in which she had escaped from the sinking liner. Dorothy had at first been unwilling to relive her ordeal so soon after the disaster and according to one newspaper there were times during the filming when she had “practically lost her reason by virtue of the terrible strain she had been under.” The one-reeler, which was produced by Jules Brulatour, would be Dorothy’s last film since she then embarked on a career in opera. This would prove to be short-lived, as would her marriage to Brulatour in 1917. Following a generous divorce settlement in 1919, the prettiest girl retreated from public attention and was never seen on stage or screen again.

With a historian’s eye, Archibald Gracie attempted to separate truth from fantasy as he listened to the survivors’ stories, a potential book beginning to form in his mind. Second Officer Lightoller and Third Officer Pitman regularly stopped by the small cabin Gracie shared with Hugh Woolner to discuss various aspects of the disaster. All agreed that the explosions heard during the sinking could not have been the ship’s boilers blowing up. From the discovery of the severed wreck in 1985 we now know that the “explosions” were actually the sound of the ship being wrenched apart. But Gracie and Lightoller firmly believed that the ship had sunk intact—a view that would become the prevailing opinion for the next seventy-three years. Gracie thought that Norris Williams and Jack Thayer, “the two young men cited as authority … of the break-in-two theory,” had confused the falling funnel for the ship breaking apart. But both Williams and Thayer knew exactly what they had seen, as did some other eyewitnesses. On the Carpathia, Jack Thayer described the stages of the ship’s sinking and breaking apart to Lewis Skidmore, a Brooklyn art teacher, who drew sketches that were later featured in many newspapers. The inaccuracies in Skidmore’s drawings, however, only bolstered the belief that the ship had, in fact, sunk intact. And what of the most famous Titanic legend of all—that the band played “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ship neared its end? It’s often claimed that this was a myth that took hold among survivors on the Carpathia and captivated the public in the aftermath of the disaster. None of the musicians survived to confirm or deny the story, but Harold Bride noted that the last tune he heard being played as he left the wireless cabin was “Autumn.” For a time this was believed to be a hymn tune by that name, but Walter Lord proposed in The Night Lives On that Bride must have been referring to “Songe d’Automne,” a popular waltz by Archibald Joyce that is listed in White Star music booklets of the period. Historian George Behe, however, has carefully studied the survivor accounts regarding the music that was heard during the sinking and has found credible evidence that “Nearer My God to Thee” and perhaps other hymns were played toward the end. Behe also recounts that the orchestra’s leader, Wallace Hartley, was once asked by a friend what he would do if he ever found himself on a sinking ship. Hartley replied, “I don’t think I could do better than play ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ ” The legendary hymn may not have been the very last tune played on the Titanic but it seems possible that it was heard on the sloping deck that night.

While so many people floated on the sea, dying, most of the lifeboats did not sit idly by. They had to confront the excruciating moral question of whether to put their own lives at risk and row back to pick up survivors, or whether to preserve their safety at a distance, and either hope that a ship would arrive soon (doubtful, since none appeared to be on the horizon), or let the others die. Most opted for the latter. Famously, Margaret Brown (discussed above) forced her boat to return, but by the time she had taken charge, they were only able to pull a few people from the icy water. The rest had already perished.

As the Empire wades into the East River hand in hand with the Chrysler, other love-struck structures begin to talk. We’re watching from the windows as apartment towers lean in to gossip, stretching laundry lines finger to finger. Grand Central, as stout and elegant as a survivor of the Titanic, stands up, shakes her skirts, and pays a visit to Pennsylvania Station, that Beaux-Arts bangle. The Flatiron and Cleopatra’s Needle shiver with sudden proximity, and within moments they’re all over one another.

I would happily spend every minute of my future hearing about every minute of his past.