Viaduct Quotes

In Brazil, every road, bridge and viaduct has been given a name, usually that of some long-forgotten personage who was once famous for doing something worthy. Honestly, every one of them; deeper into the country, I’ve even found unsurfaced dirt tracks given names. I’m never likely to have even five minutes of fame, but if I did, I don’t think I’d want to be remembered by a dirt track going from Nowhere Town to Obscure Village.

It is not believed that a people capable of inventing the genre of "oral painting" could have spawned the viaduct killer, and in any case no ghetto resident is permitted access to any other area of the city. ("A Short Guide To The City")

This planet was a marketplace where evil tugged murderously at its chains. Its spies were everywhere. At windy corners where young girls with knowing children’s faces were selling flowers and matches, on the operating tables at the hospitals, in the slums, at railway stations, under viaducts.

But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years - problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space - and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die.

Go that way, past the viaduct, and the wops will jump you, or chase you into Jew town...Polacks would stomp on you...Micks will shower you with Irish confetti from the brickyards.

Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs.

The view of the highway was so bad that you could not even see the next viaduct. Te moment it loomed out of the mist it disappeared again, as if the world created itself and was blotted out again.

Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs

There is an endless chain of cities, a circle without beginning or end, over which there breaks unrelentingly a shifting wave of laws. There is the city-jungle and the city where people live in the pillars of tall viaducts that crisscross each other in countless overpasses and underpasses, the city of sounds and nothing else, the city in the swamp, the city of smooth white balls rolling on concrete, the city comprising apartments spread across several continents, the city where sculptures fall endlessly from dark clouds and smash on the paving stones, the city where the moon’s path passes through the insides of apartments. All cities are mutually the center and periphery, beginning and end, capital and colony of each other.

Swirled tight, trussed, manic, most trusted. You love hills, swells, waves of sand, waves of water. You love traffic on bridges that might split in two. You love stairs leading to stairs leading to ice cream stands. Shards of pottery as good as a map. You love fractured control towers and the very broken Alaskan Way Viaduct. You love squat corner stores and barber-pole signs. You love the idea of privacy in a city of windows, the idea of light in a city of shadows.

It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart by a thoasand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame. This smoke is more than the day’s breath, more than dark strength--it is an imperial presence that lives and moves. People were crossing the streets and squares, going everywhere. Busses were grinding off, hundreds of them, down the long concrete viaducts, smeared with years’ pitiless use and no pleasure, into haze-gray, grease black, red lead and pale aluminum, between scrap heaps that towered high as blocks of flats, down side-shoving curves into roads clogged with Army convoys, other tall busses and canvas lorries, bicycles and cars, hitching now and then, over it all the enormous gas ruin of the sun among the smokestacks, the barrage balloons, power lines and chimneys brown as aging indoor wood, brown growing deeper, approaching black through an instant-- perhaps the true turn of the sunset-- that is wine to you, wine and comfort. The Moment was 6:43:16 British Double Summer Time: the sky beaten like Death’s drum, still humming, and Slothrop’s cock--say what? yes lookit inside his GI undershorts here’s a sneaky hardon stirring, ready to jump-- well great God where’d that come from? There is in his history, and likely, God help him, in his dossier, a peculiar sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky. (But a harden?)

That is the most extraordinary fact about Britain. It wants to be a garden. Flowers bloom in the unlikeliest places–on railway sidings and waste grounds where there is nothing beneath them but rubble and grit. You even see clumps of flowery life growing on the sides of abandoned warehouses and old viaducts. If all the humans in the UK vanished tomorrow, Britain would still be in flower.

This Only" A valley and above it forests in autumn colors. A voyager arrives, a map leads him there. Or perhaps memory. Once long ago in the sun, When snow first fell, riding this way He felt joy, strong, without reason, Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight, Of a train on the viaduct, a feast in motion. He returns years later, has no demands. He wants only one, most precious thing: To see, purely and simply, without name, Without expectations, fears, or hopes, At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

The Jewish doctors and lawyers and the successful merchants who owned big stores downtown lived in one-family houses on streets branching off the eastern slope of the Chancellor Avenue hill, closer to grassy, wooded Weequahic Park, a landscaped three hundred acres whose boating lake, golf course, and harness-racing track separated the Weequahic section from the industrial plants and shipping terminals lining Route 27 and the Pennsylvania Railroad viaduct east of that and the burgeoning airport east of that and the very edge of America east of that—the depots and docks of Newark Bay, where they unloaded cargo from around the world.

The Korowai Pass had been closed since the end of the summer, when a spate of shallow earthquakes trigered a landslide that buried a stretch of the highway in rubble. killing five, and sending a long-haul transport truck over a precipice where it skimmed a power line, ploughed a channel down the lountainside, and then exploded on a viaduct below. He pused one of the nets into the evil-smelling hole and then pulled it our again, and then he drew a breath and held the trigger down with both his thumbs and thrust the lighted wand against the sopping fabric, praying that the flame would catch, prayting that the fire woul d send up smoke and burn away the nets so that the scale of the destruction would be visable from overhead, so that somebody would see it, somebody would notice, so that somebody would care, and as the fre began to blaze and crackle up the ancient trees around him, Tony prayed that somebody would come put it out.

Stalinist logic ... said that every Soviet person who had lived abroad had to be imprisoned in camp ... Stalin feared that they might bring European freedom back from their European crusade ... I had seen downcast columns of returning war prisoners - the only people around who were grieving instead of celebrating. Even then their gloom had shocked me, though I didn't yet grasp the reason for it ... Very few of the war prisoners returned across the Soviet border as free men, and if one happened to get through by accident because of the prevailing chaos, he was seized later on ... the former POWs, looking out on the Motherland newly restored to them through the same barbed wire through which they had seen Germany ... When they arrived ... police vans were waiting, as were armed guards holding lists of names. They could not even shoot or stab themselves to death since all their weapons had been taken away. Some jumped off the high viaduct into the river or onto the stones ... But the West did not understand at all. The democratic West simply could not understand.

In 1853, Haussmann began the incredible transformation of Paris, reconfiguring the city into 20 manageable arrondissements, all linked with grand, gas-lit boulevards and new arteries of running water to feed large public parks and beautiful gardens influenced greatly by London’s Kew Gardens. In every quarter, the indefatigable prefect, in concert with engineer Jean-Charles Alphand, refurbished neglected estates such as Parc Monceau and the Jardin du Luxembourg, and transformed royal hunting enclaves into new parks such as enormous Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes. They added romantic Parc des Buttes Chaumont and Parc Montsouris in areas that were formerly inhospitable quarries, as well as dozens of smaller neighborhood gardens that Alphand described as "green and flowering salons." Thanks to hothouses that sprang up in Paris, inspired by England’s prefabricated cast iron and glass factory buildings and huge exhibition halls such as the Crystal Palace, exotic blooms became readily available for small Parisian gardens. For example, nineteenth-century metal and glass conservatories added by Charles Rohault de Fleury to the Jardin des Plantes, Louis XIII’s 1626 royal botanical garden for medicinal plants, provided ideal conditions for orchids, tulips, and other plant species from around the globe. Other steel structures, such as Victor Baltard’s 12 metal and glass market stalls at Les Halles in the 1850s, also heralded the coming of Paris’s most enduring symbol, Gustave Eiffel’s 1889 Universal Exposition tower, and the installation of steel viaducts for trains to all parts of France. Word of this new Paris brought about emulative City Beautiful movements in most European capitals, and in the United States, Bois de Boulogne and Parc des Buttes Chaumont became models for Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park in New York. Meanwhile, for Parisians fascinated by the lakes, cascades, grottoes, lawns, flowerbeds, and trees that transformed their city from just another ancient capital into a lyrical, magical garden city, the new Paris became a textbook for cross-pollinating garden ideas at any scale. Royal gardens and exotic public pleasure grounds of the Second Empire became springboards for gardens such as Bernard Tschumi’s vast, conceptual Parc de La Villette, with its modern follies, and “wild” jardins en mouvement at the Fondation Cartier and the Musée du Quai Branly. In turn, allées of trees in some classic formal gardens were allowed to grow freely or were interleaved with wildflower meadows and wild grasses for their unsung beauty. Private gardens hidden behind hôtel particulier walls, gardens in spacious suburbs, city courtyards, and minuscule rooftop terraces, became expressions of old and very new gardens that synthesized nature, art, and outdoors living.

As he passed a spectacular viaduct to his right, he though about psychopaths, and how they were to be found everywhere, not only in run-down tenements and slums and squats, but even here, in this place of serene beauty.

A light patter of rain began to fall, and Alexei put on the windshield wipers. We took the Alaskan Way Viaduct up past Elliot Bay into Ballard, then turned toward the water and bumped along an older part of the wharf to a warehouse at the edge of a pier. The warehouse, like the pier, was old and unkempt, with great rusted doors that slid along tracks and peeling paint and an air of poverty. Dmitri climbed out, pushed open the door, and we drove inside to park between a brand-new $100,000 Porsche Carrera and an $80,000 Mercedes SL convertible. Guess the air of poverty only went so far.

Who can chart the vastness of Incarceron? Its halls viaducts, its chasms? Only the man who has known freedom Can define his prison.

Everywhere, the silt encroached, shoring itself in huge banks against a railway viaduct or crescent of offices, oozing through a submerged arcade like the fetid contents of some latter-day Cloaca Maxima. Many of the smaller lakes were now filled with the silt, yellow disks of fungus-covered sludge from which a profuse tangle of competing plant forms emerged, walled gardens in an insane Eden.

However, this process of installing a dynamo for each separate building was costly. A centralized power station would solve the problem, so Edison tested the concept in the United Kingdom at the Holborn Viaduct in London.

Still, she did not allow self-pity to overcome her. She relied on her ability, since childhood, to chase away bad memories. She did not ponder on all the evil done to her in the village; nor did she recall the fear she had felt on the viaduct. Her mind did not return to the past, and an inner strength blanked out her fears and sorrows. The only bad memory she could not erase was that of her aunt making her cry in front of the locked door, as well as the shame she had felt returning to say good-bye as she walked down the muddy road in the village. Her black plastic shoes reminded her of those incidents.

viaduct, its brick arches filled in by storerooms. A

A modest goodness enrolls a future in two balances and a viaduct.

Abrí el estuche de los CDs, en busca de un rgan disco de carretera, ansioso por escoger uno, dubitativo, había tantos que me parecían buenos que empecé a angustiarme, era preciso acertar, el riesgo de fallar en la elección era fatal, en ese momento era la decisión más importante de nuestras vidas, me detuve en Astral Weeks, no podía ser otro disco me dijiste, tenía que ser Astral Weeks, y ya estábamos de acuerdo en eso, esperé a ponernos en marcha para dar al play, el viaje y la canción habían de empezar a la vez, subí el volumen hasta reventarlo, bajamos las cuatro ventanas, "if a ventured in the slipstream", me pusiste la mano en el muslo, "between de viaducts of your dream", yo saqué el brazo izquierdo fuera, abría la mano para sentir la resistencia del aire abrasador, "to be born again, to be born again". Ponte esa canción ahora mismo, según lees esto, yo la escucho mientras escribo esto. Cierro los ojos, estoy en esa carretera.

Black and white are in the deaf Tomb in which I chatter.

Like the Rain, Smell it Coming” I am dreaming of tornadoes again, too many for the sky to contain. I have checked eight websites and the dictionary on my nightstand. I did not need technology or a writer to tell me there is chaos in my heart. I don’t tell people sometimes my dreams come true. I fear some parts are not metaphor. In the mornings I check the horizon. I am relieved when there is some whisper of light. On the way home from camping, a large storm made the highway a blur of brake lights, my fingers killers to my steering wheel. I kept searching for funnels, their willowy bodies twisting their way to the ground. Mapped out escape routes and viaducts to pull beneath. Today I fell asleep on the couch again. The wind rustled me awake, and parts of the sky were dark again. I can’t shake that something is coming. I don’t do well with worry. My mother built me to fix things. Vinyl Poetry Volume 3, May 2011

The white paint lasts at the end of my dark white wall.

You can be sure that all laws affecting the welfare of the young are the work of doddering moribund ancients afflicted with angina pectoris, atherosclerosis, prolapses of the infundibulum, fulminating ventricles, and dilated viaducts.

For every challenge there is a success story right down the viaduct, so do not stop questioning. You got to keep going.