Downtown Quotes

I was bringing the whole music, hip-hop, art, break dancing and urban cultural thing to the downtown table. ~ Fab Five Freddy

​ "This place is fun, Downtown is fun!" I said, looking at the blurred lights of the lamps on the street. "No wonder you left me for this… I wouldn't be surprised if a ghost came out." I closed my fist, trying to catch the lights. "Now I get it, Dan! You're a ghost!"
​ "Am I?" he talked to me in an accommodating way, like anyone would do with a friend too drunk to think clearly.
​ "Yes! There's even two of you now."
​ "Of course, that would be the only possible reason." We reached the parking lot.
​ "Say Dan, have you come back to help me with Shallie? But if you're a ghost, can you just call her for me?" I grabbed his arm. "Can you? Can you bring her to me?" Suddenly all the fake happiness I was feeling before left me in a deep, black desperation. Dan's expression changed too, and got darker.
​ "I'm not a ghost, Drew," he said, calmly, securing the helmet under my chin. "I'm sorry," he added. ~ Elen Chase

Well the thing is that the New York of 1846 to 1862 was very different from downtown New York now. Really nothing from that period still exists in New York. ~ Martin Scorsese

Official boundaries are often hard to see. If you head north on Woodward Avenue, away from downtown Detroit, you wouldn't know exactly when you left the city and crossed over into Oakland County - except for a small sign that tells you. ~ Robert Reich

I shined off high school band, marching, jazz studies. At the time I was too cool for school, I had this professional gig and I was going home taking a shower and heading to downtown Hawaii, Waikiki. ~ Eric Hernandez

Her stomach twisted into a vicious knot every time she remembered the phone call from the police last month, after her sweet-natured employee, Molly, had been attacked by homeless guys in downtown Denver. Poor Molly had defined introverted even before the incident; the attack had pushed her further into her shell. So when Molly asked Amery to accompany her to a women's self-defense class, Amery had agreed. ~ Lorelei James

If only Ed Fleming had a mother who gave such sound advice. The manager of Wazoo's, a downtown Denver restaurant, Fleming is a CSU alum who has been darned giddy about the Rams' recent success. So giddy that he donned a necklace made of Pez candies, a red blazer - and nothing else. A few people gaped (some actually set aside their beers), but most ignored Fleming as he strutted like a red-blazered rooster, demanding that all hail the Mighty Naked Beer King. ~ J.R. Moehringer

Buildings are seldom just buildings in downtown Chicago, they are Examples, and not a city on Earth, I swear, is as knowledgeably preoccupied with architectural meaning. Where else would a department store include in its advertisements the name of the architect who created it, or a newspaper property section throw in a scholarly exposition of theoretical design? ~ Jan Morris

In Nepal, the phenomenon is reversed. Time is a stick of incense that burns without being consumed. One day can seem like a week; a week, like months. Mornings stretch out and crack their spines with the yogic impassivity of house cats. Afternoons bulge with a succulent ripeness, like fat peaches. There is time enough to do everything - write a letter, eat breakfast, read the paper, visit a shrine or two, listen to the birds, bicycle downtown to change money, buy postcards, shop for Buddhas - and arrive home in time for lunch. ~ Jeff Greenwald

Downtown is divided again, between the blocks of brick emporiums of the 1880s and a straggle of modern stores which look as if they have been squeezed from a tube labeled Instant Shopping Center. ~ Ivan Doig

For me, growing up in Harlem and then migrating down to SoHo and the Lower East Side and chillin' down there and making that my stomping ground ... That was a big thing, because I'm from Harlem, and downtown is more artsy and also more open-minded. So I got the best of both worlds. ~ ASAP Rocky

We don't have any CGI with any of the car stuff. I think it's a real experience when you see this car going through really fast really wild and you see me driving a lot of the times and also a big chase in downtown Atlanta. It's just incredible. ~ Sean William Scott

People talk about wanting amenities - downtown is the amenity. ~ Jack White

Famously sunny Los Angeles has long been known as the homeless capital of America, from beachy communities like Santa Monica and Venice to Skid Row downtown. ~ John Carlos Frey

I'm pretty darn happy. I really wanted to go to San Diego and play for those offensive masterminds. I'm looking forward to a 15-year career, a couple of trips to the Super Bowl and a parade through downtown San Diego. ~ Ryan Leaf

He'd been drinking in a bar downtown, when he thought he heard a choir of angels singing in the Tiki Lounge. And that's when he got religion. ~ Elton John

Downtown Newcago spread out before me, its surfaces reflecting starlight. Everything was steel here. Like a cyborg from the future with the skin ripped off. Only, you know, not murderous. Or, well, alive at all.
Man, I thought. I really do suck at metaphors. ~ Brandon Sanderson

I throw a leather biker jacket over everything. It adds an instant downtown cool vibe and stops a look becoming too girlie. Bonus points if you wear it like a cape! ~ Ashley Madekwe

L.A. is still such a fascinating place to me, so big and diverse. It's so spread out that you can go from Zuma to downtown and there's really like 10 different towns in between. ~ Dylan McDermott

There was this long lovely dancer in a little club downtown, love to watch her do her stuff. ~ Bob Seger

She was in her element walking the concrete sidewalks, listening to the buzz of traffic and the hum of city life. One reason was because as a child she lived in the old downtown of the small town, where the movie theater, the bank, several restaurants and most of city's government structure was located. As a child she'd seen empty wine bottles and empty snuff boxes littering the streets on Sunday morning. ~ Richard E. Riegel

Piper directed me into downtown Los Angeles.
I considered this a bad sign. "Downtown Los Angeles" had always struck me as an oxymoron, like "hot ice cream" or "military intelligence". (Yes, Ares, that was an insult.) ~ Rick Riordan

There was one, a Mr. Omuro, who had bought control of a great area of rental property in downtown San Francisco, and who for a time had been Frank's landlord. There was a bad apple, he thought. A shark who had never made repairs, had partitioned rooms smaller and smaller, raised rents ~ Philip K. Dick

Each day as I travel through downtown Tucson, I am amazed at how quickly the most ancient of human behaviors have changed. For as long as there have been Homo sapiens - roughly 200,000 years - people have filled their lives principally with two activities: talking directly with other people, and doing physical things. ~ Andrew Weil

McGahern still lives on and works a farm in Leitrim, and friends say that even though he has held high profile academic posts round the world as a visiting professor he remains essentially a countryman.

Last term he taught in an upstate New York college, but seeing him in the soulless urban grid of downtown Syracuse wearing an old tweed flat cap and long black overcoat, he could have been in an Irish agricultural town on market day as he casually engaged strangers on the street to ask for advice on finding a decent restaurant. Friends say he has extraordinary confidence in who he is and where he's from - he behaves pretty much the same way wherever is and whoever he is with. ~ John McGahern

The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can't go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who's sniffing cocaine. ~ Noam Chomsky

Adam lived in an apartment located above the office of St. Agnes Catholic Church, a fortuitous combination that focused most of the objects of Ronan's worship into one downtown block. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

I write late into the night at the Tutweiler in downtown Birmingham, and try hard to turn down that second cheeseburger at Milo's over by UAB, which has the best one in the whole wide world. ~ Rick Bragg

I promised myself that I would maintain momentum.
"Maintain momentum" was the imperative that echoed all the way downtown.
In fact I had no idea what would happen if I lost it.
In fact I had no idea what it was. ~ Joan Didion

It was a modest, out-of-the-way place in downtown Tucson, the only shrine in America dedicated to the soul of a sinner, reported the historical plaque there. [...] He went there because that was the one holy place that didn't compel him to change into someone else in order to welcome him. ~ Elif Shafak

Herman and I have been doing a lot of talking about the cake the past couple of days, and we think we have a good plan for the three tiers. The bottom tier will be the chocolate tier and incorporate the dacquoise component, since that will all provide a good strong structural base. We are doing an homage to the Frango mint, that classic Chicago chocolate that was originally produced at the Marshall Field's department store downtown. We're going to make a deep rich chocolate cake, which will be soaked in fresh-mint simple syrup. The dacquoise will be cocoa based with ground almonds for structure, and will be sandwiched between two layers of a bittersweet chocolate mint ganache, and the whole tier will be enrobed in a mint buttercream.
The second tier is an homage to Margie's Candies, an iconic local ice cream parlor famous for its massive sundaes, especially their banana splits. It will be one layer of vanilla cake and one of banana cake, smeared with a thin layer of caramelized pineapple jam and filled with fresh strawberry mousse. We'll cover it in chocolate ganache and then in sweet cream buttercream that will have chopped Luxardo cherries in it for the maraschino-cherry-on-top element.
The final layer will be a nod to our own neighborhood, pulling from the traditional flavors that make up classical Jewish baking. The cake will be a walnut cake with hints of cinnamon, and we will do a soaking syrup infused with a little bit of sweet sherry. A thin layer of the thi ~ Stacey Ballis

Yeah. When you want what's real and you try to find that in high school, you might as well be looking for a mossy rock beside a babbling brook on the corner of Sixth and Pine in downtown Seattle. ~ Deb Caletti

Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, taste like love without the fear of love's dissolution, and as we came to the 90-degree curve Sunrise Avenue takes before heading straight downtown, I could almost taste them. ~ John Green

On that gray street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew. ~ Stephen King

There are almost no beautiful cities in America, though there are many beautiful parts of cities, and some sections that are glorious without being beautiful, like downtown Chicago. Cities are too big and too rich for beauty; they have outgrown themselves too many times. ~ Noel Perrin

That was the old Ellen Gulden, the girl who would walk over her mother in golf shoes, who scared students away from writing seminars, who started work on Monday after graduating from Harvard with honors on a Thursday, who loved the moments in the office when she would look out at the impenetrable black of the East River, starred with the reflected lights of Queens, with only the cleaning crew for company, and think of her various superiors out at dinner parties and restaurants and her various similars out at downtown clubs or cheap but authentic places in Chinatown and say to herself, 'I'm getting ahead.' That Ellen Gulden, the one her boss suspected of using the dying-mother ploy to get more money or a better job title, would have covered every inch of [this datebook] with the frantic scribble of unexamined ambition. ~ Anna Quindlen

I was a litigation lawyer, working in downtown Toronto. I was successful, yet I was very unfulfilled. I had the sense that I really wasn't living according to my values, and I didn't have the passion or sense of mission I was looking for. ~ Robin S. Sharma

area was less busy, swirling like currents in a lazy stream and sparking light greens, clear blue, and lemon yellow, which was a relief after so much horror lining the streets of downtown Lisbon. The area was mostly ghostless, but I supposed that a place that had been used only for agriculture for a few hundred years hadn't acquired the depth of life and death that towns and cities do. After a very long block, we turned and crossed the street to ~ Kat Richardson

In my late teens, early 20s, when I started stand-up and I was living downtown for the first time, I was deep into my blues and Bukowski phase. And, you know, that's when that's appropriate. And I grew out of it. ~ Paul F. Tompkins

It was dusk when I drove back into downtown Detroit. I was annoyed by how much traffic there was at that hour of the day. Being a guy with two good legs who doesn't mind ankling, I hadn't realized the car situation had gotten so bad in the city. I almost had two smack-ups with people who refused to yield to me. Then I bumped someone from behind, intentionally, at the new flashing traffic light on Jefferson. The guy in the car had refused to move - he just sat there waiting because the light was red. After I bumped him (not that hard), the squirt hopped out of his car red in the face, and I must admit the sight of him gave me my first laugh in two days. He said, "Can't you see it's a red light?" I told him a red light is just a suggestion. Then I pressed the gas lightly and started pushing his car further out into the intersection whilst he stood there in disbelief. "Better get back in, your car is leaving without you," I said. ~ W.K. Berger

It took him forever to get to downtown Vancouver although Tony had to admit that saving the world by public transportation was a particularly Canadian way to do things. ~ Tanya Huff

No one that has ever been in combat ever wants to see war anywhere in the world. It is horrible. It's horrible looking at the pock-marked walls. It's horrible looking at the flesh embedded on walls in Bosnia. It was horrible looking and interviewing and talking to the kids who lost their parents, because Saddam Hussein decided to feed their parents to the lions in downtown Baghdad. To characterize particularly myself, but other groups, as wanting to advocate a war I think is not only disingenuous, I think it's a patent falsehood intentionally created to stigmatize a group of people. ~ Matt Shea

But the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library was still a place of wonders to Tess, even if the book budget had been slashed and the hours cut. Her parents had made a lot of mistakes, a fact Tess compulsively shared on first dates, but she gave them credit for doing one thing right: Starting when she was eight, they gave her a library card and dropped her off at the downtown Pratt every Saturday while they shopped. Twenty-one years later, Tess still entered through the children's entrance on the side, pausing to toss a penny in the algae-coated fish pond, then climbing the stairs to the main hall. If she could be married here, she would. ~ Laura Lippman

She ate her breakfast in silence, then drove downtown in weather so lowering the streetlights seemed decapitated. This was when you could discover if your preparations for winter were adequate, and if you were ready for the restrictions of movement and light that were about to be upon you. ~ Thomas McGuane

I created my own space, which was called the cave. It was a live/work space in downtown Los Angeles on 7th and Spring. When I lived there it was quite derelict. I got this massive space and half of it was my bedroom and the other half of it was the back room - no [natural] light, all fluorescent lights. ~ Kesh

But I can stop on any corner at the intersection of two busy streets, and before me are thousands of lives headed in all four directions, uptown downtown east and west, on foot, on bikes, on in-line skates, in buses, strollers, cars, trucks, with the subway rumble underneath my feet ... and how can I not know I am momentarily part of the most spectacular phenomenon in the unnatural world? ... The city may begin from a marketplace, a trading post, the confluence of waters, but it secretly depends on the human need to walk among strangers. ~ E.L. Doctorow

That'll take some finagling,' she told Mulder.
'I'll keep watch, then,' he said. 'You go downtown and see what you can finagle. ~ Ellen Steiber

The whole point of bike-sharing is to give New Yorkers another way to commute. A lot of folks in Bay Ridge work in downtown Brooklyn or other parts of the borough. For them, it would make more sense to hop on a Citi Bike than to wait for a train or a bus. ~ Sal Albanese

I was suddenly very aware of the fact it was me standing up in that tunnel with the wind over my face. Not caring if I saw downtown. Not even thinking about it. Because I was standing in the tunnel. And I was really there. And that was enough to make me feel infinite. ~ Stephen Chbosky

Balanced atop the highest spire of the Salt Lake Temple, gleaming in the Utah sun, a statue of the angel Moroni stands watch over downtown Salt Lake City with his golden trumpet raised. This massive granite edifice is the spiritual and temporal nexus of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which presents itself as the world's only true religion. Temple Square is to Mormons what the Vatican is to Catholics, or the Kaaba in Mecca is to Muslims. At last count there were more than eleven million Saints the world over, and Mormonism is the fastest-growing faith in the Western Hemisphere. At present in the United States there are more Mormons than Presbyterians or Episcopalians. On the planet as a whole, there are now more Mormons than Jews. Mormonism is considered in some sober academic circles to be well on its way to becoming a major world religion
the first such faith to emerge since Islam. ~ Jon Krakauer

One night the month before, back on the other side of the Belgian border, Aughenbaugh had delivered a lecture on the etymology of the word war. He said that he had looked it up and it came from an ancient Indo-European root signifying confusion. That was a foxhole night, bitter cold. The 5th Panzer Army was making its last great push west. You had to hand it to those Indo-Europeans, my grandfather thought, rolling through Vellinghausen. Confusion shown on the faces of the townspeople. War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs. It confounded conquest with liberation, anger with heartache, hunger with gratitude, hatred with awe. The 53rd Combat Engineers looked pretty confused, too. They were milling around at the edge of town, contemplating the long stretch of road between and beautiful downtown Berlin, trying to figure out if they ought to mine it or clear it of mines. ~ Michael Chabon

When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go downtown. ~ Tony Hatch

In South Pasadena, artists were around but invisible somehow. Even though it was just a fifteen-minute drive from Downtown LA, it felt worlds apart. That suburban American experience can both protect and stunt you. I couldn't wait to move to New York to become the person I've always wanted to become. ~ Porochista Khakpour

Both of these places, Cairo's downtown and Tahrir Square, are in the heart of downtown Cairo. They are places where young people gather to exchange political and cultural ideas. And so that's possibly a factor into why they went after these institutions, although there's been no public comment from the government on why these raids happened. ~ Leila Fadel

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

No one has to know until we adopt in a few years. I'm sure there are loads of damn babies waiting for parents to buy them. We will be fine."

I know she hasn't accepted my offer of marriage, or even being in a relationship with me, but I hope she doesn't use this opportunity to remind me of that.

She laughs softly. "Damn babies? Please tell me you don't think there is a store somewhere downtown where you walk in and purchase a baby?" She lifts her hand to her mouth to stop herself from laughing at me.

"There isn't?" I joke. "What's Babies 'R' Us, then?"

"Oh my goodness!" She tilts her head back in laughter.

I reach across the small space between us and grab hold of her hand. "If that damn store isn't full of babies, lined up, ready for purchase, than I'm suing for false advertisement. ~ Anna Todd

I lived in New York City back in the 1980s, which is when the Bordertown series was created. New York was a different place then -- dirtier, edgier, more dangerous, but also in some ways more exciting. The downtown music scene was exploding -- punk and folk music were everywhere -- and it wasn't as expensive to live there then, so a lot of young artists, musicians, writers, etc. etc. were all living and doing crazy things in scruffy neighborhoods like the East Village.

I was a Fantasy Editor for a publishing company back then -- but in those days, "fantasy" to most people meant "imaginary world" books, like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. A number of the younger writers in the field, however, wanted to create a branch of fantasy that was rooted in contemporary, urban North America, rather than medieval or pastoral Europe. I'd already been working with some of these folks (Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, etc.), who were writing novels that would become the foundations for the current Urban Fantasy field. At the time, these kinds of stories were considered so strange and different, it was actually hard to get them into print.

When I was asked by a publishing company to create a shared-world anthology for Young Adult readers, I wanted to create an Urban Fantasy setting that was something like a magical version of New York...but I didn't want it to actually be New York. I want it to be any city and every city -- a place that anyone from anywhere could go to or rela ~ Terri Windling

If only I could cry. I am beyond that. The light, the light, lending itself to empty downtown Saturday, but still the stupid insensate cars flush by oblivious to their stupidity, my silent plea.
It isn't Mexico. It's not Paris. It's a painting by Hopper come to life. I am trapped inside a dead thing. Language is impossible here, even in English. Who has the arrogance to say: I'm mad, this is my crazy view of things, help me.
I'm trapped in a silent world, a tableau of forty years ago. The walls are different, the tables, the heights of the veiling and the chairs. I loom above this letter. The view past the rows of cakes in the plate glass window is unfamiliar. I am a ghost. There is nothing now between me and death. Death is the unfamiliarity of everything, the strangeness of the once familiar. The same spatial configurations only the light is hollow, sick.
I think I lack the energy to hit expensive discos which I don't know where they are to be rejected tonight. I look passable. My energy's low. I love to dance but despair is not a good muse.
This Mexico, babe. Men who don't love you but act wildly as if they do initially. Self-involved, narcissistic men... The men drink and philosophize about pain. The women live it solo and culturelessly. No one cries, except easily, sentimentally. The devil, therefore God, exists.
Oaxaca was a pushover compared to this. Pain had boundaries there.
Spare us big cities, oh lord! ~ Maryse Holder

As the doctor said, When a fifty-eight-year-old man goes downtown dressed up in a Dale Evans cowgirl outfit, complete with a skirt with fringe, it's time ... ~ Fannie Flagg

He'd never answered the text from his brother last night because he was otherwise occupied getting a gorgeous stranger off on an open-air balcony in the middle of downtown Chicago. You couldn't make this shit up.
Penthouse, check your mail. ~ Kate Meader

Unfortunately for the Culver Creek Nothings, we weren't playing the deaf-and-blind school. We were playing some Christian school from downtown Birmingham, a team stocked with huge, gargantuan apemen with thick beards and a strong distaste for turning the other cheek. ~ John Green

I became interested in film as a viewer when I was a teenager. I would spend entire afternoons in an arthouse theater in downtown Santiago. I didn't really expect to be a filmmaker back then. But it was clearly an interest. ~ Omar Zuniga

The first thing we have to do," I told Luke the next day, "is find a nice place we can rent or sublet. Should we focus on the downtown area? Montrose? Or would you be open to finding something close by in Sugar Land? We could always go to Austin, but we'd have to take care to avoid you-know-who. And it's a lot more expensive to rent in Austin."
Luke looked contemplative, sucking slowly on the bottle as if he were mulling the possibilities.
"Are you thinking it over?" I asked him. "Or are you working on another dirty diaper?"
-Ella & Luke ~ Lisa Kleypas

While I sleep, and I sleep often these days, he spends much of his time in the church downtown. The very one I never could convince him to attend. He claims he is praying. But I know he is trying to strike a bargain with our Maker.
One hand of Black Jack, I know he says. Winner gets to keep the girl.
I know for sure, were J. granted that game of cars with the Almighty, he'd go into it with both an ace and a jack up his sleeve. ~ Suzanne Brockmann

I can remember when anything further downtown New York than Canal Street was risky and the whole area still looked like a '70s cop movie location; when the original loft-owners were more dash-than-cash, artistic types. ~ Peter York

My mom grew up in Idaho, went to Brigham Young University: they're very Molly Mormon. And my father is, like, first generation Albanian, and his parents lived in Southey and grew up in downtown Boston. My parents are complete opposites. ~ Eliza Dushku

Remember when I was obsessed with that little Lithuanian restaurant downtown? And it was only ever open when the grumpy old woman ran it felt like opening? I'd stop by every day for a week with no luck. And then, when I'd pretty much given up on ever tasting Napoleonas torte again, I'd drive by and see the open sign in the window.
Well, being with Chris is like trying to date that restaurant. I never know when he's going to be there and how open he'll be to me. Almost never is he all there, all in. Almost never do I get the Chris I got the night of Kiley's wedding
open sign, cold cucumber soup, rouladen, poppy seed kolaches. ~ Rainbow Rowell

I headed downtown right away. It was still early in the evening, glittering with electric, with ice; and trembling in the factories, those nearly all windows, over the prairies that had returned over demolitions with winter grass pricking the snow and thrashed and frozen together into beards by the wind. The cold simmer of the lake also, blue; the steady skating of rails too, down to the dark. ~ Saul Bellow

We were too late for the elevated, and walked back downtown through Hanover Street. I remember that wall. We switched from Tremont up Beacon, and Pickman left me at the corner of Joy, where I turned off. I never spoke to him again. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

I swung around downtown and slowed down to miss a solitary drunk emerging blindly from the Tripoli bar and out upon the street in a sort of gangling somnambulistic trot, pursued on his way by the hollow roar of the juke box from the ghastly lit and empty bar. 'Sunstroke,' I murmured absently. 'Simply a crazed victim of the midnight sun.' As I parked my mud-spattered Coupe alongside the Miners' State Bank, across from my office over the dime store, I reflected that there were few more forlorn and lonely sounds than the midnight wail of a jukebox in a deserted small town, those raucous proclamations of joy and fun where, instead, there dwelt only fatigue and hangover and boredom. To me the wavering hoot of an owl sounded utterly gay by comparison. ~ Robert Traver

I brush off my skirt and notice that a small trail of blood runs from a nasty scrape on my knee. I don't even care. I'm still on an oh-so-sweet adrenaline high.

Porter grins, eyebrows high. "Damn, Bailey. You took him downtown. Full-on atomic drop body slam. I had no idea you had it in you."

Me neither, to be honest. "No one steals from Sam Spade and gets away with it," I say.

He holds his hand up, and I slap it ~ Jenn Bennett

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph ~ Allen Ginsberg

Yes John and I were together for nearly ten years. It was nice for a long time. I worked for Oldmanston and Pheiff, one of LA's big ad agencies. He and I bought a loft in one of the downtown renovations. Very Pricey. I had a studio. It was all very Queer as Folk. ~ Z.A. Maxfield

Last year, when we were in Mobile, Al., covering Hurricane Ivan, we heard the stories of poor people, many of them black stranded downtown because they had no way out. ~ Al Roker

Really, nobody was there?" I asked.
"Well, nobody important," he said, putting his glasses back on and blinking. ~ Daniel Amory

Chess enjoys a not wholly undeserved reputation for psychic derangement. It is an endeavor associated, when not with frank madness, with oddness and isolation. I remember a psychiatrist friend visiting me at a chess club in downtown Boston once. He walked in, sat down, looked around and said, 'Jeez, I could run a group here. ~ Charles Krauthammer

In the cab going downtown, Doug believed he now understood the sensations felt by a person slowly sinking into the grasp of an octopus. Play dead, he told himself. But how? ~ Donald E. Westlake

'The Good Guy' is a totally differently-looking New York than 'How To Make It' portrays. 'The Good Guy' is all about Wall Street and that culture, which 'How To Make It' touches on, but 'How To Make It' also is downtown, Lower East Side loft parties, cool clubs, Brooklyn and that world. ~ Bryan Greenberg

I teach a Bible study for homeless guys in downtown Atlanta every week. Been doing it for years. That's the guys I'd rather go talk to. I'd rather take my act outside the church. ~ Jeff Foxworthy

Shon was the man in charge of the biggest drug operation in Kansas City, Missouri. When he was fourteen years old, he was put on by one of the biggest drug dealers KC has ever seen. He went by the name of Big Tone. When Shon came to Tone looking for work, he wasn't feeling it. He didn't like the idea of a fourteen-year-old working for him. But as time went by, Tone gave in; he like that Shon was persistent. Shon would show up every week at the coffee shop downtown that Tone chilled at on Sundays, until Tone put him on. He took Shon under his wing and gave it to him straight, no chaser. Before long, Shon and his boys were moving dumb weight for Tone. Tone took a real liking to Shon; he started to look at him as a son he never had. He knew Shon would go far in his line of work. ~ Shaniqua Desha

No one expects a Broadway musical comedy to be in the vanguard of what is bohemian, raunchy, folkloric, academic or aggressively experimental. That is not its job. Its job is to synthesize musical and social traditions with high-styled vivacity, especially those that dwell on different sides of the tracks in real life. The highbrow meets the lowbrow; sweet meets hot; uptown, downtown, all around the town. ~ Margo Jefferson

I still enjoy doing the things I've always done, like going to a monthly dance party at a club downtown. ~ Tamara Tunie

A majority of the crime in the downtown is property crime. There have been a few larcenies and burglaries, but robberies and assaults are not common in the downtown. There isn't usually any violent crime. ~ Greg Smith

Should I have a doughnut or my disgusting cardboard?" asked Gwynn, as she drew up languidly before me at a study table in a bookstore on State Street, raising a puffed rice cake in the air.
My eyes narrowed attentively at her face, but as I hesitated, she announced eagerly, "Disgusting cardboard it is! ~ Daniel Amory

By the mid 1970s, the great downtown bookstores had begun to disappear as their customers migrated from city to suburb where population density was too thin to support major backlist retailers. ~ Jason Epstein

Seeing the road show of 'A Chorus Line' in 1977 at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Memphis was a life-changing event for me: there were gay people, on the stage, and they all lived in New York. ~ Ira Sachs

This morning when I looked out the roof window
before dawn and a few stars were still caught
in the fragile weft of ebony night
I was overwhelmed. I sang the song Louis taught me:
a song to call the deer in Creek, when hunting,
and I am certainly hunting something as magic as deer
in this city far from the hammock of my mother's belly.
It works, of course, and deer came into this room
and wondered at finding themselves
in a house near downtown Denver.
Now the deer and I are trying to figure out a song
to get them back, to get all of us back,
because if it works I'm going with them.
And it's too early to call Louis
and nearly too late to go home.
[from poem, "Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On"] ~ Joy Harjo

Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs that drift from a neighbor's window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious. ~ Anne Fadiman

They're not tourists, either, they're nothing like the gawkers and brayers in a place like Times Square, but they don't live here, they live in Jersey or Westchester, they're burghers right out of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, they cross Broadway as if they fucking own it, they think they look rakish, they think they're creatures of the night, they have neighbors whom they consider burghers because they don't like driving in New York, because they'd rather stay home (right now, the woman in the fringed pashmina shawl, the one walking arm-in-arm with Cowboy Boots, explodes in laughter, a great smacking hoot of a laugh, a three-martinis laugh, audible for a block or so), while the residents of downtown Manhattan, the ones who survive the days here, walk more modestly, certainly more quietly, more like penitents, because it's almost impossible to maintain a sense of hubris when you live here, you're too constantly confronted by the rampant otherness of others; hubris is surely much more attainable when you've got a house and a lawn and an Audi, when you understand that at the end of the world you'll get a second's more existence because the bomb won't be aimed at you, the shock wave will take you out but you're not anybody's main target, you've removed yourself from the kill zone, no one gets shot where you live, no one gets stabbed by a random psychopath, the biggest threat to your personal, ongoing security is the possibility that the neighbor's son will break in and steal a ~ Michael Cunningham

For a moment, I wondered how different my life would have been had they been my parents, but I shook the thought away. I knew my father had done the best he could, and I had no regrets about the way I'd turned out. Regrets about the journey, maybe, but not the destination. Because however it had happened, I'd somehow ended up eating shrimp in a dingy downtown shack with a girl that I already knew I'd never forget. ~ Nicholas Sparks

Well, I like way downtown near the Battery. I lived down there at this time and for, I guess, the following well, this is where I moved to uptown and I've been here for four years and this is 1965. ~ Robert Rauschenberg

Today I realize that I'm not marrying the one I thought loved me, I'm just Morgan Lewis, the owner of a bakery, a tiny apartment in downtown Atlanta, and a 2012 Camry. Nothing special, just another person walking through town to start her day. ~ A.M. Willard

You ever notice how sometimes, in the middle of July, right downtown, you'll see a flower poking up through a crack in the asphalt. And you think, What a stupid place to set down roots. It'll get run over, or it'll dry up and blow away. But it hangs on, and it grows, and it blooms. Somehow, against the odds, it finds what it needs and it makes that place better for being there. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

I grew up in the suburbs, so I figured 'Why not try downtown living?' And, honestly, I love it. I've been very pleasantly surprised at how much downtown Indianapolis has to offer. ~ Andrew Luck

The downtown local pulled in, its four yellow lights suggesting the feelers of some great dashing worm. Jane stood at the very rear of the train, and absently watched the tunnel lights. With a spurt, yellow meteors jumped up and arranged themselves in a row behind, one end of it growing, the other fading away in the tunnel. Sometimes a blue one flew into the row. Once the red eyes of an express train behind loomed up, a monster roaring past out of the dark. It was sinister but impersonal. It didn't care in the least whether or not Jane liked civilization. It was civilization. ~ Barbara Newhall Follett

For me, hipsterism is for one to appropriate the codes of a social class or another milieu that wasn't theirs originally, in order to define their personality through something different and unique. Which is why a lot of hipsters live downtown, and they're dressed as farmers. Then you have the Oscar Wilde hipster: the dandy. ~ Xavier Dolan

I think what Kanye West is going to mean is something similar to what Steve Jobs means. I am undoubtedly, you know, Steve of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture. Period. By a long jump. I honestly feel that because Steve has passed, you know, it's like when Biggie passed and Jay-Z was allowed to become Jay-Z. ~ Kanye West

Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a didashah and pointing a long arm. ~ Mona Simpson

Shortly before school started, I moved into a studio apartment on a quiet street near the bustle of the downtown in one of the most self-conscious bends of the world. The "Gold Coast" was a neighborhood that stretched five blocks along the lake in a sliver of land just south of Lincoln Park and north of River North. The streets were like fine necklaces and strung together were the brownstone houses and tall condominiums and tiny mansions like pearls, and when the day broke and the sun faded away, their lights burned like jewels shining gaudily in the night.
The world's most elegant bazaar, Michigan Avenue, jutted out from its eastern tip near The Drake Hotel and the timeless blue-green waters of Lake Michigan pressed its shores. The fractious make-up of the people that inhabited it, the flat squareness of its parks and the hint of the lake at the ends of its tree-lined streets squeezed together a domesticated cesspool of age and wealth and standing. It was a place one could readily dress up for an expensive dinner at one of the fashionable restaurants or have a drink miles high in the lounge of the looming John Hancock Building and five minutes later be out walking on the beach with pants cuffed and feet in the cool water at the lake's edge. ~ Daniel Amory

Detroit is a city that really stands out. It's been through a very difficult time. There's been a lot of pain here, and the city, physically, has suffered. You can see it in certain neighborhoods, and there's buildings downtown that have been abandoned. ~ Michael Imperioli