K O Railroad Quotes

I was one man and I tackled a big railroad. I did the best I could. ~ O. Winston Link

In this life, one can choose to make themselves visible for the world to see, or invisibly slither along like a wraith in the night. ~ K.O. Bailey

everyday life - a series of incidents, some of which make an impression, while most are forgotten. Your consciousness is trained to repress. You crave a holiday, two weeks on a Greek island in the summer or, slighter shorter-term, a long weekend on a ferry to Denmark. Drinking, shouting, laughing, homing in on a woman with just the right kind of husky laugh, who has warm eyes and who thinks pointed shoes are absolutely great. But until that happens: days like photographic slides - images which flicker for a few seconds before disappearing, some easier to remember than others, but then those disappear, too. ~ K.O. Dahl

I was part of your train but my railroad car was disconnected and
switched at the track, and now my friends and I are on a separate journey
learning how not to rock the lifeboat, sending out a patient S.O.S to you for
help. I reach out with love, possibly one of a dying breed, the old survival of the fittest theory, or perhaps I am throwing you a lifeline from my Rectangular Bubble. ~ Ann Lloyd

Bearing Two Nine Five distance six miles from ----- -----. Attack! Attack!" On the bridge of the Grayson we shook off an overpowering weariness and listened to the PT's as they tore in for the enemy to lash out with torpedoes ("pickles," in PT language). "----- ----- they're headed for you. Cut'em off - cut'em off." "They're headed for the ----- -----. Get in there! What the hell's the matter? " "O.K. - O.K. I've fired my pickles - we got him - I'm getting out of here." "All ----- Close in - Close in." Toward Savo there was a red glow - a sudden blinding flash of flame. ----- had caught a pickle. That was swell. The PT's were in there with everything they had. But their pickles were limited in number. Now the destroyers could go after the enemy with our own tin fish and comparatively heavy guns. Scotty Etheridge ~ Frederick J. Bell

The Reading Terminal Market on 12th and Arch was created in 1892 when the Reading Railroad opened markets below the elevated tracks of the new train shed. It had consistently housed an undetermined amount of aromas since then by creating a gastronomic bazaar conveniently located at street level. ~ Craig Johnson

Separation of the Church and State is like a railroad track. It cannot be close to one another, neither can it be distant, because there will be derailment. We (Church) should cooperate with the government and the government should cooperate with us because we're serving the same people. ~ Jaime Sin

The cart slowed as they came to a place so dark and quiet that it seemed as if they had entered some remote forest. Peeking beneath the hem of the cart's canvas covering, Garrett saw towering gates covered with ivy, and ghostly sculptures of angels, and solemn figures of men, women, and children with their arms crossed in resignation upon their breasts. Graveyard sculptures. A stab of horror went through her, and she crawled to the front of the cart to where West Ravenel was sitting with the driver.
"Where the devil are you taking us, Mr. Ravenel?"
He glanced at her over his shoulder, his brows raised. "I told you before- a private railway station."
"It looks like a cemetery."
"It's a cemetery station," he admitted. "With a dedicated line that runs funeral trains out to the burial grounds. It also happens to connect to the main lines and branches of the London Ironstone Railroad, owned by our mutual friend Tom Severin."
"You told Mr. Severin about all this? Dear God. Can we trust him?"
West grimaced slightly. "One never wants to be in the position of having to trust Severin," he admitted. "But he's the only one who could obtain clearances for a special train so quickly."
They approached a massive brick and stone building housing a railway platform. A ponderous stone sign adorned the top of the carriage entrance: Silent Gardens. Just below it, the shape of an open book emblazoned with words had been carved in the stone. Ad Meliora. "Toward be ~ Lisa Kleypas

A man sits in an office deciding what stocks to buy. He imagines, no doubt, that he is planning his purchases according to his own judgment. In actual fact his judgment is a melange of impressions stamped on his mind by outside influences which unconsciously control his thought. He buys a certain railroad stock because it was in the headlines yesterday and hence is the one which comes most prominently to his mind; because he has a pleasant recollection of a good dinner on one of its fast trains; because it has a liberal labor policy, a reputation for honesty; because he has been told that J. P. Morgan owns some of its shares. ~ Edward L. Bernays

When my friends and I played cowboys and Indians, I was always the Chinese railroad worker. ~ Robin Williams

The best practice is to follow the advice posted on every railroad crossing: Stop. Look. Listen. ~ Sam Keen

Traveling across the United States, it's easy to see why Americans are often thought of as stupid. At the San Diego Zoo, right near the primate habitats, there's a display featuring half a dozen life-size gorillas made out of bronze. Posted nearby is a sign reading CAUTION: GORILLA STATUES MAY BE HOT. Everywhere you turn, the obvious is being stated. CANNON MAY BE LOUD. MOVING SIDEWALK ABOUT TO END. To people who don't run around suing one another, such signs suggest a crippling lack of intelligence. Place bronze statues beneath the southern California sun, and of course they're going to get hot. Cannons are supposed to be loud, that's their claim to fame, and - like it or not - the moving sidewalk is bound to end sooner or later. It's hard trying to explain a country whose motto has become You can't claim I didn't warn you. What can you say about the family who is suing the railroad after their drunk son was killed walking on the tracks?

This pretty much sums up my trip to Texas. ~ David Sedaris

Truth, says instrumentalism, is what works out, that which does what you expect it to do. The judgment is true when you can "bank" on it and not be disappointed. If, when you predict, or when you follow the lead of your idea or plan, it brings you to the ends sought for in the beginning, your judgment is true. It does not consist in agreement of ideas, or the agreement of ideas with an outside reality; neither is it an eternal something which always is, but it is a name given to ways of thinking which get the thinker where he started. As a railroad ticket is a "true" one when it lands the passenger at the station he sought, so is an idea "true," not when it agrees with something outside, but when it gets the thinker successfully to the end of his intellectual journey.

Truth, reality, ideas and judgments are not things that stand out eternally "there," whether in the skies above or in the earth beneath; but they are names used to characterize certain vital stages in a process which is ever going on, the process of creation, of evolution. In that process we may speak of reality, this being valuable for our purposes; again, we may speak of truth; later, of ideas; and still again, of judgments; but because we talk about them we should not delude ourselves into thinking we can handle them as something eternally existing as we handle a specimen under the glass.

Such a conception of truth and reality, the instrumentalist believes, is in harmony with the gener ~ Holly Estil Cunningham

Give me a moment I am preparing to drawback to scream
Louder than a train overhead below a railroad bridge ~ John E. Wordslinger

A TEN-YEAR-OLD lad in Indianapolis who was arrested for picking up coal along the side of railroad tracks is now in jail. If the boy had known enough to steal the whole railroad he would be heralded as a Napoleon of finance. ~ Mother Jones

The true pioneer of civilization is not the newspaper, not religion, not the railroad - but whiskey! ~ Mark Twain

You're never lost. You always know exactly where you are. You're right here. It's just that sometimes you've misplaced your destination.
Brian W. Porter 2005
Have you ever wondered how the computer you're using got to the store? How about your medicines, the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the furniture, the plants in the garden center? Do they have a railroad right there? Does merchandise magically appear? Only if you grow your own food, make your own clothes, make your own tools, cut your own wood, and make your own furniture, can you get away from trucking. Everything you see, even the nature outside in some places, has been on at least one truck. ~ Brian W. Porter

It was the custom when men received nominations to come to me for contributions, and I made them and considered them good paying investments for the company. In a Republican district I was a strong Republican; in a Democratic district I was Democratic, and in doubtful districts I was doubtful. In politics I was an Erie Railroad man all the time. ~ Jay Gould

Because everybody on the school board, and the railroad, and the PTA and paper mill had to be somebody's mother or father, whether really or as a member of a category; and there was a point at which the reflex to their covering warmth, protection, effectiveness against bad dreams, bruised heads and simple loneliness took over and made worthwhile anger with them impossible. ~ Thomas Pynchon

And she [Margaret Thatcher] also had a sort of a way, like a railroad train, of going, taking a breath and starting quite quietly and making a point in a way that you don't really know that this point is going to be made through several examples, and there will be not be a break in the speaking voice at any point. ~ Meryl Streep

My parents moved to Los Angeles when I was really young, but I spent every summer with my grandparents, and I'd stay with my grandfather on the farm in Longview. He was retired from the railroad, and he had a small farm with some cows and some pigs. I remember part of my youth was feeding hogs and plowing fields and stuff, so that's a part of me. ~ Forest Whitaker

The close relationship between railroad expansion and the genera development and prosperity of the country is nowhere brought more distinctly into relief than in connection with the construction of the Pacific railroads. ~ John Moody

Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts. ~ Don DeLillo

Canadian Railroad Trilogy is an extremely fine piece of songwriting. ~ Johnny Cash

It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad. ~ David R. Brower

I myself was born beside a river - the Avon in Sarum. So when I first encountered New York's great harbor and the Hudson River as a teenager, and came to understand their historic canal and railroad links to the vast spaces of the Midwest, I felt both the thrill of a new adventure and a deep sense of homecoming. ~ Edward Rutherfurd

Some of the most vivid writing in America is on the walls of restrooms. The men's room in the Albany, N.Y. railroad station, for instance, should be preserved as a national shrine: there is more wit there than in any Broadway hit! ~ Truman Capote

It is still news to her that passion
could steer her wrong
though she went down, a thousand times
strung out
across railroad tracks, off bridges
under cars, or stiff
glass bottle still in hand, hair soft
on greasy pillows, still it is
news she cannot follow love (his
burning footsteps in blue crystal
snow) & still
come out all right. ~ Diane Di Prima

She breathed that air he'd forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler. ~ John Updike

American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100
degrees centigrade in plastic thermos cups, usually obligatory in railroad
stations for purposes of genocide, whereas coffee made with an American
percolator, such as you find in private houses or in humble luncheonettes,
served with eggs and bacon, is delicious, fragrant, goes down like pure
spring water, and afterwards causes severe palpitations, because one cup
contains more caffeine than four espressos. ~ Umberto Eco

Labor Day. We could hear their bellow and grind from the Route 19 overpass. Below, the river gleamed like a flaw in metal. Leaving the parking lot behind, we billy-goated down the fisherman's trail, one by one, the way all mountain people do. Loud clumps of bees clustered in the fireweed and boneset, and the trail underfoot crunched with cans, condom wrappers, worm containers. A half-buried coal bucket rose from the dirt with a galvanized grin. The laurel hell wove itself into a tunnel, hazy with gnats. There, a busted railroad spike. The smell of river water filled our noses. ~ Matthew Neill Null

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift ~ Frank H. Wu

As with most small town southerners, respectability was as much a part of my DNA as was my hair and eye color. It was the goal everyone strived for, the standard by which every citizen of Morganville was judged. And while my family, the Frenchs, weren't the richest- that honor going to Ian and Helena Morgan- we were one of the most respected. Thanks mostly to the Judge, my grandfather.

His name was Carl, but no one, including his daughters, had ever called him anything but Judge. He retired from the bench when I was five, and since my own father pulled a vanishing act shortly before my birth, the Judge stepped forward to fill that role for me. I thought the man walked on water and took every word from his lips as gospel.

"Alix," he told me. "Stay away from the railroad tracks. A wowzer cat lives under the trestle, and you don't want to get tangled up with one of those."

"What's a wowzer cat?" I asked, enthralled.

"It's a fifty pound cat with eight legs and nine bung holes, and it's meaner than a gar."

The Judge had an odd sense of humor. ~ Katherine Allred

Real evidence is usually vague and unsatisfactory. It has to be examined
sifted. But here the whole thing is cut and dried. No, my friend, this evidence has been very cleverly manufactured
so cleverly that it has defeated its own ends. ~ Agatha Christie

This time he had seen it coming, like a monster in a slow-motion nightmare. This time he had seen it coming, like standing rooted on the railroad tracks, unable to jump aside. ~ Michael Grant

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The most beautiful warrior, who has scar tissue designs coiled like railroad tracks over the rigorous architecture of his chest and shoulders and back. ~ Jennifer Egan

This may be the only example in history of an individual financing an entire railroad of significance out of his own pocket. ~ Bill Dedman

A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by. ~ Christopher Morley

It's the big new bridge," said Serge. "Takes you right across Lake What-the-Fuck." "Is that another real name?" "No," said Serge. "That's what I call it. It's really named Lake Surprise. But surprise is usually something good that provides delight, like winning the lottery or reaching in the back of the fridge and finding an unexpected jar of olives. But this lake got its name because it pissed people off." "How'd it do that?" "Another funny story. When Henry Flagler started the Overseas Railroad down the Keys, he looked for the route with the most land, because bridges over water cost more. So he sent out surveyors, and they began laying tracks south from the mainland of Florida, across some little islands and an isthmus to Key Largo. And I can't believe they built that far before realizing that right in the middle of a big chunk of land was this giant lake, and now they have to build an extra bridge that wasn't in the budget. ~ Tim Dorsey

I still want my right to defend myself. A railroad operation, and you know it, from Nixon on down. they got you running around violating my constitutional rights. ~ Bobby Seale

Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. Think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity, and be clear! When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair. ~ E.B. White

When you are waiting for a train, don't keep perpetually looking to see if it is coming. The time of its arrival is the business of the conductor, not yours. It will not come any sooner for all your nervous glances and your impatient pacing, and you will save strength if you will keep quiet. After we discover that the people who sit still on a long railroad journey reach that journey's end at precisely the same time as those who "fuss" continually, we have a valuable piece of information which we should not fail to put to practical use. ~ Anna Brackett

The morning we left South Bend, every student and professor was out of bed long before breakfast and marched downtown accompanying the team to the railroad station. It was the first time I'd seen anything like this mass hysteria generated on the Notre Dame campus over a football game. ~ Knute Rockne