Tootsies Downtown Quotes

Imagine you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look - it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions - good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide - be a bore?
Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped up on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico.
Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon?
Explain. ~ Walker Percy

As the ferry coasts into downtown,
all lit up and windy and magic,
I realize kids who grow up in cities
must never dream of
going anywhere else
because they're already there. ~ Kirsten "Kiwi" Smith

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

I think so many great artists are flocking to LA because the downtown art scene is so vibrant, there is cheap living and you can really flourish as an artist there. There is an unbelievably supportive and really smart, talented theatre audience in LA full of young, hungry, vibrant people. It's something that sort of makes me think of what New York must have been like in its downtown theater scene in the 1980s - before my time. ~ Jon Bernthal

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

To my great surprise, Twitter is not housed in a silver pod that orbits Earth at supersonic speeds, vacuuming up and then dispersing digital bits of worldwide chitchat; it's in a big, bland office building in downtown San Francisco, near a bowling alley and an Old Navy. ~ Susan Orlean

I've officially turned into a loser," she whispered cynically. "I'm looking forward to going home and having cereal for dinner and walking Mitchell and studying a little and then going to sleep. I've had my 'going out and having fun' quota for the year, I guess, and it's June. ~ Daniel Amory

Shaking hands with the Queen of England was a long way from being forced to sit in the colored section of the bus going into downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. ~ Althea Gibson

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

I watch these kids.
They don't seem entirely unhappy. A few times I've even circled the Free Clinic on foot, trying to catch a closer glimpse of these kids and their lives as they pop in and out of the clinic's Sputnik-era, gone-to-seed building--Lancaster's future trolls and Popeyes loitering out back having hushed paranoid conversations. And once I even went to have a look where they hang out in a big way, out in the delivery bay behind the now-closed Donut Hut, the delivery bay grotto out back with a floor spongy with pigeon shit, chewing gum, cigarette ashes, and throat oysters--dank and sunless. I went to visit this place once when all the druggies were away, having their druggy lives downtown doing their druggy things: yelling at parked cars and having conversations with amber lights. I visited this place and I was confused: confused and attracted. Who do these people think they are? How can they not care about the future or hot running water or clean sheets or cable TV? These people. And on the walls down at the delivery bay, do you know what they had written? Written in letters several hands high, letters built of IV needles attached to the cement with soiled bandages and wads of chewing gum? They had written the words WE LIKE IT. ~ Douglas Coupland

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

Subject that got people aroused ... was Who Owns America? ... They had a chart going ... filling in connections between the big local contractors and the steel companies and the city and county governments and the unions ... and the downtown merchants ... They found they still did not know who owned obvious centers of power like the banks. They did not know who owned the local paper. Or the radio stations. ~ Marge Piercy

My parents, stupidly, always let me go downtown. This was pre-pager, even. It made me adventurous. I think it makes you tough. ~ Judy Greer

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

It was just too hard from my standpoint to apply myself properly for the lessons from art school and also work 6 hours a day at the Ben Paris restaurant in downtown Seattle. There was just no time to have a life. ~ Mike Royer

It was like having two children in the car with her. Okay, one child and a young adult that
kept backsliding. Hal, of course, was attempting to prove he was really only eight years old.
Taggart could resist the taunting part of the time. Nigel was the senile grandmother who never
noticed that the children were fighting. He sat in the backseat, smiling serenely at the passing
landscape. What made things worse was that Taggart called shotgun so he could film through the
front window. That made it so she couldn't reach Hal to swat him into silence. She found herself
tempted to hit Taggart just because he was beside her. And because he'd changed into a dark blue
silk shirt and cologne that smelled so good she just wanted to roll in it.
"I can kill us all," Jane growled, gripping the wheel tightly, and resisted the urge to drive the
production truck into the ditch to prove her point.
Somehow they reached downtown without her killing anyone. ~ Wen Spencer

I was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown. There was a dish called Mother and Child Reunion. It's chicken and eggs. And I said, I gotta use that one. ~ Paul Simon

I came to NYU to study experimental theater. Shortly thereafter, I was featured in a 'Newsweek' article about the emerging downtown club scene, and, well, that was it for NYU. I was off and running. ~ James St. James

I was the illegitimate child of the legitimate theater. I had no training. I came from downtown rock and roll, and when I came in and auditioned for the Broadway revival of 'Hair,' I had no eyebrows - kind of a Bowie-esque glimmer kid. And it was hard representing the flower power era when we were stone cold punks. ~ Annie Golden

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

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

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 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

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

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

A financial shift happened with 'Facing the Giants' and 'Fireproof,' where movies that were faith-based films were profitable. And people in Hollywood - like people in downtown U.S.A. - are out to make money. ~ John Schneider

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

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

I came from dinner, went downtown with my friends, the elevator was down, I ran down the hall toward my room at 10 at night, having had two glasses of wine. ~ Jill Clayburgh

I know many of you thought that I would be retiring today, but if I was ever going to announce my retirement it would not be in a downtown Los Angeles hotel with this fairly ugly carpet. ~ Maria Sharapova

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

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

I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities. ~ Jane Jacobs

When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask if I'm leaving. ~ Steven Wright

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

I finished the movie a month ago in downtown Los Angeles. I had a lot of fun doing it. ~ Coolio

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