Train Journeys Quotes

It is when we are incubating particularly awkward but potentially vital ideas that we tend to feel most desperate to avoid looking inside.
... we will have nothing substantial to offer anyone else so long as we have not first mastered the art of being patient midwives to our own thoughts.
We need long train journeys on which we have no wireless signal and nothing to read, where our carriage is mostly empty, where the views are expansive and where the only sounds are those made by the wheels as they click against the rails in rhythmical succession. ~ Alain De Botton

We are always personally under an agitating pressure and cloud of anxiety. And Olmsted himself had grown increasingly susceptible to illness. He was sixty-eight years old and partly lame from a decades-old carriage accident that had left one leg an inch shorter than the other. He was prone to lengthy bouts of depression. His teeth hurt. He had chronic insomnia and facial neuralgia. A mysterious roaring in his ears at times made it difficult for him to attend to conversation. He was still full of creative steam, still constantly on the move, but overnight train journeys invariably laid him low. Even in his own bed his nights often became sleepless horrors laced with toothache. ~ Erik Larson

Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom
we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during
long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is
gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the
beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation
about the excessive price of the on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or
blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief. ~ Alain De Botton

We need long train journeys on which we have no wireless signal ~ Alain De Botton

To punish MPs because of the distance they live from London - those with fast train journeys quite close to London as well as those at some distance from both the capital or an appropriate airport - is perverse, but also dangerous to democracy. ~ David Blunkett

The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write ... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up. ~ Chris Van Allsburg

Our society trains us to think of marriage as a contractual arrangement. If one party fails to fulfill his or her end, the contract is null and void. Increasingly children are raised in a contractual environment. When contractual thinking dominates our horizon, we can even make Jesus or the church an asset we think we can manage. ~ Michael Horton

Whenever I watched this movie ["How to Train Your Dragon"], I thought, "That's where I want to be. I want to be up in that sky. I want to be flying through the clouds and be living in that environment." So I think if I had a dragon, I would spend most of my time up in the air all over the place and taking in this beautiful planet. ~ Gerard Butler

Gymnastics demands so much of our time. We train all week and travel and compete on weekends. The people you're surrounded by really become your second family, your best friends, your sisters. My coach was like a second mother for me. ~ Amanda Borden

One of these, bearing the name of Crampton, is an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, a long slender body imprisoned in a shiny brass corset, and supple catlike movements; a smart golden blonde whose extraordinary grace can be quite terrifying when she stiffens her muscles of steel, sends the sweat pouring down her steaming flanks, sets her elegant wheels spinning in their wide circles, and hurtles away, full of life, at the head of an express or a boat-train.
The other, Engerth by name, is a strapping saturnine brunette given to uttering raucous, guttural cries, with a thickset figure encased in armor-plating of cast iron; a monstrous creature with her disheveled mane of black smoke and her six wheels coupled together low down, she gives an indication of her fantastic strength when, with an effort that shakes the very earth, she slowly and deliberately drags along her heavy train of goods-wagons. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

What profound reward you must glean from studying the world so closely ... Too many people turn away from small wonders, I find. There is so much more potency to be found in detail than generalities, but most souls cannot train themselves to sit still for it. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Whoever wishes to hold the fortress of contemplation must first of all train in the camp of action. ~ Pope Gregory I

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, on the 15th October, 1856, so that he is now about twenty-six years of age, but brief as has been his career, it has been full of promise for the future. The son of highly intellectual parents, he has had an exceptional education, has travelled much in wild and remote, through classic lands, and in the course of these journeys has learnt to appreciate the beauties of the old authors, in whose works whilst at college he attained exceptional proficiency. But his naturally enthusiastic temperament teaches him to hope for better in the future than has been achieved in the past, and to see how vast will be the influence of Art and Literature on the coming democracy of Intellect, when education and culture shall have taught men to pride themselves on what they have done, and not alone on the deeds of their ancestors. ~ Walter Hamilton

He can't fly around tall buildings, or outrun a speeding train, the only talent he seems to have is leaving a nasty stain! ~ Tim Burton

The fascination for the Great Train Robbery has never diminished. ~ Luke Evans

My journey, my life.
My life can only be navigated by me. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy. ~ Jean-Baptiste Joseph Emile Montegut

I think creative blocks come from people's life journeys. If you don't know who you are or what you're about or what you believe in it's really pretty impossible to be creative. ~ Rainn Wilson

You will train always for a hundred terrific reasons.
Quit and it will be for no good reason at all. ~ Dave Draper

For Delta blueman Robert Johnson and his contemporaries, the train was the eternal metaphor for the travelling life, and it still holds true today. There is no travel like it. Train lines carve through all facets of a nation. While buses stick to major highways and planes reduce the unfolding of lives to a bird's eye view, trains putter through the domains of the rich and the poor, the desperate and the idle, rural and urban, isolated and cluttered. Through train windows you see realities rarely visible in the landscaped tourist areas. Those frames hold the untended jungle of a nation's truth. Despite my shredded emotions, there was still no feeling like dragging all your worldly possessions onto a carriage, alone and anonymous, to set off into the unknown; where any and all varieties of adventures await, where you might meet a new best friend, where the love of your life could be hiding in a dingy cafe. The clatter of the tracks is the sound of liberation. ~ Patrick O'Neil

The whistle of the old steam trains ... could conjure up visions of bleak distances with one solitary wail. ~ M.C. Beaton

Karate-do strives internally to train the mind to develop a clear conscience, enabling one to face the world honestly, while externally developing strength to the point where one may overcome even ferocious wild animals. Mind and technique become one in true karate. ~ Gichin Funakoshi

I wanted to be puzzled and charmed, to experience the endless, beguiling variety of a continent where you can board a train and an hour later be somewhere where the inhabitants speak a different language, eat different foods, work different hours, live lives that are at once so different and yet so oddly similar. I wanted to be a tourist. ~ Anonymous

He had thought on the train of sending his head to a laundry, it was true, but he had been drawn not so much to the idea of the laundered head as to that of the sleeping body. A very pleasant sleep, with head detached. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

You're not quite the one because you don't feel permanent. You're lovely. You're here. You're soft and comfortable and I can curl up beside you and hey, at least neither of us are alone. You don't feel like the start of something, you feel like the continuation of nothing. You're not quite the one because we're not even thinking about crazy concepts like the "one." No one is meeting anyone's parents. No one is going to be a plus-one at anyone's friend's weddings. No one is holding hands on the subway train. You're not quite the one because you're not meant to be the one. You're a bookmark, a beautiful pause, a blinking light on hold at an office desk. ~ Karen Noble

In Bible-story journeys, ain't no journey hopeless. Everybody finds what they suppose to find. ~ William H. Armstrong

Can you train yourself to love the right man? Of course you can. The problem is forgetting about the wrong man, the one passing by who came in a door that was left open without asking permission. ~ Paulo Coelho

When Christian pushes into the brick wall of the building catty-corner to the rear of BB&B - first left on the Dark Zone side - and disappears, I melt down in a fit of the giggles. I toss a rock at the spot where he vanished. It bounces off the brick and clatters to the cobblestone. I'm feeling twenty shades of Harry Potter's train station, especially when he pokes his head out of the wall and says impatiently, Come on, lass. This is hardly my favorite place to be. ~ Karen Marie Moning

seeking a place to rest my head without shame
seeking a father who never worried about me
seeking a mother whose body never hurt
seeking the piano that could play itself
seeking a person who wants to meet me on a train
seeking a person who knows where estonia is
seeking my sense of self i never found–seeking

an end to all of this. ~ Jessie Knoles

As I'm sure you know, whenever you are examine someone else's belongings, you are bound to learn many interesting things about the person of which you were not previously aware. You might examine some letters you sister received recently, for instance, and learn that she was planning on running away with an archduke. You might examine the suitcase of another passenger on a train you are taking, and learn that he had been secretly photographing you for the past six months. I recently looked in the refrigerator of one of my enemies and learned she was a vegetarian, or at least pretending to be one, or had a vegetarian visiting her for a few days. And as the Baudelaire orphans examined some of the objets in Olaf's trunk, they learned a great deal of unpleasant things. ~ Lemony Snicket

He was filled with loss and an off-brand of nostalgia for events that were supposed to become part of his past but now wouldn't at all. In the mind's special processes, a ten-mile run takes far longer than the minutes reported by a grandfather clock. Such time, in fact, hardly exists in the real world; it is all out on the train somewhere, and you only go back to it when you are out there. He and Mize had been through two solid years of such regular time-warp escapes together. There was something different about that, something beyond friendship; they had a way of transferring pain back and forth, without the banality of words. ~ John L. Parker Jr.

I've known the glory of the stage and the glory of the spotlight. I still crave it. I want to be on 'American Bandstand' and 'Soul Train' as a solo artist. As a producer, songwriter and arranger, I help other artists say what they want to say. But on my records, I say what I want to say. ~ Narada Michael Walden

Let whatever happens, be what needs to happen, so that I may awaken. ~ T. Scott McLeod

He slid back again into his earlier position. "This getting up early," he thought, "makes a man quite idiotic. A man must have his sleep. Other travelling salesmen live like harem women. For instance, when I come back to the inn during the course of the morning to write up the necessary orders, these gentlemen are just sitting down to breakfast. If I were to try that with my boss, I'd be thrown out on the spot. Still, who knows whether that mightn't be really good for me? If I didn't hold back for my parents' sake, I'd have quit ages ago. I would've gone to the boss and told him just what I think from the bottom of my heart. He would've fallen right off his desk! How weird it is to sit up at that desk and talk down to the employee from way up there. The boss has trouble hearing, so the employee has to step up quite close to him. Anyway, I haven't completely given up that hope yet. Once I've got together the money to pay off my parents' debt to him - that should take another five or six years - I'll do it for sure. Then I'll make the big break. In any case, right now I have to get up. My train leaves at five o'clock ~ Franz Kafka

An unanticipated destination, perhaps, but you must admit,all the best journeys take unexpected detours. ~ Lisa Mangum

He [Sam] wrote it with great flourishes, his hand making many dizzy elliptical journeys before it settled down to make a elaborate 'E' with a curving tail as long as some prehistoric baboons. ~ Bess Streeter Aldrich

When a school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guaranty of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious ~ John Dewey

It is you who are unpoetical," replied the poet Syme. "If what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say! ~ G.K. Chesterton

We need more science in the world. Train me. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Every scholarly history that was written before 1920 was written by a man who had been taught by a man, whose thesis would be examined by a man, and whose book would be published by a male publisher and reviewed by a male critic. This could not change until women were admitted to universities and colleges. When women could train as historians in the universities, they could for the first time research, write, and publish scholarly history. ~ Philippa Gregory

I like intellectual journeys. ~ Christopher Meloni

The tritone - an augmented fourth (or, in hazz parlance, a flatted fifth) - is a difficult interval to sing and has often been regarded as having an ugly, uncanny, or even diabolical quality. Its use was forbidden in early ecclesiastical music, and early theorists called it diabolus in musica ("the devil in music"). But Tartini used it, for this very reason, in his Devil's Trill Sonata for violin.
Though the raw tritone sounds so harsh, it is easily filled out with another tritone to form a diminished seventh. And this, the Oxford Companion to Music notes, "has a luscious effect ... The chord is indeed the most Protean in all harmony. In England the nickname has been given it of 'The Clapham Junction of Harmony' - from a railway station in London where so many lines join that once arrived there one can take a train for almost anywhere else. ~ Oliver Sacks

You can't tell which way the train went by looking at the tracks. ~ James Patterson

Train the mind, body and spirit, so you may achieve anything. Life is about sharing your dreams/purpose (gifts/passions/talents) with the world and helping others find their way. ~ Elizabeth Salamanca-Brosig

I cannot undo myself, and the train is steaming. ~ Sylvia Plath

There was too much opinion in this country, too many sob stories. Nobody wanted to put a lid on anything; everyone wanted to say it all, about everything. If you as much as said hello to someone on a train or a plane, you were in for the unexpurgated memoirs. Nehru in 1947 had declared us a nation finding utterance - but in fifty years the utterance had become a mad clamour, a crazed babble, an unending howl. We were a nation of Scheherzades, afraid we'd die if, for a moment, we shut up. For myself, I'd mastered a face of steel, and an inscrutable nod. It did not always shut everyone up, but it did to some extent dam the ghastly flow. ~ Tarun J. Tejpal

What's it going to be this year?" asked Willem. They were taking the train up on Wednesday, the night before Thanksgiving. "Elk? Venison? Turtle?"
"Trout," he said.
"Trout!" Willem replied. "Well, trout's easy. We may actually end up with trout this year."
"He said he was going to stuff it with something, though."
"Oh. I take it back. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Then his friend said, 'If you fly you will save a day.'
He nodded, he agreed, he would sacrifice his ticket, he would save a day.
I ask you what does a day saved matter to him or to you? A day saved from what? for what? Instead of spending the day traveling, you will see your friend a day earlier, but you cannot stay indefinitely, you will travel home twenty-four hours sooner, that is all. But you will fly home and again save a day? Save it form what, for what? You will begin work a day earlier, but you cannot work on indefinitely. It only means that you will cease work a day earlier. And then, what? You cannot die a day earlier. So you will realize perhaps how rash it was of you to save a day, when you discover how you cannot escape those twenty-four hours you have so carefully preserved; you may push them forward and push them forward, but some time they must be spend, and then you may wish you had spent them as innocently as in the train from Ostend. ~ Graham Greene

Sometimes you have to understand that you push ahead, there's going to be a lot of flak, there's going to be a lot of dogs barking, but the wagon train moves ahead. ~ Juan Williams

As historians, we spend days in archives, gazing at account books. We train would-be historians in the arts of deciphering letters and documents, early Latin, scribal handwriting, medieval French. ~ Kate Williams

He should have caught up with me inside of fifteen minutes at the outside, if he'd been able to get on the next train after mine. But then there was that station agent to be considered. And Rafe didn't have a solitary coin on him; he'd have to break one of those fifties. I now remembered something that I'd been noticing half my life and that had never meant anything to me until today - a little sign outside each subway change booth, advising the public that the agent wasn't obliged to make change for anything bigger than $1. Never get mixed up in a murder, flashed through my mind insanely, unless you've got plenty of small change.
("Don't Wait Up For Me, Tonight") ~ Cornell Woolrich

If you want the truth to go round the world you must hire an express train to pull it; but if you want a lie to go round the world it will fly; it is as light as a feather, and a breath will carry it. ~ Charles Spurgeon

For some people the experience of crossing by carriage was positively terrifying. "You drive over to Suspension Bridge," wrote Mark Twain, "and divide your misery between the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and the chances of having a railway-train overhead smashing down onto you. Either possibility is discomforting taken by itself, but, mixed together, they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness. ~ David McCullough