Brooklyn Quotes

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.

His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.

Raymond Chandler

Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it's obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.

Imogen Binnie

They pine for the hip, frosty girlfriend they abandoned for a pleasant if unexciting marriage to her sunnier, less mentally present sister coast.

Sari Botton

To people from 'Brooklyn-Brooklyn' North Brooklyn is really just South Queens.

Dallas Athent

We’re all a little broken, on the sidewalk. On the street. In the city.

Corey Ann Haydu

Maybe it wasn’t rational, but she didn’t like the idea of Leo invading her little world. Yesterday, Brooklyn had belonged to her. The Long Island ’burbs where she’d grown up had felt far away from the brick streets and renovated factory spaces of Brooklyn. In this job, she’d felt truly independent, putting down her own fragile roots in a new place. Fast forward twenty-four hours, and her daddy had joined the workplace and her ex-boyfriend had shown up to remind her of all that she’d lost. Really, a girl could be forgiven for feeling slightly hysterical. Not that there was any time to panic.

Sarina Bowen

When the Brooklyn rain comes downhopefully it will be to fuckin' wake you up

Julian Gallo

To the bankrupt poet, to the jilted lover, to anyone who yearns to elude the doubt within and the din without, the tidal strait between Manhattan Island and her favorite suburb offers the specious illusion of easy death. Melville prepared for the plunge from the breakwater on the South Street promenade, Whitman at the railing of the outbound ferry, both men redeemed by some Darwinian impulse, maybe some epic vision, which enabled them to change leaden water into lyric wine. Hart Crane rejected the limpid estuary for the brackish swirl of the Caribbean Sea. In each generation, from Washington Irving’s to Truman Capote’s, countless young men of promise and talent have examined the rippling foam between the nation’s literary furnace and her literary playground, questioning whether the reams of manuscript in their Brooklyn lofts will earn them garlands in Manhattan’s salons and ballrooms, wavering between the workroom and the water. And the city had done everything in its power to assist these men, to ease their affliction and to steer them toward the most judicious of decisions. It has built them a bridge.

Jacob M. Appel

Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.

Jonathan Lethem

Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.

Henry Miller

Well, I didn't really know what to say. So maybe I should say that I have thought about you and I like you, I like seeing you, I care for you and maybe I love you too. And the next time if you tell me you love me, I'll--" She stopped."You'll what?""I'll say I love you too.

Colm Tóibín

Florence, listen to me carefully.... Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place

Sana Krasikov

Who is she, after all? Not a member of the Party. Not even a Russian...What can she do, really, but watch the ginger-haired sacrificial lamb get slaughtered? One wrong move and Florence herself might be on the chopping block herself

Sana Krasikov

The immediate difficulty, Florence realised while riding the high rail back to Brooklyn, was how to break the news to her parents, even if she could convince them that being a chaperone to six foreign men was a legitimate occupation for a twenty-three-year-old girl. What choice did she have? A paycheck could not win a girl’s independence

Sana Krasikov

Even the worst things about Devonairre Street are better than the rest of the city.

Corey Ann Haydu

Your technique means nothing if you're not using your talents for the betterment of humanity.

Gene Dunn

…you either do or do not have a comedy mind, whatever that is, maybe a heightened sense of the ridiculous and the absurdity of life…We are all crazy and crazed.

Joan Rivers

People say it is not the key to happiness, but I have always figured if you have enough money you can have a key made.

Joan Rivers

I said, "Is there!" I told him there is a Mafia school where they teach them math — if Johnny has ten fingers and they cut off two, how many does he have left?

Joan Rivers

Somehow, some way, every person in the arts has to find an accommodation with disappointment and embarrassment. They are the pollen in the air we breathe.

Joan Rivers

It gathers emotionally inside you, in a strange way a by-product of struggle, of a willingness to do anything, try anything, expose yourself to anything — staying in motion because sooner or later those ripples will cause change.

Joan Rivers

Laughing made me feel safe. I was not going to be enveloped by the seediness that coated this world like dust.

Joan Rivers

When you begin to losing your audience, do not get loud; get quiet, make them find you and come back to you.

Joan Rivers

I am driven. Being driven is my energy source. It is my fun.…I believe that where there is action, there is movement, and those ripples will eventually produce something positive.

Joan Rivers

The revelation that personal truth can be the foundation of comedy, that outrageousness can be cleansing and healthy…

Joan Rivers

The act of creation fascinates me. You can only sit with blank page and wait. You cannot press a button, cannot program it.

Joan Rivers

Everything comes out of smoke and mist and nothingness, a mystical happening…

Joan Rivers

Liked" was the kiss of death. "Loved" or "hated" interested him. At least the performer had aroused emotion.

Joan Rivers

Maybe that is why in my comedy I try and puncture the hypocrisy all around us, why it is almost a crusade with me to strip life down to what really is true.

Joan Rivers

…but I think comedy is more aggressive than that. It is a medium for revenge. We can deflate and punish the pomposity and the rejection which hurt us. Comedy is power.

Joan Rivers

I had a blind date with a dentist — and he told me to come back in six months.

Joan Rivers

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.

Lev Grossman

He'd once explained that when he was a boy his very proper parents had forbidden him and his brothers to curse in the house so 'feather buckets' was the young boys coded way of saying 'f*ck it

Kate Carlisle

I had to say it gave me a warm feeling to picture Meredith Winslow spending twenty years or so in an ill fitting orange jumpsuit, cozying up to a great big girl named Beulah

Kate Carlisle

Men were good for one thing only. Killing spiders. Other than that, I was on my own. It was sad though. Where was the chivalry of yesteryear?

Kate Carlisle

He'd once explained that when he was a boy his very proper parents had forbidden him and his brothers to curse in the house so 'feather buckets' was the young boys coded way of saying 'f*ck it

Kate Carlisle

I had to say it gave me a warm feeling to picture Meredith Winslow spending twenty years or so in an ill fitting orange jumpsuit, cozying up to a great big girl named Beulah

Kate Carlisle

Men were good for one thing only. Killing spiders. Other than that, I was on my own. It was sad though. Where was the chivalry of yesteryear?

Kate Carlisle

Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn't happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?

Betty Smith

Brooklyn Quotes

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