Quotes About Chicago

“Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.”
― Warren Ellis

“It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

“Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“Leave the fireworks for those who cast no spark of their own.”
― Karen Abbott, Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

“I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

“... Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“It is wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago”
― Dan C. Quayle

“Look, girls know when they’re cute,” he said. “You don’t have to tell them. All they need to do is look in the mirror. I have one friend out in New York, an attorney. She moved out there after the school year to take the bar. She doesn’t have a job. I was like, ‘How are you going to get a job there in this market?’ And she’s like, ‘I’ll wink and I’ll smile.’ She’s a pretty girl. Whether that works despite her poor grades is yet to be seen.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“There have been times I have thought some dreams should never be dreamt, but I would hate a world where that was true.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“Let me tell your something. I'm from Chicago. I don't break.”
― Barack Obama

“Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning...proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.”
― Carl Sandburg

“The great trains howling from track to track all night. The taut and telegraphic murmur of ten thousand city wires, drawn most cruelly against a city sky. The rush of city waters, beneath the city streets. The passionate passing of the night's last El.”
― Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning

“I don’t think I’ve ever referred to any girl I dated as my girlfriend. I think that would freak me out. Even the girl that I dated for two years in college I don’t think I ever referred to her as my girlfriend.”
“How would you introduce her?” I asked.
“I’m just going to say her name,” he said.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“One of the professors told me last week that he feels bad teaching with the way the economy is now. ‘What’s the point?’ he said. ‘Kids aren’t getting jobs.’ You never hear faculty talk that way. He did.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“When I burn please bury me deep
Somewhere on West Division Street
Put a bottle beneat' my head
'n a bottle beneat' my feet”
― Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning

“I bet you think fellas are the ones to remember a girl -- don't you?"

He shook his head hurriedly, that he'd always thought that.

"Fellas have all the fun 'n she just sees one right after another, so it seems like HE'D remember her, better 'n SHE'D remember him, only it works the other way around. I ain't forgot one single fella, all these years. But I bet there ain't TWO 'd know me from a big of bananas this minute.”
― Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning

“I often wonder what Einstein would have done in my position. At Peterson, I kept an Einstein poster in my room, the one that says 'Imagination is more important than knowledge.' Einstein was smart, maybe even as smart as Laserator, but he played it way too safe. Then again, nobody ever threw a grappling hook at Einstein. I like to think he would have enjoyed my work, if he could have seen it. But no one sees anything I do, not until it's hovering over Chicago.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“It's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities most like Man himself— loneliest creation of all this very old poor earth.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“That weekend the city blushed with a great heat wave but on Monday it rained, cooling the ache in the street’s burn.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“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, Minor Snobs

“Partying means drinking. It also means playing records by Lou Reed and Chicago, which I thought was a city but is also a band it turns out.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“I remember when I was twenty-five,” he said. “No client comes to you when you’re twenty-five. It’s like when you are looking for a doctor. You don’t want the new one that just graduated. You don’t want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“...a city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“On the Rolling Stones - You will walk out of the Amphitheatre after watching the Stones perform and suddenly the Chicago stockyards smell clean and good by comparison.”
― Tom Fitzpatrick

“Well, if you’re a native Chicagoan, you know how dumb he [Dr. Robert Hartley] is. He gets on the Ravenswood El, he goes past his stop on Sheridan Road, he gets off in Evanston, where the El is on the ground, and then he walks back 55 blocks to his apartment. Now, would you want to have that man as a psychologist? A man who misses his stop every day?”
― Bob Newhart

“She loves swimming,” said Ellen, who I knew had been a competitive swimmer in college.
Ellen looked in the rearview mirror at Kara.
“Don’t you Kara?” asked Ellen.
There was no response.
“I didn’t start until I was three,” said Ellen. “She’s got a two year start on me.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“So he bought tickets to the Greyhound and they climbed, painfully, inch by inch and with the knowledge that, once they reached the top, there would be one breath-taking moment when the car would tip precariously into space, over an incline six stories steep and then plunge, like a plunging plane. She buried her head against him, fearing to look at the park spread below. He forced himself to look: thousands of little people and hundreds of bright little stands, and over it all the coal-smoke pall of the river factories and railroad yards. He saw in that moment the whole dim-lit city on the last night of summer; the troubled streets that led to the abandoned beaches, the for-rent signs above overnight hotels and furnished basement rooms, moving trolleys and rising bridges: the cagework city, beneath a coalsmoke sky.”
― Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning

“Big-shot town, small-shot town, jet-propelled old-fashioned town, by old-world hands with new-world tools built into a place whose heartbeat carries farther than its shout, whose whispering in the night sounds less hollow than its roistering noontime laugh: they have builded a heavy-shouldered laughter here who went to work too young.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make