Trains Quotes

“I got stuck in a toilet.”
― Gary Paulsen, Gone to the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood

“A train is a poem that will take you anywhere you want to go.”
― Dale Maharidge, The Last Great American Hobo

“If the train you've been waiting for doesn't come to your stop, will the world come to an end? Of course not! This time you wait for the train you didn't wait for!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The stop you get off is more important than the train you take because no one stays on the train!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“On the train I had a lot of time to think. I thought how in the thirty years of my life I had seldom gotten on a train in America without being conscious of my color. In the South, there are Jim Crow cars and Negroes must ride separate from the whites, usually in a filthy antiquated coach next to the engine, getting all the smoke and bumps and dirt. In the South, we cannot buy sleeping car tickets. Such comforts are only for white folks. And in the North where segregated travel is not the law, colored people have, nevertheless, many difficulties. In auto buses they must take the seats in the rear, over the wheels. On the boats they must occupy the worst cabins. The ticket agents always say that all other accommodations are sold. On trains, if one sits down by a white person, the white person will sometimes get up, flinging back an insult at the Negro who has dared to take a seat beside him. Thus it is that in America, if you are yellow, brown, or black, you can never travel anywhere without being reminded of your color, and oft-times suffering great inconveniences.

I sat in the comfortable sleeping car on my first day out of Moscow and remembered many things about trips I had taken in America. I remembered how, once as a youngster going alone to see my father who was working in Mexico, I went into the dining car of the train to eat. I sat down at a table with a white man. The man looked at me and said, "You're a nigger, ain't you?" and left the table. It was beneath his dignity to eat with a Negro child. At St. Louis I went onto the station platform to buy a glass of milk. The clerk behind the counter said, “We don't serve niggers," and refused to sell me anything. As I grew older I learned to expect this often when traveling. So when I went South to lecture on my poetry at Negro universities, I carried my own food because I knew I could not go into the dining cars. Once from Washington to New Orleans, I lived all the way on the train on cold food. I remembered this miserable trip as I sat eating a hot dinner on the diner of the Moscow-Tashkent express.

Traveling South from New York, at Washington, the capital of our country, the official Jim Crow begins. There the conductor comes through the train and, if you are a Negro, touches you on the shoulder and says, "The last coach forward is the car for colored people." Then you must move your baggage and yourself up near the engine, because when the train crosses the Potomac River into Virginia, and the dome of the Capitol disappears, it is illegal any longer for white people and colored people to ride together. (Or to eat together, or sleep together, or in some places even to work together.) Now I am riding South from Moscow and am not Jim-Crowed, and none of the darker people on the train with me are Jim-Crowed, so I make a happy mental note in the back of my mind to write home to the Negro papers: "There is no Jim Crow on the trains of the Soviet Union.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“If you're wise enough to know which trains to take and which trains to miss, you'll neither be thrown in the wrong direction nor find yourself at stops you don't want!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Think about the trains you will take, not the trains you missed!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The new transportation system is multi-modal, autonomous and electric. People utilize a variety of vehicles including cars, bicycles, passenger drones, hoverboards, airplanes, boats, rockets and more. And with ease, efficiency and comfort. At Mayflower-Plymouth, we’re making that real.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Wind against the goggles. Cool night air against her cheeks. She roars on into the night, hissing and clanking and smoking. She heads toward the glow of the big city, with sparks trailing behind her like dying moths.”
― Shawn P. McCarthy

“Trains changed - conductors never did.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Is there anyone who has not felt the magnetic attraction of unseen cities, train whistles, the rhythmic chant of wheels on the railway tracks stretching behind you, where you came from, and before you, where you’re headed—who knows to what chance encounters and fresh hopes? Wonder about faraway places is born in us in childhood; and, with me, it never dimmed.”
― Lev Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever

“Newspaper letters review the deserted cities
& drowse at the windows in pale sun & the evening breeze’s rales.

The train has stopped.
("Anna Karenina / October 18, 1910," Translated by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould )”
― Hasan Alizadeh, House Arrest

“I made myself very popular with the group by showing them how to shut it [a loudspeaker] off. I wrapped a rubber band around the metal stump and this rubber offered enough of a grip to shut the thing off.”
― Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster

“It was an extraordinary landscape-pale yellow, under a blue sky-extraordinary because it was not a desert, but rather the largest pasture imaginable; here and there a herd of horses, here and there a camel, or a man, or a tent. It was inhabited, but with a sparseness that was impressive.”
― Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster

“It was always like a fire drill, getting on or off a Chinese train, with people panting and pushing”
― Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster

“If he doesn't talk to me, and he doesn't walk around with me, and he doesn't travel in the same compartment,' I said, 'I don't understand why he wants to come with me.'

'To make sure you are comfortable. Hospitality. You are our guest ...”
― Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster

“I found my berth and discovered that no one else was going to Xian. The sleeper was empty. This was the rarest situation on a Chinese train, and one to be relished. Such circumstances were almost luxurious and definitely cozy.”
― Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster

“A good country is the one in which trains run on time, and carry happy passengers.”
― Mantaranjot Mangat, Plotless

“Only the train of memories runs on a disused railroad!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Yes, the train wants to leave the path drawn for it, because he wants to be free, but that would be the end of his life! The poor train lives with this dilemma all his life!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The simplicity of a train's success strategy is admirable: Move forward and reach your destination!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“I like trains and the romance of traveling by train. When you travel by train, you can’t go wherever you want to go; you have to stay on the train tracks (aka rails) and follow where they run.

When you don’t have a choice of things to do or places to go, the decision to monotask is much easier. Therefore, I like to remind myself to Sleep on rails. Riding the rails (in the comfort of my own bed of course) from one point to another keeps me focused on sleep and prevents me from taking any side trips during the night.”
― Thatcher Wine, The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better

“There is enough steam still in the pipes to feed its piston, but it has no real power. The wheel is nothing more than a spinning flower decorating a grave.”
― Shawn P. McCarthy

“I've never heard of ghosts driving ghost trucks.”
“Says the girl who recently jumped onboard a ghost train.”
“That was a psychokinetic visual and tactile apparition pooling energy and traumatic memories from several entities—”
“Uh-huh. Ghost train,”
― J.L. Bryan, House of Whispers

“I always take the same car now, fifth one from the front. I pretend it's the best car, least crowded, closest to where I'm going. Even when I have to walk half a platform to get on and off. I pretend not to hope.

I can't pretend away this feeling.”
― Ismée Amiel Williams

“I always take the same car now, fifth one from the front. I pretend it's the best car, least crowded, closest to where I'm going. Even when I have to walk half a platform to get on and off. I pretend not to hope.

I can't pretend away this feeling”
― Ismée Amiel Williams, This Train Is Being Held

“I love wide stretches of open land, but to the average Spaniard, who typically thrives in company and is most at home in a crowd, these fields of Extremadura (which literally means “extremely tough”) could even be intimidating, only partly because not far back in time there were bandits in the region.

They were named as the ‘extreme’ end of the country.

If it is at least not totally empty, there is certainly a sense of that great lonesome feeling created by the far-off, long, long line at which the earth's surface and the sky meet: a pleasant melancholy of an imagined solitary truck crawling across a plain, the ancestral memory of a caravan trail or a child’s drawing of a single emblematic tree on a small hill.”
― Brett Hetherington, Slow Travels in Unsung Spain

“Sometimes, when she was going to Jamaica, Mrs. Chandler would go to New York. And they would take the same train. On the ride down they would talk—about some story being played up in the newspapers, about clothes or some moving picture.

But when the train pulled into Grand Central, the wall was suddenly there. Just as they got off the train, just as the porter was reaching for Mrs. Chandler's pigskin luggage, the wall suddenly loomed up. It was Mrs. Chandler's voice that erected it. Her voice high, clipped, carrying, as she said, 'I'll see you on Monday, Lutie.'

There was a firm note of dismissal in her voice so that the other passengers pouring off the train turned to watch the rich young woman and her colored maid; a tone of voice that made people stop to hear just when it was the maid was to report back for work. Because the voice unmistakably established the relation between the blond young woman and the brown young woman.

And it never failed to stir resentment in Lutie. She argued with herself about it. Of course, she was a maid. She had no illusions about that. But would it hurt Mrs. Chandler just once to talk at that moment of parting as though, however incredible it might seem to anyone who was listening, they were friends? Just two people who knew each other and to whom it was only incidental that one of them was white and the other black?

Even while she argued with herself, she was answering in a noncommittal voice, "Yes, ma'am.”
― Ann Petry, The Street

“Railways, like Daleks, have difficulties in getting up hills.”
― Ian Marchant, Parallel Lines: Or, Journeys on the Railway of Dreams

“Yes, you can learn something from anything! For example, stand on a railway and look at a train coming from afar: There is a discipline, a self-confidence, a charisma, a determination in the arrival of the trains! This is how you can go somewhere and make a good impression at your destination!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan