Trains Quotes

“So when I watch trains, it makes me think about how much movement there is in the world. How every train has dozens of cars and every car has hundreds of parts, and all those parts and cars work day after day. And then there are all these other motions. People are born and die. Seasons change. Rivers flow to the sea. Earth circles the sun and the moon circles Earth. Everything whirring and spinning toward something. And I get to be part of it for a little while, the way I get to watch a train for a minute or two, and then it's gone.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.”
― Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

“It's not getting from A to B. It's not the beginning or the destination that counts. It's the ride in between...This train is alive with things that should be seen and heard. It's a living, breathing something -- you just have to want to learn its rhythm.”
― David Baldacci, The Christmas Train

“The train is a small world moving through a larger world.”
― Elisha Cooper, Train

“When it happens and it hits hard, we decide certain things, and realize there's truth in all those dark, lonely days"

He had an instantaneous look about him,
a glimmer and a glint over those eyes,
he knew how the world worked,
and took pleasure in its wickedness.

He would give a dime or two to those sitting on the street,
he would tell them things like:
"It won't get any better,"
and
"Might as well use this to buy your next fix,"
and finally
"It's better to die high than to live sober,"

His suit was pressed nicely, with care and respect,
like the kind a corpse wears,
he'd say that was his way of honoring the dead,
of always being ready for the oncoming train,
I liked him,
he never wore a fake smile
and he was always ready to tell a story about
how and
when

"We all wake up alone," he said once,
"Oftentimes even when sleeping next to someone, we wake up before them and they are still asleep and suddenly we are awake, and alone."
I didn't see him for a few days,
a few days later it felt like it'd been weeks,
those weeks drifted apart from one another,
like leaves on a pond's surface,
and became like months.

And then I saw him and I asked him where he'd been,
he said,
"I woke up alone one day, just like any other, and I decided I didn't like it anymore.”
― Dave Matthes, Ejaculation: New Poems and Stories

“I woke up feeling alone, so lonely. The night before, I had cried myself to sleep. I lay there on the floor, listening to the tube trains passing beneath me. I thought, All those hundreds and thousands and millions of people. London, London - I hate you. I picked myself up and got ready.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“أحب القطارات و الأماكن العامة فقط لامتلائها بالغرباء المريحين الذين لا يطلبون شئ و لا ينتظرون منى اكثر من صمتى”
― Ahmed Salama

“Many trains arrive at your station; treat them good whether they stay or leave!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The train may fall in love with a station, but it has to go and it goes! Don’t be like the train; stay at the station you fell in love, go nowhere!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“If you sleep on the train, you will miss your station; if you sleep at the station, you will miss your train! You can control your fate only when you are awake!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The trains always arrive at your station. The question is which one to take?”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Corner Seat

Suspended in a moving night
The face in the reflection train
Looks at first sight as self-assured
As your own face - But look again:

Windows between you and the world
Keep out the cold, keep out the fright;
Then why does your reflection seem
So lonely in the moving night?”
― Louis MacNeice

“It’s been my experience that most folk who ride trains could care less where they’re going. For them it’s the journey itself and the people they meet along the way. You see, at every stop this train makes, a little bit of America, a little bit of your country, gets on and says hello. That’s why trains are so popular at Christmas. People get on to meet their country over the holidays. They’re looking for some friendship, a warm body to talk to. People don’t rush on a train, because that’s not what trains are for. How do you put a dollar value on that? What accounting line does that go on?”
― David Baldacci, The Christmas Train

“... a woman who was washing clothes in the river during the hottest time of the day ran screaming down the main street in an alarming state of commotion.
"It's coming," she finally explained. "Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Thomas Lull knows he is un-American: he hates cars but loves trains, Indian trains, big trains like a nation on the move. He is content with the contradiction that they are at once hierarchical and democratic, a temporary community brought together for a time; vital while it lasts, burning away like early mist when the terminus is reached.”
― Ian McDonald, River of Gods

“The very old lady in black looked up at a notice over the window:
TO STOP THE TRAIN PULL DOWN THE CHAIN
PENALTY FOR IMPROPER USE, FIVE POUNDS.
She smiled the gentlest, sweetest smile. "All my life I have been afraid that one day the temptation would prove too much for me," she said.
"Don't suppose there's anyone who doesn't feel like that, ma'am," said the soldier, grinning.”
― Constance Savery, Enemy Brothers

“Lord, that Hollywood train, forever coming round the bend!”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“The station was crowded by the time the express pulled up. I felt then, as I do now, that there is no joy like the arrival of a train [...] particularly a European train that will carry you south.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“It seemed as if the train would never depart. Local trains are always somehow overzealous. At first they panic everyone into believing they are just about to thunder off down the track with an almighty jolt, then, at the very last minute, there is always some improbable hitch.”
― Dezső Kosztolányi, Skylark

“This is Denmark. We are Danes. We keep our distance. We do not pick a seat close to strangers if other seats are available. We do not talk to strangers in the trains.”

William Wilson in the short story 'Metro' by Steen Langstrup”
― Steen Langstrup, Metro

“The whistling of a ghost is like no other sound in a fistful of universes, because it is woven of all the whistles the ghost has ever heard, and so it usually includes train moans, lunch whistles, fire alarms, and the affronted-virgin screaming of tea kettles.”
― Peter S. Beagle, A Fine and Private Place

“The rage for railroads is so great that many will be laid in parts where they will not pay.”
― George Stephenson

“What is it about me that gets them all crying? It’s not the end of the world.”
― Diane Samuels, Kindertransport: A Drama

“The train hit her with the sound of a meat-filled hefty bag smacking the pavement, and the effect was much the same, I guess. (Dark City Lights)”
― Warren Moore

“The train rolled right through dinner and over the sunset and around ten o'clock and into a nap and out the next day...”
― Lindsay Mattick, Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World's Most Famous Bear

“It was the day after Thanksgiving. I was the 3 p.m. backwaiter, but the trains were running irregularly, and while I had heard one sighing into the station as I ran down the stairs, my card was out of money. Which is to say, I was late.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“What a lovely ride that was. I haven't been on a train in an eternity. Something wonderfully soothing about traveling that way.”
― Aidan Donnelley Rowley, The Ramblers

“We'd seen it a million times before, since girls on the Tracks rarely knew of loyalty. She'd be gone when the breeze got under her skin. "You can't trust Vagabond hearts. They are already so broken that they think nothing of breaking yours," he had explained once. I wondered who was the first to break his heart–where he'd gained that knowledge the first time around.”
― J.D. Brewer, Vagabond

“This was the moment when the 20th century really began, in all its viciousness and bloody-mindedness. Me, I had imagination in spades, though. I saw myself as a corpse, swept into this stream of fools against my will along with thousands, millions of other corpses, and I didn’t like it one little bit.

The other guys, still waiting on the platform at the Gare de l’Est, already saw themselves throwing back a well-earned beer on Alexanderplatz.

Only the mothers really knew. They knew the babies in their arms were tomorrow’s war orphans, and the cattle cars (8 horses, 40 men) were nothing but rail-mounted coffins joined end to end and headed for military cemeteries.”
― Jacques Tardi, Goddamn This War!