Trains Quotes

“I've always felt that distant train whistles heard in the dead of night are the universe's way of letting us know the best days are neither ahead nor behind us...they're happening right now, cradled in the palms of our hands. But that doesn't change the fact that the whiskey, weed, and romance eventually runs out and the night will soon turn to day.”
― Dave Matthes, Sleepeth Not, the Bastard

“Trains are beautiful. They take people to places they've never been, faster than they could ever go themselves. Everyone who works on trains knows they have personalities, they're like people. They have their own mysteries.”
― Sam Starbuck, The Dead Isle

“On the train: staring hypnotized at the blackness outside the window, feeling the incomparable rhythmic language of the wheels, clacking out nursery rhymes, summing up moments of the mind like the chant of a broken record: god is dead, god is dead. going, going, going. and the pure bliss of this, the erotic rocking of the coach. France splits open like a ripe fig in the mind; we are raping the land, we are not stopping.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The tannoy is crackling but I can only hear heavy breathing and snuffling.
...
Uh-oh, the tannoy is crackling again.
"Sorry about that, ladies and gentlemen, I momentarily lost hold of my pie.”
― Louise Rennison, A Midsummer Tights Dream

“Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?'

Worries

Forget your worries

All the stations full of cracks tilted along the way

The telegraph wires they hang from

The grimacing poles that gesticulate and strangle them

The world stretches lengthens and folds in like an accordion tormented by a sadistic hand

In the cracks of the sky the locomotives in anger

Flee

And in the holes,

The whirling wheels the mouths the voices

And the dogs of misfortune that bark at our heels

The demons are unleashed

Iron rails

Everything is off-key

The broun-roun-roun of the wheels

Shocks

Bounces

We are a storm under a deaf man's skull...

'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?'

Hell yes, you're getting on my nerves you know very well we're far away

Overheated madness bellows in the locomotive

Plague, cholera rise up like burning embers on our way

We disappear in the war sucked into a tunnel

Hunger, the whore, clings to the stampeding clouds

And drops battle dung in piles of stinking corpses

Do like her, do your job

'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?”
― Blaise Cendrars, Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of the Little Jeanne de France

“Do you remember the long orphanage of the train stations

We crossed cities that turn-tabled all day

And vomited at night the sunshine of the day ("The Voyager")”
― Pierre Albert-Birot, The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology

“In America, Fredericka, they don't really have trains for people. The trains here are used mainly to transport pigs, television sets, and fruit.”
― Mark Helprin, Freddy and Fredericka

“Early youth is a baffling time. The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you. Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made. In this respect early youth is exactly like old age; it is a time of waiting before a big trip to an unknown destination. The chief difference is that youth waits for the morning limited and age waits for the night train.”
― Bruce Catton, Waiting for the Morning Train

“All of my life, trains had been coming and going, interrupting Ever’s daily life with their loud disregard.”
― Matthew Aaron Goodman, Hold Love Strong