The Corner Quotes

“That's the myth of it, the required lie that allows us to render our judgments. Parasites, criminals, dope fiends, dope peddlers, whores--when we can ride past them at Fayette and Monroe, car doors locked, our field of vision cautiously restricted to the road ahead, then the long journey into darkness is underway. Pale-skinned hillbillies and hard-faced yos, toothless white trash and gold-front gangsters--when we can glide on and feel only fear, we're well on the way. And if, after a time, we can glimpse the spectacle of the corner and manage nothing beyond loathing and contempt, then we've arrived at last at that naked place where a man finally sees the sense in stretching razor wire and building barracks and directing cattle cars into the compound.

It's a reckoning of another kind, perhaps, and one that becomes a possibility only through the arrogance and certainty that so easily accompanies a well-planned and well-tended life. We know ourselves, we believe in ourselves; from what we value most, we grant ourselves the illusion that it's not chance in circumstance, that opportunity itself isn't the defining issue. We want the high ground; we want our own worth to be acknowledged. Morality, intelligence, values--we want those things measured and counted. We want it to be about Us.

Yes, if we were down there, if we were the damned of the American cities, we would not fail. We would rise above the corner. And when we tell ourselves such things, we unthinkably assume that we would be consigned to places like Fayette Street fully equipped, with all the graces and disciplines, talents and training that we now posses. Our parents would still be our parents, our teachers still our teachers, our broker still our broker. Amid the stench of so much defeat and despair, we would kick fate in the teeth and claim our deserved victory. We would escape to live the life we were supposed to live, the life we are living now. We would be saved, and as it always is in matters of salvation, we know this as a matter of perfect, pristine faith.

Why? The truth is plain:

We were not born to be niggers.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood

“It isn't about the welfare check. It never was.

It isn't about sexual permissiveness, or personal morality, or failures in parenting, or lack of family planning. All of these are inherent in the disaster, but the purposefulness with which babies make babies in places like West Baltimore goes far beyond accident and chance, circumstance and misunderstanding. It's about more than the sexual drives of adolescents, too, though that might be hard to believe in a country where sex alone is enough of an argument to make anyone do just about anything.

In Baltimore, a city with the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation, the epidemic is, at root, about human expectation, or more precisely, the absence of expectation.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood

“The three-story derelict is home to Smitty, Gale, and Gale's baby - a nuclear family nested on the corner - and Ella is accustomed to seeing them on the front steps, waiting for redemption or a cool breeze from the harbor, neither of which seems particularly likely.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood

“There should be no surprise when you come to that hideous moment for which you've spent a lifetime preparing.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood

“With heroin alone, the sources of supply seemed finite and organizational; access was limited to those with a genuine connection to the New York suppliers, who had, in turn, cultivated a connection to a small number of importers. The cocaine epidemic changed that as well, creating a freelance market with twenty-year-old wholesalers supplying seventeen- year-old dealers. Anyone could ride the Amtrak or the Greyhound to New York and come back with a package. By the late eighties, the professionals were effectively marginalized in Baltimore; cocaine and the open market made the concept of territory irrelevant to the city drug trade.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood

“anonymity of the crowd, by the comfort that greater numbers allow. There are the big cats, the dealers, who rule the turf on reputation and occasional savagery, and the jackals who follow them:”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood

“The corners now constitute a world apart, a rock-hard subculture formed in the crucible of lost America.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood

“This is an existential crisis rooted not only in race—which the corner has slowly transcended—but in the unresolved disaster of the American rust-belt, in the slow, seismic shift that is shutting down the assembly lines, devaluing physical labor, and undercutting the union pay scale. Down on the corner, some of the walking wounded used to make steel, but Sparrows Point isn’t hiring the way it once did. And some used to load the container ships at Seagirt and Locust Point, but the port isn’t what she used to be either. Others worked at Koppers, American Standard, or Armco, but those plants are gone now. All of which means precious little to anyone thriving in the postindustrial age. For those of us riding the wave, the world spins on an axis of technological prowess in an orbit of ever-expanding information. In that world, the men and women of the corner are almost incomprehensibly useless and have been so for more than a decade now. How”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood

“No doubt some kind of war on drugs was a political inevitability, just as that war’s failure to thwart human desire was inevitable as well. But we might have saved ourselves from the psychic costs of the drug war—the utter alienation of an underclass from its government, the wedding of that alienation to a ruthless economic engine, and finally, the birth of an outlaw philosophy as ugly and enraged as hate and despair can produce—if we had embraced the common sense that comes with the paper bag.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood

“We need to start over, to admit that somehow the forces of history and race, economic theory and human weakness have conspired to create a new and peculiar universe in our largest cities. Our rules and imperatives don't work down here. We've got to leave behind the useless baggage of a society and culture that still maintains the luxury of reasonable judgments. Against all the sanction we can muster, this new world is surviving, expanding, consuming everything in its path. To insist that it should be otherwise on the merits of some external morality is to provoke a futile debate. In West Baltimore or East New York, in North Philly or South Chicago, they're not listening anymore, so how can our best arguments matter?”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood

“Democrats, Republicans, it doesn’t matter who’s running for office—they’ll all promise to get hard with it, to get things back under control, to spend the money on a bigger, better campaign. They talk that shit as if the national prison population hasn’t tripled in ten years. They talk it because they don’t know what else to say, because they know that at the very least, these are the words that most of us want to hear.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood

“The drugs, Gary would say, shaking his head. The drugs are killing my mind. A few moments before, he couldn’t keep up with the beg”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood

“process is not a means to a better end, but the end itself. This is welfare. This is a transaction that has become as hurtful and as hateful as any business done on any drug corner in the city. The process itself leaves each side in utter contempt of the other—givers and takers trapped in their respective roles, unable to create or accomplish anything that lasts much beyond the first of every month.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood

“why lie around in bed when you could just as well work an illness out of you?”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood

“Ten or twenty or thirty years of addiction—it doesn’t matter. Every fiend in the street is trying to re-create that first perfect shot of dope or coke, the one that told him this was what he wanted in life.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood

“that sugar-sweet moment when he chases down a vein, slams it home, and discovers that what they’re saying about them Green Tops is true: The shit is right. And if the shit ain’t right, if he cooks it up and guns it home and it’s B-and-Q, or just enough to get him out of the gate, then the first rule still applies.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood

“And they, too, must be serviced by a coterie of specialists. The shooting galleries—vacant or near-vacant rowhouses, battered by the constant traffic, emptied of all valuables—are manned by a service industry all their own. The keepers of the inn guard the door, charging a buck or two for entry, maybe less if a fiend is willing to share some of the hype. For the price of admission, you get a patch of solid floor, a choice of bottle caps, a pint or so of communal water, and if you’re lucky, a book of dry matches or a shared candle. You bring your own spike, but if you don’t have one, there will likely be someone else at or near the gallery selling works for a couple bucks.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood

“Cocaine changed the world. The heroin trade was limited to the hardcore, but the arrival of cheap, plentiful cocaine in the early and mid-1980s broke down all the barriers and let everyone play. Both are white powder, but each has a distinct, pharmacological flavor: Dope is the downer, the heavy; a couple of trips to the corner, a $20 investment and a fiend has enough in him to suffer the day. Coke is the rush to the wire, all of it gone in a flash and never enough to slake that thirst. With heroin, even the hungriest fiend can look to a limit; coke demands that every bill that can be begged or borrowed or stolen goes up to the corner.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood

“But the corner is relentless and certain. It can’t be underestimated. It can’t be appeased with pretense or melodrama or the easy fatalism of youth. It waits. It works. It finishes whatever it begins in its own time, in its own way.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood

“What, you finally ask yourself, do I do now? Your entire recovery—all that passes for drug treatment in this country—has been about defining what you don’t want to be, what you fear and dread and need to avoid.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood