Trains Quotes

“It’s not that we have to quit
this life one day, but it’s how
many things we have to quit
all at once: music, laughter,
the physics of falling leaves,
automobiles, holding hands,
the scent of rain, the concept
of subway trains... if only one
could leave this life slowly!”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn't really in the whistle—it is in you.”
― Meindert DeJong, The Little Cow and the Turtle

“You can start by wiping that fucking dumb-ass smile off your rosey, fucking, cheeks! Then you can give me a fucking automobile... a fucking Datsun, a fucking Toyota, a fucking Mustang, a fucking Buick! Four fucking wheels and a seat! And I really don't care for the way your company left me in the middle of fucking nowhere with fucking keys to a fucking car that isn't fucking there. And I really didn't care to fucking walk down a fucking highway and across a fucking runway to get back here to have you smile at my fucking face. I want a fucking car RIGHT FUCKING NOW!”
― Steve Martin

“The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her—her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“He offered her power, money, status...
a giant prison, all in exchange
for only...her soul.”
― Jamie Weise

“It ought to be plain how little you gain
by getting excited and vexed.
You'll always be late for the previous train,
and always on time for the next.”
― Piet Hein

“...what thrills me about trains is not their size or their equipment but the fact that they are moving, that they embody a connection between unseen places.”
― Marianne Wiggins

“The aristocrats, if such they could be called, generally hated the whole concept of the train on the basis that it would encourage the lower classes to move about and not always be available.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“I lie down on many a station platform; I stand before many a soup kitchen; I squat on many a bench;--then at last the landscape becomes disturbing, mysterious, and familiar. It glides past the western windows with its villages, their thatched roofs like caps, pulled over the white-washed, half-timbered houses, its corn-fields, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the slanting light, its orchards, its barns and old lime trees.

The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and my heart trembles. The train stamps and stamps onward. I stand at the window and hold on to the frame. These names mark the boundaries of my youth.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“He had let me know time after time that he was a thinking man, a man of intellect and wit. Yet one unintended hungry look into my eyes and he betrayed each of his words he had carefully spoken to me. I knew it in that instant. He was a viscerally driven man. And one day, he would possess me.”
― Jamie Weise

“We teach our child many things I don’t believe in, and almost nothing I do believe in. We teach punctuality, particularly if the enforcement of it disturbs the peace. My father taught me, by example, that the greatest defeat in life was to miss a train. Only after many years did I learn that an escaping train carries away with it nothing vital to my health. Railroad trains are such magnificent objects we commonly mistake them for Destiny.”
― E.B. White, One Man's Meat

“Trains tap into some deep American collective memory.”
― Dana Frank, Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California's Kitsch Monuments

“Six express tracks and twelve locals pass through Palimpsest. The six Greater Lines are: Stylus, Sgraffito, Decretal, Foolscap, Bookhand, and Missal. Collectively, in the prayers of those gathered prostrate in the brass turnstiles of its hidden, voluptuous shrines, these are referred to as the Marginalia Line. They do not run on time: rather, the commuters of Palimpsest have learned their habits, the times of day and night when they prefer to eat and drink, their mating seasons, their gathering places. In days of old, great safaris were held to catch the great trains in their inexorable passage from place to place, and women grappled with them with hooks and tridents in order to arrive punctually at a desk in the depth, of the city.

As if to impress a distracted parent on their birthday, the folk of Palimpsest built great edifices where the trains liked to congregate to drink oil from the earth and exchange gossip. They laid black track along the carriages’ migratory patterns. Trains are creatures of routine, though they are also peevish and curmudgeonly. Thus the transit system of Palimpsest was raised up around the huffing behemoths that traversed its heart, and the trains have not yet expressed displeasure.

To ride them is still an exercise in hunterly passion and exactitude, for they are unpredictable, and must be observed for many weeks before patterns can be discerned. The sport of commuting is attempted by only the bravest and the wildest of Palimpsest. Many have achieved such a level of aptitude that they are able to catch a train more mornings than they do not.

The wise arrive early with a neat coil of hooked rope at their waist, so that if a train is in a very great hurry, they may catch it still, and ride behind on the pauper’s terrace with the rest of those who were not favored, or fast enough, or precise in their calculations. Woe betide them in the infrequent mating seasons! No train may be asked to make its regular stops when she is in heat! A man was once caught on board when an express caught the scent of a local. The poor banker was released to a platform only eight months later, when the two white leviathans had relinquished each other with regret and tears.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

“Suicide by train is also popular in many developed countries. Without ready access to firearms, suicidal people often turn to trains. —Der Spiegel, July 27, 2011

Once it happens you can’t remember
how you started out: innocent,
barreling into the tunnel,
shooting out at each station
like a dolphin out of a dim green pool.
Pneumatic doors inhale open, puff shut,
lock with a solid thump.

Up and down the line, fifty times a day,
it’s a long slow song. You
feel the rumble as much as hear it.
In your dim green trance
the words retain wonder:
Vorsicht, Türe werden geschloßen.
Caution, the doors are closing.

Then the first time:
someone decides darkness will answer,
hides out in the tunnel,
steps out in front of the train
like he knows where he’s going,
steps out at you, dying at you,
knowing you can’t stop in time.

Now each time the doors close,
they seal you in. You are a human bullet
shot into the tunnels, hoping no one
will block the light far ahead,
each station one minute’s reprieve.”
― Karen Greenbaum-Maya

“At least when I get on the Boston train I have a good chance of landing in the South Station
And not in that part of the daily press which is reserved for victims of aviation.”
― Ogden Nash, Hard Lines

“A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.”
― Russell Baker

“Temple of the Rat King. Ark of the Soot God. Sphincter of Hades. Yes, King's Cross Station, where, according to Knuckle Sandwich, a blow job costs only five quid - any of the furthest-left three cubicles in the men's lavvy downstairs, twenty-four hours a day.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“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

“But when you're caked in your own leavings, you don't really mind being hit with brutally hard jets of water.”
― Douglas Coupland, Worst. Person. Ever.

“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

“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

“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

“Vast rivers, the kind that flow through continents and look like seas at their widest points, hold a particular fascination for me, as do trains. The reason is simple: we don't have these things in Shetland, and I hope the childlike awe I feel on a riverbank, or watching an intercity train swoosh across a high bridge, will never fade. Best, of course, when the two are combined.

About a hundred miles southwest of Kharkiv the train had slowed, and I watched from the window, totally transfixed, as we clunked across a bridge that seemed to stretch on and on over the dark river. Lights glimmered, reassuring, in the distance. There are many bridges which knit the city of Dnipro together, taking trains and traffic across both the Dnipro and Samara rivers. The city sprawls at their confluence.”
― Jen Stout, Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia's War

“and beneath this wondrous sky the black valley, utterly still, the train moving through it making a great noise but unable to wake this dead world.”
― Denis Johnson, Train Dreams