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Quote by Clifford Cohen

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Clifford Cohen

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“I am sorry if I took an inappropriate way that might have hurt your feelings; I am earnestly careful because of my bitter experience; people have broken my trust severely. I saw you also came to my social media pages; it's no problem; you seem like a good soul, but I can't help myself to trust strangers; I don't know them, and they disguise themselves to play a dubious role. I don't want to be the victim again. Somehow you also pretended to be someone like beloved; it showed emotional victimization. I adore honest, truthful, and uncomplicated characters. I hope, and I am sure, as a mature person, you will realize it. I am not interested in anyone.”

“Summer in Pittsburgh had a way of hating you, had a way of beating you down, getting into your bones and thoughts. Only the strongest survived the humidity of Pittsburgh summers, until winter came on and brought with it a test of a different sort, to see who was strong enough to make it to summer. All weather in Pittsburgh had an attitude, forced you to submit to it. Dared you to survive.”

“You can be anything in Pittsburgh, a stripper, a writer, a student, a bartender, or something else, or everything else, all of it at once, and no one cares, or if they care, they mean it, it's love. In Pittsburgh, you are tough or you are not. You write or you don't write. You start hearts or allow hearts to wind down like old clocks. I almost never think about what Pittsburgh means because I know it.”

“I was flying. My shoulders loosened, my stride opened, my heart banged the base of my throat. I crossed Carnegie and ran up the block waving my arms. I crossed Lexington and ran up the block waving my arms. A linen-suited woman in her fifties did meet my exultant eye. She looked exultant herself, seeing me from far up the block. Her face was thin and tanned. We converged. Her warm, intelligent glance said she knew what I was doing- not because she herself had been a child but because she herself took a few loose aerial turns around her apartment every night for the hell of it, and by day played along with the rest of the world and took the streetcar. So Teresa of Avila checked her unseemly joy and hung on to the altar rail to hold herself down. The woman's smiling, deep glance seemed to read my own awareness from my face, so we passed on the sidewalk- a beautifully upright woman walking in her tan linen suit, a kid running and flapping her arms- we passed on the sidewalk with a look of accomplices who share a humor just beyond irony. What's a heart for?”

“The old frame house down near the waterfront had never held so many people since the day it was put up. It must have been a pleasant place fifty years before: trees overhanging the limpid water, cows grazing in the meadows on both sides of the river, little frame houses like this one dotting the banks here and there. It wasn't a pleasant place any more: garbage scows, coal yards, the river a greasy gray soup. Dead-end blocks of decrepit tenements on one side of it, lumberyards and ice-plants and tall stacks on the other. The house was set far back from the street, hemmed in by the blank walls that rose around it. ("I Wouldn't Be In Your Shoes")”