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Downtown Quotes

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Downtown Quotes

“Look, girls know when they’re cute,” he said. “You don’t have to tell them. All they need to do is look in the mirror. I have one friend out in New York, an attorney. She moved out there after the school year to take the bar. She doesn’t have a job. I was like, ‘How are you going to get a job there in this market?’ And she’s like, ‘I’ll wink and I’ll smile.’ She’s a pretty girl. Whether that works despite her poor grades is yet to be seen.”

PhilosophyDreamSchoolRomanceFictionEconomyDreamsYouthAdventureSummerYoung AdultYaContemporaryYoung Adult FictionChicagoJobCityLaw SchoolDowntownStudent
Book:Minor Snobs
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“Do you want to achieve something or do you just want to make money?” asked a nearby man in a white shirt to another man in a striped shirt. I waited for the answer as I slowly walked past them. “Why is it an either or question?” the man in the striped shirt finally murmured philosophically under a sip of beer. They both stood there looking at each other in thought.”

LifePhilosophyDreamPartyStudentsSummerChicagoCityLaw SchoolDowntownLake
Book:Minor Snobs
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“Shortly before school started, I moved into a studio apartment on a quiet street near the bustle of the downtown in one of the most self-conscious bends of the world. The “Gold Coast” was a neighborhood that stretched five blocks along the lake in a sliver of land just south of Lincoln Park and north of River North. The streets were like fine necklaces and strung together were the brownstone houses and tall condominiums and tiny mansions like pearls, and when the day broke and the sun faded away, their lights burned like jewels shining gaudily in the night. The world’s most elegant bazaar, Michigan Avenue, jutted out from its eastern tip near The Drake Hotel and the timeless blue-green waters of Lake Michigan pressed its shores. The fractious make-up of the people that inhabited it, the flat squareness of its parks and the hint of the lake at the ends of its tree-lined streets squeezed together a domesticated cesspool of age and wealth and standing. It was a place one could readily dress up for an expensive dinner at one of the fashionable restaurants or have a drink miles high in the lounge of the looming John Hancock Building and five minutes later be out walking on the beach with pants cuffed and feet in the cool water at the lake’s edge.”

SchoolSummerNeighborhoodChicagoCityDowntownContemporary FictionLakeContemporary Literature
Book:Minor Snobs
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“I don’t think I’ve ever referred to any girl I dated as my girlfriend. I think that would freak me out. Even the girl that I dated for two years in college I don’t think I ever referred to her as my girlfriend.” “How would you introduce her?” I asked. “I’m just going to say her name,” he said.”

LoveDreamSchoolRomanceFictionEconomyDreamsYouthAdventureSummerYoung AdultYaContemporaryYoung Adult FictionChicagoJobCityLaw SchoolDowntownStudent
Book:Minor Snobs
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“It was a generation growing in its disillusionment about the deepening recession and the backroom handshakes and greedy deals for private little pots of gold that created the largest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. As heirs to the throne, we all knew, of course, how bad the economy was, and our dreams, the ones we were told were all right to dream, were teetering gradually toward disintegration. However, on that night, everyone seemed physically at ease and exempt from life’s worries with final exams over and bar class a distant dream with a week before the first lecture, and as I looked around at the jubilant faces and loud voices, if you listened carefully enough you could almost hear the culmination of three years in the breath of the night gasp in an exultant sigh as if to say, “Law school was over at last!”

SummerChicagoCityLaw SchoolDowntownContemporary FictionLakeContemporary Literature
Book:Minor Snobs
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“The city, to her, meant a few particular blocks - the best blocks - lying together in a neat rectangle, linked by arcades and department stores; three streets one way, cut by four at right angles, bound at the top by gardens, self-enclosed at the bottom and either end. Three or four times a week she walked the streets of these blocks, smelt the coffee, the flowers, the rich expensive leather, the cosmetics.”

AustraliaUrbanCitySydneyDowntown
Book:Down in the City
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“I remember when I was twenty-five,” he said. “No client comes to you when you’re twenty-five. It’s like when you are looking for a doctor. You don’t want the new one that just graduated. You don’t want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys.”

DreamSchoolFictionEconomyDreamsYouthAdventureSummerYoung AdultYaLawyerYoung Adult FictionChicagoJobCityAttorneyDowntownLaw Student
Book:Minor Snobs
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“That's the words: "So I'm back to the velvet underground" - which is a clothing store in downtown San Francisco, where Janis Joplin got her clothes, and Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane, it was this little hole in the wall, amazing, beautiful stuff - "back to the floor that I love, to a room with some lace and paper flowers, back to the gypsy that I was."”

LittlesBeautifulStuffRoomsGraceFlowerWallPaperClothesStoresHolesClothingsAirplaneSan FranciscoGypsyVelvetDowntownLaceSlickI'm BackVelvet UndergroundAmazing BeautifulPaper Flowers
Author:Stevie Nicks
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“If only Ed Fleming had a mother who gave such sound advice. The manager of Wazoo's, a downtown Denver restaurant, Fleming is a CSU alum who has been darned giddy about the Rams' recent success. So giddy that he donned a necklace made of Pez candies, a red blazer - and nothing else. A few people gaped (some actually set aside their beers), but most ignored Fleming as he strutted like a red-blazered rooster, demanding that all hail the Mighty Naked Beer King.”

PeopleIfsHas BeensMadeMotherSoundAdviceKingsRedNakedManagersBeerRestaurantsIgnoredCandyHailDowntownNecklacesDenverGiddyRamsRoostersBlazersPezSound Advice
Author:J. R. Moehringer
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“Buildings are seldom just buildings in downtown Chicago, they are Examples, and not a city on Earth, I swear, is as knowledgeably preoccupied with architectural meaning. Where else would a department store include in its advertisements the name of the architect who created it, or a newspaper property section throw in a scholarly exposition of theoretical design?”

EarthNamesCitiesExampleDesignBuildingPropertyStoresArchitectureNewspapersDepartmentChicagoArchitectSwearSectionsTheoreticalAdvertisementsDowntownScholarlyDepartment StoresDowntown Chicago
Book:Locations
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“Chicago's downtown seems to me to constitute, all in all, the best-looking twentieth-century city, the city where contemporary technique has best been matched by artistry, intelligence, and comparatively moderated greed. No doubt about it, if style were the one gauge, Chicago would be among the greatest of all the cities of the world.”

IfsWorldSeemsWould BeCitiesDoubtCenturyStyleGreedArchitectureTechniqueContemporaryNo DoubtChicagoTwentieth CenturyArtistryDowntownMatchedAll The BestGauges
Book:Locations
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“My parents had come from Mexico, a short road in my imagination. I felt myself as coming from a caramelized planet, an upside-down planet, pineapple-cratered. Though I was born here, I came from the other side of the looking glass, as did Alice, though not alone like Alice. Downtown I saw lots of brown people. Old men on benches. Winks from Filipinos. Sikhs who worked in the fields were the most mysterious brown men, their heads wrapped in turbans. They were the rose men. They looked like roses.”

PeopleMenFeltParentSidesBornImaginationSawsFieldsPlanetsRoseGlassesMysteriousBrownOld ManMexicoMy ImaginationNot AloneBenchesUpside DownDowntownFilipinoPineapplesTurbans
Book:Brown: The Last Discovery of America
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“I know that I come from mid-20th century America, urban, specifically downtown New York, specifically an Italian-American area, Roman Catholic - that's who I am. And a part of what I know is there's a decency to people who tried to make a living in the kind of world that was around us and also the Skid Row area of the Bowery; it impressed me.”

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Author:Martin Scorsese
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“I think so many great artists are flocking to LA because the downtown art scene is so vibrant, there is cheap living and you can really flourish as an artist there. There is an unbelievably supportive and really smart, talented theatre audience in LA full of young, hungry, vibrant people. It's something that sort of makes me think of what New York must have been like in its downtown theater scene in the 1980s - before my time.”

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Author:Jon Bernthal
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“Visit Cape Town and history is never far from your grasp. It lingers in the air, a scent on the breezy, an explanation of circumstance that shaped the Rainbow People. Stroll around the old downtown and it's impossible not to be affected by the trials and tribulations of the struggle. But, in many ways, it is the sense of triumph in the face of such adversity that makes the experience all the more poignant.”

PeopleWayFacesStruggleImpossibleAirCircumstancesTownsAdversityTrialsTriumphExplanationAffectedRainbowScentTribulationDowntownPoignantTrials And TribulationsCapesBreezyCape Town
Author:Tahir Shah
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“Being accused of making money by selling sex in Hollywood, home of the casting couch and the gratuitous nude scene, is so rich with irony that it's a better subject for a comic novel than a column.... On one coast the cops are busting sex workers on Eighth Avenue, dragging them downtown to night court where they pay the fine and go right back to their corner; on another they're charging Heidi Fleiss with pandering in a town in which the verb is an art form.”

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Author:Anna Quindlen
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“Living in a small town you couldn't go anywhere on a Saturday where a store had the game on. If you were downtown you heard the game. If you were at the gas station you heard the game. I remember I would be mowing the lawn and I would stop for the Nebraska game. I would have it cranking outside.”

IfsWould BeRememberGamesHeardTownsStoresGasStationsSaturdaySmall TownLawnsDowntownNebraskaGas StationsMowingMowing The LawnLiving In A Small Town
Author:Larry the Cable Guy
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“I was doing stand up comedy when I was 11, that's how I got started; not because I wanted to do comedy, but because we were broke, living in Echo Park in Downtown Los Angeles, from 1986, I saw the Rodney King riots; my parents didn't really work. But I wanted a new backpack, that's how I got into this business - I wanted a new backpack.”

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Author:Shia LaBeouf
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