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Tenements Quotes

Browse 36 quotes about Tenements.

Tenements Quotes

“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")”

TenementsUrban DecayWaterfront
Author:Cornell Woolrich
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“As a poodle may have his hair cut long or his hair cut short, as he may be trimmed with pink ribbons or with blue ribbons, yet he remains the same old poodle, so capitalism may be trimmed with factory laws, tenement laws, divorce laws and gambling laws, but it remains the same old capitalism. These "humanitarian parts" are only trimming the poodle. Socialism, one and inseparable with its "antirent and anticapital parts," means to get rid of the poodle.”

MayMeanLongLawCuttingHairCapitalismBlueRemainsDivorceHumanitarianSocialismGamblingFactoriesInseparableRibbonsPoodlesTrimmingHair CutTenements
Author:Daniel De Leon
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“From the Berlin tenement reform law of 1897 to H. P. Berlage's plan for Amsterdam South of 1917, designers and theorists in Germany and Holland moved toward the development of a perimeter residential block that would preserve the plastic continuity of the street while opening up the resultant courtyard for use as an enclosed semi-public space.”

UseLawSpacePlansStreetsDevelopmentMovedSouthOpeningBlockReformPreservesDesignerGermanyPlasticContinuityBerlinOpening UpTheoristsHollandAmsterdamTenementsPerimeter
Author:Kenneth Frampton
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“The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow though it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.”

MenMayForceLibertyWindKingsRainCrossesEnglandBlowDareStormLibertarianShakesLibertarianismCrownsRoofRuinedDefiancePoorestThresholdFrailCottagesTenements
Author:William Pitt
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“My loving friend, you see, my life was never given a foundation, no one was able to imagine what it would want to become. In Venice there stands the so-called Ca del Duca, a princely foundation, on which later the most wretched tenement came to be built. With me it's the opposite: the beautiful arched elevations of my spirit rest on the most tentative beginning; a wooden scaffolding, a few boards....Is that why I feel inhibited in raising the nave, the tower to which the weight of the great bells is to be hoisted (by angels, who else could do it)?”

WantFeelsAbleBeautifulSpiritGivenImagineAngelBuiltOppositesWeightFoundationBoardsBellsTowersWretchedVeniceElevationScaffoldingTenementsLoving Friends
Author:Rainer Maria Rilke
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“[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!”

BeautifulResultsModernFrontsPhotographyRiversSubtleFactoriesElectricIncapableCablesRubbishDamsTenements
Book:Understanding Brecht (New Edition)
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“Since the industrial revolution, cities, and especially the inner cities, were the places for the newly arrived. Voluntary immigrants seeking economic betterment, refugees, the bohemians, the artists - all of those people were crammed into densely populated neighborhoods and tenements. And as people climbed up the economic ladder they moved out, which really accelerated with the "white flight" phenomenon in the '60s and '70s.”

PeopleArtistWhiteCitiesEconomicRevolutionMovedSeekingFlightNeighborhoodImmigrantsPhenomenonRefugeeLaddersBettermentIndustrial RevolutionInner CityTenements
Author:Cleve Jones
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“I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.”

KnowsMindI CanEndsBodyRealityRememberMovingYoungSufferingFunctionTownsPhenomenonBereavementFundamentalistTenantsMoving OutNihilistTenements
Book:William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill [and] John Steinbeck
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“I was in the black silence of a medieval street, and blindly I followed its sharp turns, comforted by the height of its narrow tenements, which seemed at any moment capable of falling together, closing this alleyway under indifferent stars like a seam.”

MomentsTogetherTurnsFallStarsBlackSilenceStreetsCapableHeightIndifferentClosingMedievalTenementsAlleyways
Book:The Vampire Chronicles Collection: Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned
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“She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.”

PeopleMadeActionFormMotherBornFateGreatnessWallShapesHatredHotAbundanceDimensionsFlatsGrayConfessionHeroismTrappedSublimeVocationWretchedConsumingExaggeratedApocalypticArdorMaternityAmorousTenements
Author:Isabel Allende
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“You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone's yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew. It came there first. Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.”

PeopleFirstsKindHouseHeavenWalksPoorSawsNiceAirTreeBedQuietWindowNeighborhoodSundayIronFlatsGatesAfternoonYardsSectionsPoor PeopleFeathersForeignersBrooklynRefinedHackedSunday AfternoonsTenements
Book:A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
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“Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:---touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am's private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to take in any any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.”

KnowsMindWellsSoulSpiritFallEnemyWatchesCuttingColorLoversFleshIntricateCastesHallwaysDeviousCitadelsEggshellsTenements
Author:William Faulkner
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“This is your heritage,' he said, as if from this dance we could know about his own childhood, about the flavor and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, and projects in Red Hook, and dance halls, and city parks, and about how his own Paps, how he had beat him, how he taught him to dance, as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to drink, his head back, still dancing, still steeping and snapping perfectly in time.”

IfsKnowsMenSaidStillsCitiesChildhoodMovementBuildingTaughtDrinkProjectsBeatsRedDancingBeerParksHallsHeritageHookFlavorGritHarlemPuerto RicoGrabbingFridgesRicoSnappingTenementsCity ParksSpanish Harlem
Author:Justin Torres
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“Some day you will read in the papers that D.L. Moody of East Northfield, is dead. Don't you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now; I shall have gone up higher, that is all, out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal-a body that death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint; a body fashioned like unto His glorious body.”

BelieveChildrenMomentsBodyDeathHouseBeliefPrayerSinGoneAliveHigherPaperEastGloriousImmortalThat MomentPapersClayMoodyTenements
Book:Secret Power: The Secret of Success in Christian Life and Work
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“Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor.”

LongSometimesFacesDarkPoorHairHusbandMiseryGentlePassagesTransportDoorwaysRainyCountenanceRainy DayVacantTenements
Book:John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings
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“It was impossible for me to believe that conditions in Europe could be worse than they were in the Polish section of Chicago, and in many Italian and Irish tenements, or that any workshops could be worse than some of those I had seen in our foreign quarters.”

BelieveImpossibleConditionsEuropeItalianChicagoQuartersSectionsPolishWorkshopsTenements
Book:Exploring the Dangerous Trades - The Autobiography of Alice Hamilton, M.D.
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