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Trains Quotes

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Trains Quotes

“I've always felt that distant train whistles heard in the dead of night are the universe's way of letting us know the best days are neither ahead nor behind us...they're happening right now, cradled in the palms of our hands. But that doesn't change the fact that the whiskey, weed, and romance eventually runs out and the night will soon turn to day.”

“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.”

“We'd seen it a million times before, since girls on the Tracks rarely knew of loyalty. She'd be gone when the breeze got under her skin. "You can't trust Vagabond hearts. They are already so broken that they think nothing of breaking yours," he had explained once. I wondered who was the first to break his heart–where he'd gained that knowledge the first time around.”

“We could visit whenever we wanted, Ashiya and Okayama were practically next door, and there were no diesel fumes on the Shinkansen. Though we had parted repeating those assurances over and over, in the thirty years since, Mina and I have seen each other only a handful of times. It's not that we’ve grown apart or lost track of each other, but simply that time has slipped away much more quickly than we could have imagined when we were young.”

“Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he’d been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.”

“I like trains and the romance of traveling by train. When you travel by train, you can’t go wherever you want to go; you have to stay on the train tracks (aka rails) and follow where they run. When you don’t have a choice of things to do or places to go, the decision to monotask is much easier. Therefore, I like to remind myself to Sleep on rails. Riding the rails (in the comfort of my own bed of course) from one point to another keeps me focused on sleep and prevents me from taking any side trips during the night.”

“When it happens and it hits hard, we decide certain things, and realize there's truth in all those dark, lonely days" He had an instantaneous look about him, a glimmer and a glint over those eyes, he knew how the world worked, and took pleasure in its wickedness. He would give a dime or two to those sitting on the street, he would tell them things like: "It won't get any better," and "Might as well use this to buy your next fix," and finally "It's better to die high than to live sober," His suit was pressed nicely, with care and respect, like the kind a corpse wears, he'd say that was his way of honoring the dead, of always being ready for the oncoming train, I liked him, he never wore a fake smile and he was always ready to tell a story about how and when "We all wake up alone," he said once, "Oftentimes even when sleeping next to someone, we wake up before them and they are still asleep and suddenly we are awake, and alone." I didn't see him for a few days, a few days later it felt like it'd been weeks, those weeks drifted apart from one another, like leaves on a pond's surface, and became like months. And then I saw him and I asked him where he'd been, he said, "I woke up alone one day, just like any other, and I decided I didn't like it anymore.”

“If you sleep on the train, you will miss your station; if you sleep at the station, you will miss your train! You can control your fate only when you are awake!”