Chicago 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.

~ Daniel Amory

One of the professors told me last week that he feels bad teaching with the way the economy is now. ‘What’s the point?’ he said. ‘Kids aren’t getting jobs.’ You never hear faculty talk that way. He did.

~ Daniel Amory

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.

~ Daniel Amory

Don’t you think most of those kids think too much about who got an A or a B when they were in law school and what that means to an inflated G.P.A. and not enough about the world?” asked Connor irrelevantly.

~ Daniel Amory

Really, nobody was there?” I asked.“Well, nobody important,” he said, putting his glasses back on and blinking.

~ Daniel Amory

Should I have a doughnut or my disgusting cardboard?” asked Gwynn, as she drew up languidly before me at a study table in a bookstore on State Street, raising a puffed rice cake in the air. My eyes narrowed attentively at her face, but as I hesitated, she announced eagerly, “Disgusting cardboard it is!

~ Daniel Amory

You know, sometimes I think this is just not it,” he said, his glasses flashing from the early night’s light. He turned toward me in a thoughtful pause.“You know what I mean, Tom?” he asked. “It’s just not.

~ Daniel Amory

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.

~ Daniel Amory

I’ve officially turned into a loser,” she whispered cynically. “I’m looking forward to going home and having cereal for dinner and walking Mitchell and studying a little and then going to sleep. I’ve had my ‘going out and having fun’ quota for the year, I guess, and it’s June.

~ Daniel Amory

This is so funny,” said Ellen, noticing the seating arrangement. “Isn’t this funny? Tom, come sit next to Robin. Griffin, sit next to Laura.” I stood up and sat next to Robin while Griffin brought his chair over to Laura. “That’s better,” said Ellen. “Isn’t that better?

~ Daniel Amory

Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.

~ Warren Ellis

It's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities most like Man himself— loneliest creation of all this very old poor earth.

~ Nelson Algren

There have been times I have thought some dreams should never be dreamt, but I would hate a world where that was true.

~ Daniel Amory

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.

~ Daniel Amory

She was neither widow nor mother: she only yearned for the dignity of a woman who had once belonged, somewhere, to somebody. She had belonged to no one, for she had never wanted chick nor child. Her idea of home had been any side-alley entrance and a pint of tinted gin. All she had ever striven for was small change left lying by strangers on North Clark Street bars; and any man's bottle at all.

~ Nelson Algren

On the Rolling Stones - You will walk out of the Amphitheatre after watching the Stones perform and suddenly the Chicago stockyards smell clean and good by comparison.

~ Tom Fitzpatrick

... Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.

~ Nelson Algren

The first thing you lose when you die is your motor skills.

~ John Howard Matthews

Gripping her wrists, he pinned her tight to the vanity. “That sex as a weapon thing can only get you so far, Tess.”Wanna bet? “I’m not damaged, cowboy. I don’t have hang-ups about my body, I don’t use sex to mask my problems”—much—“and right now, if you don’t touch me in some very hot, very wet places, I might die.

~ Kate Meader

New Rule: Don't name your kid after a ballpark. Cubs fans Paul and Teri Fields have named their newborn son Wrigley. Wrigley Fields. A child is supposed to be an independent individual, not a means of touting your own personal hobbies. At least that's what I've always taught my kids, Panama Red and Jacuzzi.

~ Bill Maher

Let me tell your something. I'm from Chicago. I don't break.

~ Barack Obama

Knowing what she did to him made her feel powerful, just as knowing what he did to her made her feel weak.

~ Kate Meader

That weekend the city blushed with a great heat wave but on Monday it rained, cooling the ache in the street’s burn.

~ Daniel Amory

I bet you think fellas are the ones to remember a girl -- don't you?He shook his head hurriedly, that he'd always thought that.Fellas have all the fun 'n she just sees one right after another, so it seems like HE'D remember her, better 'n SHE'D remember him, only it works the other way around. I ain't forgot one single fella, all these years. But I bet there ain't TWO 'd know me from a big of bananas this minute.

~ Nelson Algren

I am stone and steel of your sleeping numbers,I remember all you forget.I will die as many timesas you make me over again.

~ Carl Sandburg

And as if by magic - and it may have been magic, for I believe America is the land of magic, and that we, we now past Americans, were once the magical people of it, waiting now to stand to some unguessable generation of the future as the nameless pre-Mycenaean tribes did to the Greeks, ready, at a word, each of us now, to flit piping through groves ungrown, our women ready to haunt as laminoe the rose-red ruins of Chicago and Indianapolis when they are little more than earthen mounds, when the heads of the trees are higher than the hundred-and-twenty-fifth floor - it seemed to me that I found myself in bed again, the old house swaying in silence as though it were moored to the universe by only the thread of smoke from the stove.

~ Gene Wolfe

Big cities can have big hearts.

~ Mary Elise Monsell

Take it all, all of it! Greg cried out. These things here...I've been making them better, fixing them. It doesn't matter...they don't matter. I've been here before. He paused to try to collect himself. It's my past, my present...these things-- He lifted a hand out to the objects around him. These things are me. Now whispering, Can't you see me?

~ Dayna S. Rubin

The rig began shaking like caffeine withdrawal. --Opening sentence of THE FURY. The duct-taped Buick swam north on Rush Street, hunting whores like a lesser white shark. --First sentence of Chapter One, THE FURY

~ Shane Gericke

By the sound of things, you know nothing about mathematics.''You can put it like that. I'm utterly useless.''Useless is such a harsh word, you are merely... inexperienced. So I thought we could start at the beginning.''I'm not that stupid. I know how to add, subtract and multiply-''I don't mean that kind of beginning...

~ Charlotte Munro

McDonald, who was known to hate policemen, was once approached by two cops for a two-dollar donation. “We’re burying a policeman,” one of them said, to which Mike responded, “Here’s ten dollars. Bury five of them.

~ Gus Russo

You should seriously get a job planning dates for The Bachelor.

~ Nicki Elson

I had thought Chicago was inevitable, like diarrhea.

~ John Varley

Chicago has so much excellent architecture that they feel obliged to tear some of it down now and then and erect terrible buildings just to help us all appreciate the good stuff.

~ Audrey Niffenegger

But we [writers] are crucial. That is what I hope you have learned. We listen for and collect and share stories. Without stories there is no nation and no religion and no culture. Without stories of bone and substance and comedy there is only a river of lies, and sweet and delicious ones they are, too. We are the gatherers, the shepherds, the farmers of stories. We wander widely and look for them and gather them and harvest them and share them as food. It is a craft as necessary and nutritious as any other, and if you are going to be good at it you must double your humility and triple your curiosity and quadruple your ability to listen.

~ Brian Doyle

The stars glittered in the sky and as the number of people at the party grew there were merging conversations and laughter and bodies moving in outlines around the kegs of beer in a curtsy of youth.

~ Daniel Amory

He pulled her toward him and gathered her in his arms as his hand lovingly cradled the back of her neck. She stopped breathing as he leaned down—ohmigod, the Adonis was about to kiss her—and planted the softest, most sensual kiss on her lips.Time stood still on the busy Chicago street.

~ Jennifer Lane

Poor health was not just the result of random acts, bad luck, bad behavior or unfortunate genetics. Deliberate public policy decision about housing, education, parks and streets were the key drivers of racial differences in mortality. Crime kept people off the streets and limited their ability to exercise. The lack of grocery stores limited dietary choices. The lack of primary care doctors and specialists in these communities made chronic disease care more difficult. The degradation and loss of hospital services in these communities affected hospital-based outcomes. … The chronic underfunding of critical health services at Cook County Hospital and other safety-net providers contributed to these poor outcomes as well. The deleterious impact of social structures such as urban poverty and racism on health has been called 'structural violence.

~ David A. Ansell

She leaned in, a tip she had read today on HuffPo’s Love & Sex section. Boobs out, smile wide, voice low. Being sexy was exhausting.

~ Kate Meader

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.

~ Daniel Amory