Chicago Quotes

He'd searched every corner of his mind looking for ways to avoid a rendezvous with Chico. In the last twenty years, Slade had come a long way from the ghetto orphanage where he'd grown up, but the only way he could help Maria was to get in touch with Chico. Slade remembered the last time he'd seen Chico as though it was yesterday.

~ Dianne Harman Cornered Coyote

Leon had attached himself to me in Chicago like a fat, brat-and-beer-filled tick; I was amazed that someone whose blood was clearly half pork grease had made it to age seventy-five.

~ John Scalzi

She went weak in the knees and could barely walk as she followed him, trembling with fear. Her hopes for a happy future with Jordan came crashing down. Whoever had told Jordan she was free to travel under the name of Maria Brooks must have misled him.

~ Dianne Harman Cornered Coyote

I met Ana doing free weights,” Roger said. “This hard-body señorita was putting me to shame on squats, and I asked her how she got such a tight ass —”“And then she decked you.”“Nah, she loved it! She’s real proud of that butt — she should be. She took me to one of her classes, and I got hooked. She’s a Zumba instructor.”Grant absorbed that information for a moment. “You do...Zumba?”“It’s great! Much more fun than PT. You just get going...” He did a little two-step maneuver on the city street, dancing to an unknown Latin beat. “Cha cha cha. Heeuh? Ana does this a little better than me...”Grant tried to hold it in. He really did. But his body quivered, his shoulders shook, and soon a whooping laugh erupted — which lasted quite a few seconds.Roger abruptly stopped his dance. “You judge, Madsen. Not cool.

~ Jennifer Lane

Staying level with Tess was going to require fast thinking, which was mighty difficult considering all the blood he needed for said thought processes was now hurtling south.“What would this job involve?”“Only one task. Make. Me. Believe.”“That I’m your fiancé?”Cue her smile, sly and sexy. First time she’d let him in on that action, too. “That you want me more than your next breath.”If she moved forward a couple of inches, his boner would make her believe.

~ Kate Meader

I could just as easily have taken the train.”He shut his eyes, just long enough for a movie of a Tess-induced train riot to screen on the backs of his eyelids. Fists flying, teeth broken, friendships destroyed as men vied to get closer to her lush body barely covered in that incendiary French maid outfit. And now he was turning hard again.

~ Kate Meader

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

I am consoled only to see that I was not mistaken: Chicago is just as I remembered it. I was here twenty five years ago. My father brought me and Scott up to see the Century of Progress and once later to the World Series. Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place. I could have been wrong: it could have been nothing of the sort, not the memory of a place but the memory of being a child. But one step out into the brilliant March day and there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place Which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered. Until now, one genie-soul and only one ever proved too strong for me: San Francisco—up and down the hills I pursued him, missed him and was pursued, by a presence, a powdering of fall gold in the air, a trembling brightness that pierced to the heart, and the sadness of coming at last to the sea, the coming to the end of America. Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North. Knowing all about genie-souls and living in haunted places like Shiloh and the Wilderness and Vicksburg and Atlanta where the ghosts of heroes walk abroad by day and are more real than people, he knows a ghost when he sees one, and no sooner does he step off the train in New York or Chicago or San Francisco than he feels the genie-soul perched on his shoulder.

~ Walker Percy

I . . . hurried to the city library to find out the true age of Chicago. City library! After all, it cannot be anything but Chicagoesque. His is the richest library, no doubt, as everything in Chicago is great in size and wealth. Its million books are filling all the shelves, as the dry goods fill the big stores. Oh, librarian, you furnished me a very good dinner, even ice cream, but—where is the table? The Chicago city library has no solemnly quiet, softly peaceful reading-room; you are like a god who made a perfect man and forgot to put in the soul; the books are worth nothing without having a sweet corner and plenty of time, as the man is nothing without soul. Throw those books away, if you don't have a perfect reading-room! Dinner is useless without a table. I want to read a book as a scholar, as I want to eat dinner as a gentleman. What difference is there, my dearest Chicago, between your honourable library and the great department store, an emporium where people buy things without a moment of selection, like a busy honey bee?The library is situated in the most annoyingly noisy business quarter, under the overhanging smoke, in the nearest reach of the engine bells of the lakeside. One can hardly spend an hour in it if he be not a Chicagoan who was born without taste of the fresh air and blue sky. The heavy, oppressive, ill-smelling air of Chicago almost kills me sometimes. What a foolishness and absurdity of the city administrators to build the office of learning in such place of restaurants and barber shops!Look at that edifice of the city library! Look at that white marble! That's great, admirable; that means tremendous power of money. But what a vulgarity, stupid taste, outward display, what an entire lacking of fine sentiment and artistic love! Ah, those decorations with gold and green on the marble stone spoil the beauty! What a shame! That is exactly Chicagoesque. O Chicago, you have fine taste, haven't you?

~ Yone Noguchi

Actually, they fought to fill the emptiness of their lives as they filled their empty glasses. They fought—not because the liquor was in them, but because it did not fill them enough.

~ Nelson Algren

A profound impression was created by the discourses of Professor GN Chakravarti and Mrs Besant, who is said to have risen to unusual heights of eloquence, so exhilarating were the influences of the gathering. Besides those who represented our society and religions, especially Vivekananda, VR Gandhi, Dharmapala, captivated the public, who had only heard of Indian people through the malicious reports of interested missionaries, and were now astounded to see before them and hear men who represented the ideal of spirituality and human perfectibility as taught in their respective sacred writings.

~ Henry Olcott

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!

~ Daniel Amory

She loves swimming,” said Ellen, who I knew had been a competitive swimmer in college. Ellen looked in the rearview mirror at Kara.“Don’t you Kara?” asked Ellen.There was no response. “I didn’t start until I was three,” said Ellen. “She’s got a two year start on me.

~ Daniel Amory

An inappropriate attraction to your friend’s fiancé was grounds for disbarment from the Woman Club. Neither did it make a lick of sense. He was uncouth, uneducated, uncivilized. All of their conversations back then had been unholy bicker fests where they charged from the opposite ends of the spectrum, determined not to meet in the middle but to rip pieces out of each other on the drive by.

~ Kate Meader

She should pull away, even though she had begged for it with her smart mouth. She should punish him for every crime he’d perpetrated. For being too good-looking, too sexy, too everything. But the kiss was like him—just too damn good. Warm and brutal, providing answers to questions she never knew she had. He teased with his tongue along the seam of her mouth, seeking that last nudge of acceptance as if it was his God-given right.She parted her lips, and like a predator hinged on her threshold, he took.

~ Kate Meader

But that kiss did more than turn her into a puddle of lust. It terrified her. Not because of how soul-searingly good it was, but because kisses like that don’t just happen. Kisses like that implied history and connection and bone-deep knowledge, and it made her question everything that had existed between them before.

~ Kate Meader

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

~ Nelson Algren

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.

~ Neil Gaiman

There seems to be a different Chicago around every street corner, behind every bar, and within every apartment, two-flat, cottage, or bungalow. City of immigrants or city of heartless plutocrats, say what you will, Chicago almost defies interpretation. In many ways Chicago is like a snake that sheds its skin every thirty years or so and puts on a new coat to conform to a new reality.

~ Dominic A. Pacyga

What are you thinking?” he asked in a disarmingly gentle tone.“That the city looks different depending on whom I’m seeing it with.”He nodded easily, as if this same thought had occurred to him. “I notice different things,” I continued. “Like with you, I pay more attention to the details of the buildings – the textures, the colors, the people standing in front of them. The reflections are different.”“Reflections?” he asked quietly.“They are.” I watched our bodies morph and distort in the window of an empty bank. “You’re there,” I said. “That’s how they’re different.

~ Jessica Hawkins

Chicago does not go to the world, the world comes to Chicago! Who needs New York? Who has taller buildings than our tall buildings? Who's got a busier airport than our airport? You want Picasso? We got Picasso, big Picasso. Nobody can make heads or tails of it. It's a lion? No, a seahorse. Looks to me like a radiator with wings. Who gives a damn, people, a Picasso's a Picasso.

~ Peter Orner

The Cool Kids are Chicago. Me being from Michigan is a part of that dynamic.

~ Chuck Inglish

I grew up with six brothers, and I'm from Chicago, so princesses and Barbie dolls were not around the house. It was more like sports and comic books, so getting to work for Marvel is like my version of being able to be a princess.

~ Chloe Bennet

And then when I went to Chicago, that's when I had these outer space experiences and went to the other planets.

~ Sun Ra

I've been in Chicago for every Christmas of my life.

~ Jane Lynch

Coming from Chicago, I like a white Christmas.

~ Dennis Franz

Our whole family assembles in Chicago at Christmas and usually in Aspen in the summer.

~ James Cronin

I started out as a high school teacher in inner-city Chicago and realized quite quickly that my students weren't that motivated.

~ Jack Canfield

Chicago's one of the rare places where architecture is more visible.

~ Frank Gehry

T.J. Miller and Kumail Nanjiani I met when I was in Chicago, learning how to do comedy.

~ Thomas Middleditch

This man is frank and earnest with women. In Fresno, he's Frank and in Chicago he's Ernest.

~ Henny Youngman

Well, I design costumes because I started with the theater in Chicago, but somehow a few lines just sort of fell to me to do it. And I studied it in school and I always liked it.

~ John Malkovich

It was Chicago with its World's Fair which vivified the national desire for civic beauty.

~ Daniel Burnham

In most places in the country, voting is looked upon as a right and a duty, but in Chicago it's a sport.

~ Dick Gregory

ChicagoNEXT is focused on making Chicago the best possible place for technology entrepreneurs.

~ J. B. Pritzker

My mom actually had a band called Six Pack - even though there were seven of them - who went around Chicago performing popular songs. Her voice was like Gladys Knight mixed with Aretha Franklin.

~ R. Kelly

I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.

~ Edward Hirsch