Tenement Quotes

#1. Nobody cared about Oma Kristel, about the way she had tried to keep herself attractive long after Youth had packed its bags and moved out of the aging tenement, about the way she always had some little gift for me, a sample bottle of unsuitable scent or a brooch made of sparkly paste.

Helen Grant

#2. I wrote a great deal of a novel, 'Winter's Tale,' on the roof of a Brooklyn Heights tenement on Henry Street. I was a technical climber, and now and then I would put down my manuscript and get up to walk along parapets and climb walls and chimneys.

Mark Helprin

#3. The poorest man in his cottage may bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter; the rain may enter - but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!

Barbara W. Tuchman

#4. Now I don't know if you realize it, but the film industry's a small world. It's like living in a tenement at one end of a back alley. Not only do you see everybody's dirty laundry, but once rumors start, you can't stop 'em.

Haruki Murakami

#5. In the house in Beverly Hills where our four children grew up, living conditions were a few thousand times improved over the old tenement on New York's East 93rd Street we Marx Brothers called home.

Harpo Marx

#6. 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.

John Cheever

#7. America is a post-Christian nation only in the sense that we have built a tenement on the foundation of a palace.

Ron Brackin

#8. I remember my own life as a small boy, son of Jewish immigrants, in a janitor's flat on Orchard and Stanton streets on the Lower East Side of New York City. My father made pants and doubled as janitor of a tenement - before he made janitoring at $30 a month, plus rooms, a career.

Jacob K. Javits

#9. Upon the clothes behind the tenement, That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines, Linking each flat, but to each indifferent, Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.

Claude McKay

#10. Like the East Side tenement, our house was seldom without the sound of music or laughter or questions being asked or stories being told.

Harpo Marx

#11. He led me out of that tangle of alleys in another direction, it seems, for when we sighted a lamp-post we were in a half-familiar street with monotonous rows of mingled tenement blocks and old houses. Charter Street, it turned out to be, but I was too flustered to notice just where we hit

H.P. Lovecraft

#12. You will die a worse death if you do not leave my domain," a voice thundered down from the third story of the old tenement. "I am a servant of the Sacred Fire, the wielder of the flame of Arnor - " "So I should call you Gandalf?

Karen Chance

#13. It was great being brought up in a Glasgow working-class tenement. It wasn't miserable, and it wasn't poverty stricken. It felt very safe, full of delights.

Peter Capaldi

#14. Houses, housetops, like human beings have wonderful character. The lives of housetops. The wear of the seasons. The country is beautiful, young, growing things. The majesty of trees. The backs of tenement houses are living documents.

Robert Henri

#15. For 'The Journal of Finn Reardon,' I traveled to New York City and walked the streets where Finn and his friends would have lived, worked, and played. I visited the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street and toured an actual flat in which families like Finn's might have lived.

Susan Campbell Bartoletti

#16. His brain was simmering and bubbling within the cracking tenement of the skull.Flames burst forth from his skull like a corolla,shrieking like voices: -Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!

James Joyce

#17. When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#18. To me, you can't have style without being inspired. When I design a collection, I am inspired by so many things. The color of a flower. The shape of a butterly's wing. The juxtaposition of an old tenement building next to a shiny new skyscraper.

Isaac Mizrahi

#19. Already my life was not mine, Now someone has made my Dreams the Tenement so, I have no way other than to love the Patron ... !

M.H. Rakib

#20. An unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark, no stable loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional, no tenement room too small for his workroom as these conditions imply
low rental.

Jane Addams

#21. More than a food, the pickle was a kind of drug for tenement children, who were still too young for whiskey.

Jane Ziegelman

#22. I've got to stay awake,' she said, punching her cheeks until the roses came. 'There isn't time to sleep, I'd look consumptive, I'd sag like a tenement, and that wouldn't be fair: a girl can't go to Sing Sing with a green face.

Truman Capote

#23. Other resources I relied on during my orphan train research were the Children's Aid Society; the New York Foundling (I attended their 140th homecoming in 2009 and met a number of train riders there); the New York Tenement Museum;

Christina Baker Kline

#24. One lies there," I thought, "who will soon be beyond the war of earthly elements. Whither will that spirit -- now struggling to quit its material tenement -- flit when at length released?

Charlotte Bronte

#25. Reporting is all about legwork, getting out and finding the story. But all the stories are on the top floors, so you have to learn to climb stairs. That's what reporting is all about, climbing tenement stairs.

Jimmy Breslin

#26. A fiery soul, which, working out its way, Fretted the pygmy-body to decay, And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay. A daring pilot in extremity; Pleas'd with the danger, when the waves went high He sought the storms.

John Dryden

#27. Who loves the golden mean is safe from the poverty of a tenement, is free from the envy of a palace.

Horace

#28. I was brought up in a tenement house in a working district. We didn't even have a bathroom! We had a gaslight in the hallway and a black-and-white TV.

Annie Lennox

#29. If matter mute and inanimate, though changed by the forces of Nature into a multitude of forms, can never die, will the spirit of man suffer annihilation when it has paid a brief visit, like a royal guest, to this tenement of clay?

William Jennings Bryan

#30. Then, moreover, the white locks of age were sometimes found to be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair.

Nathaniel Hawthorne