Train Travel Quotes

“The journey has its own lyrics
A duet of balanced motion
The rails and wheels in tune”
― Richard L. Ratliff

“Corner Seat

Suspended in a moving night
The face in the reflection train
Looks at first sight as self-assured
As your own face - But look again:

Windows between you and the world
Keep out the cold, keep out the fright;
Then why does your reflection seem
So lonely in the moving night?”
― Louis MacNeice

“So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.”
― Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia

“All the training was necessary for my personal development.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“I hope you have sent your jewels to the bank,’ I said.

‘Oh, darling, don’t tease, you know how I haven’t got any now. But my money,’ she said with a self-conscious giggle, ‘is sewn into my stays. Fa rang up and begged me to, and I must say it did seem quite an idea. Oh, why aren’t you coming? I do feel so terrified – think of sleeping in the train, all alone.’

‘Perhaps you won’t be alone,’ I said. ‘Foreigners are greatly given, I believe, to rape.’

‘Yes, that would be nice, so long as they didn’t find my stays. Oh, we are off – good-bye darling, do think of me,’ she said, and, clenching her suède-covered fist, she shook it out of the window in a Communist salute.”
― Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love

“His action of joining them, which would have been rude in a restaurant that was not moving at three hundred kilometers an hour, was perfectly acceptable on a train, which mimicked the entirely random joinings of life but revealed their true nature by making them last only hours or days, rather than years and decades. People on a train form an alliance, as if the world that surrounded the parallel rails were hostile and and they refugees from it. The dining car, humming and rocking gently in the night, annihilated past and future and made all associations outside of itself seem vaguely unreal. So they welcomed him at their table, for he was one of them, a traveler, not one of those wraiths through whose night-lit cities they passed.”
― Alexander Jablokov, Carve the Sky

“In viaggio verso Bologna ho pensato a chi diceva di sentire il tempo come un enorme dolore. E ho visto, seduti accanto a me, donne e uomini di malaffari che andavano a guadagnarsi il pane vendendo un po’ di se stessi. Su tutta la carrozza non c’era un posto libero. Eppure il treno sembrava deserto.”
― Teresio Vola, Inutili omicidi

“...Bir trenle Kaliforniya ovalarını geçerken bir sabun reklamının hoparlörden yükselen gürültüsünü duymamaya çalışıyordum; o sırada yaşlı bir çiftçi güleç bir yüzle yanıma yaklaşarak, "Bu zamanda nereye gidersen git, uygarlıktan yakanı kurtaramazsın," dedi. Heyhat! Ne kadar doğru!..”
― Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays

“In writing I was often aware that the same observation could fit neatly into different ideological moulds and that a train window is both mirror and window.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, Across a red world

“Life on the road, even for a worldly man like C. W. Post and his well-bred daughter, presented certain challenges. although he could order meals, fasten Marjorie's buttons, and make sure that she was properly dressed, C. W. could not fix her hair.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post

“He had been in New York the whole year managing his father's winery and office in lower Manhattan, but now he'd come home by train for Christmas--and the world was wonderful. Three thousand miles was nothing, you got on a train, you had your own private little room, you changed at Chicago, you ate great meals in the diner, you read mystery stories and newspapers in the club car, and then all of a sudden there you were back in Fresno, and there everybody was, standing on the station platform waiting for you. Who could ask for anything more?”
― William Saroyan, Places Where I've Done Time