Weekend Words: Park
It used to be that no one would venture below Houston Street without a police escort. Now the long-gone, hardscrabble artists’ neighborhood has graduated from million-dollar lofts to million-dollar parking spots.
It used to be that no one would venture below Houston Street without a police escort. Now the long-gone, hardscrabble artists’ neighborhood has graduated from million-dollar lofts to million-dollar parking spots.
“All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.”
—Charlie Chaplin
“Bigger cars, bigger parking lots, bigger corporate structures, bigger farms, bigger drug stores, bigger supermarkets, bigger motion-picture screens. The tangible and the functional expand, while the intangible and the beautiful shrink. Left to wither is the national purpose, national educational needs, literature and theater, and our critical faculties. The national dialogue is gradually being lost in a froth of misleading self-congratulation and cliche. National needs and interests are slowly being submerged by the national preoccupation with the irrelevant.”
—J. William Fulbright
“I was about four — a scene in a park, hearing my Irish nanny saying to another giant in a starched white uniform, Susan is very high-strung, and thinking, That’s an interesting word. Is it true?”
—Susan Sontag, The Paris Review interview, 1995
“It was Brooklyn against the world. They were not only complete fanatics, but they knew baseball like the fans of no other city. It was exciting to play there. It was a treat. I walked into that crummy, flyblown park as Brooklyn manager for nine years, and every time I entered, my pulse quickened and my spirits soared.”
—Leo Durocher, on the Brooklyn Dodgers
“If the people don’t want to come out to the park, nobody’s gonna stop them.”
—Yogi Berra
“If I don’t drive around the park,
I’m pretty sure to make my mark.
If I’m in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again,
If I abstain from fun and such,
I’ll probably amount to much,
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.”
—Dorothy Parker, “Observation”
“The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.”
—Robert Maynard Hutchins
“Much wine had passed, with grave discourse
Of who fucks who, and who does worse
(Such as you usually do hear
From those that diet at the Bear),
When I, who still take care to see
“Drunkenness relieved by lechery,
Weent out into St. James’s Park
To cool my head and fire my heart.”
—John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “A Ramble in St. James’s Park”
