Top 131 Subway Quotes

I’m happy to be the guy on the subway that people stare at and they just can’t quite place it. I don’t really like my life intruded upon too much. In a way, it’s kind of nice to not be all that well known.

I like romantic dates – going on a long walk in Central Park and then taking the subway downtown and going out to eat and ordering oysters. After that, you walk around again and talk.

I will say that walking down the street, getting on the subway, taking the elevator, if there’s one or two people and they say, ‘Great job, Mayor,’ that is a real turn-on. I mean, anybody that wouldn’t find that satisfying, rewarding, exciting, thrilling – I think they should see the doctor.

In America, when you hear about the Underground Railroad, it’s so evocative. You think it’s a literal subway for a few minutes before your teacher goes on and describes where it actually was.

I remember how my mom would take me on the subway from Queens to Broadway. We’d go to the offices of casting agents. Many doors were slammed in our faces. I was just a boy, but I remember that well.

When you’re directed by social media, I think it’s very easy to lose a sense of agency. And you can see it when you go to any subway station, you walk down any street in a city, you will see 70-80 percent of people staring into their phones as they walk or stand.

I got lost a lot, and I was a really bad waitress… I got lost on the subway.

When I see someone interesting on the subway – the lady with her new Bible or the delivery guy holding down a dozen Mylar balloons – my mind goes in two different directions. Where are they coming from? And where are they going?

When my son first started to take the subway, my husband and I used to follow him to make sure he was all right, and then we had to stop following him and let him do it by himself.

If there’s an intellectual highway, there’s also an intellectual subway.

From blood banking to the modern subway, from jazz to social justice, the contributions of African Americans have shaped and molded and influenced our national culture and our national character.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can’t do anything anyway.

I am very lucky, because for the most part people are very nice to me, and I am still able to go about my life and ride the subway and all that.

There’s nothing wrong with officials taking the subway. Why is this unusual? So people talked about ‘one country, two systems,’ but maybe we should talk about ‘two countries, one system’ instead. We should try to narrow the gap.

There’s been a big spur in downtown development with new business, restaurants and a lot of loft buying. The buses run, and there’s a subway that runs through downtown.

There are a lot of artists in Gowanus, and certain things come into your visual vocabulary from living there – the scale of the subway and the canal, sometimes it almost looks like a de Chirico painting, with the intense angles of the shadows and everything.

The idea for ‘Awakened’ came to me one night on my long commute home to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The subway station was empty and eerily quite, and I could barely see into the darkened tunnel ahead. The further I peered, the darker the tunnel became. I wondered what could live in there… or under there.

I take the subway to work. I fly coach back and forth to Chicago.

Red Hook is cut off from the rest of the borough by the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and has no subway access, forcing residents to rely on the bus, their feet or, for those lucky enough to afford it, a car.

I’ve been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.

While in high school, I worked part time at Subway, then at the front desk of the local YMCA, then at a tennis club, until I landed an unpaid internship at ‘The Mountain View Voice,’ my hometown newspaper.

In late 2004, I left my much-maligned home state of New Jersey for the supposedly greener pastures of Astoria, Queens. I’d finally be in the mix, living off the subway line, able to go from audition to audition during the day and from late night show to late night show in the wee hours of the morning.

I am tired of people using ‘diverse’ to mean ‘of color.’ That’s not what that word means. ‘Diversity’ means people of all different races, all together – like a New York City subway.

I commuted an hour and a half each way to high school in N.Y.C. I took a bus, a ferry, then a subway.

I moved to New York when I was 10, from Rio de Janeiro. So there was no need for driving: I took the subway, cabs and the bus.

Smurfs must only eat Smurfberries. They can eat Smurfberry pie, they can have a Smurfberry sandwich, they can do whatever they want. But you can’t have a Subway sandwich. It’s got to be Smurfberries.

I think people who live in New York don’t realize just how much time they spend talking about the subway.

When I was designing, I had in mind Jimi Hendrix, and I could hardly find skinny indie black kids to wear my clothes. I remember one telling me he had to swap his skinny jeans for baggy ones in the subway before going home, so he wouldn’t get in trouble in his neighborhood.

I started reading G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ on a subway ride, almost missed my stop, and walked home thumbing pages.

I regretted the solitary nature of the writer’s life – other people, normal working people, spent their days with co-workers, rode the subway home with a crowd, walked through thronged streets. I worked at home, all by myself.

I lived in Paris for two years with my family. I would roam the streets of Paris during the day for a few hours in the subway, on the streets, and I listened to the French language, and I got a sense of the rhythm and the melody of the language.

I’m very social, and in a place like New York, even if you’re alone on the subway, you never feel lonely.

I was 14, and I left on my own. Living in a subway train, and police used to come in with a nightstick and say, ‘You can’t sleep here.’ I’d get up and go across the street, get on another train, and go back the other way.

I started a deli when I was 19 years old. Kevin O’s. The sandwiches at Kevin O’s were a little like Subway before Subway – fresh baked bread. My best seller was turkey with cream cheese and artichoke hearts. I just made it up.

You don’t look at each other on the subway.

In China, inaugurations are frequent affairs, though they have nothing to do with presidents. A news cycle rarely passes without some fanfare over the inaugural ride on a new subway line or the inaugural trip across an unusually large bridge.

In my vocal, I think you can hear something of my earlier times when I’d sing in subway halls for the echo and perform doo-wop on street corners. But I had a lot of influences, too – singers like Sam Cooke, Brook Benton and Roy Hamilton.

There’s nothing worse than getting on a crowded subway on, like, a 90-degree day.

I love getting on the subway because you get on the car, and you see the entire human race represented in any given subway car.

It was weird. Like, people came up to me and knew me as Daredevil before any footage had come out. I remember a guy on the subway being like, ‘You’re Charlie Cox. You’re Daredevil.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah…?’ I was barely Daredevil. I hadn’t even signed the contract, you know?

I’ve always lived in a city. I’m very social, and in a place like New York, even if you’re alone on the subway, you never feel lonely.

Being an actress wasn’t a plan at all, so what’s happened to me is very strange. Life isn’t very normal, even though I’m still very much a normal girl. I ride the subway, I ride the bus, and all of that.

I’ve been working on ‘The New York Times’ crossword puzzle on the subway. I can make it until about Wednesday.

My first time I directed a play was ‘No Exit,’ a play set in a subway.

With a track like ‘White Christmas,’ everybody has done that song in every format you can imagine, so I just looked at the chords at that particular song and what chords would make it work. That’s kind of quite a sad song, and I had this idea of someone singing it in the subway, someone who is homeless, old and sad.

They used to tease me at the ‘Oprah’ show, ‘Are you really going to do another white Shaker kitchen, with white subway tile and stainless steel appliances?’ And my answer is, ‘I can vary it a bit, but I’m never going to err from classic materials.’

If you’re walking through the Union Square subway station – New Yorkers know it’s obnoxious and crowded, and in the summer it’s too hot – there are always amazing musicians playing, and sometimes there are multiple, different musicians set up in there.

When I was little, I had concerts on the subway, and old ladies came up to me like, ‘You are so good!’

I wish I had taken Spanish instead of French in high school. I could eavesdrop on a lot more conversations on the subway if I knew Spanish.

There may be a perception that, with franchises, they’re all the same, so that limits the ability to experiment. But that’s not true. We’ve always kept two slots open on the menu of each Subway franchise – slots that franchisees can use to come up with their own sandwich ideas.

When you’re playing an icon like Wolverine, it’s sometimes better to be someone that nobody knows because they don’t know what to expect. I don’t mind a little bit of anonymity; it helps on the subway.

I can be unkind to someone in the street or in the subway – I’m a bad-tempered person – but I’m unable to be unkind to a character. They exist because of me, and I have responsibility for them.

If you could take a subway from the suburbs in Boston, where I live, to downtown in 10 minutes, that improves your life over sitting in a traffic jam. People should see that.

Every time – well, not every time, but in celebration of a great review or a great accolade, I take the team of Daniel to Katz’s Deli for lunch. We take the trip on the subway, we were like 40 or 50 people, and we go in the back room and have a pastrami sandwich.

My family lived under communism their entire lives. When they arrived in South Korea, they didn’t even know how to use the bank system and ATM or the subway, nothing.

I’ve worked everywhere. I worked in a warehouse packing surf supplies, a restaurant washing dishes, in retail, and I was a ‘sandwich artist’ at Subway.

I need to tone up, as I eat a lot of fast food. I love Maccy D’s, Subway and Domino’s.

Use the environment to remind you of what needs to be done. If you’re afraid you’ll forget to buy milk on the way home, put an empty milk carton on the seat next to you in the car or in the backpack you carry to work on the subway.

People are always telling me that they’ve seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.

I spent my entire youth in front of a TV watching old movies, and as soon as I was able to get a subway pass, when I was 14, I joined the Museum of Modern Art and was there all weekend watching old movies.

I would roll up pennies to take the subway to work in Times Square. I was broke, but I was happy.

Whether a plane to Singapore, a subway in Manhattan, or the streets of Cincinnati, I search for meaningful conversation wherever I may travel. Without it, I believe we lose the ability to not only understand others, but more importantly, ourselves.

I like L.A., I really do, but I’m really a New Yorker. In New York, there’s a feeling that you’re not praised or treated too preciously. No one ever feels too important because someone on the subway will reassure you that you’re not.

These days, you’re always surrounded by music and sounds, whether you’re in the mall or a subway car.

As a frequent rider of the subway myself, I cannot count the number of times I have had to personally intercede in a physical or verbal altercation, whether on the platform or in a subway car.

I have to pay a huge price to express myself. You get people asking to take photos all the time; you can’t ride the subway… I still ride the subway, but there’s always people sneaking photos or coming up to you.

I sometimes read on the subway, but I’m a hopeless eavesdropper and get easily distracted by strangers’ conversations.

I bike around New York City for hours and write about everything I love, think about, or see. I also ride back and forth on the subway – that’s where I get my best writing done.

It’s funny: most people who recognize me on the subway and stuff – it’s much more they think of me as a funny guy. I get much more of people telling me how much I make them laugh, actually. Which is nice.

I was a sandwich artist at Subway and can still rattle off the order of toppings. I was fired because I got meatball sauce on the ivory cutting boards.

There’s that stigma about New Yorkers, how they’re so mean, but in my experience it was quite the opposite. People were very genuine and very nice, even on the subway.

The weird thing about the subway is no one looks at each other. So I play the O2 in London. It’s a 20,000 capacity venue, and then I’ll take the subway to my gig, and everyone’s going to my gig, and no one looks at you. If anyone does, they say, ‘Hey, you look exactly like James Blunt, only smaller.’

Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call.

When I moved back to New York, I saw a lot of girls knitting on the subway, and it had a bit of a comeback.

I’ve thought about bringing my children to retrace my own steps of the morning of September 11, 2001, but they’re too young for that. Maybe when they’re twenty. Maybe by then, even though it’s been only a short subway ride away for years now, I’ll have the nerve to see the 9-11 memorial for the first time.

I’m still that kid that worked at Subway and Target.

When I ride the subway back and forth, sometimes I look at the other passengers and wonder if any of them are children who have been adopted or parents who have adopted.

I like taking the subway to work.

The problem – not problem, but main thing – for me has been adjusting my kids… Four-year-old twins! I’m waking up in the morning for rehearsal, taking them to school, and then having to go to rehearsal – trying to do a 15-minute warm-up, even on the subway.

Taking the stairs instead of an elevator, walking to an appointment rather than taking a bus, subway or taxi, and spending times outdoors in warm and sunny weather are all easy ways to increase daily physical activity.

I’m going to start work on developing a series for HBO, because I’m naturally given to episodic stories of considerable length. And I won’t have to listen to complaints about how wordy and long my work is if you can watch it on your telephone on the subway: You can make it conform to your day as if it were a book.

From reinforcing beaches in the Rockaways to installing generators at the Coney Island Houses and sealing holes in the subway system, New York is fortifying our ability to withstand future storm surges.

My first job was as a sandwich artist at Subway.

Believe it or not, I’ve never been on the subway.

I’m not a car guy. The subway gets me where I need to go efficiently and cheaply, and I don’t worry about traffic.

What I learned at that moment on the subway 30 years ago, staring at my blank passport, was this: If you have an impulse to do something, and it’s not totally irresponsible, why not do it? It might just be the journey you’ve always needed.

One of the things that I love about crime novels is that you can turn the volume all the way up. If I can make somebody blow their subway stop, I win.

New York City is home to so many people from so many places and the uniqueness of it is that you never feel a foreigner. English is almost hardly ever heard in the subway. In fact, it’s weird.

I’m constantly warning people that are involved in my life that I can go busk and make a living. I can make my rent in New York City in the subway, I promise, if I’m forced to.

My favorite Subway sandwiches are meatball and chipotle chicken.

I am a New Yorker! Mass transit is my sweet ride. I know the subway system like the back of my hand.

I still want to be the guy who can get on the subway and check out the freak on the subway.

Every time I get caught on the subway around 3 or 4 during the school year, it’s definitely dicey. I get a lot of like – ‘Yo, are you that girl?’ Then I have to go eight stops with them.

Since the very beginning, we wanted to create an experience for our guests: more than just a place to sleep. We wanted to cook breakfast in the morning; we wanted to provide a subway map for our guests. Pick them up from the airport.

When I was modeling in Japan, I could blend in a little because of my hair, but my roommates with blonde hair got harassed. People would touch their hair and grope them in the subway. Actually, a lot of groping happens in the subway in Japan, but that’s probably true of subways everywhere.

Any notable moments spent on a subway usually do nothing more than expose human awfulness at its most pronounced.

I wouldn’t want to take the late night subway in the U.S. or go for a late night stroll in the U.K. Women feel insecure anywhere in the world where they may become victims of predatory behavior.

When I was applying to college, my mother told me I could apply to any school within the Boston subway map.

No one is asking what happened to all the homeless. No one cares, because it’s easier to get on the subway and not be accosted.

I’ve taken clowns into the war in Bosnia, the refugee camps of Kosovo, and none of those are any more important than clowning in a subway or an elevator or just walking down the street.

I was, I think, extremely lucky, because the minute I saw my face plastered on ‘Time’ magazine in the subway with my mother, I just said, ‘Wow.’ And it made ‘Time’ magazine come down to life-size scale.

For most of the nineteen-seventies, the official route map of the New York City subway system was a beautiful thing.

I’m practicing a kind of meandering faith, or faithful meandering. I just trust that something is coming. I don’t know what it is. But I’ve been a straphanger all my life; I know what it’s like to not know when the next train is coming, but I trust the subway.

I will take the subway and look at certain women and think ‘God, that woman’s story will never be told. How come that lady doesn’t get a movie about her?’

I’d sometimes go to Paris by myself – it was an easy two-hour train ride – to get a break from the everyday grind, to walk around a big city, ride a subway, feel the energy of a world capital.

My father was a doctor, and I admired him and got along well with him. He took me with him on house calls. We were living in Flushing, which was then a sleepy village of 25,000 – before the subway got there. I’ve been sure I wanted to be a doctor since I was about 12.

I do wait in line, and I do take the subway, and I do my own grocery shopping, and I do take the kids to school. But it almost doesn’t matter to a certain segment of the populace.

It’s not like it’s hard to be decent and respectful and well-behaved. I do wait in line, and I do take the subway, and I do do my own grocery shopping, and I do take the kids to school.

The starting point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It’s all working towards the same destination – the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I’m still taking the subway.

The first four and a half years was me in the studio every day, writing songs for other people. I had jobs, too – eleven jobs. I worked at Kinko’s, Fatburger, Subway – I was a sandwich artist – and I was a claims processor at Allstate Insurance.

The subway in New York is a great social experiment; there are so many races and ways of life sitting together on each car.

The most successful Subway customers, of course, are the ones who can’t keep their hands off their sandwich. Join your artist in the sandwich assembling process. That sneeze guard is a suggestion. That sneeze guard is trying to intimidate you into staying on the customer’s side of the partition.

Right now, I’m hankering for new adventures… Ninety percent of the time I’m having romantic-comedy fantasies in which I’m wearing little pencil skirts and hurrying down to the subway.

‘The Food Network’ was just starting in New York, and I was getting lots of attention from Mesa Grill. They had no money, so if you couldn’t get there by subway, you couldn’t be on. It wasn’t like TV was something I really wanted to do – but I knew it would be great publicity for my restaurants.

I can’t take the subway anymore. I think I can still take the bus, though. It’s a double-edged sword because I’m grateful that people recognize and support me, but there are definite downsides to that.

I carried props into the subway – the latest ‘Semlotext(e),’ a hefty volume of the Frankfurt School – so that the employed would not get the wrong idea or, more to the point, the usual idea about me.

I’d love to have our trains, our subway cars and our taxis built right here in New York City. You can create 40,000 living wage jobs… the city’s contracting power is huge.

When I first started fighting, it wasn’t the easiest thing. I didn’t have all the money in the world. I was eating Subway once in a while, some packets of oatmeal here and there. It wasn’t that bad, but it’s because I was fortunate and had good people there to support me.

The celebrity aspect is nothing short of ridiculous, and auditioning is brutal and dehumanizing. Every time I see a pretty young girl on the subway reading sides for an audition, my only thought is, ‘Man, am I glad I’m not doing that anymore.’ I never feel nostalgia, just relief.

I love to go on road trips. That’s one thing I love about being in L.A. and having a car. In New York, you can get around on the subway but you can’t really go anywhere. But there’s a danger in believing that where you are defines you.

I love New York, I love the smell of New York… I love the subway.

It’s such a great honor to be a part of the Subway Famous Fan Family.

A lot of the ways of advertising a book – the cover, whether somebody sees it on a subway or sees it in a bookstore – those things are going to rapidly diminish as we move to an electronic model.

I’ve become a huge fan of the subway, even though I’ve gotten lost… well, not lost, but went the wrong direction on the subway a couple of times.

My crazy fear is I’m always afraid my keys are going to fall down a subway grate when I walk over it. I’m afraid they’re going to jump out of my pocket and fall down. Isn’t that stupid?

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don’t. Don’t evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

I am a stereotypical northeasterner. I’m always in a rush. I’ve attracted stares from out-of-towners when I’ve shoved past someone blocking the subway door.

The only pleasurable part of taking the subway, as everyone will agree, is concocting elaborate fantasies about what it would be like to be married to the most interesting strangers you see there.

When you read a supernatural suspense story or a ghost story, or a horror story, the evil at play is something that you can dismiss. And I wonder if, in this time, if people really want to be sitting on the subway reading a book about someone releasing a dirty bomb on the subway.

I think it’s easy for directors to stay fresh more than actors, especially once an actor becomes a star. It’s hard for Russell Crowe to walk down a street or take a subway. I can fly coach.

The unknown makes people uncomfortable. And even living in a city that’s as cosmopolitan as New York City is, there’s so many things I don’t know about other cultures, even though I encounter other cultures – maybe even 18 or 19 of them – when I get on a subway car every day.