Chicago Quotes

“Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“... Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“...a city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“It's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities most like Man himself— loneliest creation of all this very old poor earth.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“Big-shot town, small-shot town, jet-propelled old-fashioned town, by old-world hands with new-world tools built into a place whose heartbeat carries farther than its shout, whose whispering in the night sounds less hollow than its roistering noontime laugh: they have builded a heavy-shouldered laughter here who went to work too young.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“The city divided by the river is further divided by racial and lingual differences.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“Jane Addams too knew that Chicago's blood was hustler's blood. Knowing that Chicago, like John the Baptist and Bathhouse John, like Billy Sunday and Big Bill, forever keeps two faces, one for winners and one for losers, one for hustlers and one for squares.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“Return along old walks where thrusts of grass by force of love have split the measure stone.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make